Join me today for Episode 981 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Oh, Lord . . . Microsoft? Really?
- BTC Mining in the Arctic
- Macroeconomic Numbers Incoming
- Stop Looking at Polymarket
- Opensats' 8th Wave of Grants
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/10/28/a-bitcoin-miner-is-setting-up-in-the-arctic-circle-to-heat-up-building-in-fishing-village/
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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. Yeehaw.
It's 9:46 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 28th day of October, 2024. And this is episode 982 of Bitcoin. And let's jump in with both feet right now with this big Microsoft news. Oh, boys. Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I brought it to you. We now know a little bit more. Let's get into this Microsoft and Bitcoin thing going on. Bitcoin Magazine gonna get us squared away here. Nicholas Hoffman is writing, at the tail end of yesterday, Macroscope, a financial analyst focused on Bitcoin, revealed a new SEC filing stating that Microsoft is voting this December, oh my god, on whether it should invest in Bitcoin.
Oh my god. Oh my god. Well, at first, I thought there is just no way this happens, not right now. And figured it will just be a short lived hype, especially after noticing a detail in the filing statement that Microsoft's board recommends its shareholders to vote against the proposal of assessment of investment in Bitcoin, end quote. But then then, Macroscope came up with another update. Yet another update. Oh, whatever shall we do, mom? That revealed something promising. Microsoft is urging its shareholders to vote against the proposal because their management already carefully considers this topic.
Well, if Microsoft were to follow in the footsteps of MicroStrategy, a wild thing to even type out and say to myself, it would mark a historic milestone for Bitcoin. Microsoft is the 3rd largest company in the world by market capitalization of $3,208,000,000,000. That's trillion with a t, ladies and gentlemen. Will it actually happen? It's anyone's guess at the moment. But Michael Saylor has himself reached out to Microsoft's chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella, to discuss the possibility. If there's one man who can speak Nadella's language and get the job done, it's Michael Sailor. Oh, god. I I like Mike. Don't get me wrong, but the hero worship is a little getting a little out of control, guys. Just a bit out of control. But, anyway, there's plenty of reasons why Microsoft should invest in Bitcoin, you know, like having $75,000,000,000 in cash on hand that is just melting away like the aforementioned and much famous and lauded ice cube. Having said that, just because Saylor understands the importance of holding actual BTC on their balance sheet, he also knows that other large corporations interested in investing in Bitcoin might prefer a different method of exposure altogether.
So if Microsoft were to invest in Bitcoin, I think they will likely just buy shares of BlackRock and other Bitcoin ETFs. I would love to be wrong though and have them actually buy the BTC and hold it themselves on their balance sheet. But in any case, one thing for certain after reading all this, Bitcoin is now too large to ignore, even for the biggest companies in the world. Alright. So that last sentence kinda sews it all up for me. And what I mean by that is that we already know that. I don't think we have to write sentences that that explain that Bitcoin's too big to ignore. I I don't think that I think we're well past that point.
Right? There used to be a time in, you know, back in the olden days when we were worried. Would this just fly into the radar forever and ever and ever? Well, no. We found that shit out roughly around, oh, I'm gonna say 2020 to 2021, specifically, when everything crashed. See, that's this is the funny thing about this is the funny thing about, bad or bad press. There is no such thing. It doesn't exist. Bad press doesn't exist. The world cast its entire collective set of eyeballs on Bitcoin because of Sam Bankman fried. His complete and utter lack of regard for management practices and policies, the complete dissolution of Alameda, and then we had the bank failures.
We had the 3 bank failures, 2 of which were heavily invested a bit or had heavily, well, they were attached to Bitcoin. Let's just call it that. Nobody nobody there's nobody in the world that didn't see that unless they're in rural India or in some, you know, I don't know, headhunting tribe down in freaking the rainforest of the Amazon. Right? Everybody knows. We don't have to worry about this anymore. But I kind of agree, if Microsoft were to start shedding some of their fiat liquidity into Bitcoin, it will most likely not be the same method that Michael Saylor is using. They'll just buy BlackRock ETF.
And then you'll say, but how is that any different than what Michael Saylor is doing? And I would agree with you because Michael Saylor is not custodying his own Bitcoin. He's using Coinbase. What's the difference? If I use Coinbase versus BlackRock to custody my Bitcoin in a very real way, it makes no difference whatsoever. It's just that I buy the actual underlying asset and then store it on Coinbase or I buy shares of something that represents the underlying asset held by BlackRock, which actually is also not held by BlackRock. It too is very much of it is held, as far as I know, by Coinbase. So what's the difference?
I understand that the vehicles and the instrumentation are completely different in their filings with the SEC. But what does it mean intellectually? For me, and I think I'm right in saying this, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. Let's cruise on over to Japan where Meta Planet has now become Asia's 2nd largest corporate Bitcoin holder. Ezra Raguera from Cointelegraph, Japanese investment firm Meta Planet, has achieved a new milestone with its latest Bitcoin purchase as its holdings has surpassed 1,000 Bitcoin worth $68,000,000 On October 28th, MetaPlanet said that it acquired yet another 156.7 Bitcoin, and this has raised total bitcoin holdings to 1018.17 BTC.
The company's latest investment puts it on its average purchase price at about 61,629 or 9,400,000 Japanese yen per bitcoin. Simon Gurvich, the CEO of Meta Planet, celebrated the company's latest bitcoin milestone, saying, quote, Meta Planet now owns more than 1,000 BTC, making it one of the largest corporate holders of bitcoin in Asia. When asked by a community member if the company would keep buying BTC, the Meta Planet executive reply with always and forever. And always and forever is in quotes. Hinting at future Bitcoin purchases. Yeah. I don't think that that's I don't think we need to say that, honestly.
But with Meta Planet's largest Bitcoin purchase, the company has now become Asia's 2nd largest corporate Bitcoin holder. According to Bitcoin data tracker Bitcoin Treasuries, Meta Planet is now the 19th largest corporate Bitcoin holder in the world. Despite reports saying that Meta Planet has become Asia's largest corporate Bitcoin holder, Bitcoin Treasury data shows that there is that the well, this company still lags behind the Chinese firm called Boya Interactive International. That's boya. Boya Interactive International. And they hold 1100 BTC that it purchased back in January.
After MetaPlanet comes a Hong Kong based company called Mitu, which holds 940.9 BTC worth about $64,000,000 So MetaPlanet revised its treasury management strategy in May. Adopting Bitcoin as its treasury reserve asset, the firm said this was a direct response to sustained economic pressure in Japan. And because of this, it would prioritize a Bitcoin first, Bitcoin only approach as a company. So, not the largest holder but getting damn close. And I have never heard of Boya Interactive International. Where did these folks come from? If anybody has heard about them before today, please let me know so that I realize just how I'm falling down on this job. Okay. Over to CoinDesk and up north to I don't know. It's it's getting Christmas time, so maybe we'll get some Santa Claus news out of an Arctic Circle Bitcoin mine will heat a building in a fishing village.
Like I said, CoinDesk Tom Carreras is writing this one. A Bitcoin mine is coming to the Arctic Circle. A 350 square meter facility conceived by retail oriented Bitcoin mining firm, SAS Mining, will be located in a very small fishing village on the coast of Norway. Once it goes live December 1st it may well become the northernmost mining operation in the world. The big idea? To remove the old oil boiler used by one of the town's largest buildings replace it with an in house Bitcoin centric data center, and warm the edifice using the tremendous heat produced by the mining rigs. Quote, heat is a really critical resource in this region of the world, Kent Halliburton, CEO of SaaS Mining, told CoinDesk, quote, it's minus 20 degrees Celsius for large portions of the year. A portion of the heat from the machines is actually going to be shunted off to dry fish, which is part of the economy here.
While Halliburton did not wish to publicize the facility's exact location, yeah, no shit, before it went live, he said that the project aimed to showcase the possibilities offered by bitcoin mining to other arctic residents, quote, for the locals. It's kinda like you need to see it to believe it. This will be helpful for them to understand that it's not bleeding edge technology. It's pretty tested and it can be deployed right now, quote, there are many multiple business owners in the community already considering this approach. And then they go into a long thing about how mining works. I'm going to make the assumption, ladies and gentlemen, that you, the listener, have a good idea of how mining works. So I'm gonna skip that section just for you. But is it a win win?
Saz Mining has 2 other mining locations. 1 in the US state of Wisconsin and another one in Paraguay. The firm's business model involves allowing retail investors to buy their own mining rigs and let Saz Mining operate them in a carbon neutral fashion for a 15% share of 1's block rewards according to the company's website. The Norwegian project wasn't really conceived as an experiment, Halliburton said. Mining has become incredibly competitive in the wake of the 4th Bitcoin halving. And the deal simply made economic sense for both parties involved. Quote, the building is paying us for the heat instead of having to pay for oil for the boiler, he said. Norway's abundance of hydropower means that electricity is very cheap and that the mining operation will be running almost completely on green energy. In fact, with a service fee of 0.046 dollars per kilowatt hour, that's like just over 4 and a half United States pennies, SaaS mining clients should be able to acquire Bitcoin for less than $54,000 a coin.
For comparison, B. Riley Securities recently said that the estimated average power cost for the sector is around 4.5¢ per kilowatt hour. Quote, there's just this excess thing that we can turn into money. Basically, we're using an electron to hash or mine Bitcoin, but we can use that same electron to heat the place. You get 2 uses out of the same electron. However, it remains to be seen if everyone else in the nation feels as positive about it. Norwegian lawmakers moved earlier this year to put restrictions on Bitcoin mining as part of an effort to provide a proper regulatory framework for data centers of all kinds. Bitcoin mining, quote, is associated with large greenhouse gas emissions and is an example of a type of business that we don't want in Norway, or however you pronounce it, the country's minister of energy reportedly said.
