Join me today for Episode 978 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Minneapolis FED Paper Echos ECB Paper
- Minn. FED Pres. Kashkari Echos ECB
- XRP's Larson All in Harris
- Polymarket Doesn't Mean a Thing
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://atlas21.com/another-paper-against-bitcoin-the-minneapolis-fed-proposes-taxes-or-bans-to-safeguard-the-public-deficit/
https://decrypt.co/287542/fed-president-crypto-drug-deals-illegal-activities
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[00:00:00]
David Bennett:
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 8:58 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 22nd day of October 2024.
This is episode 978 of Bitcoin. And we've got a little bit more about that ECB paper. Something that I told you was going to happen yesterday actually did happen. Well, it's it's I hate being right, but I was right and it just seems to go seems to go on. I think this is yet another I think what we're seeing is another fully fledged media based attack on Bitcoin and the perception of Bitcoin by the masses in the world, not just this country in the United States, but the world, especially the western world, which we are just apparently easily manipulated in thought and deed. And then there's some, well, we got some BlackRock news.
Mark Cuban is gonna be here today as is the Ripple cofounder, Larson, Chris Larson. We've gotta talk about that because it's just, you know, I mean, I know they're I know. I get it, guys. They're they're they're shitcoiners. But, hey, they they are doing stuff and reaching for things. And every time they do, it's always dangerous. So it's better to know what your enemy is doing than be completely oblivious to what the hell's going on. But first, let's have a different analysis of the European Central Bank propaganda piece that I talked about yesterday.
Their white paper that suggests that if you are a Bitcoin holder then you are what's wrong with apparently the universe, I guess. But from Bitcoin Magazine, Frank Korva has his own analysis of what the ECB gets wrong about Bitcoin. That's the title of the article. And he says, last week, I guess that's how you pronounce it. And Hyrgen Scharf of the European Central Bank published a paper entitled, quote, the distributional consequences of Bitcoin in which they made a host of dubious claims about Bitcoin. The notion that those who were late to investing in Bitcoin are impoverished by those who were early to investing in it and that Bitcoin has failed as a payments technology are the author's central arguments.
Bitcoin analyst Ter de Miester sounded the alarm about the report on Twitter and we went through that yesterday. As a former academic, I was appalled at how lazy the arguments in the paper were. Hence, I have taken the time to push back upon some of them. One. The main premise of the paper is that if Bitcoin's price continues to rise, early Bitcoin investors, or the early birds as the author calls them, will gain wealth at the expense of the late comers. While this is true if the early birds hold all of their coins to no end, the dynamics is no different with any other publicly traded asset.
The bigger point that the researchers miss though is that some of us are both early birds as well as latecomers. See, I first bought Bitcoin in January of 2018. And I also bought some last week. Did I impoverish myself in this scenario? No, no I didn't. Nor has anyone who has dollar cost averaged into Bitcoin over any period of time. Also, I bought some gold earlier this year. After doing so, I didn't shake my fist at the sky yelling, damn all of you who have front run me to gold over the last 5000 years. I simply made the purchase in efforts to preserve my wealth in a highly inflationary environment, one that the ECB itself is partially responsible for causing, and then went about my day.
Point number 2. One of the other primary arguments in the paper is that Bitcoin has failed as a payments technology. In making this claim, the authors fail to even mention the lightning network, a layer built on top of bitcoin that enables fast cheap bitcoin payments. In recent years, the lightning network has grown exponentially. From August 2021 to August 2023 the network grew by 12 12 percent which occurred mostly during a Bitcoin bear market. Major players from the world of traditional payments are building on lightning as well. A prominent example of this is David Marcus, former president of PayPal, who is the current CEO of Lightspark, which is building enterprise ready payment structures via the lightning network.
Beyond Lightning, Bitcoin is still quite young and will likely need to be more fully monetized or less volatile in fiat money terms before people begin using it more frequently as a money. 3. Throughout the piece, the authors bring up how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are the preferred currencies of criminals and bad actors worldwide. While there's little evidence that proves this to be the case as methodology of chainalysis, the blockchain analysis firm often employed to look into crypto and criminal activity, is questionable at best.
Terrorist organizations like Hamas have stopped relying on crypto donations because of their traceability. With that said, TD Bank was just fined $3,000,000,000 for enabling money laundering, while Wells Fargo is currently in the crosshairs of regulators for doing the exact same thing. And data shows that criminals prefer cash above all else when committing crimes. Lastly, I made 2 purchases last week with Bitcoin, and I can assure you that neither were illegal. And I'm not the only one who recently made perfectly legal purchases with Bitcoin. And he's got a tweet screen capture, from Senator Cynthia Lummis who says, $900,000,000 in non crypto fiat currency money laundering versus $900,000 in crypto money laundering.
Crypto is clearly not the problem. Criminals and bad actors are. It would be a historic mistake to crush an entire emerging industry based on incorrect data. And she's responding to a Sam Lyman post, but we won't get into it. 4, the authors also make the claim that Bitcoin is a threat to democracy because, you know, crypto packs now donate to politicians. And we got more on that here in a little bit the pre purposes or the you know what they this this is an editing issue that's why I'm having problems with this sentence the sentence says the presupposes where it should says this presupposes that every other lobbying group out there isn't a threat to democracy which is laughable What the authors also missed is that Bitcoin is often a money of last resort for pro democracy activists who've been debanked by authoritarian regimes. And one of the first moves in the modern dictator's playbook is to cut dissidents off from the traditional financial system.
In these cases, pro democracy activists have to rely on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin's former opposition, popularized using cryptocurrencies for donations when the Putin regime limited its access to traditional financial rails. And finally, the authors suggest that central banks can just tighten monetary policy to counteract the bubble forming in bitcoin's price. The last 2 years have proven this isn't true, as rates are just about the highest they have been in over a decade and a half, yet Bitcoin's price is still on the verge of approaching an all time high in US dollar terms. Plus, tightening from the US Federal Reserve, the central bank of the US, led to the collapse hold on okay yeah led to the collapse oh, good lord. I've lost my place. Good. I'm so sorry.
Plus the tightening for the US Federal Reserve, the Central Bank of the United States led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, as well as other banks in 2023 highlighting the fact that tightening makes the traditional financial system more fragile. This only makes a stronger case for people to store their wealth outside of the traditional system in an asset like Bitcoin. Beyond these points, the tone of this paper from the ECB is paternalistic in that it suggests that all retail investors are just incapable of learning more about how markets work and why bitcoin is important.
Towards the end of the paper or the report, Bonsaisel and Schauff cite a source that claims that unsophisticated investors are drawn into the market as the Bitcoin bubble grows, seemingly suggesting that everyone of these retail investors only buys at the top and sells at the bottom of drawdown. I was once one of those unsophisticated retail investors and while I first bought Bitcoin near its 2017 top, I also bought it on dozens of other occasions including when its price dipped to local lows, like in 2018 and 2020.
I did so because in studying Bitcoin and learning what problems it solves, I came to a place to have more faith in it than I did in traditional monetary and other financial systems. There are many others like me. And I'd imagine that they too take offense at the ECB's diminishing of their intellectual capabilities and writing deeply biased reports that misrepresent what Bitcoin is and the reasons why people invest in and adopt it. Alright. So that's the end of the article by Frank Korba. I think he makes some good points adding on to what Tour de Meester has already said, and I told you about that in yesterday's episode entitled It's Raining FUD.
Well, it's still raining FUD. We have another, another one. Now, remember what I was telling you yesterday. That this paper from the ECB is going to be followed up by other papers from other central banks. Well, out of Atlas21 dotcom we have this one written entitled Another paper against Bitcoin. The Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank proposes taxes or bans to safeguard the public deficit. Now, that was also mentioned in the ECB paper to tax Bitcoin either out of existence or so heavily that they have full control over the price of Bitcoin or to ban Bitcoin outright.
Good luck with the second one. Sure, you can tax it. How are you going to prove that I own it? Now, some of you will say, well, of course, they can prove that you own it when you sell it for cash through traditional financial channels. Yes, that is true. But what if I buy stuff directly for Bitcoin? What they'll do is they will force not a black market, they will force a circular Bitcoin economy upon the face of the planet in a highly accelerated rate if they try to tax the living shit out of it. Banning it? Impossible. You'd have to have consensus from a 170 countries that are all on the same page.
We can't get a room full of, like, we can't get the G8 on many occasions to agree upon something simple. Alright? So good luck, you know, herding cats of 170 countries to all say collectively that they are going to go against their citizenry because that will cause a different issue. I am loath to say the sentence. But let's get into this one from the Minneapolis Fed. A new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis published on October 17th argues that governments may consider the option of taxing or banning Bitcoin to maintain the sustainability of significant and permanent budget deficits.
The document examines how Bitcoin and other assets with fixed supply can pose challenges and obstacles for public debt management policies banning Bitcoin to control debt the authors of the paper believe that Bitcoin introduces the so called balanced budget trap. Keep that shit in mind. A state in which the governments are, by God, forced to establish a balanced budget. Hindering its ability to spend beyond the resources obtained through simple taxation. In other words, without Bitcoin as a monetary competitor, the authors argue that debt can increase indefinitely. In the analysis, Bitcoin is described as a private security with a fixed supply not tied to real resources.
And it is further suggested that taxation or a ban could mitigate the potential problem of limited spending. I'm pausing to let you know they are telling you that they are just going to print money and you have no say about it. And we all know where this ends up and we have the Minneapolis Fed saying, fuck it we're just gonna do it and everybody knows this means hyperinflation this is Weimar Republic 2.0 but they don't care and they need to get Bitcoin out of the way so they can continue to print their money. They have literally no interest in a balanced budget anymore. It is outside of the Overton window to recommend, suggest, or even hint that maybe you guys should control your spending.
Be that as it may we continue the option of a legal prohibition could according to the document help restore the possibility of maintaining permanent primary deficits. Alternatively, imposing a tax on Bitcoin could achieve the same objective. A primary deficit occurs when a government spends more than it collects in taxes and other revenue excluding interest payments on its debt. The term permanent for the primary deficit is key as it means the government plans to continue spending more than it collects indefinitely. Here's the debt situation in the United States of America.
Currently, the US finds itself with a total national debt estimated at $35,700,000,000,000 that's $1,000,000,000,000 with a t, with an estimated annual primary deficit of $1,800,000,000,000 According to a recent report by Reuters, one of the main factors contributing to the growing deficit for the fiscal year 2024 has been the 29% increase in interest cost on treasury debt securities due to higher rates and an overall increase in debt. What's the industry reactions? Well, Matthew Siegel, head of digital asset research at Van Eck highlighted a similarity between the proposal to ban or tax bitcoin and the approach taken by the European Central Bank, stating quote, the new paper claims governments can run permanent deficits if consumers don't notice and adopt new money like, you know, BTC.
Fantasizes about legal prohibition and extra taxes on BTC to ensure government debt remains only risk free security. End quote. Dan McArdle, co founder of Messari, referenced an old paper from the Minneapolis Fed entitled Money is Memory, dated 1996. Although it predates the creation of Bitcoin, this document provides a definition of money that could be applied to Bitcoin's characteristics an object not tied to production with a fixed supply and functioning as economic memory. I prefer the 1996 Minneapolis Fed, which produced the Money is Memory paper, an intellectual exercise that without knowing it made the case for Bitcoin 12 years before the Genesis block.
Central Banks Against Bitcoin The report from the Minneapolis Fed comes just days after the paper released by 2 ECB economists, Ulrich Beinsayil and Jurgen Schaaf. According to those authors, long term Bitcoin holders would profit at the expense of new investors and the general population. The document states that Bitcoin does not increase the productive potential of the economy and that its increases in value has merely redistributive effects. As a solution, they propose legislation to prevent Bitcoin's price from rising, or to make it disappear entirely.
The authors encourage non holders and their political representatives to actively oppose Bitcoin, arguing that the idea of Bitcoin as an investment is based on a redistribution at their expense. End quote. And that is the end of this particular paper. What was it telling you yesterday? This report is just days after the ECB economists Ulrich and Juergen wrote that ECB propaganda piece against Bitcoin. It doesn't stop there by the way. It does and and this is it's this is really odd. It'll be I just want to make sure yeah, actually yeah. Okay.
I read something, like, here at the very end. Let me just demonstrate here. Let's see. Hold on. Report for the Minneapolis Fed. Well, I cannot find it, so it must have been in the, in the other paper. But some of this language and I did catch this on on another article, about this whole ECB and and Bitcoin thing. And and and when you get into some of the, I don't know, the the other economists that are not exactly mainstream the kind of the more the heavy duty academic kind guys these guys are talking about something called Markov analysis and Markov style economics.
And it's suggesting that you can somehow or another look at an asset as how did they put it? Look at an asset as memory. That's where this this thing comes oh, that's where it is. I prefer the 1996 Minneapolis Fed, which produced the money is memory paper. Well, that memory or money is memory paper is kinda referring to Markov. Except the way that these some of these, economists that are against Bitcoin are using the Markov analysis of against Bitcoin is is kinda is kinda brutal. It's basically suggesting that by controlling the price through heavy taxation, they can keep Bitcoin at a place where there's no memory that comes before it. Like for some reason or another, after a while, the price of Bitcoin is so stable that you don't you forget that it came from, like, $11 a Bitcoin and peaked at $73,000 a Bitcoin. That you that after a while, that's that entire thing is just forgotten about. And it's just nothing but sideways crab walk. But that crab walk is forced by these things like banning or heavy, heavy taxation to where no matter what you do with Bitcoin, you're only ever, if you're lucky, going to get your principal back.
That's what they're talking about when they say heavy taxation, to make damn sure that you don't actually realize at any time better purchasing power. What you're going to end up with is your principal which is has, by that time, lost its purchasing value. So they're going to force by heavy taxation of Bitcoin, they would be able to force a situation where you forgot what Bitcoin has done in the past. And again, good luck. As I said yesterday, they start doing this kind of crap and these countries are going to see emigrations out of their country of the smartest, the best, the brightest, the people that have foresight, and the people that have foresight are going to be easily identifiable because they're going to be able to have all of their wealth portable and they will be able to go wherever the hell they want even if it's out in a cruise ship permanently anchored in international waters that moves around.
I'm telling you man these people do not know what they're playing with And this continual pitting of 1 group of people against the other is not only dangerous, it means that they're looking at the human condition, human beings, as weaponry and chattel and a milk cow all at once. It's a disgusting way to view your fellow humans. And anybody that actually engages in that kind of behavior is better tarred and feathered and run out on a rail yet I don't think the population of the world has a spine left. We do not have the kind of thought process as a citizenry of the times of Genghis Khan.
We do not have the same thought processes of the people of ancient Rome. And if you I'm going to just say the word Caesar. We do not have the same type of thought process, the same type of willingness, the same type of spine, the large ball sack that we had during the American Revolution. We don't have that anymore. As somebody reminded me on Noster, we don't live in those times anymore. These types of activities are not an option. Well, something better damn well be an option Because these people are coming for us. We are in the then they fight you phase.
They're here to fight us. The Fed president says that crypto almost never used outside of drug deals and illegal activities. Again, from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, this time President Neel Kashkari himself said, quote, very few transactions are actually happening in crypto at a town hall in Wisconsin. And this is by the way from Decrypt and written by Liz Napolitano. Neil Kashkari on Monday dismissed crypto as the currency of drug deals and other criminal enterprises. Kashkari told audience members at a town hall in Wisconsin that very few transactions are actually happening in crypto, a video of the event hosted by the Chippewa Falls Area Chamber of Commerce shows. The comments underscores the underscores the bank regulators' resistance to crypto even as institutional adoption of the asset class heats up.
They're not paying for goods and services using crypto, Kashkari said on Monday. It almost never happens unless people are buying drugs or engaging in other illegal activities, end quote. Kashkari, who clinched the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis' highest office in 2016 has often scoffed at Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. 4 years ago, the former investment banker compared the digital asset market to a giant garbage dumpster. And in 2021, he similarly bitched and moaned that the market was overrun with 1,000 of garbage coins at a conference in Montana. On that one, we we shall agree.
Proponents of the cryptocurrency industry have often countered those criticisms. However, and on Monday, they again pushed back against the abrasive remarks. Quote, I think being this wrong should be illegal. Castle Island Ventures partner Nick Carter said Monday on Twitter responding to Kashkari's comments, Custodia Bank CEO Caitlin Long and Brown Rudnick partner Hailey Linen joined the chorus of crypto industry supporters criticizing the regulators' bleak assessment of the digital assets market. Quote, legitimate crypto projects in the space have state of the art anti money laundering policies to prevent this, Lennon said in a Twitter post. Quote, we've been fighting this false narrative for decades.
End quote. The Federal Reserve System governs the regional and federal bank systems, including crypto related banking in the United States. It has the authority to issue restrictions on crypto banking in addition to the power to issue central bank digital currencies. Just 17% of American adults reported ever having owned digital assets in 2023 according to a Pew Pew Research Center survey, although industry funded polls have set that number much higher. Meanwhile, U. S. Federal Reserve data shows that just 2% of the U. S. Adult population made a payment using cryptocurrencies in 2022. Institutional adoption of crypto, however, has picked up in recent months, accelerated by the approval of spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs in the United States earlier this year.
Roughly 80% of institutional investors and wealth managers reported planning to increase their investments in digital assets in the coming months, according to a 2024 poll from Europe based investment manager, Nickel Digital. So that's the end of that article. So now we have Neel Kashkari coming right on the heels of this second propaganda piece against Bitcoin out of the Minneapolis Fed itself and essentially kind of reinforcing what it said in the ECB paper, that Bitcoin has failed as a payments method. Do you see how the narrative is cohesive amongst all of these groups?
Is there not a difference between Europe and the United States? Well, I personally think there is. I mean, there's a whole bunch of elite companies in the United States buying a whole shit ton of Bitcoin. And yet, the Minneapolis Fed says it's crap and it's failed. The ECB says it's crap and it's failed. And all these people keep saying it's only used for criminals, then why the fuck is Larry Fink buying the living shit out of it? They don't want you to have it. This is just a mind game. This is just them understanding that they've been able to do this to the population of the world for decades by using mass media mainstream media and any other kind of media that they own and they own most of it they're able to push a narrative that is succinct and congruent with each other to the point that it sounds like a worldwide narrative.
It's not easy to it's or rather it's not hard to fool massive amounts of people. It's just it's not but I mentioned BlackRock so how much did they buy Braden Lindria tells us about it from Cointelegraph BlackRock's Ibit investors throw $329,000,000 into the ETF as Bitcoin dips 3%. So as the price was dipping, Ibit was buying. Investors in Ishares Bitcoin Trust bought the dip sending $329,000,000 in inflows to the fund yesterday in one day October 21st after bitcoin slipped 3% on that day. The Fidelity wise Origin Bitcoin Fund was the only other United States spot Bitcoin ETF to record an inflow with $5,900,000 on October 21st while others recorded either 0 or negative flows. It was the 3rd time in 4 days trading days that BlackRock's spot Bitcoin exchange traded fund received over $300,000,000 in inflows, far side investors data show.