But Halliburton says the Norwegian government is simply undergoing an education process, and SAS Mining's facility is meant to help showcase the benefits of Bitcoin mining. Quote, because our data center is heating the building, it would be very hard for legislators to justify turning it off since it would jeopardize life in such a cold client climate during the winter months. So, no, we do not see legislation being a problem in the future, Halliburton said. Halliburton okay. That's the end of the article. Let me say this. That last sentence that Halliburton said is the kind of hyperbole that you do not want to see out of your CEO.
Look. Yes. They're going to remove an oil the oil boiler. That's what heats the building. They're going to replace it with Bitcoin miners. That's going to take the place of the old oil boiler. But once that's done, that does not mean that CEO mister Halliburton can sit there and say, well, of course, Norway is not gonna turn it off. It would kill everybody inside. That is hyperbole. It's hyperbolic. It really doesn't have any place in the argument for doing this kind of thing, which I think is actually good. But here's the rub and here it comes. You know it's coming.
You know it's coming. I'll let you think about it. Norway, up in the Arctic Circle, polar bears, ice flows, glaciers. Oh my god. What could possibly what could possibly go wrong? Oh, I know. We'll add heat. Do you see where I'm going with this? Now, I'm not actually say suggesting by any way, shape, form, or fashion that adding Bitcoin miners up there is going to heat up the Arctic Circle and quote unquote make the climate change worse. No. No. No. No. Why? Because it's just replacing one heat source that's already there with another heat source that uses a different type of energy input.
It's actually cleaner to use Bitcoin in this particular in this particular, application. But here but Greenpeace Norway or Greenpeace, you know, or or whatever. It all the people that are basically being told by the World Economic Foundation and the IC or was it international, IFM, whatever the hell, the UN, all the people that are going to lose control because of this. They are going to scream that we're going to start killing polar bears. You watch. It's coming. I'll bet you my hat that some climate scientist guys get together and write yet another academic white paper about how any Bitcoin mining above the Arctic Circle is bad for the environment. It's going to happen.
You wait and see. Now let's move on. We've got economics numbers coming out for the end of this month and going into the next month. So let's see if Stacy Elliott from Decrypt will help us understand why Bitcoin prices jumped ahead of key US inflation and jobs reports. Deja vu for the price of Bitcoin? BTC climbed back above 69,000 during European trading hours after last setting this recent high water mark just last week. No shit. Bitcoin bounced above the $69,000 mark early on Monday, though it's cooled slightly since. It's up 2% for the day per data from CoinGecko. Looking ahead, traders are entering an extremely busy period for macroeconomic factors. Listen up.
This week alone will include a new gross domestic product report for the Q3 personal consumption data which is used to track inflation and a new jobs report on Friday. Together, these releases will provide a comprehensive overview of the economy's strength inflation trajectory, and employment trends, wrote BRN analyst, Valentin Fournier, in a note shared with Decrypt. Quote, these factors can significantly influence Bitcoin's price trajectory. End quote. Then we're not done. Guys, we're not done. Then next Tuesday, November 5th, Americans head to the polls to vote in the most important election of our times. No. Actually, he says a tightly contested US presidential election race between vice president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Having just the election decided well, sorry. Just having the election decided, Fournier said, should provide a boost to Bitcoin's price. We don't give a fuck who's in office at this point. Quote, given the current accumulation phase, upcoming macroeconomic data, and the positive sentiment surrounding the US presidential election, we believe Bitcoin is well positioned for strong upside moves. We continue to recommend a substantial allocation to Bitcoin with a preference over Ethereum to maximize potential gains.
There is no preference. Ethereum is garbage. Don't buy it. And if you hold it, sell it for Bitcoin. Directly into Bitcoin. Whatever. Meanwhile, Singapore based crypto trading firm QCP Capital noted that a recent Trump podcast interview appears to have been super or supercharging his lead over Harris on crypto based prediction market platform, Polymarket. Pausing to give you the warning. Polymarket has absolutely no value when it comes to who's leading in the polls. All Polymarket actually tells you is who's betting that Trump will win versus who's betting Harris will win.
It has no it there's no connection with, like, massive amounts of people telling pollsters who they're gonna vote for. And I've gotten to the point now I actually I think I think there may be a note in in when I give thanks to all the people that send in donations to the show today, I think there may be somebody who said something about the last time I talked about polls. I don't believe me either. I don't think we have any idea who is actually ahead in the polls. If for all of you people who are going, Trump's gonna win and then point at poly market, that doesn't tell you if Trump's going to win.
All that's telling you is who's putting money on something. But that that's those people I could have 4 people put enough money on Trump to make Trump look like he's win gonna win by 99.99 percent just because of the sheer amount of capital inflow into that bet. No. This poly market doesn't tell you shit. Please, please, for the love of God, stop posting the polly market poll as some kind of barometer as to who's gonna win the presidential election. It don't mean shit. Unless you're the last one at the card table in Texas Hold'em, we don't know who's going to win this. We've got to wait. Anyway, quote, Trump's interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which was released nearly a week before the election, has gained significant traction with over 32,000,000 views, driving his poly market odds to above 66%, the firm wrote in a trading note on Monday. Again, pausing. No.
Poly market, as far as I know, is a is a bet for cash only Or, well, for Bitcoin. You've gotta actually put money up. I don't know anything about Polymarket that has even suggested that somehow or another, it's ingesting some kind of Nielsen ratings as part of its no. This doesn't make any sense. There's just because the Joe Rogan Experience podcast with Trump got 32,000,000 views, that that data is not being ingested by poly market. If anything, it's being ingested by the people that are betting money that Trump's going to win on poly market. But again, that's being filtered to people that have money to bet.
And remember, if you're betting sums of money that are, like, well over $10 on a game of pool, you might consider yourself a degenerate. I am not a betting man and I'm not trying to insult anybody. I think betting is a vice that gets people into trouble and destroys lives. I don't think it should be done, but I sure as shit don't think it should be used to tell me who the fuck's gonna win the election. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I'm sorry. Was I ranting? Anyway, continuing, but QCP, like BRN, believes that Bitcoin's bullish momentum is now less closely tied to Trump winning. Quote, despite crypto being touted as Trump's trade, BTC's correlation with Trump's odds appears to be weakening as it aims to break $70,000 and clear its July highs, the firm added.
Okay, so that's the end of the article. Please, please listen to me. Polymarket is a betting site. It is not a predictor of anything. It's just not. Sure, some people will tell you that it is. I think that they're wrong. And I'm not gonna say anything more about it. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities. Can we talk about Iran and Israel for just a second here? I'm gonna get into the oil prices. West Texas Intermediate is down 5.75%. Reminder, oil trading started at 3 o'clock Pacific Daylight Time yesterday.
Right? It always starts for me, oil trading, and that means Brent Norsee, Saudi Arabian crude, West Texas Intermediate, natural gas, it all starts trading on Sunday for me at 3 o'clock Pacific Daylight Time. I've witnessed the largest downside gap between Friday's close of West Texas Intermediate and Sunday afternoon's opening of the oil markets. It gapped down so hard. Wow. Wow. And why why why is West Texas Intermediate sitting at $67.59 a barrel? Why is Brent Nor C down 5.7% itself to 71.71? Why is natural gas falling through the floor at 9.77% downside at $2.31 per 1,000 cubic feet. All of it affects the gasoline price, which is down almost 5% to go sub $2 a gallon to a buck 97.
Why? I'm going to deposit something that's going to make me entirely unpopular with a lot of people. I don't think Israel and Iran hates each other anywhere close to what we are made to believe. I, in fact, don't think that the United States hates Iran anywhere close to what we've been told. I don't think Iran at this point is a honest to God, quote, unquote, terrorist state. Why do I say this? Iran launched their second barrage of missiles at Tel Aviv in Israel, what, a couple weeks ago or last week or something like that, did almost zero damage. Exactly like their first missile barrage.
And this is supposed to, you know, be in retaliation for the the death of the Hezbollah commander in Lebanon. Because, you know, Hezbollah is controlled by Iran. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Rumors of war and war. Rumors of war and war. Keep everybody pissed off until it fucks with the oil prices during a time that the elections are coming up. You see where I'm going with this? Now let's talk about Israel's retaliatory strike on Iran because of their retaliatory strike on Israel because of whatever. It honestly, it killed it killed 2 Iranian soldiers.
Other than that, not a whole lot of damage. And immediately at the conclusion of that strike by Israel upon Iran, they made it dead sure that everybody in the world knew that that was it. That was over. Israel was gonna do no more. And amidst all of this, they touched 0 of Iran's oil infrastructure. Because if Israel had destroyed even half of the ability of Iran to export oil, whether produce it or however they get it onto a ship. If they had destroyed just half of it, you'd see oil prices at just under $100 a barrel. Can you have that going into a United States election if Israel is really good friends and cozying up with the incumbent administration?
No, you can't. If you've got a $100 oil and you've got gas prices in California at $8 a gallon, Kamala Harris does not win the election. I don't think she's gonna win anyway, but it doesn't matter. That's nail in the coffin kind of shit right there. So this leads me to believe that the incumbent administration of the United States, which is definitely deep state, Israel, which has always been attached at the hip like a baby to the United States, and Iran are really just all good buddy buddy, and this is all just for show. That's why what I just said is going to be incredibly unpopular If I've pissed you off my deepest apologies and my sincerest apologies but I'm seeing bullshit in action And when I see bullshit now, I'm just gonna call it the fuck out. Let's move on. Gold is down but scant.
$2,753 an ounce. Silver is up a half point. Platinum is up 1 point. Copper is down 0.16%. Palladium is up 1 and a half points. Biggest loser in agriculture today is it's gonna be wheat. 1.23% to the downside. Biggest winner is chocolate, 2 and a quarter to the upside, while live cattle is down 0.09 percent. Lean hogs are up almost a full point and feeder cattle are up just over a quarter. The Dow is doing well, probably because oil prices were kept low. Why? Well, we went into that. Now Dow is up 0.64%. Quite a nice change. That's about represents a 267 point change to the upside.