BlackRock's Ibit continues to lead all spot Bitcoin ETFs product, crossing the $23,000,000,000 mark in total net inflows on October 21st. That was yesterday. $23,000,000,000 since they opened. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunos noted that Ibid has posted the 3rd largest ETF inflows in 2024. Trailing only Vanguard and BlackRock's S and P index funds, tickered VOO and IVV respectively. It comes as Bitcoin's price dropped 3.25 percent to a daily low of $66,975 yesterday after failing to break the $70,000 price resistance. It cut into the 10 day price surge that saw Bitcoin rise from 59,000 to 69,000 data shows. Market selling off slightly today as expected and that's okay, crypto trader Jelly said.
Jelly, literally, j e l l e. I guess that's either gel or jelly. I don't know. Whatever. Other crypto traders like emperor, whatever, set a price pullback to the 62,000 range may be in the cards this week after Bitcoin posted its highly weekly close in 5 months on October 20th. The price surge between October 11th 21st has been primarily attributed to traders speculating on the upcoming US election, which we also have in the news. Meanwhile, total net inflows across all Bitcoin ETFs currently amount to $21,200,000,000 which includes over $20,000,000,000 in outflows from GBTC.
Bitcoin is currently trading at 67,360, which is down, you know, 2.2% over the last, few hours, and we're still right around there right now. So we've got the narrative from all of the elites saying the Bitcoin bad, yet we see the actions of the other elites which are not out there it's not like they have 2 different clubs, guys. These are the same people. They're just different we're seeing different departments of the same club. We're seeing that their financial arm actually do the shit and we're seeing their recruitment arm actually go through and scare the living crap out of people so that there's more stuff that their financial arm can actually purchase.
They're scaring you out of your Bitcoin. They're doing it on purpose and they know exactly what they're doing. They don't actually think Bitcoin is bad. They know that Bitcoin is bad for them. But the only way that they can get ahead of this is by buying Bitcoin. They know what's up. Don't be fooled. Don't sell your Bitcoin. Let's run numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities. I got a little bit of, IRS news. My entire trending now side bracket from cnbc.com is filled with IRS stuff. In fact, there's 3 out of the 5 trending now stories is that the IRS has announced new federal income tax brackets for 2025 and they all seem to be higher, which means that you're gonna be able to make more money before you get into a higher tax bracket.
Right? So the IRS has unveiled higher capital gains tax brackets for 2025, as well. And in the 3rd story on trending now, the IRS has announced bigger estate and gift tax exemptions for 2025. I think they really I don't know what they're doing. I mean, it's like half of me thinks that they really want Kamala Harris to lose to Trump and the other half is making me think that they want her to win. I don't know, man. I'm confused. I don't care. I honestly just make make sure I wanna make sure of something here. If hopefully, I'll remember to to get into that. I was just looking at another story that has to do with the elections.
But futures and commodities. Oil, West Texas Intermediate is up 2.8% to $72.54 Apparently, China has enacted some more stimulus, which is powering their economy in a very, very fake way. How do I know? Because that's what we've been doing. Whatever. Brent Norsey is up 2 and a half points, $76.20. Natural gas up 1 and a half. And gasoline is up 2.7 to $2.07 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks doing very, very well today. Gold is up a half point to $27.52.60. Silver is up 2.44%. Platinum is up 2.17. Copper is up a third. And palladium is up 2.25%. Biggest loser in ag today is chocolate. 3.69 to the downside. Biggest winner is gonna be a tie between corn and soybeans, which are both up basically 1.5%.
I got live cattle up 3 quarters of a point. Lean hogs are up 0.8. Feeder cattle are up 2 thirds of a point. While the Dow and the rest of the equity markets are kind of sucking swamp water, Dow is down 0.16%, S and P is down a 3rd, Nasdaq is down 0.4%, and the S and P mini is down 0.8%. So, Bitcoin having a couple of stumbling blocks over the last couple of days. $67,030 has just flashed across my screen. That is a $1,330,000,000,000 market cap as it was yesterday, I think. And we can only get 24.3 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,771,252.36 of.
And fees have risen again, but only to 0.17bt c on average on a per block basis. And there are 118 blocks carrying 243,000 transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 16 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 14. Hash rate is at 715 and a half exahashes per second. Not bad. Not bad at all. And from its raining FUD, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and Dubravco. 2340 Sat says a friend is asking if anyone in the Dallas Fort Worth area would like a kitten. Comes with a couple of supplies and he's got a primal note in there. Actually, let me just, let me see what that is.
I was waiting for this primal note to come up. Oh, nope. No. It's not in that one. Okay. Yeah. So if anybody if anybody knows of somebody or if you or somebody you know wants a kitten in the Dallas Fort Worth area, get a hold of Dubravko. That is at dubravk0. Onnoster, dubravk0. Pies to play with 21100 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. You are right about the bidaxe thing. I learned so much more about mining in the process of setting up the bidaxe. It was so easy and simple to do. I'm hoping that your assessment of this being the catalyst that enables more plebs and newbies to help secure the network and start mining. I agree, Pies. Get on those bidaxes. Learn how to mine. Anonymous with a 1,000 says, thanks. Still loving this show. I'm glad to hear that. God's death with 5:37 says, thank you, sir. No, thank you. Perma Nerd with 333. Thank you, sir. No, thank you. Pies to Pleb with a 100. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And that's the weather report.
Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. Ripple cofounder Chris Larsen is flooding Kamala Harris' election effort with shitcoin number 4, XRP. Yeah. This is out of CoinDesk. Jesse Hamilton, if you haven't heard about it, you might wanna know what's going on. Ripple cofounder, CEO Chris Larsen said that he's added another $10,000,000 in the Ripple Tide token known as XRP in an effort to boost president vice president Kamala Harris as the democrat faces off against former president Trump. Larson has become the crypto sector's leading supporter for Harris, saying Monday in on Twitter that he's pitching in with $10,000,000 more in XRP. Quote, it's time for the democrats to have a new approach to tech innovation, including crypto, he wrote, and added, quote, will ensure that American technology dominates the world, end quote. Federal election commission records show that he's previously donated $1,750,000 to her PAC. He's also given 100 of 1,000 of dollars to Democratic congressional campaigns.
While significant, his millions are overshadowed by the overall crypto industry's campaign involvement led by the super pack, Fair Shake. That group's $169,000,000 in donations, primarily from Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and Andreessen Horowitz, or a 16 z, has not only dominated the crypto sector's election involvement, but as put it among the biggest sources of campaign cash in the 2024 elections. While Fair Shake has made some clear efforts to divide its spending between the 2 major parties and to avoid taking a side in the presidential election, many of the industry's leaders have come out individually for their presidential favorites.
So Chris Larsen From from Ripple is all in Kamala Harris, and I don't I don't necessarily get that except except under the the following circumstance He doesn't like Bitcoin at all, and we know that's actually a fact. He wants Kamala Harris to crush anything but Ripple. The games that are being played here are the same games that have been played over and over and over and over again. There's nothing different here. Except that when these people start doing these kinds of donations and becoming political, that's when you know that they are your enemy. Anybody who has any designs on getting power, cozying up to political parties, being part of the cabinet of whatever president.
They are your enemy. And they should be treated as such. You should not believe what they say. You should not provide them any material comforts at all. If they come by your house and ask you for a cup of tea, you need to say fuck off. You need to do the exact opposite of what was it, Job? And, let yeah. It's like what Job did in it was either Sodom or Gomorrah, I can't remember what town he was living in, where he invited the angels in and then, you know, it was a really big mess and the only reason that his family was saved is because everybody else treated him like shit. Well, in this particular case, politicians and the people that want to befriend the politicians should be treated like shit.
Even if one of us turns into a pillar of salt, they should be treated like shit. They should be talked down to. They should be ridiculed 20 fourseven. They should be given no quarter. They should be given no comfort. They should be given no solace. They should be given nothing. If I could take their air away, I would take their air away. They have been nothing but disaster for millennia. Not centuries, not decades, but for 1000 of years those who seek power should immediately be put to the sword. If you breathe that you want to be king, your next breath should be your last.
If you breathe that you want to be a senator, your next breath should be your last. If you seek power, control, prominence your last breath should come very soon after you suggest that that's what you want. Maybe we should stop all this. Maybe we should just quit trying to get ahead of one another and lift each other up and I'm not talking about communism, I'm not talking about that shit. Do you know have have any idea how much richer most people on this planet would be if these guys got out of our way? Do you have any clue if we didn't have the kinds of regulations how many people would be happy just having a fucking taco stand.
Because that's what they really wanna do. But the health department, and the these, the certificates, and the inspections, and the paying of bribes, It's just impossible for people to to be happy in a very simple way. Where where where they value a different kind of wealth than like somebody like Mark Cuban, Who, by the way, is dismissing the poly market election odds as a result of foreign money. This is added decrypt and Will McCurdy is gonna tell us more. Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has dismissed the usefulness of the decentralized prediction market, Polymarket, when it comes to predicting the 2024 presidential election winner.
Quote, from all indications, most of the money coming into is foreign money. So I don't think it's an indication of anything, he said in an interview with CNBC's Squawk Box. Polymarket odds gives Donald Trump a 64.1% chance of defeating vice president Kamala Harris with the democratic candidate sitting at a mere 36%. Over $2,200,000,000 has been staked on the polygon based platform at the time of writing, with most of the capital flowing in being wagered, of course, on Trump. Well, just over $600,000,000 has been placed on Trump so far, while more than 400,000,000 has been put behind Harris.