S and P is up a third. Nasdaq is up a 5th of a point, and the S and P mini is up almost a full point itself. Bitcoin is also up. $68,900 a coin puts us at a $1,360,000,000,000 market cap, and you can buy damn near 25 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,774,146.44 of. And fees are phenomenally low right now. My god. Average fees per block coming in at 0.04 BTC on average on a per block basis. And there are only 96 blocks carrying a measly 183,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 4. Count them. 1, 2, 3, 4 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 3.
And hash rate, Lord have mercy, was through the roof earlier today. This morning, I posted 868 exahashes per second. That has now dropped, mempool.spaceforward/mining showing 723.4 exahashes per second. From Denmark, done with life. We have Open Mic, which boosted 7,777 sats. That's a full petro boost. Says, keep on ribbing. Mutum 85,000 sat says, based solely on your advocacy of Biddax, I acquired 1 KYC free with dirty fiat at tabconf in Atlanta today doing my part to decentralize hash. Way to go. Mute them. Let me know how your experience goes. In fact, stream it on zap.stream.
That might actually be, something I wanna watch. Alright. FOMO Metronic with 1,001 sat says Denmark can suck a dick with the rest of them. God's death 537. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Perma nerd with 333 says, I hope this small boost doesn't put you into a higher unrealized gains tax bracket. You never know. I mean, he it sounds funny, but you never know. Pies to play with 420 says, thank you, sir. No, thank you. And that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use from The Block written by James Hunt.
October's crypto investment inflows climbed to $3,400,000,000 after $900,000,000 was added just last week. Holy shit. Global crypto funds run by asset managers such as BlackRock, Bitwise, Fidelity, Grayscale, ProShares, and 21 Shares registered net inflows of $901,000,000 last week. In a week. Almost $1,000,000,000 in a week. A week. Over $3,360,000,000 has now flowed into digital asset investment products in October, representing just 12% of assets under management at those funds and the 4th largest month on record. Annually, this has pushed the year to date inflows to be $27,000,000,000 which is nearly triple the $10,500,000,000 set in 2021.
Bitcoin based funds almost entirely dominated. Generating $920,000,000 of net weekly inflows globally. Short Bitcoin positions also saw minor net outflows of 1,300,000. Blockchain equities and Solana also registered weekly inflows of 12,200,000 and 10.8 respectively. In comparison, Ethereum. No. I don't care. Let's move on. US spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds witnessed 997.6 $1,000,000 in net weekly inflows alone. Led by BlackRock's Ibit, a US based crypto investment products brought in $906,000,000 worth of net inflows overall. However, however, other Bitcoin based products registered negative flows and funds based in Sweden, Canada, Brazil, and Hong Kong saw a combined $29,900,000 in net outflows. Have fun. Stay poor. Bitcoin is currently trading for $68,554.
Yes. We know. Let's move on. Quote, we believe that current Bitcoin prices and flows are heavily influenced by US politics. Oh, thank god. Because, you know, what could possibly go wrong? With the recent surge in inflows likely linked to the Republicans' poll gains, CoinShares head of research James Butterfield said. Whatever. Pro crypto Republican candidate Donald Trump currently leads Democrat Kamala Harris by odds of 66.5 to 33.4% to win the presidential election on November 5th, according to the decentralized predictions platform, Poly market. What? See, it's this kind of bullshit.
This is what I'm talking about. Poly market does not have their fingers on the pulse of the United States public other than those that have a fuck ton of money and wanna be degenerate gamblers. Yeah. They have their pulse on those guys, but those guys don't have their pulse on the American public. Some of them think they do. Some of them think that they've got a system to winning at, oh, I don't know, roulette. You know, how many people have said they got a system for playing roulette? You know, the wheel with the ball that goes around. You don't have a system for roulette.
Poly Market is like saying, I have a system to understand the United States political spectrum. You do not. Please stop it. Quote, the former president has also taken the lead in all 6 swing states with poly market, god, showing 84% odds of Republican senate, 52% odds of Republican house, and 48% chance of a Republican sweep compared to 12% for Democrats. And it goes on. Please stop. Last week, poly market claimed that there was no evidence of market manipulation in US elections bet on the platform despite slippage issues. In contrast, the latest national polling averages continue to call a close race. See, the with numbers within the margin of error showing Harris leading Trump by 48.1% to 46.7%, according to 538.
However, the gap between the two candidates in the national polls has narrowed since the peak 3.7 lead for Harris on August 23rd, with analysts at Bernstein noting that the traditional polls have historically underestimated Trump. Yeah. We saw that. Now these are national polls. It doesn't mean that I'm saying, well, I believe these polls because these are the that 538 bullshit and the rest of the national pollsters. Were they right or wrong calling the election for Hillary Clinton? I'm just gonna ask that question. Were they right or were they wrong? Obviously, they were wrong. And they were wrong by a big margin.
Now these margins now let's say that these margins are actually true. And by the way, that's the end of the article. But let's say these margins are true. 48.1 percent for Harris and 46.7 percent for Trump. Those are not the numbers that I'm generally seeing in national polls. I'm actually seeing Trump ahead. But, of course, and again, I haven't really looked at the polls since, oh, I don't know, last week. So God only knows what's changed. And I honestly don't give a shit. But that margin of error statement, these numbers are within the margin of error. That is exactly where, if you're going no matter who wants to commit it although generally speaking, it seems to be democratic election or democrat parties always being able to pull election chicanery.
And I just think that's because they're better at it. I really do. I act in in a way, it's actually kind of impressive. But if you're gonna pull election chicanery and and just let me say it, cheat, this is where you need to be doing it. This is where the margin of error comes into play in a big big way. Because all you need is plausible plausible believability by the public that your candidate actually won, but you cheated to get her there. Because if that is not the case, and Trump is leading by, like, 5 percentage points in, like, most of the polls and you try to cheat and then come out and say Kamala Harris actually won the election even though that she was 5 points down in the polls, that's gonna cause some problems.
It really is. It's gonna cause some problems. You want if you're going to cheat on election, this is the number that you want. You want these numbers to be well within a margin of error. Or if Kamala Harris is ahead by 5 points, then you don't even need to cheat at that point, although you never know. But I'm just saying this is where the danger area is for me. And if I and like I said, I'm not all that worried about the elections. Because here's a new boss, same as the old boss kind of thing. But if you are worried about the elections, this is this exactly is where you need to be worrying about. This margin of error allows people to cheat and you're blinded by the fact that you have this plausible believability that she was she was ahead just enough that maybe she could pull it out of the fire. And then if the popular vote is manipulated and she does, nobody's just really gonna put down any potential massive unrest.
And, again, I want to reiterate what I was saying about Israel, the United States, and Iran seem to me to all be working together to make damn sure that these oil prices don't hit a $100 a barrel because that is nail in the coffin territory for the Harris campaign. Okay. There's a new paper that's been that has been written that responds to the ECB's criticisms on Bitcoin. Now, this is from Murray Rudd, but he's only one of a team of people that seem to have written a rebuttal against that insanity that we saw come out of the ECB and their Bitcoin analysis. I it's a long paper. I'm not going to read the whole thing. In fact, I'm only going to read this one section to you.
They go through, right, before I read it, they go through and point by point, they make rebuttals on everything the ECB paper said. So let's just I'm just gonna give you like a little taste. And, yes, the URL to this paper will be in the show notes. If you get chapters, if I remember to do it correctly, then this URL will also be directly in the chapters. So this is entitled let's see. Let me let me get get you the paper name. Challenging bias in the ECB's Bitcoin analysis. Now, here's the section I want to read. Bitcoin ownership is highly concentrated amongst a small number of large players.
Bien, Sell, and Schaff, who wrote the paper, argue that Bitcoin's wealth is highly concentrated among a small number of holders, undermining its claims of decentralization. And according to Bien, Sell, and Schaff, this concentration presents risks of market manipulation and unfair redistribution of wealth. This claim, however, overlooks the changing dynamics of Bitcoin ownership and the widespread dispersion of Bitcoin holdings. Institutional and retail investors have increased their level of participation in the market. For example, around 10% of Canadians owned Bitcoin by 2021.
And they give paper citations for all of their points of evidence. And in the UK, HMRC Research showed that by 2021 about 10% of adults own crypto assets, with bitcoin being the predominant holding. Miners receiving bitcoin rewards can either hold or sell their rewards, with some firms retaining as much as possible after paying their operating expenses and other firms selling all Bitcoin as they are mined. Overall, selling in the Bitcoin mining industry tends to be cyclical, with miners periodically draining their holdings to pay operating cost when the Bitcoin price is low, contributing further to Bitcoin wide or Bitcoins wide distribution.
Many of the largest Bitcoin wallets that belong to exchanges like Coinbase and Binance and ETF issuers like BlackRock and Fidelity, hold Bitcoin on behalf of millions of users. And recently, BlackRock described that 80% of the buyers of these new spot Bitcoin products in the US are direct investors. Of the 80% of direct investors, 75% have never owned an iShare, one of the best known and largest ETF providers on the planet. End quote. Find, Sell and Chaff create the appearance of concentration when, in reality, institutional and exchange wallets represent the holdings of diverse investors rather than single entities.
The suggestion that Bitcoin's wealth concentration is inherently unfair also raises concerns about the buying sale in Schaff's underlying worldview. They imply that any form of inequality is unjust, yet fail to explain why this applies. A free market for Bitcoin has been available to all since its inception. They or anyone else could have acquired Bitcoin at any point of time, both benefiting themselves and lessening the inequality that they very well criticize. Presumably, however, they chose not to do so. And unlike the vast majority of cryptocurrency tokens or altcoins, bitcoin had a fair and public launch. There was no pre launch distribution of bitcoin. There was no founder shares. No venture capital backers purchasing bitcoin at a discount.
Everyone who accumulated Bitcoin had to undertake the work to earn it, whether through mining or otherwise, or to pay market price when they purchased it. The argument that concentration of wealth in Bitcoin is harmful reflects a misunderstanding of the Bitcoin protocol itself. Unlike traditional financial systems, large Bitcoin holders have no privileged positions or influence over the network. The protocol rules apply uniformly to all participants regardless of their holdings. This stands in stark contrast to fiat systems where very large financial players can exert disproportionate influence upon monetary policy and market operations.
In private corporations, even a significant minority shareholder can have significant influence over company decisions. Such influence is not possible with Bitcoin. Bitcoin's transparent nature allows for much clearer insights into ownership trends compared to traditional financial systems. And the rest of this paper does this on a point by point basis calling out the bullshit that was printed in the ECB's critique of Bitcoin. Now it's this one right here. Buy and sell and shaft create the appearance of concentration, win, and reality institutional.
And exchange wallets represent the holdings of diverse investors rather than single entities. I cannot tell you how many different times it's been that we've had to refute somebody's complete lack of understanding of Bitcoin or fervent hatred of their impending loss of power. We've had to refute that bullshit so many times by saying, look, you're saying that this one wallet holds over 2% of the wealth. That one wallet represents thousands of customers. We've breathed this. We've lived this. We've known this. We've tried to expound upon this. We've tried to let people know. We've done everything that we can. They're never going to stop with this bullshit.
The minute you think that they do or that they are going to stop, they're not, they're gonna print another paper. It's just at this point, they know they're wrong. They're just trying to wear us down. And they've got the weaponry to do it with. They've got the media on their side because the media in the world, especially the West, is 100% bought and paid for. They will tell the public whatever they're paid to tell the public. They're not news. They're not media. Well, they are a media. That media is called propaganda. It's a genre.
No. I'm serious. You can study propaganda as a master's or PhD student in any technical communication or English department in most universities in the United States. How does propaganda work? How do we propagate it? How do we get it out? How do we make it effective? This shit has been going on since the fucking Nazis. And these people own everything, every outlet. Every advertising person is going to have to fall in line. And the larger advertisers get to tell the media corporations how they're going to fall in line or they're going to pull like like I don't know. Let's say a famous very large pharmaceutical company that just recently put out a product that may have caused some serious harm.
They are able to pick up the phone and tell CNBC, you either get that dude off the air talking about our product in such a bad light or we are going to pull our next month's advertising from you and go to your competitor. That's propaganda. This is a type of media, but it certainly isn't news. It certainly isn't informed. And it certainly does not help you out. Propaganda is here for one reason and one reason only. To get enough of a population to believe the same thing, whether it's a lie or not, so that they can affect outcomes on the other side. That's it. So if you want to read this paper, and I highly recommend that you do, and I also highly recommend that you get it out to your friends, if you still have LinkedIn I do.
I know it's weird, but I still have LinkedIn Put it out on LinkedIn. Put it out everywhere. Get it into the hands of everybody that has said, did you read that ECB paper? You can say, why I sure did. Did you read the rebuttal that makes it look like a bunch of kindergartners wrote it? Oh, you have it? Here you go. It'll be in the show notes. Promise. Okay. Open Sats issues its 8th wave. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 times. Open Sats has issued Bitcoin grants. Yum. Hats off, guys. Good job, brothers. Alright. Open Sats is proud to announce its 8th wave of Bitcoin grants dedicated to supporting innovative and open source projects that enhance the growth and resilience of the Bitcoin ecosystem, announced the organization.
Number one grant goes to Citadel Tech. And let's see. They enhanced Bitcoin privacy using the Maxwell Belcher atomic swap protocol from 2013, enabling bit private Bitcoin UTXO transfers that appear as standard taproot transactions offering a passive privacy even for non users Number 2 grant issued to Lampeau open source project for creating a modular, customizable lightning node It integrates with the lightning development kit and lnproto test featuring a swappable API, wallet, on chain data source, and a plug in system. Number 3, cashew nut Shell is an open source chummy and e cash system enhancing privacy for custodial bitcoin users through anonymous transactions, private exchange via Mintz, and integration with decentralized platforms like Nostr. Woo hoo. Featuring private receipts and proof of liabilities.
And 4 and finally, the Pickcart payments plugin has seeking to enhance lightning network payment efficiency with the Pickcart Richter model, integrated via the Renepay, r e n e p a y, I think that's Renepay, plug in for core lightning. And it uses Bayesian analysis and minimum cost flow algorithms to optimize multipath payments, reducing failures from liquidity shortages, especially for smaller nodes. Open Sats is a 5013c nonprofit organization. That's probably a disclaimer that I should always remind people of. Now for the last bit for today, Bitcoin Keeper version 1.2.17 overhauled tap signer experience.
The Bitcoin Keeper new version has been released. So what's new? Well, the TapSigner experience has been overhauled. You can download encrypted backups of your TapSigner. You can change the card's PIN number, and you can unblock the card if rate limited. I'm not really I'm not really all that familiar with Keysigner, or or I'm sorry Bitcoin Keeper, but, I I presume if you are, you'll know what that is. There's key and signer improvements, associate contracts with signing keys or oh, sorry. Associate contracts with signing keys. Oh, this is nice. Better options for exporting and securing keys. Now there's wallet data management, and they, say that it has enhanced wallet import and export options, improved file sharing across the app, and then there's an electum electum server improvement and there's regular bug fixes, UI updates and support for more fiat currencies. So there you go. That's the show in a nutshell.
Again, I'm gonna make sure that that you understand that I I understand that there are many people in this audience that support Israel. I also understand that there's many people in this audience that don't like what Israel is doing to Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. It's the reason I am saying what I'm saying. And I still believe it. And I don't feel bad about saying what I said. I smell a rat. I can't help it. I'm seeing this and I'm like like Israel barely responded to the first wave of missile attacks by Iran. And maybe it's because they didn't have to pay for it. Because each one of those shots by the that dome iron dome shield thing is, like, I don't know, like, a half a $1,000,000, a $1,000,000 or something like that. Hell, you could just send, like, drones over Israel and have them waste, you know, half a $1,000,000,000 like every other weekend. Have some fireworks.
Maybe. But I don't know. For for the amount of of me growing up, when I grew up, Israel and Iran have always been enemies. Always been like at each other's throats. It's always been this and it's always been that and Iran has always been bad. And I'm not standing up for Iran because I don't know. I don't live there. I'm just looking at what I'm being told because I no longer believe anything that I'm being told anymore. Not by certainly not by western propaganda outlets or mainstream media as it's also known as. So it makes me wonder. If they want me to believe that Iran and Israel are just archenemies, then why am I not seeing archenemies actually do archenemy scale fighting?
And some people on Noster because I've said this on Noster, and some people said, I think they just wanna, you know, avoid an all out war. I honestly, and I'm gonna say this, and I'm not exactly sure how I'm gonna back it up, I don't think that's it. I don't think that there's ever a threat of war between Iran and Israel. We'll have to see. I mean, if I see, like, an like, a huge city in Iran set ablaze and on fire from border to border, from city limit to city limit, then I will know that Israel actually means business. If I see Iran with all the money they're getting from Russia, which is another thing I don't know if I should believe, I don't know if they're actually Russian backed. I'm being told that. But I get told a lot of stuff about Russia.
Russian election interference. It was all Russian propaganda that we had the, Hunter Biden laptop. I don't believe anything anymore because everything is a fucking lie. Why would you expect anybody to believe anything being told by people who just lie? So, therefore, I don't believe it. I don't believe it at all. But if I did, then Iran would be able to mount a much larger retaliatory strike on Israel. Don't you think? So if I were to see Tel Aviv on fire, every building from city limit to city limit, from border to border, then I would know that Iran actually meant business.
But that's not what we're seeing, is it? And I do absolutely 100% believe that it's all about keeping oil at the price structure that it's at right now. No changes. No changes at all. You can't go down very far because your buddies in Saudi Arabia, they're gonna start really getting iffy. And then the guys in West Texas start closing down closing up wells. They'll just shut them down. They're not going to sell into to a shitty market. Not with what they've got it not with their expenses. So now all of a sudden you've got like oil producers who are just shutting in their well and they'll open it up later when prices go back up to something that they actually can stomach.
Right? So you can't go down too low, but you certainly can't hit a $100 a barrel oil this close to an election with a race that is this tight It just that's there's where my thinking is and I wish I wish I could articulate it just a little bit better, but I think I think I'm clear I think something fishy is going on. I don't think Israel and Iran hate each other as much as we've been led to believe. And I think it's more about the price of oil in the mid east given that we're coming into the November November 5th elections than it is that everybody in that region doesn't want wider escalation. There's missiles flying around anyway.
I'm not sure. I these I see, it doesn't it doesn't make sense that they did that we're gonna fire a barrage of missiles at Israel, but we you know what? We're we're not gonna make it that bad so that we don't risk a a wider war. Well, then don't fire the missiles. If you're backing Hezbollah, don't back Hezbollah. Say, you know, prove it. Figure out a way to prove it to to Israel that you're not backing, you know, the people that are coming down from the north and trying to attack them. And if you're, you know, if you're Israel, if if you're going to retaliate because somebody, like, struck your country, your sovereign soil with foreign weapons of war, then you should at least respond in a way that does more than you've done.
That's what that's what this is for me. It's like it's really about the price of oil and the light touch that these people are having. Because if it really is about not wanting war or not wanting a wider escalation, then you don't you stop firing missiles and bullets at each other. That's how you get a decrease of escalation or that you don't escalate war. You just stop doing it because any bullet or missile or rocket that you launch could be the one thing that pops the whole thing off. I don't know, man. Like I said, I smell something fishy and I understand that there are 2 different forms of people that listen to this show. People that don't support Israel and people that do support Israel.