Mark Cuban pointed out that Polymarket doesn't allow US citizens to place bets on the election. This follows a 2022 decision by the CFTC, which saw the platform hit with a $1,400,000 fine. Despite being critical of PolyMarkets' usefulness as a predictor of the presidential race, he revealed that he is an indirect investor in the platform through a crypto fund that I'm in. Unlike a traditional online betting platform like Draft Kings, poly market users don't bet against the house. Its odds also aren't decided by a panel of expert odds makers. Instead, odds are determined by users buying and selling shares in a particular outcome, and shares are created when opposing sides agree on odds.
This dissanction has led some third party commentators to argue that poly market's odds can be manipulated by betters with other motives. An article in the Wall Street Journal speculated that Trump's strong odds on the platform might be a mirage manufactured by a group of 4 Polymarket accounts that have collectively pumped about $30,000,000 of crypto into bets that Trump will win. The 4 users, and they give their names here, but I'm not gonna repeat them, all placed bets on a Trump victory in quick secession. However, Polymarket has passed form no. Hold on. However, Polymarket has passed form when it comes to making calls on political events, having correctly predicted that president Biden would drop out of the 2024 race before November.
That's a terrible sentence, but I just gotta I gotta go with it. Okay. So why am I telling you what Mark Cuban says when I clearly don't like Mark Cuban? And if you've listened to the show, you know that I'm I'm not a big fan of Mark Cuban. Well, the reason is because I 100% agree with Mark Cuban. This whole Polymarket thing and and it's not that Polymarket itself is bullshit. I don't care that it's based on Polygon. That's it's based on a shitcoin chain or a shit chain. I don't care. That's that's not what's going on here. I also don't care that people are betting. I don't think people should bet. I think it's a vice that will get you into trouble, but we're not here for that either. So what the hell am I here for? I'm here because this Polymarket thing is being used all I see it all the time.
The odds that Trump are gonna win this election are 64%. But yet when you look at whether it's on Twitter or over on Noster, when you look and you realize that that's what the poly market odds are, and not actual polls that are just asking Joe and Jane on the street who they're gonna vote for, I get I think it's dubious as well. I don't think there's I don't think that there's a there there. That doesn't mean that I don't think that, you know, that Trump is going that I well, it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not making a prediction as to whether or not Trump loses or wins or Harris loses or wins or I don't know, whatever. That's completely outside of my control and it's outside of your control too.
But for those people that keep looking at PolyMarkets saying Trump is going to win, that's not what PolyMarkets is telling you. For the exact reasons that Mark Cuban brought up. There are many times that I will tell you that I am not a fan of an individual. Yet, when I feel they are 100% correct about something I'm go and I agree with them I'm not gonna lie about it. In this particular case, Mark Cuban has his eye on the ball. This poly market thing needs it's not that it needs to go away. It just you just need to stop being fooled into believing that those are the real odds for this election.
They are not the real odds for this election. If you go look at the polls, Trump is leading, I think, by, like, 52 to 53%. It is not wide of enough margin for me to be comfortable that Trump is actually going to win this particular election. Because as that margin is squelched or it that margin becomes either if it becomes any smaller or it doesn't expand, that's enough margin of error for cheating on this election to occur and not draw any eyebrows from the mainstream media individuals that are like, wait a minute. This margin is way too big for this for this election to have gone that way. That if if the margin's too big, Trump has too big of a margin ahead of Harris, there's no way that they can actually cheat and get away with it. They can cheat, but if the margin's too big they won't be able to get away with it, and they don't want to damage themselves doing that.
Also, I do believe that there is a huge element of the Democratic party that wants to see Trump actually win. They'll just never tell you that. Because if he wins, he's going to inherit what? $35,700,000,000,000 of debt in an unserviceable market, post COVID, with still supply chain issues going everywhere. And the fact that we printed so much freaking money, inflation is out of fucking control. He's not going to inherit a like the poster child of America. What he's inheriting is some kind of abomination of what America used to be.
That's going to play into the Democrats' future plans just fine. Because if they can get this economy to get even more screwed up while he's president of the United States, even though he won't be able to run again because he will be ineligible, he will have taken his two terms, the Republican Party itself will be damaged beyond all repair. And the Democrats will have all manner of free range. So if you don't think that that isn't isn't an actual scenario that the Democratic Party and the operatives in the Democratic Party have gained out, you would be fooling yourself. So I don't believe poly market for a single second. And I don't think you should either.
But here is something that we can sink our teeth into. I'm not sure if we want to, but it's probably true from The Block, James Hunt writing, Stripe acquires stablecoinplatformbridgefor1.1000000000 dollars crypto market scream risk on and more. I hope you had a good weekend folks. In today's daily Stripe's $1,100,000,000 acquisition of bridge is confirmed. Bernstein says Bitcoin ETF inflows, crypto equity markets, and retail trading sentiments are screaming risk on. Japan's DPP leader pledges a 20% tax cap on crypto gains and more. Meanwhile, perpetually rising Bitcoin prices would lead to societal impoverishment, as the ECB economists claim, as the BIS highlights risk in traditional financials move towards tokenization.
So, the payments giant Stripe has acquired the platform bridge or stablecoin platform bridge for $1,100,000,000 according to TechCrunch. The deal marks stripes and not strike. We're talking about Stripe. Like, if you use, oh, what is it? Oh, what the hell do I hold on for a second. Now now I gotta look and see what the hell it is that I use because I'm draw draw to like substack. Yeah. Like substack. If you get paid out by substack, you're using Stripe to get paid, that's what their rail is. So s t r I p e bought a stable coin situation known as bridge. What do they call it? So I'm really screwing this up. Hold on for a second.
Platform. That's I'm looking for the stablecoin platform. Stripe has bought a stablecoin platform. That should be all that we really need to know about it. Stripe is now going to use a stablecoin rail. Now, will they use it for everything? I don't know. Exactly why did they buy it? Well, I'm not exactly sure, but I conjecture because they realize they're going to have to get into this or they are going to lose their footing. Now, let's take this back to what what is the ECB said, the European Central Bank said about Bitcoin and crypto. What has the, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve said about Bitcoin and crypto?
What is Neel Kashkari saying about Bitcoin and crypto? There's 2 different set of elites but they represent the exact same club. One set of elites is scaring the piss out of you to get you to sell all your Bitcoin, while the other set of elites from the same club is buying everything that they shake out of the tree. That's how this club works. One side fearmongers. And the other side, well, it drinks up all the blood that's flowing in the streets. I'm just saying, be careful with these people. They've got our number. Now, Dutch Bitcoin exchange, BL 3p, is shutting down December the 30 20th.
So be aware, after more than 10 years of service, Dutch Bitcoin only exchange, BL 3p, will be shutting down December 20, 2024. Quote, this decision driven by new regulations such as Mica will allow us to fully focus on improving the by Bytonic or BitTonic platform and its product range. While bl three p has been an integral part of BitTonic and the Bitcoin community for a decade, we believe that this transition will enable us to provide you with better services and new opportunities, said the platform in a blog post. It's also important to note that bl 3p lightning NFC cards will be deactivated on December 20th, added the exchange.
Users are encouraged to switch to the Bytonic platform, which aims to implement bl3p features such as target orders, dynamic withdrawal fees, lightning network integration in the near future. So it sounds to me like they're just kinda changing they're just rebranding in in in a way. But if you are a user of the bl3p you need to get all your shit off there. And if you wanna move over to Bitonic, might wanna start doing that sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, Core Lightning version 24.08.2. Remember and update channel hints.
Core lightning is a lightweight, highly customizable, and standard compliant implementation of the lightning network protocol. Quote, this point release addresses a few crash fixes and includes an enhancement sorry, to remember and update channel hints for payments, said the project. So if you are a user of Core Lightning, you need to upgrade to 24.08.2. Like I said, unless it's an emergency, you might wanna wait just to make certain that there's not any bugs that that's been introduced. However, there are such things as emergency updates that you have to do. I do not see this as being one of them.
Finally, for today, DeByFi DeByFi app 0.0.52 now is released with cold card MK 4 integration. Debitfy is a non custodial Bitcoin backed lending platform providing institutional grade liquidity. It lets you borrow against your Bitcoin, aw shit, using secure multisig escrow, and it's available appears only on Android. Quote, the new version of DeWiFi app is now live. The latest update brings features designed to enhance user experience and security, including cold card mark 4 integration, explore page, contact form, and bug fixes. And that's it. That's it for the day, guys.
Please please please. I really think that it's probably, well, it would behoove us to watch very carefully what new narratives are being reinforced by central banks, central bankers, and other institutions. Like the the whole example is that that ECB paper, the the European Central Bank propaganda piece dropped a few days ago. 2 or 3 days later, the Federal Reserve, Bank of Minneapolis, dropped a paper that echoed the sentiment. Neel Kashkari, the president or the chair of the Minneapolis Fed, echoed those same sentiments of the two papers. That in his talk that we talked about today, he was basically saying, well, Bitcoin's kind of failed as a payment mechanism.
A, no it hasn't. But be that as it may. I'm just saying that what I'm seeing are cross border narratives being compiled together to form a global narrative and they're being reinforced by all the members of the club. And when I'm I mean that. This is a club of people and you're not in it. They have an entire section of the club designed to scare the living piss out of the population of the world, And the other arm of the same club is there to pick up the gold that has been shook free out of the tree. So one job is to shake the tree, and the other one is to pick up the fruit. You're the tree.
Your Bitcoin is the fruit. Stop listening to what these people have to say and just watch what the the only branch of this club that you need to watch is the Larry Fink branch of the club. The Ibit, BlackRock, the Fidelity branch of the club. The institutional buyers that are buying the Bitcoin that's being shaken out of the out of the public en mass right now because of the side of the club that you need to stop listening to. Sure, you should probably watch what they're doing, but for God's sake, don't listen to a single word they say. I'll see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 8:58 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 22nd day of October 2024.