And it's not that I'm trying to straddle the fence. I'm looking at the propaganda that I've been fed for decades, and I'm not seeing it in reality. That's where I'm at, and 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. Yeehaw.
It's 9:46 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 28th day of October, 2024. And this is episode 982 of Bitcoin. And let's jump in with both feet right now with this big Microsoft news. Oh, boys. Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I brought it to you. We now know a little bit more. Let's get into this Microsoft and Bitcoin thing going on. Bitcoin Magazine gonna get us squared away here. Nicholas Hoffman is writing, at the tail end of yesterday, Macroscope, a financial analyst focused on Bitcoin, revealed a new SEC filing stating that Microsoft is voting this December, oh my god, on whether it should invest in Bitcoin.
Oh my god. Oh my god. Well, at first, I thought there is just no way this happens, not right now. And figured it will just be a short lived hype, especially after noticing a detail in the filing statement that Microsoft's board recommends its shareholders to vote against the proposal of assessment of investment in Bitcoin, end quote. But then then, Macroscope came up with another update. Yet another update. Oh, whatever shall we do, mom? That revealed something promising. Microsoft is urging its shareholders to vote against the proposal because their management already carefully considers this topic.
Well, if Microsoft were to follow in the footsteps of MicroStrategy, a wild thing to even type out and say to myself, it would mark a historic milestone for Bitcoin. Microsoft is the 3rd largest company in the world by market capitalization of $3,208,000,000,000. That's trillion with a t, ladies and gentlemen. Will it actually happen? It's anyone's guess at the moment. But Michael Saylor has himself reached out to Microsoft's chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella, to discuss the possibility. If there's one man who can speak Nadella's language and get the job done, it's Michael Sailor. Oh, god. I I like Mike. Don't get me wrong, but the hero worship is a little getting a little out of control, guys. Just a bit out of control. But, anyway, there's plenty of reasons why Microsoft should invest in Bitcoin, you know, like having $75,000,000,000 in cash on hand that is just melting away like the aforementioned and much famous and lauded ice cube. Having said that, just because Saylor understands the importance of holding actual BTC on their balance sheet, he also knows that other large corporations interested in investing in Bitcoin might prefer a different method of exposure altogether.
So if Microsoft were to invest in Bitcoin, I think they will likely just buy shares of BlackRock and other Bitcoin ETFs. I would love to be wrong though and have them actually buy the BTC and hold it themselves on their balance sheet. But in any case, one thing for certain after reading all this, Bitcoin is now too large to ignore, even for the biggest companies in the world. Alright. So that last sentence kinda sews it all up for me. And what I mean by that is that we already know that. I don't think we have to write sentences that that explain that Bitcoin's too big to ignore. I I don't think that I think we're well past that point.
Right? There used to be a time in, you know, back in the olden days when we were worried. Would this just fly into the radar forever and ever and ever? Well, no. We found that shit out roughly around, oh, I'm gonna say 2020 to 2021, specifically, when everything crashed. See, that's this is the funny thing about this is the funny thing about, bad or bad press. There is no such thing. It doesn't exist. Bad press doesn't exist. The world cast its entire collective set of eyeballs on Bitcoin because of Sam Bankman fried. His complete and utter lack of regard for management practices and policies, the complete dissolution of Alameda, and then we had the bank failures.
We had the 3 bank failures, 2 of which were heavily invested a bit or had heavily, well, they were attached to Bitcoin. Let's just call it that. Nobody nobody there's nobody in the world that didn't see that unless they're in rural India or in some, you know, I don't know, headhunting tribe down in freaking the rainforest of the Amazon. Right? Everybody knows. We don't have to worry about this anymore. But I kind of agree, if Microsoft were to start shedding some of their fiat liquidity into Bitcoin, it will most likely not be the same method that Michael Saylor is using. They'll just buy BlackRock ETF.
And then you'll say, but how is that any different than what Michael Saylor is doing? And I would agree with you because Michael Saylor is not custodying his own Bitcoin. He's using Coinbase. What's the difference? If I use Coinbase versus BlackRock to custody my Bitcoin in a very real way, it makes no difference whatsoever. It's just that I buy the actual underlying asset and then store it on Coinbase or I buy shares of something that represents the underlying asset held by BlackRock, which actually is also not held by BlackRock. It too is very much of it is held, as far as I know, by Coinbase. So what's the difference?
I understand that the vehicles and the instrumentation are completely different in their filings with the SEC. But what does it mean intellectually? For me, and I think I'm right in saying this, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. Let's cruise on over to Japan where Meta Planet has now become Asia's 2nd largest corporate Bitcoin holder. Ezra Raguera from Cointelegraph, Japanese investment firm Meta Planet, has achieved a new milestone with its latest Bitcoin purchase as its holdings has surpassed 1,000 Bitcoin worth $68,000,000 On October 28th, MetaPlanet said that it acquired yet another 156.7 Bitcoin, and this has raised total bitcoin holdings to 1018.17 BTC.
The company's latest investment puts it on its average purchase price at about 61,629 or 9,400,000 Japanese yen per bitcoin. Simon Gurvich, the CEO of Meta Planet, celebrated the company's latest bitcoin milestone, saying, quote, Meta Planet now owns more than 1,000 BTC, making it one of the largest corporate holders of bitcoin in Asia. When asked by a community member if the company would keep buying BTC, the Meta Planet executive reply with always and forever. And always and forever is in quotes. Hinting at future Bitcoin purchases. Yeah. I don't think that that's I don't think we need to say that, honestly.
But with Meta Planet's largest Bitcoin purchase, the company has now become Asia's 2nd largest corporate Bitcoin holder. According to Bitcoin data tracker Bitcoin Treasuries, Meta Planet is now the 19th largest corporate Bitcoin holder in the world. Despite reports saying that Meta Planet has become Asia's largest corporate Bitcoin holder, Bitcoin Treasury data shows that there is that the well, this company still lags behind the Chinese firm called Boya Interactive International. That's boya. Boya Interactive International. And they hold 1100 BTC that it purchased back in January.
After MetaPlanet comes a Hong Kong based company called Mitu, which holds 940.9 BTC worth about $64,000,000 So MetaPlanet revised its treasury management strategy in May. Adopting Bitcoin as its treasury reserve asset, the firm said this was a direct response to sustained economic pressure in Japan. And because of this, it would prioritize a Bitcoin first, Bitcoin only approach as a company. So, not the largest holder but getting damn close. And I have never heard of Boya Interactive International. Where did these folks come from? If anybody has heard about them before today, please let me know so that I realize just how I'm falling down on this job. Okay. Over to CoinDesk and up north to I don't know. It's it's getting Christmas time, so maybe we'll get some Santa Claus news out of an Arctic Circle Bitcoin mine will heat a building in a fishing village.
Like I said, CoinDesk Tom Carreras is writing this one. A Bitcoin mine is coming to the Arctic Circle. A 350 square meter facility conceived by retail oriented Bitcoin mining firm, SAS Mining, will be located in a very small fishing village on the coast of Norway. Once it goes live December 1st it may well become the northernmost mining operation in the world. The big idea? To remove the old oil boiler used by one of the town's largest buildings replace it with an in house Bitcoin centric data center, and warm the edifice using the tremendous heat produced by the mining rigs. Quote, heat is a really critical resource in this region of the world, Kent Halliburton, CEO of SaaS Mining, told CoinDesk, quote, it's minus 20 degrees Celsius for large portions of the year. A portion of the heat from the machines is actually going to be shunted off to dry fish, which is part of the economy here.
While Halliburton did not wish to publicize the facility's exact location, yeah, no shit, before it went live, he said that the project aimed to showcase the possibilities offered by bitcoin mining to other arctic residents, quote, for the locals. It's kinda like you need to see it to believe it. This will be helpful for them to understand that it's not bleeding edge technology. It's pretty tested and it can be deployed right now, quote, there are many multiple business owners in the community already considering this approach. And then they go into a long thing about how mining works. I'm going to make the assumption, ladies and gentlemen, that you, the listener, have a good idea of how mining works. So I'm gonna skip that section just for you. But is it a win win?
Saz Mining has 2 other mining locations. 1 in the US state of Wisconsin and another one in Paraguay. The firm's business model involves allowing retail investors to buy their own mining rigs and let Saz Mining operate them in a carbon neutral fashion for a 15% share of 1's block rewards according to the company's website. The Norwegian project wasn't really conceived as an experiment, Halliburton said. Mining has become incredibly competitive in the wake of the 4th Bitcoin halving. And the deal simply made economic sense for both parties involved. Quote, the building is paying us for the heat instead of having to pay for oil for the boiler, he said. Norway's abundance of hydropower means that electricity is very cheap and that the mining operation will be running almost completely on green energy. In fact, with a service fee of 0.046 dollars per kilowatt hour, that's like just over 4 and a half United States pennies, SaaS mining clients should be able to acquire Bitcoin for less than $54,000 a coin.
For comparison, B. Riley Securities recently said that the estimated average power cost for the sector is around 4.5¢ per kilowatt hour. Quote, there's just this excess thing that we can turn into money. Basically, we're using an electron to hash or mine Bitcoin, but we can use that same electron to heat the place. You get 2 uses out of the same electron. However, it remains to be seen if everyone else in the nation feels as positive about it. Norwegian lawmakers moved earlier this year to put restrictions on Bitcoin mining as part of an effort to provide a proper regulatory framework for data centers of all kinds. Bitcoin mining, quote, is associated with large greenhouse gas emissions and is an example of a type of business that we don't want in Norway, or however you pronounce it, the country's minister of energy reportedly said.
But Halliburton says the Norwegian government is simply undergoing an education process, and SAS Mining's facility is meant to help showcase the benefits of Bitcoin mining. Quote, because our data center is heating the building, it would be very hard for legislators to justify turning it off since it would jeopardize life in such a cold client climate during the winter months. So, no, we do not see legislation being a problem in the future, Halliburton said. Halliburton okay. That's the end of the article. Let me say this. That last sentence that Halliburton said is the kind of hyperbole that you do not want to see out of your CEO.
Look. Yes. They're going to remove an oil the oil boiler. That's what heats the building. They're going to replace it with Bitcoin miners. That's going to take the place of the old oil boiler. But once that's done, that does not mean that CEO mister Halliburton can sit there and say, well, of course, Norway is not gonna turn it off. It would kill everybody inside. That is hyperbole. It's hyperbolic. It really doesn't have any place in the argument for doing this kind of thing, which I think is actually good. But here's the rub and here it comes. You know it's coming.
You know it's coming. I'll let you think about it. Norway, up in the Arctic Circle, polar bears, ice flows, glaciers. Oh my god. What could possibly what could possibly go wrong? Oh, I know. We'll add heat. Do you see where I'm going with this? Now, I'm not actually say suggesting by any way, shape, form, or fashion that adding Bitcoin miners up there is going to heat up the Arctic Circle and quote unquote make the climate change worse. No. No. No. No. Why? Because it's just replacing one heat source that's already there with another heat source that uses a different type of energy input.
It's actually cleaner to use Bitcoin in this particular in this particular, application. But here but Greenpeace Norway or Greenpeace, you know, or or whatever. It all the people that are basically being told by the World Economic Foundation and the IC or was it international, IFM, whatever the hell, the UN, all the people that are going to lose control because of this. They are going to scream that we're going to start killing polar bears. You watch. It's coming. I'll bet you my hat that some climate scientist guys get together and write yet another academic white paper about how any Bitcoin mining above the Arctic Circle is bad for the environment. It's going to happen.
You wait and see. Now let's move on. We've got economics numbers coming out for the end of this month and going into the next month. So let's see if Stacy Elliott from Decrypt will help us understand why Bitcoin prices jumped ahead of key US inflation and jobs reports. Deja vu for the price of Bitcoin? BTC climbed back above 69,000 during European trading hours after last setting this recent high water mark just last week. No shit. Bitcoin bounced above the $69,000 mark early on Monday, though it's cooled slightly since. It's up 2% for the day per data from CoinGecko. Looking ahead, traders are entering an extremely busy period for macroeconomic factors. Listen up.
This week alone will include a new gross domestic product report for the Q3 personal consumption data which is used to track inflation and a new jobs report on Friday. Together, these releases will provide a comprehensive overview of the economy's strength inflation trajectory, and employment trends, wrote BRN analyst, Valentin Fournier, in a note shared with Decrypt. Quote, these factors can significantly influence Bitcoin's price trajectory. End quote. Then we're not done. Guys, we're not done. Then next Tuesday, November 5th, Americans head to the polls to vote in the most important election of our times. No. Actually, he says a tightly contested US presidential election race between vice president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Having just the election decided well, sorry. Just having the election decided, Fournier said, should provide a boost to Bitcoin's price. We don't give a fuck who's in office at this point. Quote, given the current accumulation phase, upcoming macroeconomic data, and the positive sentiment surrounding the US presidential election, we believe Bitcoin is well positioned for strong upside moves. We continue to recommend a substantial allocation to Bitcoin with a preference over Ethereum to maximize potential gains.
There is no preference. Ethereum is garbage. Don't buy it. And if you hold it, sell it for Bitcoin. Directly into Bitcoin. Whatever. Meanwhile, Singapore based crypto trading firm QCP Capital noted that a recent Trump podcast interview appears to have been super or supercharging his lead over Harris on crypto based prediction market platform, Polymarket. Pausing to give you the warning. Polymarket has absolutely no value when it comes to who's leading in the polls. All Polymarket actually tells you is who's betting that Trump will win versus who's betting Harris will win.
It has no it there's no connection with, like, massive amounts of people telling pollsters who they're gonna vote for. And I've gotten to the point now I actually I think I think there may be a note in in when I give thanks to all the people that send in donations to the show today, I think there may be somebody who said something about the last time I talked about polls. I don't believe me either. I don't think we have any idea who is actually ahead in the polls. If for all of you people who are going, Trump's gonna win and then point at poly market, that doesn't tell you if Trump's going to win.
All that's telling you is who's putting money on something. But that that's those people I could have 4 people put enough money on Trump to make Trump look like he's win gonna win by 99.99 percent just because of the sheer amount of capital inflow into that bet. No. This poly market doesn't tell you shit. Please, please, for the love of God, stop posting the polly market poll as some kind of barometer as to who's gonna win the presidential election. It don't mean shit. Unless you're the last one at the card table in Texas Hold'em, we don't know who's going to win this. We've got to wait. Anyway, quote, Trump's interview on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which was released nearly a week before the election, has gained significant traction with over 32,000,000 views, driving his poly market odds to above 66%, the firm wrote in a trading note on Monday. Again, pausing. No.
Poly market, as far as I know, is a is a bet for cash only Or, well, for Bitcoin. You've gotta actually put money up. I don't know anything about Polymarket that has even suggested that somehow or another, it's ingesting some kind of Nielsen ratings as part of its no. This doesn't make any sense. There's just because the Joe Rogan Experience podcast with Trump got 32,000,000 views, that that data is not being ingested by poly market. If anything, it's being ingested by the people that are betting money that Trump's going to win on poly market. But again, that's being filtered to people that have money to bet.
And remember, if you're betting sums of money that are, like, well over $10 on a game of pool, you might consider yourself a degenerate. I am not a betting man and I'm not trying to insult anybody. I think betting is a vice that gets people into trouble and destroys lives. I don't think it should be done, but I sure as shit don't think it should be used to tell me who the fuck's gonna win the election. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I'm sorry. Was I ranting? Anyway, continuing, but QCP, like BRN, believes that Bitcoin's bullish momentum is now less closely tied to Trump winning. Quote, despite crypto being touted as Trump's trade, BTC's correlation with Trump's odds appears to be weakening as it aims to break $70,000 and clear its July highs, the firm added.
Okay, so that's the end of the article. Please, please listen to me. Polymarket is a betting site. It is not a predictor of anything. It's just not. Sure, some people will tell you that it is. I think that they're wrong. And I'm not gonna say anything more about it. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities. Can we talk about Iran and Israel for just a second here? I'm gonna get into the oil prices. West Texas Intermediate is down 5.75%. Reminder, oil trading started at 3 o'clock Pacific Daylight Time yesterday.
Right? It always starts for me, oil trading, and that means Brent Norsee, Saudi Arabian crude, West Texas Intermediate, natural gas, it all starts trading on Sunday for me at 3 o'clock Pacific Daylight Time. I've witnessed the largest downside gap between Friday's close of West Texas Intermediate and Sunday afternoon's opening of the oil markets. It gapped down so hard. Wow. Wow. And why why why is West Texas Intermediate sitting at $67.59 a barrel? Why is Brent Nor C down 5.7% itself to 71.71? Why is natural gas falling through the floor at 9.77% downside at $2.31 per 1,000 cubic feet. All of it affects the gasoline price, which is down almost 5% to go sub $2 a gallon to a buck 97.
Why? I'm going to deposit something that's going to make me entirely unpopular with a lot of people. I don't think Israel and Iran hates each other anywhere close to what we are made to believe. I, in fact, don't think that the United States hates Iran anywhere close to what we've been told. I don't think Iran at this point is a honest to God, quote, unquote, terrorist state. Why do I say this? Iran launched their second barrage of missiles at Tel Aviv in Israel, what, a couple weeks ago or last week or something like that, did almost zero damage. Exactly like their first missile barrage.
And this is supposed to, you know, be in retaliation for the the death of the Hezbollah commander in Lebanon. Because, you know, Hezbollah is controlled by Iran. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Rumors of war and war. Rumors of war and war. Keep everybody pissed off until it fucks with the oil prices during a time that the elections are coming up. You see where I'm going with this? Now let's talk about Israel's retaliatory strike on Iran because of their retaliatory strike on Israel because of whatever. It honestly, it killed it killed 2 Iranian soldiers.
Other than that, not a whole lot of damage. And immediately at the conclusion of that strike by Israel upon Iran, they made it dead sure that everybody in the world knew that that was it. That was over. Israel was gonna do no more. And amidst all of this, they touched 0 of Iran's oil infrastructure. Because if Israel had destroyed even half of the ability of Iran to export oil, whether produce it or however they get it onto a ship. If they had destroyed just half of it, you'd see oil prices at just under $100 a barrel. Can you have that going into a United States election if Israel is really good friends and cozying up with the incumbent administration?
No, you can't. If you've got a $100 oil and you've got gas prices in California at $8 a gallon, Kamala Harris does not win the election. I don't think she's gonna win anyway, but it doesn't matter. That's nail in the coffin kind of shit right there. So this leads me to believe that the incumbent administration of the United States, which is definitely deep state, Israel, which has always been attached at the hip like a baby to the United States, and Iran are really just all good buddy buddy, and this is all just for show. That's why what I just said is going to be incredibly unpopular If I've pissed you off my deepest apologies and my sincerest apologies but I'm seeing bullshit in action And when I see bullshit now, I'm just gonna call it the fuck out. Let's move on. Gold is down but scant.
$2,753 an ounce. Silver is up a half point. Platinum is up 1 point. Copper is down 0.16%. Palladium is up 1 and a half points. Biggest loser in agriculture today is it's gonna be wheat. 1.23% to the downside. Biggest winner is chocolate, 2 and a quarter to the upside, while live cattle is down 0.09 percent. Lean hogs are up almost a full point and feeder cattle are up just over a quarter. The Dow is doing well, probably because oil prices were kept low. Why? Well, we went into that. Now Dow is up 0.64%. Quite a nice change. That's about represents a 267 point change to the upside.