This is episode 978 of Bitcoin. And we've got a little bit more about that ECB paper. Something that I told you was going to happen yesterday actually did happen. Well, it's it's I hate being right, but I was right and it just seems to go seems to go on. I think this is yet another I think what we're seeing is another fully fledged media based attack on Bitcoin and the perception of Bitcoin by the masses in the world, not just this country in the United States, but the world, especially the western world, which we are just apparently easily manipulated in thought and deed. And then there's some, well, we got some BlackRock news.
Mark Cuban is gonna be here today as is the Ripple cofounder, Larson, Chris Larson. We've gotta talk about that because it's just, you know, I mean, I know they're I know. I get it, guys. They're they're they're shitcoiners. But, hey, they they are doing stuff and reaching for things. And every time they do, it's always dangerous. So it's better to know what your enemy is doing than be completely oblivious to what the hell's going on. But first, let's have a different analysis of the European Central Bank propaganda piece that I talked about yesterday.
Their white paper that suggests that if you are a Bitcoin holder then you are what's wrong with apparently the universe, I guess. But from Bitcoin Magazine, Frank Korva has his own analysis of what the ECB gets wrong about Bitcoin. That's the title of the article. And he says, last week, I guess that's how you pronounce it. And Hyrgen Scharf of the European Central Bank published a paper entitled, quote, the distributional consequences of Bitcoin in which they made a host of dubious claims about Bitcoin. The notion that those who were late to investing in Bitcoin are impoverished by those who were early to investing in it and that Bitcoin has failed as a payments technology are the author's central arguments.
Bitcoin analyst Ter de Miester sounded the alarm about the report on Twitter and we went through that yesterday. As a former academic, I was appalled at how lazy the arguments in the paper were. Hence, I have taken the time to push back upon some of them. One. The main premise of the paper is that if Bitcoin's price continues to rise, early Bitcoin investors, or the early birds as the author calls them, will gain wealth at the expense of the late comers. While this is true if the early birds hold all of their coins to no end, the dynamics is no different with any other publicly traded asset.
The bigger point that the researchers miss though is that some of us are both early birds as well as latecomers. See, I first bought Bitcoin in January of 2018. And I also bought some last week. Did I impoverish myself in this scenario? No, no I didn't. Nor has anyone who has dollar cost averaged into Bitcoin over any period of time. Also, I bought some gold earlier this year. After doing so, I didn't shake my fist at the sky yelling, damn all of you who have front run me to gold over the last 5000 years. I simply made the purchase in efforts to preserve my wealth in a highly inflationary environment, one that the ECB itself is partially responsible for causing, and then went about my day.
Point number 2. One of the other primary arguments in the paper is that Bitcoin has failed as a payments technology. In making this claim, the authors fail to even mention the lightning network, a layer built on top of bitcoin that enables fast cheap bitcoin payments. In recent years, the lightning network has grown exponentially. From August 2021 to August 2023 the network grew by 12 12 percent which occurred mostly during a Bitcoin bear market. Major players from the world of traditional payments are building on lightning as well. A prominent example of this is David Marcus, former president of PayPal, who is the current CEO of Lightspark, which is building enterprise ready payment structures via the lightning network.
Beyond Lightning, Bitcoin is still quite young and will likely need to be more fully monetized or less volatile in fiat money terms before people begin using it more frequently as a money. 3. Throughout the piece, the authors bring up how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are the preferred currencies of criminals and bad actors worldwide. While there's little evidence that proves this to be the case as methodology of chainalysis, the blockchain analysis firm often employed to look into crypto and criminal activity, is questionable at best.
Terrorist organizations like Hamas have stopped relying on crypto donations because of their traceability. With that said, TD Bank was just fined $3,000,000,000 for enabling money laundering, while Wells Fargo is currently in the crosshairs of regulators for doing the exact same thing. And data shows that criminals prefer cash above all else when committing crimes. Lastly, I made 2 purchases last week with Bitcoin, and I can assure you that neither were illegal. And I'm not the only one who recently made perfectly legal purchases with Bitcoin. And he's got a tweet screen capture, from Senator Cynthia Lummis who says, $900,000,000 in non crypto fiat currency money laundering versus $900,000 in crypto money laundering.
Crypto is clearly not the problem. Criminals and bad actors are. It would be a historic mistake to crush an entire emerging industry based on incorrect data. And she's responding to a Sam Lyman post, but we won't get into it. 4, the authors also make the claim that Bitcoin is a threat to democracy because, you know, crypto packs now donate to politicians. And we got more on that here in a little bit the pre purposes or the you know what they this this is an editing issue that's why I'm having problems with this sentence the sentence says the presupposes where it should says this presupposes that every other lobbying group out there isn't a threat to democracy which is laughable What the authors also missed is that Bitcoin is often a money of last resort for pro democracy activists who've been debanked by authoritarian regimes. And one of the first moves in the modern dictator's playbook is to cut dissidents off from the traditional financial system.
In these cases, pro democracy activists have to rely on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin's former opposition, popularized using cryptocurrencies for donations when the Putin regime limited its access to traditional financial rails. And finally, the authors suggest that central banks can just tighten monetary policy to counteract the bubble forming in bitcoin's price. The last 2 years have proven this isn't true, as rates are just about the highest they have been in over a decade and a half, yet Bitcoin's price is still on the verge of approaching an all time high in US dollar terms. Plus, tightening from the US Federal Reserve, the central bank of the US, led to the collapse hold on okay yeah led to the collapse oh, good lord. I've lost my place. Good. I'm so sorry.
Plus the tightening for the US Federal Reserve, the Central Bank of the United States led to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, as well as other banks in 2023 highlighting the fact that tightening makes the traditional financial system more fragile. This only makes a stronger case for people to store their wealth outside of the traditional system in an asset like Bitcoin. Beyond these points, the tone of this paper from the ECB is paternalistic in that it suggests that all retail investors are just incapable of learning more about how markets work and why bitcoin is important.
Towards the end of the paper or the report, Bonsaisel and Schauff cite a source that claims that unsophisticated investors are drawn into the market as the Bitcoin bubble grows, seemingly suggesting that everyone of these retail investors only buys at the top and sells at the bottom of drawdown. I was once one of those unsophisticated retail investors and while I first bought Bitcoin near its 2017 top, I also bought it on dozens of other occasions including when its price dipped to local lows, like in 2018 and 2020.
I did so because in studying Bitcoin and learning what problems it solves, I came to a place to have more faith in it than I did in traditional monetary and other financial systems. There are many others like me. And I'd imagine that they too take offense at the ECB's diminishing of their intellectual capabilities and writing deeply biased reports that misrepresent what Bitcoin is and the reasons why people invest in and adopt it. Alright. So that's the end of the article by Frank Korba. I think he makes some good points adding on to what Tour de Meester has already said, and I told you about that in yesterday's episode entitled It's Raining FUD.
Well, it's still raining FUD. We have another, another one. Now, remember what I was telling you yesterday. That this paper from the ECB is going to be followed up by other papers from other central banks. Well, out of Atlas21 dotcom we have this one written entitled Another paper against Bitcoin. The Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank proposes taxes or bans to safeguard the public deficit. Now, that was also mentioned in the ECB paper to tax Bitcoin either out of existence or so heavily that they have full control over the price of Bitcoin or to ban Bitcoin outright.
Good luck with the second one. Sure, you can tax it. How are you going to prove that I own it? Now, some of you will say, well, of course, they can prove that you own it when you sell it for cash through traditional financial channels. Yes, that is true. But what if I buy stuff directly for Bitcoin? What they'll do is they will force not a black market, they will force a circular Bitcoin economy upon the face of the planet in a highly accelerated rate if they try to tax the living shit out of it. Banning it? Impossible. You'd have to have consensus from a 170 countries that are all on the same page.
We can't get a room full of, like, we can't get the G8 on many occasions to agree upon something simple. Alright? So good luck, you know, herding cats of 170 countries to all say collectively that they are going to go against their citizenry because that will cause a different issue. I am loath to say the sentence. But let's get into this one from the Minneapolis Fed. A new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis published on October 17th argues that governments may consider the option of taxing or banning Bitcoin to maintain the sustainability of significant and permanent budget deficits.
The document examines how Bitcoin and other assets with fixed supply can pose challenges and obstacles for public debt management policies banning Bitcoin to control debt the authors of the paper believe that Bitcoin introduces the so called balanced budget trap. Keep that shit in mind. A state in which the governments are, by God, forced to establish a balanced budget. Hindering its ability to spend beyond the resources obtained through simple taxation. In other words, without Bitcoin as a monetary competitor, the authors argue that debt can increase indefinitely. In the analysis, Bitcoin is described as a private security with a fixed supply not tied to real resources.
And it is further suggested that taxation or a ban could mitigate the potential problem of limited spending. I'm pausing to let you know they are telling you that they are just going to print money and you have no say about it. And we all know where this ends up and we have the Minneapolis Fed saying, fuck it we're just gonna do it and everybody knows this means hyperinflation this is Weimar Republic 2.0 but they don't care and they need to get Bitcoin out of the way so they can continue to print their money. They have literally no interest in a balanced budget anymore. It is outside of the Overton window to recommend, suggest, or even hint that maybe you guys should control your spending.