S and P is up a third. Nasdaq is up a 5th of a point, and the S and P mini is up almost a full point itself. Bitcoin is also up. $68,900 a coin puts us at a $1,360,000,000,000 market cap, and you can buy damn near 25 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,774,146.44 of. And fees are phenomenally low right now. My god. Average fees per block coming in at 0.04 BTC on average on a per block basis. And there are only 96 blocks carrying a measly 183,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 4. Count them. 1, 2, 3, 4 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 3.
And hash rate, Lord have mercy, was through the roof earlier today. This morning, I posted 868 exahashes per second. That has now dropped, mempool.spaceforward/mining showing 723.4 exahashes per second. From Denmark, done with life. We have Open Mic, which boosted 7,777 sats. That's a full petro boost. Says, keep on ribbing. Mutum 85,000 sat says, based solely on your advocacy of Biddax, I acquired 1 KYC free with dirty fiat at tabconf in Atlanta today doing my part to decentralize hash. Way to go. Mute them. Let me know how your experience goes. In fact, stream it on zap.stream.
That might actually be, something I wanna watch. Alright. FOMO Metronic with 1,001 sat says Denmark can suck a dick with the rest of them. God's death 537. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Perma nerd with 333 says, I hope this small boost doesn't put you into a higher unrealized gains tax bracket. You never know. I mean, he it sounds funny, but you never know. Pies to play with 420 says, thank you, sir. No, thank you. And that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use from The Block written by James Hunt.
October's crypto investment inflows climbed to $3,400,000,000 after $900,000,000 was added just last week. Holy shit. Global crypto funds run by asset managers such as BlackRock, Bitwise, Fidelity, Grayscale, ProShares, and 21 Shares registered net inflows of $901,000,000 last week. In a week. Almost $1,000,000,000 in a week. A week. Over $3,360,000,000 has now flowed into digital asset investment products in October, representing just 12% of assets under management at those funds and the 4th largest month on record. Annually, this has pushed the year to date inflows to be $27,000,000,000 which is nearly triple the $10,500,000,000 set in 2021.
Bitcoin based funds almost entirely dominated. Generating $920,000,000 of net weekly inflows globally. Short Bitcoin positions also saw minor net outflows of 1,300,000. Blockchain equities and Solana also registered weekly inflows of 12,200,000 and 10.8 respectively. In comparison, Ethereum. No. I don't care. Let's move on. US spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds witnessed 997.6 $1,000,000 in net weekly inflows alone. Led by BlackRock's Ibit, a US based crypto investment products brought in $906,000,000 worth of net inflows overall. However, however, other Bitcoin based products registered negative flows and funds based in Sweden, Canada, Brazil, and Hong Kong saw a combined $29,900,000 in net outflows. Have fun. Stay poor. Bitcoin is currently trading for $68,554.
Yes. We know. Let's move on. Quote, we believe that current Bitcoin prices and flows are heavily influenced by US politics. Oh, thank god. Because, you know, what could possibly go wrong? With the recent surge in inflows likely linked to the Republicans' poll gains, CoinShares head of research James Butterfield said. Whatever. Pro crypto Republican candidate Donald Trump currently leads Democrat Kamala Harris by odds of 66.5 to 33.4% to win the presidential election on November 5th, according to the decentralized predictions platform, Poly market. What? See, it's this kind of bullshit.
This is what I'm talking about. Poly market does not have their fingers on the pulse of the United States public other than those that have a fuck ton of money and wanna be degenerate gamblers. Yeah. They have their pulse on those guys, but those guys don't have their pulse on the American public. Some of them think they do. Some of them think that they've got a system to winning at, oh, I don't know, roulette. You know, how many people have said they got a system for playing roulette? You know, the wheel with the ball that goes around. You don't have a system for roulette.
Poly Market is like saying, I have a system to understand the United States political spectrum. You do not. Please stop it. Quote, the former president has also taken the lead in all 6 swing states with poly market, god, showing 84% odds of Republican senate, 52% odds of Republican house, and 48% chance of a Republican sweep compared to 12% for Democrats. And it goes on. Please stop. Last week, poly market claimed that there was no evidence of market manipulation in US elections bet on the platform despite slippage issues. In contrast, the latest national polling averages continue to call a close race. See, the with numbers within the margin of error showing Harris leading Trump by 48.1% to 46.7%, according to 538.
However, the gap between the two candidates in the national polls has narrowed since the peak 3.7 lead for Harris on August 23rd, with analysts at Bernstein noting that the traditional polls have historically underestimated Trump. Yeah. We saw that. Now these are national polls. It doesn't mean that I'm saying, well, I believe these polls because these are the that 538 bullshit and the rest of the national pollsters. Were they right or wrong calling the election for Hillary Clinton? I'm just gonna ask that question. Were they right or were they wrong? Obviously, they were wrong. And they were wrong by a big margin.
Now these margins now let's say that these margins are actually true. And by the way, that's the end of the article. But let's say these margins are true. 48.1 percent for Harris and 46.7 percent for Trump. Those are not the numbers that I'm generally seeing in national polls. I'm actually seeing Trump ahead. But, of course, and again, I haven't really looked at the polls since, oh, I don't know, last week. So God only knows what's changed. And I honestly don't give a shit. But that margin of error statement, these numbers are within the margin of error. That is exactly where, if you're going no matter who wants to commit it although generally speaking, it seems to be democratic election or democrat parties always being able to pull election chicanery.
And I just think that's because they're better at it. I really do. I act in in a way, it's actually kind of impressive. But if you're gonna pull election chicanery and and just let me say it, cheat, this is where you need to be doing it. This is where the margin of error comes into play in a big big way. Because all you need is plausible plausible believability by the public that your candidate actually won, but you cheated to get her there. Because if that is not the case, and Trump is leading by, like, 5 percentage points in, like, most of the polls and you try to cheat and then come out and say Kamala Harris actually won the election even though that she was 5 points down in the polls, that's gonna cause some problems.
It really is. It's gonna cause some problems. You want if you're going to cheat on election, this is the number that you want. You want these numbers to be well within a margin of error. Or if Kamala Harris is ahead by 5 points, then you don't even need to cheat at that point, although you never know. But I'm just saying this is where the danger area is for me. And if I and like I said, I'm not all that worried about the elections. Because here's a new boss, same as the old boss kind of thing. But if you are worried about the elections, this is this exactly is where you need to be worrying about. This margin of error allows people to cheat and you're blinded by the fact that you have this plausible believability that she was she was ahead just enough that maybe she could pull it out of the fire. And then if the popular vote is manipulated and she does, nobody's just really gonna put down any potential massive unrest.
And, again, I want to reiterate what I was saying about Israel, the United States, and Iran seem to me to all be working together to make damn sure that these oil prices don't hit a $100 a barrel because that is nail in the coffin territory for the Harris campaign. Okay. There's a new paper that's been that has been written that responds to the ECB's criticisms on Bitcoin. Now, this is from Murray Rudd, but he's only one of a team of people that seem to have written a rebuttal against that insanity that we saw come out of the ECB and their Bitcoin analysis. I it's a long paper. I'm not going to read the whole thing. In fact, I'm only going to read this one section to you.
They go through, right, before I read it, they go through and point by point, they make rebuttals on everything the ECB paper said. So let's just I'm just gonna give you like a little taste. And, yes, the URL to this paper will be in the show notes. If you get chapters, if I remember to do it correctly, then this URL will also be directly in the chapters. So this is entitled let's see. Let me let me get get you the paper name. Challenging bias in the ECB's Bitcoin analysis. Now, here's the section I want to read. Bitcoin ownership is highly concentrated amongst a small number of large players.
Bien, Sell, and Schaff, who wrote the paper, argue that Bitcoin's wealth is highly concentrated among a small number of holders, undermining its claims of decentralization. And according to Bien, Sell, and Schaff, this concentration presents risks of market manipulation and unfair redistribution of wealth. This claim, however, overlooks the changing dynamics of Bitcoin ownership and the widespread dispersion of Bitcoin holdings. Institutional and retail investors have increased their level of participation in the market. For example, around 10% of Canadians owned Bitcoin by 2021.
And they give paper citations for all of their points of evidence. And in the UK, HMRC Research showed that by 2021 about 10% of adults own crypto assets, with bitcoin being the predominant holding. Miners receiving bitcoin rewards can either hold or sell their rewards, with some firms retaining as much as possible after paying their operating expenses and other firms selling all Bitcoin as they are mined. Overall, selling in the Bitcoin mining industry tends to be cyclical, with miners periodically draining their holdings to pay operating cost when the Bitcoin price is low, contributing further to Bitcoin wide or Bitcoins wide distribution.
Many of the largest Bitcoin wallets that belong to exchanges like Coinbase and Binance and ETF issuers like BlackRock and Fidelity, hold Bitcoin on behalf of millions of users. And recently, BlackRock described that 80% of the buyers of these new spot Bitcoin products in the US are direct investors. Of the 80% of direct investors, 75% have never owned an iShare, one of the best known and largest ETF providers on the planet. End quote. Find, Sell and Chaff create the appearance of concentration when, in reality, institutional and exchange wallets represent the holdings of diverse investors rather than single entities.
The suggestion that Bitcoin's wealth concentration is inherently unfair also raises concerns about the buying sale in Schaff's underlying worldview. They imply that any form of inequality is unjust, yet fail to explain why this applies. A free market for Bitcoin has been available to all since its inception. They or anyone else could have acquired Bitcoin at any point of time, both benefiting themselves and lessening the inequality that they very well criticize. Presumably, however, they chose not to do so. And unlike the vast majority of cryptocurrency tokens or altcoins, bitcoin had a fair and public launch. There was no pre launch distribution of bitcoin. There was no founder shares. No venture capital backers purchasing bitcoin at a discount.