Be that as it may we continue the option of a legal prohibition could according to the document help restore the possibility of maintaining permanent primary deficits. Alternatively, imposing a tax on Bitcoin could achieve the same objective. A primary deficit occurs when a government spends more than it collects in taxes and other revenue excluding interest payments on its debt. The term permanent for the primary deficit is key as it means the government plans to continue spending more than it collects indefinitely. Here's the debt situation in the United States of America.
Currently, the US finds itself with a total national debt estimated at $35,700,000,000,000 that's $1,000,000,000,000 with a t, with an estimated annual primary deficit of $1,800,000,000,000 According to a recent report by Reuters, one of the main factors contributing to the growing deficit for the fiscal year 2024 has been the 29% increase in interest cost on treasury debt securities due to higher rates and an overall increase in debt. What's the industry reactions? Well, Matthew Siegel, head of digital asset research at Van Eck highlighted a similarity between the proposal to ban or tax bitcoin and the approach taken by the European Central Bank, stating quote, the new paper claims governments can run permanent deficits if consumers don't notice and adopt new money like, you know, BTC.
Fantasizes about legal prohibition and extra taxes on BTC to ensure government debt remains only risk free security. End quote. Dan McArdle, co founder of Messari, referenced an old paper from the Minneapolis Fed entitled Money is Memory, dated 1996. Although it predates the creation of Bitcoin, this document provides a definition of money that could be applied to Bitcoin's characteristics an object not tied to production with a fixed supply and functioning as economic memory. I prefer the 1996 Minneapolis Fed, which produced the Money is Memory paper, an intellectual exercise that without knowing it made the case for Bitcoin 12 years before the Genesis block.
Central Banks Against Bitcoin The report from the Minneapolis Fed comes just days after the paper released by 2 ECB economists, Ulrich Beinsayil and Jurgen Schaaf. According to those authors, long term Bitcoin holders would profit at the expense of new investors and the general population. The document states that Bitcoin does not increase the productive potential of the economy and that its increases in value has merely redistributive effects. As a solution, they propose legislation to prevent Bitcoin's price from rising, or to make it disappear entirely.
The authors encourage non holders and their political representatives to actively oppose Bitcoin, arguing that the idea of Bitcoin as an investment is based on a redistribution at their expense. End quote. And that is the end of this particular paper. What was it telling you yesterday? This report is just days after the ECB economists Ulrich and Juergen wrote that ECB propaganda piece against Bitcoin. It doesn't stop there by the way. It does and and this is it's this is really odd. It'll be I just want to make sure yeah, actually yeah. Okay.
I read something, like, here at the very end. Let me just demonstrate here. Let's see. Hold on. Report for the Minneapolis Fed. Well, I cannot find it, so it must have been in the, in the other paper. But some of this language and I did catch this on on another article, about this whole ECB and and Bitcoin thing. And and and when you get into some of the, I don't know, the the other economists that are not exactly mainstream the kind of the more the heavy duty academic kind guys these guys are talking about something called Markov analysis and Markov style economics.
And it's suggesting that you can somehow or another look at an asset as how did they put it? Look at an asset as memory. That's where this this thing comes oh, that's where it is. I prefer the 1996 Minneapolis Fed, which produced the money is memory paper. Well, that memory or money is memory paper is kinda referring to Markov. Except the way that these some of these, economists that are against Bitcoin are using the Markov analysis of against Bitcoin is is kinda is kinda brutal. It's basically suggesting that by controlling the price through heavy taxation, they can keep Bitcoin at a place where there's no memory that comes before it. Like for some reason or another, after a while, the price of Bitcoin is so stable that you don't you forget that it came from, like, $11 a Bitcoin and peaked at $73,000 a Bitcoin. That you that after a while, that's that entire thing is just forgotten about. And it's just nothing but sideways crab walk. But that crab walk is forced by these things like banning or heavy, heavy taxation to where no matter what you do with Bitcoin, you're only ever, if you're lucky, going to get your principal back.
That's what they're talking about when they say heavy taxation, to make damn sure that you don't actually realize at any time better purchasing power. What you're going to end up with is your principal which is has, by that time, lost its purchasing value. So they're going to force by heavy taxation of Bitcoin, they would be able to force a situation where you forgot what Bitcoin has done in the past. And again, good luck. As I said yesterday, they start doing this kind of crap and these countries are going to see emigrations out of their country of the smartest, the best, the brightest, the people that have foresight, and the people that have foresight are going to be easily identifiable because they're going to be able to have all of their wealth portable and they will be able to go wherever the hell they want even if it's out in a cruise ship permanently anchored in international waters that moves around.
I'm telling you man these people do not know what they're playing with And this continual pitting of 1 group of people against the other is not only dangerous, it means that they're looking at the human condition, human beings, as weaponry and chattel and a milk cow all at once. It's a disgusting way to view your fellow humans. And anybody that actually engages in that kind of behavior is better tarred and feathered and run out on a rail yet I don't think the population of the world has a spine left. We do not have the kind of thought process as a citizenry of the times of Genghis Khan.
We do not have the same thought processes of the people of ancient Rome. And if you I'm going to just say the word Caesar. We do not have the same type of thought process, the same type of willingness, the same type of spine, the large ball sack that we had during the American Revolution. We don't have that anymore. As somebody reminded me on Noster, we don't live in those times anymore. These types of activities are not an option. Well, something better damn well be an option Because these people are coming for us. We are in the then they fight you phase.
They're here to fight us. The Fed president says that crypto almost never used outside of drug deals and illegal activities. Again, from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, this time President Neel Kashkari himself said, quote, very few transactions are actually happening in crypto at a town hall in Wisconsin. And this is by the way from Decrypt and written by Liz Napolitano. Neil Kashkari on Monday dismissed crypto as the currency of drug deals and other criminal enterprises. Kashkari told audience members at a town hall in Wisconsin that very few transactions are actually happening in crypto, a video of the event hosted by the Chippewa Falls Area Chamber of Commerce shows. The comments underscores the underscores the bank regulators' resistance to crypto even as institutional adoption of the asset class heats up.
They're not paying for goods and services using crypto, Kashkari said on Monday. It almost never happens unless people are buying drugs or engaging in other illegal activities, end quote. Kashkari, who clinched the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis' highest office in 2016 has often scoffed at Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. 4 years ago, the former investment banker compared the digital asset market to a giant garbage dumpster. And in 2021, he similarly bitched and moaned that the market was overrun with 1,000 of garbage coins at a conference in Montana. On that one, we we shall agree.
Proponents of the cryptocurrency industry have often countered those criticisms. However, and on Monday, they again pushed back against the abrasive remarks. Quote, I think being this wrong should be illegal. Castle Island Ventures partner Nick Carter said Monday on Twitter responding to Kashkari's comments, Custodia Bank CEO Caitlin Long and Brown Rudnick partner Hailey Linen joined the chorus of crypto industry supporters criticizing the regulators' bleak assessment of the digital assets market. Quote, legitimate crypto projects in the space have state of the art anti money laundering policies to prevent this, Lennon said in a Twitter post. Quote, we've been fighting this false narrative for decades.
End quote. The Federal Reserve System governs the regional and federal bank systems, including crypto related banking in the United States. It has the authority to issue restrictions on crypto banking in addition to the power to issue central bank digital currencies. Just 17% of American adults reported ever having owned digital assets in 2023 according to a Pew Pew Research Center survey, although industry funded polls have set that number much higher. Meanwhile, U. S. Federal Reserve data shows that just 2% of the U. S. Adult population made a payment using cryptocurrencies in 2022. Institutional adoption of crypto, however, has picked up in recent months, accelerated by the approval of spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs in the United States earlier this year.
Roughly 80% of institutional investors and wealth managers reported planning to increase their investments in digital assets in the coming months, according to a 2024 poll from Europe based investment manager, Nickel Digital. So that's the end of that article. So now we have Neel Kashkari coming right on the heels of this second propaganda piece against Bitcoin out of the Minneapolis Fed itself and essentially kind of reinforcing what it said in the ECB paper, that Bitcoin has failed as a payments method. Do you see how the narrative is cohesive amongst all of these groups?
Is there not a difference between Europe and the United States? Well, I personally think there is. I mean, there's a whole bunch of elite companies in the United States buying a whole shit ton of Bitcoin. And yet, the Minneapolis Fed says it's crap and it's failed. The ECB says it's crap and it's failed. And all these people keep saying it's only used for criminals, then why the fuck is Larry Fink buying the living shit out of it? They don't want you to have it. This is just a mind game. This is just them understanding that they've been able to do this to the population of the world for decades by using mass media mainstream media and any other kind of media that they own and they own most of it they're able to push a narrative that is succinct and congruent with each other to the point that it sounds like a worldwide narrative.
It's not easy to it's or rather it's not hard to fool massive amounts of people. It's just it's not but I mentioned BlackRock so how much did they buy Braden Lindria tells us about it from Cointelegraph BlackRock's Ibit investors throw $329,000,000 into the ETF as Bitcoin dips 3%. So as the price was dipping, Ibit was buying. Investors in Ishares Bitcoin Trust bought the dip sending $329,000,000 in inflows to the fund yesterday in one day October 21st after bitcoin slipped 3% on that day. The Fidelity wise Origin Bitcoin Fund was the only other United States spot Bitcoin ETF to record an inflow with $5,900,000 on October 21st while others recorded either 0 or negative flows. It was the 3rd time in 4 days trading days that BlackRock's spot Bitcoin exchange traded fund received over $300,000,000 in inflows, far side investors data show.
BlackRock's Ibit continues to lead all spot Bitcoin ETFs product, crossing the $23,000,000,000 mark in total net inflows on October 21st. That was yesterday. $23,000,000,000 since they opened. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunos noted that Ibid has posted the 3rd largest ETF inflows in 2024. Trailing only Vanguard and BlackRock's S and P index funds, tickered VOO and IVV respectively. It comes as Bitcoin's price dropped 3.25 percent to a daily low of $66,975 yesterday after failing to break the $70,000 price resistance. It cut into the 10 day price surge that saw Bitcoin rise from 59,000 to 69,000 data shows. Market selling off slightly today as expected and that's okay, crypto trader Jelly said.
Jelly, literally, j e l l e. I guess that's either gel or jelly. I don't know. Whatever. Other crypto traders like emperor, whatever, set a price pullback to the 62,000 range may be in the cards this week after Bitcoin posted its highly weekly close in 5 months on October 20th. The price surge between October 11th 21st has been primarily attributed to traders speculating on the upcoming US election, which we also have in the news. Meanwhile, total net inflows across all Bitcoin ETFs currently amount to $21,200,000,000 which includes over $20,000,000,000 in outflows from GBTC.
Bitcoin is currently trading at 67,360, which is down, you know, 2.2% over the last, few hours, and we're still right around there right now. So we've got the narrative from all of the elites saying the Bitcoin bad, yet we see the actions of the other elites which are not out there it's not like they have 2 different clubs, guys. These are the same people. They're just different we're seeing different departments of the same club. We're seeing that their financial arm actually do the shit and we're seeing their recruitment arm actually go through and scare the living crap out of people so that there's more stuff that their financial arm can actually purchase.
They're scaring you out of your Bitcoin. They're doing it on purpose and they know exactly what they're doing. They don't actually think Bitcoin is bad. They know that Bitcoin is bad for them. But the only way that they can get ahead of this is by buying Bitcoin. They know what's up. Don't be fooled. Don't sell your Bitcoin. Let's run numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities. I got a little bit of, IRS news. My entire trending now side bracket from cnbc.com is filled with IRS stuff. In fact, there's 3 out of the 5 trending now stories is that the IRS has announced new federal income tax brackets for 2025 and they all seem to be higher, which means that you're gonna be able to make more money before you get into a higher tax bracket.
Right? So the IRS has unveiled higher capital gains tax brackets for 2025, as well. And in the 3rd story on trending now, the IRS has announced bigger estate and gift tax exemptions for 2025. I think they really I don't know what they're doing. I mean, it's like half of me thinks that they really want Kamala Harris to lose to Trump and the other half is making me think that they want her to win. I don't know, man. I'm confused. I don't care. I honestly just make make sure I wanna make sure of something here. If hopefully, I'll remember to to get into that. I was just looking at another story that has to do with the elections.
But futures and commodities. Oil, West Texas Intermediate is up 2.8% to $72.54 Apparently, China has enacted some more stimulus, which is powering their economy in a very, very fake way. How do I know? Because that's what we've been doing. Whatever. Brent Norsey is up 2 and a half points, $76.20. Natural gas up 1 and a half. And gasoline is up 2.7 to $2.07 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks doing very, very well today. Gold is up a half point to $27.52.60. Silver is up 2.44%. Platinum is up 2.17. Copper is up a third. And palladium is up 2.25%. Biggest loser in ag today is chocolate. 3.69 to the downside. Biggest winner is gonna be a tie between corn and soybeans, which are both up basically 1.5%.
I got live cattle up 3 quarters of a point. Lean hogs are up 0.8. Feeder cattle are up 2 thirds of a point. While the Dow and the rest of the equity markets are kind of sucking swamp water, Dow is down 0.16%, S and P is down a 3rd, Nasdaq is down 0.4%, and the S and P mini is down 0.8%. So, Bitcoin having a couple of stumbling blocks over the last couple of days. $67,030 has just flashed across my screen. That is a $1,330,000,000,000 market cap as it was yesterday, I think. And we can only get 24.3 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,771,252.36 of.
And fees have risen again, but only to 0.17bt c on average on a per block basis. And there are 118 blocks carrying 243,000 transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 16 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 14. Hash rate is at 715 and a half exahashes per second. Not bad. Not bad at all. And from its raining FUD, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and Dubravco. 2340 Sat says a friend is asking if anyone in the Dallas Fort Worth area would like a kitten. Comes with a couple of supplies and he's got a primal note in there. Actually, let me just, let me see what that is.
I was waiting for this primal note to come up. Oh, nope. No. It's not in that one. Okay. Yeah. So if anybody if anybody knows of somebody or if you or somebody you know wants a kitten in the Dallas Fort Worth area, get a hold of Dubravko. That is at dubravk0. Onnoster, dubravk0. Pies to play with 21100 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. You are right about the bidaxe thing. I learned so much more about mining in the process of setting up the bidaxe. It was so easy and simple to do. I'm hoping that your assessment of this being the catalyst that enables more plebs and newbies to help secure the network and start mining. I agree, Pies. Get on those bidaxes. Learn how to mine. Anonymous with a 1,000 says, thanks. Still loving this show. I'm glad to hear that. God's death with 5:37 says, thank you, sir. No, thank you. Perma Nerd with 333. Thank you, sir. No, thank you. Pies to Pleb with a 100. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And that's the weather report.
Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. Ripple cofounder Chris Larsen is flooding Kamala Harris' election effort with shitcoin number 4, XRP. Yeah. This is out of CoinDesk. Jesse Hamilton, if you haven't heard about it, you might wanna know what's going on. Ripple cofounder, CEO Chris Larsen said that he's added another $10,000,000 in the Ripple Tide token known as XRP in an effort to boost president vice president Kamala Harris as the democrat faces off against former president Trump. Larson has become the crypto sector's leading supporter for Harris, saying Monday in on Twitter that he's pitching in with $10,000,000 more in XRP. Quote, it's time for the democrats to have a new approach to tech innovation, including crypto, he wrote, and added, quote, will ensure that American technology dominates the world, end quote. Federal election commission records show that he's previously donated $1,750,000 to her PAC. He's also given 100 of 1,000 of dollars to Democratic congressional campaigns.
While significant, his millions are overshadowed by the overall crypto industry's campaign involvement led by the super pack, Fair Shake. That group's $169,000,000 in donations, primarily from Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and Andreessen Horowitz, or a 16 z, has not only dominated the crypto sector's election involvement, but as put it among the biggest sources of campaign cash in the 2024 elections. While Fair Shake has made some clear efforts to divide its spending between the 2 major parties and to avoid taking a side in the presidential election, many of the industry's leaders have come out individually for their presidential favorites.
So Chris Larsen From from Ripple is all in Kamala Harris, and I don't I don't necessarily get that except except under the the following circumstance He doesn't like Bitcoin at all, and we know that's actually a fact. He wants Kamala Harris to crush anything but Ripple. The games that are being played here are the same games that have been played over and over and over and over again. There's nothing different here. Except that when these people start doing these kinds of donations and becoming political, that's when you know that they are your enemy. Anybody who has any designs on getting power, cozying up to political parties, being part of the cabinet of whatever president.
They are your enemy. And they should be treated as such. You should not believe what they say. You should not provide them any material comforts at all. If they come by your house and ask you for a cup of tea, you need to say fuck off. You need to do the exact opposite of what was it, Job? And, let yeah. It's like what Job did in it was either Sodom or Gomorrah, I can't remember what town he was living in, where he invited the angels in and then, you know, it was a really big mess and the only reason that his family was saved is because everybody else treated him like shit. Well, in this particular case, politicians and the people that want to befriend the politicians should be treated like shit.
Even if one of us turns into a pillar of salt, they should be treated like shit. They should be talked down to. They should be ridiculed 20 fourseven. They should be given no quarter. They should be given no comfort. They should be given no solace. They should be given nothing. If I could take their air away, I would take their air away. They have been nothing but disaster for millennia. Not centuries, not decades, but for 1000 of years those who seek power should immediately be put to the sword. If you breathe that you want to be king, your next breath should be your last.
If you breathe that you want to be a senator, your next breath should be your last. If you seek power, control, prominence your last breath should come very soon after you suggest that that's what you want. Maybe we should stop all this. Maybe we should just quit trying to get ahead of one another and lift each other up and I'm not talking about communism, I'm not talking about that shit. Do you know have have any idea how much richer most people on this planet would be if these guys got out of our way? Do you have any clue if we didn't have the kinds of regulations how many people would be happy just having a fucking taco stand.
Because that's what they really wanna do. But the health department, and the these, the certificates, and the inspections, and the paying of bribes, It's just impossible for people to to be happy in a very simple way. Where where where they value a different kind of wealth than like somebody like Mark Cuban, Who, by the way, is dismissing the poly market election odds as a result of foreign money. This is added decrypt and Will McCurdy is gonna tell us more. Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has dismissed the usefulness of the decentralized prediction market, Polymarket, when it comes to predicting the 2024 presidential election winner.
Quote, from all indications, most of the money coming into is foreign money. So I don't think it's an indication of anything, he said in an interview with CNBC's Squawk Box. Polymarket odds gives Donald Trump a 64.1% chance of defeating vice president Kamala Harris with the democratic candidate sitting at a mere 36%. Over $2,200,000,000 has been staked on the polygon based platform at the time of writing, with most of the capital flowing in being wagered, of course, on Trump. Well, just over $600,000,000 has been placed on Trump so far, while more than 400,000,000 has been put behind Harris.
Mark Cuban pointed out that Polymarket doesn't allow US citizens to place bets on the election. This follows a 2022 decision by the CFTC, which saw the platform hit with a $1,400,000 fine. Despite being critical of PolyMarkets' usefulness as a predictor of the presidential race, he revealed that he is an indirect investor in the platform through a crypto fund that I'm in. Unlike a traditional online betting platform like Draft Kings, poly market users don't bet against the house. Its odds also aren't decided by a panel of expert odds makers. Instead, odds are determined by users buying and selling shares in a particular outcome, and shares are created when opposing sides agree on odds.