Everyone who accumulated Bitcoin had to undertake the work to earn it, whether through mining or otherwise, or to pay market price when they purchased it. The argument that concentration of wealth in Bitcoin is harmful reflects a misunderstanding of the Bitcoin protocol itself. Unlike traditional financial systems, large Bitcoin holders have no privileged positions or influence over the network. The protocol rules apply uniformly to all participants regardless of their holdings. This stands in stark contrast to fiat systems where very large financial players can exert disproportionate influence upon monetary policy and market operations.
In private corporations, even a significant minority shareholder can have significant influence over company decisions. Such influence is not possible with Bitcoin. Bitcoin's transparent nature allows for much clearer insights into ownership trends compared to traditional financial systems. And the rest of this paper does this on a point by point basis calling out the bullshit that was printed in the ECB's critique of Bitcoin. Now it's this one right here. Buy and sell and shaft create the appearance of concentration, win, and reality institutional.
And exchange wallets represent the holdings of diverse investors rather than single entities. I cannot tell you how many different times it's been that we've had to refute somebody's complete lack of understanding of Bitcoin or fervent hatred of their impending loss of power. We've had to refute that bullshit so many times by saying, look, you're saying that this one wallet holds over 2% of the wealth. That one wallet represents thousands of customers. We've breathed this. We've lived this. We've known this. We've tried to expound upon this. We've tried to let people know. We've done everything that we can. They're never going to stop with this bullshit.
The minute you think that they do or that they are going to stop, they're not, they're gonna print another paper. It's just at this point, they know they're wrong. They're just trying to wear us down. And they've got the weaponry to do it with. They've got the media on their side because the media in the world, especially the West, is 100% bought and paid for. They will tell the public whatever they're paid to tell the public. They're not news. They're not media. Well, they are a media. That media is called propaganda. It's a genre.
No. I'm serious. You can study propaganda as a master's or PhD student in any technical communication or English department in most universities in the United States. How does propaganda work? How do we propagate it? How do we get it out? How do we make it effective? This shit has been going on since the fucking Nazis. And these people own everything, every outlet. Every advertising person is going to have to fall in line. And the larger advertisers get to tell the media corporations how they're going to fall in line or they're going to pull like like I don't know. Let's say a famous very large pharmaceutical company that just recently put out a product that may have caused some serious harm.
They are able to pick up the phone and tell CNBC, you either get that dude off the air talking about our product in such a bad light or we are going to pull our next month's advertising from you and go to your competitor. That's propaganda. This is a type of media, but it certainly isn't news. It certainly isn't informed. And it certainly does not help you out. Propaganda is here for one reason and one reason only. To get enough of a population to believe the same thing, whether it's a lie or not, so that they can affect outcomes on the other side. That's it. So if you want to read this paper, and I highly recommend that you do, and I also highly recommend that you get it out to your friends, if you still have LinkedIn I do.
I know it's weird, but I still have LinkedIn Put it out on LinkedIn. Put it out everywhere. Get it into the hands of everybody that has said, did you read that ECB paper? You can say, why I sure did. Did you read the rebuttal that makes it look like a bunch of kindergartners wrote it? Oh, you have it? Here you go. It'll be in the show notes. Promise. Okay. Open Sats issues its 8th wave. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 times. Open Sats has issued Bitcoin grants. Yum. Hats off, guys. Good job, brothers. Alright. Open Sats is proud to announce its 8th wave of Bitcoin grants dedicated to supporting innovative and open source projects that enhance the growth and resilience of the Bitcoin ecosystem, announced the organization.
Number one grant goes to Citadel Tech. And let's see. They enhanced Bitcoin privacy using the Maxwell Belcher atomic swap protocol from 2013, enabling bit private Bitcoin UTXO transfers that appear as standard taproot transactions offering a passive privacy even for non users Number 2 grant issued to Lampeau open source project for creating a modular, customizable lightning node It integrates with the lightning development kit and lnproto test featuring a swappable API, wallet, on chain data source, and a plug in system. Number 3, cashew nut Shell is an open source chummy and e cash system enhancing privacy for custodial bitcoin users through anonymous transactions, private exchange via Mintz, and integration with decentralized platforms like Nostr. Woo hoo. Featuring private receipts and proof of liabilities.
And 4 and finally, the Pickcart payments plugin has seeking to enhance lightning network payment efficiency with the Pickcart Richter model, integrated via the Renepay, r e n e p a y, I think that's Renepay, plug in for core lightning. And it uses Bayesian analysis and minimum cost flow algorithms to optimize multipath payments, reducing failures from liquidity shortages, especially for smaller nodes. Open Sats is a 5013c nonprofit organization. That's probably a disclaimer that I should always remind people of. Now for the last bit for today, Bitcoin Keeper version 1.2.17 overhauled tap signer experience.
The Bitcoin Keeper new version has been released. So what's new? Well, the TapSigner experience has been overhauled. You can download encrypted backups of your TapSigner. You can change the card's PIN number, and you can unblock the card if rate limited. I'm not really I'm not really all that familiar with Keysigner, or or I'm sorry Bitcoin Keeper, but, I I presume if you are, you'll know what that is. There's key and signer improvements, associate contracts with signing keys or oh, sorry. Associate contracts with signing keys. Oh, this is nice. Better options for exporting and securing keys. Now there's wallet data management, and they, say that it has enhanced wallet import and export options, improved file sharing across the app, and then there's an electum electum server improvement and there's regular bug fixes, UI updates and support for more fiat currencies. So there you go. That's the show in a nutshell.
Again, I'm gonna make sure that that you understand that I I understand that there are many people in this audience that support Israel. I also understand that there's many people in this audience that don't like what Israel is doing to Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. It's the reason I am saying what I'm saying. And I still believe it. And I don't feel bad about saying what I said. I smell a rat. I can't help it. I'm seeing this and I'm like like Israel barely responded to the first wave of missile attacks by Iran. And maybe it's because they didn't have to pay for it. Because each one of those shots by the that dome iron dome shield thing is, like, I don't know, like, a half a $1,000,000, a $1,000,000 or something like that. Hell, you could just send, like, drones over Israel and have them waste, you know, half a $1,000,000,000 like every other weekend. Have some fireworks.
Maybe. But I don't know. For for the amount of of me growing up, when I grew up, Israel and Iran have always been enemies. Always been like at each other's throats. It's always been this and it's always been that and Iran has always been bad. And I'm not standing up for Iran because I don't know. I don't live there. I'm just looking at what I'm being told because I no longer believe anything that I'm being told anymore. Not by certainly not by western propaganda outlets or mainstream media as it's also known as. So it makes me wonder. If they want me to believe that Iran and Israel are just archenemies, then why am I not seeing archenemies actually do archenemy scale fighting?
And some people on Noster because I've said this on Noster, and some people said, I think they just wanna, you know, avoid an all out war. I honestly, and I'm gonna say this, and I'm not exactly sure how I'm gonna back it up, I don't think that's it. I don't think that there's ever a threat of war between Iran and Israel. We'll have to see. I mean, if I see, like, an like, a huge city in Iran set ablaze and on fire from border to border, from city limit to city limit, then I will know that Israel actually means business. If I see Iran with all the money they're getting from Russia, which is another thing I don't know if I should believe, I don't know if they're actually Russian backed. I'm being told that. But I get told a lot of stuff about Russia.
Russian election interference. It was all Russian propaganda that we had the, Hunter Biden laptop. I don't believe anything anymore because everything is a fucking lie. Why would you expect anybody to believe anything being told by people who just lie? So, therefore, I don't believe it. I don't believe it at all. But if I did, then Iran would be able to mount a much larger retaliatory strike on Israel. Don't you think? So if I were to see Tel Aviv on fire, every building from city limit to city limit, from border to border, then I would know that Iran actually meant business.
But that's not what we're seeing, is it? And I do absolutely 100% believe that it's all about keeping oil at the price structure that it's at right now. No changes. No changes at all. You can't go down very far because your buddies in Saudi Arabia, they're gonna start really getting iffy. And then the guys in West Texas start closing down closing up wells. They'll just shut them down. They're not going to sell into to a shitty market. Not with what they've got it not with their expenses. So now all of a sudden you've got like oil producers who are just shutting in their well and they'll open it up later when prices go back up to something that they actually can stomach.
Right? So you can't go down too low, but you certainly can't hit a $100 a barrel oil this close to an election with a race that is this tight It just that's there's where my thinking is and I wish I wish I could articulate it just a little bit better, but I think I think I'm clear I think something fishy is going on. I don't think Israel and Iran hate each other as much as we've been led to believe. And I think it's more about the price of oil in the mid east given that we're coming into the November November 5th elections than it is that everybody in that region doesn't want wider escalation. There's missiles flying around anyway.
I'm not sure. I these I see, it doesn't it doesn't make sense that they did that we're gonna fire a barrage of missiles at Israel, but we you know what? We're we're not gonna make it that bad so that we don't risk a a wider war. Well, then don't fire the missiles. If you're backing Hezbollah, don't back Hezbollah. Say, you know, prove it. Figure out a way to prove it to to Israel that you're not backing, you know, the people that are coming down from the north and trying to attack them. And if you're, you know, if you're Israel, if if you're going to retaliate because somebody, like, struck your country, your sovereign soil with foreign weapons of war, then you should at least respond in a way that does more than you've done.
That's what that's what this is for me. It's like it's really about the price of oil and the light touch that these people are having. Because if it really is about not wanting war or not wanting a wider escalation, then you don't you stop firing missiles and bullets at each other. That's how you get a decrease of escalation or that you don't escalate war. You just stop doing it because any bullet or missile or rocket that you launch could be the one thing that pops the whole thing off. I don't know, man. Like I said, I smell something fishy and I understand that there are 2 different forms of people that listen to this show. People that don't support Israel and people that do support Israel.
And it's not that I'm trying to straddle the fence. I'm looking at the propaganda that I've been fed for decades, and I'm not seeing it in reality. That's where I'm at, and 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.