This dissanction has led some third party commentators to argue that poly market's odds can be manipulated by betters with other motives. An article in the Wall Street Journal speculated that Trump's strong odds on the platform might be a mirage manufactured by a group of 4 Polymarket accounts that have collectively pumped about $30,000,000 of crypto into bets that Trump will win. The 4 users, and they give their names here, but I'm not gonna repeat them, all placed bets on a Trump victory in quick secession. However, Polymarket has passed form no. Hold on. However, Polymarket has passed form when it comes to making calls on political events, having correctly predicted that president Biden would drop out of the 2024 race before November.
That's a terrible sentence, but I just gotta I gotta go with it. Okay. So why am I telling you what Mark Cuban says when I clearly don't like Mark Cuban? And if you've listened to the show, you know that I'm I'm not a big fan of Mark Cuban. Well, the reason is because I 100% agree with Mark Cuban. This whole Polymarket thing and and it's not that Polymarket itself is bullshit. I don't care that it's based on Polygon. That's it's based on a shitcoin chain or a shit chain. I don't care. That's that's not what's going on here. I also don't care that people are betting. I don't think people should bet. I think it's a vice that will get you into trouble, but we're not here for that either. So what the hell am I here for? I'm here because this Polymarket thing is being used all I see it all the time.
The odds that Trump are gonna win this election are 64%. But yet when you look at whether it's on Twitter or over on Noster, when you look and you realize that that's what the poly market odds are, and not actual polls that are just asking Joe and Jane on the street who they're gonna vote for, I get I think it's dubious as well. I don't think there's I don't think that there's a there there. That doesn't mean that I don't think that, you know, that Trump is going that I well, it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not making a prediction as to whether or not Trump loses or wins or Harris loses or wins or I don't know, whatever. That's completely outside of my control and it's outside of your control too.
But for those people that keep looking at PolyMarkets saying Trump is going to win, that's not what PolyMarkets is telling you. For the exact reasons that Mark Cuban brought up. There are many times that I will tell you that I am not a fan of an individual. Yet, when I feel they are 100% correct about something I'm go and I agree with them I'm not gonna lie about it. In this particular case, Mark Cuban has his eye on the ball. This poly market thing needs it's not that it needs to go away. It just you just need to stop being fooled into believing that those are the real odds for this election.
They are not the real odds for this election. If you go look at the polls, Trump is leading, I think, by, like, 52 to 53%. It is not wide of enough margin for me to be comfortable that Trump is actually going to win this particular election. Because as that margin is squelched or it that margin becomes either if it becomes any smaller or it doesn't expand, that's enough margin of error for cheating on this election to occur and not draw any eyebrows from the mainstream media individuals that are like, wait a minute. This margin is way too big for this for this election to have gone that way. That if if the margin's too big, Trump has too big of a margin ahead of Harris, there's no way that they can actually cheat and get away with it. They can cheat, but if the margin's too big they won't be able to get away with it, and they don't want to damage themselves doing that.
Also, I do believe that there is a huge element of the Democratic party that wants to see Trump actually win. They'll just never tell you that. Because if he wins, he's going to inherit what? $35,700,000,000,000 of debt in an unserviceable market, post COVID, with still supply chain issues going everywhere. And the fact that we printed so much freaking money, inflation is out of fucking control. He's not going to inherit a like the poster child of America. What he's inheriting is some kind of abomination of what America used to be.
That's going to play into the Democrats' future plans just fine. Because if they can get this economy to get even more screwed up while he's president of the United States, even though he won't be able to run again because he will be ineligible, he will have taken his two terms, the Republican Party itself will be damaged beyond all repair. And the Democrats will have all manner of free range. So if you don't think that that isn't isn't an actual scenario that the Democratic Party and the operatives in the Democratic Party have gained out, you would be fooling yourself. So I don't believe poly market for a single second. And I don't think you should either.
But here is something that we can sink our teeth into. I'm not sure if we want to, but it's probably true from The Block, James Hunt writing, Stripe acquires stablecoinplatformbridgefor1.1000000000 dollars crypto market scream risk on and more. I hope you had a good weekend folks. In today's daily Stripe's $1,100,000,000 acquisition of bridge is confirmed. Bernstein says Bitcoin ETF inflows, crypto equity markets, and retail trading sentiments are screaming risk on. Japan's DPP leader pledges a 20% tax cap on crypto gains and more. Meanwhile, perpetually rising Bitcoin prices would lead to societal impoverishment, as the ECB economists claim, as the BIS highlights risk in traditional financials move towards tokenization.
So, the payments giant Stripe has acquired the platform bridge or stablecoin platform bridge for $1,100,000,000 according to TechCrunch. The deal marks stripes and not strike. We're talking about Stripe. Like, if you use, oh, what is it? Oh, what the hell do I hold on for a second. Now now I gotta look and see what the hell it is that I use because I'm draw draw to like substack. Yeah. Like substack. If you get paid out by substack, you're using Stripe to get paid, that's what their rail is. So s t r I p e bought a stable coin situation known as bridge. What do they call it? So I'm really screwing this up. Hold on for a second.
Platform. That's I'm looking for the stablecoin platform. Stripe has bought a stablecoin platform. That should be all that we really need to know about it. Stripe is now going to use a stablecoin rail. Now, will they use it for everything? I don't know. Exactly why did they buy it? Well, I'm not exactly sure, but I conjecture because they realize they're going to have to get into this or they are going to lose their footing. Now, let's take this back to what what is the ECB said, the European Central Bank said about Bitcoin and crypto. What has the, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve said about Bitcoin and crypto?
What is Neel Kashkari saying about Bitcoin and crypto? There's 2 different set of elites but they represent the exact same club. One set of elites is scaring the piss out of you to get you to sell all your Bitcoin, while the other set of elites from the same club is buying everything that they shake out of the tree. That's how this club works. One side fearmongers. And the other side, well, it drinks up all the blood that's flowing in the streets. I'm just saying, be careful with these people. They've got our number. Now, Dutch Bitcoin exchange, BL 3p, is shutting down December the 30 20th.
So be aware, after more than 10 years of service, Dutch Bitcoin only exchange, BL 3p, will be shutting down December 20, 2024. Quote, this decision driven by new regulations such as Mica will allow us to fully focus on improving the by Bytonic or BitTonic platform and its product range. While bl three p has been an integral part of BitTonic and the Bitcoin community for a decade, we believe that this transition will enable us to provide you with better services and new opportunities, said the platform in a blog post. It's also important to note that bl 3p lightning NFC cards will be deactivated on December 20th, added the exchange.
Users are encouraged to switch to the Bytonic platform, which aims to implement bl3p features such as target orders, dynamic withdrawal fees, lightning network integration in the near future. So it sounds to me like they're just kinda changing they're just rebranding in in in a way. But if you are a user of the bl3p you need to get all your shit off there. And if you wanna move over to Bitonic, might wanna start doing that sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, Core Lightning version 24.08.2. Remember and update channel hints.
Core lightning is a lightweight, highly customizable, and standard compliant implementation of the lightning network protocol. Quote, this point release addresses a few crash fixes and includes an enhancement sorry, to remember and update channel hints for payments, said the project. So if you are a user of Core Lightning, you need to upgrade to 24.08.2. Like I said, unless it's an emergency, you might wanna wait just to make certain that there's not any bugs that that's been introduced. However, there are such things as emergency updates that you have to do. I do not see this as being one of them.
Finally, for today, DeByFi DeByFi app 0.0.52 now is released with cold card MK 4 integration. Debitfy is a non custodial Bitcoin backed lending platform providing institutional grade liquidity. It lets you borrow against your Bitcoin, aw shit, using secure multisig escrow, and it's available appears only on Android. Quote, the new version of DeWiFi app is now live. The latest update brings features designed to enhance user experience and security, including cold card mark 4 integration, explore page, contact form, and bug fixes. And that's it. That's it for the day, guys.
Please please please. I really think that it's probably, well, it would behoove us to watch very carefully what new narratives are being reinforced by central banks, central bankers, and other institutions. Like the the whole example is that that ECB paper, the the European Central Bank propaganda piece dropped a few days ago. 2 or 3 days later, the Federal Reserve, Bank of Minneapolis, dropped a paper that echoed the sentiment. Neel Kashkari, the president or the chair of the Minneapolis Fed, echoed those same sentiments of the two papers. That in his talk that we talked about today, he was basically saying, well, Bitcoin's kind of failed as a payment mechanism.
A, no it hasn't. But be that as it may. I'm just saying that what I'm seeing are cross border narratives being compiled together to form a global narrative and they're being reinforced by all the members of the club. And when I'm I mean that. This is a club of people and you're not in it. They have an entire section of the club designed to scare the living piss out of the population of the world, And the other arm of the same club is there to pick up the gold that has been shook free out of the tree. So one job is to shake the tree, and the other one is to pick up the fruit. You're the tree.
Your Bitcoin is the fruit. Stop listening to what these people have to say and just watch what the the only branch of this club that you need to watch is the Larry Fink branch of the club. The Ibit, BlackRock, the Fidelity branch of the club. The institutional buyers that are buying the Bitcoin that's being shaken out of the out of the public en mass right now because of the side of the club that you need to stop listening to. Sure, you should probably watch what they're doing, but for God's sake, don't listen to a single word they say. I'll see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Media Attacks on Bitcoin
Global Narrative Against Bitcoin
Market Updates and Bitcoin's Position
