Join me today for Episode 989 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- A Cypherpunk's View of the Election
- France to Ban Polymarket
- Gensler Might Resign
- What Polymarket Got Right
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
Circle P:
The King Ranch Donation Pages:
https://www.ruralamericainaction.com/fundraising/save-king-ranch-and-agriculture-in-washington
https://www.givesendgo.com/Kingranch
Articles:
https://primal.net/e/note163m7nhaz3tpqraxnyhgx6fsq8verlnr9r7gkz2jlc25p9wtav7gsq5dzxe
https://cointelegraph.com/news/france-ban-crypto-betting-platform-polymarket
https://decrypt.co/290387/sec-chairman-gary-gensler-likely-resign-analyst
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
- https://geyser.fund/project/thebitcoinandpodcast
https://primal.net/e/note1t58zc2wgx6fh3hkj8zrcnczdxk2hasf60vc86pjp9y4hzz9sz55sd498ea
https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-mark-uyeda-high-chance-next-sec-chairman
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/11/07/trumps-biggest-boon-to-crypto-would-be-passing-the-bitcoin-act-coinshares/
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find me on nostr
npub1vwymuey3u7mf860ndrkw3r7dz30s0srg6tqmhtjzg7umtm6rn5eq2qzugd (npub)
6389be6491e7b693e9f368ece88fcd145f07c068d2c1bbae4247b9b5ef439d32 (Hex)
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DavidB84567
StackerNews:
stacker.news/NunyaBidness
Podcasting 2.0:
fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
Apple Podcasts:
tinyurl.com/unm35bjh
Mastodon:
https://noauthority.social/@NunyaBidness
Support Bitcoin And . . . on Patreon:
patreon.com/BitcoinAndPodcast
Find Lightning Network Channel partners here:
https://t.me/+bj-7w_ePsANlOGEx (Nodestrich)
https://t.me/plebnet (Plebnet)
Music by:
Flutey Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
[00:00:00]
David Bennett:
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:0:2 AM Pacific Standard Time. Not not not Pacific Daylight Time. I I forgot that last Sunday, we finally got our census about us and decided to go back to the old ways of, you know, measuring time.
Maybe, you know, maybe we'll be able to get rid of daylight savings time once and for all this time around. Who knows? I don't I don't know why we're still doing it. It's very confusing. It causes lots of problems. Honestly, it's it's bad. As my dad would say, it's a bad deal, Dave. It's a bad deal. But it is the 7th November 2024 and this is a palindrome episode of Bitcoin and episode number 989. 11 away. 11 away from the 1 thousandth show. Wow. I mean, and honestly, I'm probably not gonna be able to do a lot for it. I'm not gonna be able to throw a party. I you know, it it sucks. But, hey, you know, I have to accept the reality of the situation.
And the reality of the situation is I just don't have enough money to be able to do stuff like that. So all I can ask is that for the 1,000th show coming up that you guys just tune in and listen to it like it's a regular show. I don't want to stop doing the show, so therefore let's treat 1,000 like it's the first episode or something like that. Okay. So we've got, several things going on today, that we're gonna get into, but I kinda wanna do something from Jiraj. [email protected], that is a way to get to him on Nostr. And this is, in fact, a Nostr note. And he's gonna talk about what Polymarket got right.
Now, as you've known, if you've been tuning into the last couple of weeks worth of shows, I've been railing against Poly Market. And some will say, well, you got that wrong too. Well, I don't think it's not that I got it wrong because I wasn't saying that Poly Market was wrong. What I was railing against is that I don't see how degenerate gambling on a presidential election or, well, anything for that matter, can change the outcome of the actual election or portray the data being presented from Polymarket as actual truthful information.
I'm not saying that it was wrong, but I am saying that I had high suspicions that I should probably not be trusting Poly Market. And I did get that wrong. That part I definitely got wrong. And that's okay. I don't mind being wrong. I'm a big boy. I can take it. I wear boxer shorts now instead of, you know, briefs. So I'm I'm totally fine. You know, I'm not gonna, you know, it's almost like the inability to give me a wedgie. You know, I'm just saying. I'm not a kid. I can take being wrong. But given that other people were really looking at Poly Market to say who the hell is actually going to win this thing instead of looking at national polls from I don't know, the AP and National Public Radio or whatever outfit was conducting these polls. I wouldn't trust in those guys either.
But it does look like that poly market got it right and all of the mainstream media polls got it wrong. So let's see if can tell us how that worked, because his post is titled, What Polymarket Got Right That Experts Got Wrong. As the dust settles on the election, there's a story that the Wall Street Journal and New York Times didn't tell you. While the mainstream news was busy with their TV pageantry and hedging on calling key swing states polymarket, the world's biggest prediction market, had already delivered its verdict by midnight Eastern Standard Time declaring Trump was 97% likely to win.
This was before the media called even a single swing state. All throughout this election, Paula Market was always one step ahead. I want to explain why this is. Because judging from the Twitter responses I was getting last night, most people deeply misunderstand this. There are 2 fundamental things that Polymarket did better than the media. Number 1, Polymarket was more accurate on the forecast going into the election. Let's take the pollsters and analysts. Election poll based models claimed, the race was a dead even fiftyfifty. Polymarket, meanwhile, was pricing Trump with a distinct edge going into the election.
He was priced around 62% to win. If you remember, the mainstream media declared Polymarket or derided Polymarket for this difference. Polymarket should be the same as the modelers, they said. Obviously, it means you can't trust Polymarket. It's priced differently because it's a bunch of Trump loving crypto bros. It's invested in by Peter Thiel. Only foreigners trade on it. It's unregulated, so it must be being manipulated. There's a whale pushing up the price of Trump, and on and on and on and on and on. Implicit in this dismissal is a deep distrust of markets, as though markets cannot be trusted unless affirmatively proven otherwise.
And, of course, if you actually trusted the markets, you might not trust the media anymore. And their whole business model is predicated on you distrusting anyone but them. Why else would you continue to click on their never ending stream of clickbait? But anyone with experience with markets knows. It doesn't fucking matter if a market is composed of Republicans or Democrats or foreigners or whatever. In reality, we know that JPMorgan was using Polymarket, as were some of the largest hedge funds in the world. Most have non US subsidiaries. It was integrated into Bloomberg terminal.
It was being quoted on CNN. And yet the media spoke of Polymarket as though it was 4 Chan. Understand, Polymarket traded $3,600,000,000 on the presidential election. This was the largest election betting market by volume in history and an order of magnitude more than any other election market ever. There was more riding on this than any single modeler's career prospects. Understand, markets work because of how much is riding on getting the answer right. These supposed biases being Trump aligned, crypto pill non Americans didn't skew the market's accuracy.
It seems obvious, in retrospect, that being non American might improve your ability to dispassionately predict an election. But the identities of the betters didn't matter. Prediction markets distill input from many diverse actors to produce prices that transcend biases. Markets don't care about ideology. They only care about being right. And as it turns out, Poly Market was more right than any pollster or modeler. Now I want to be clear what I'm not saying. The difference between 6040 and 5050 sounds big, but it's not. Elections are noisy.
High school statistics will tell you that if you want to tell if a coin is rigged to be 6040 rather than 5050, you would need over 100 coin flips to have 90% certainty. The outcome of Trump won this election does not tell you whether the coin was 6040 or 5050. My point is, not that Poly Market was right and the modelers were wrong They actually didn't disagree with each other by much. I'm making a more subtle point. The market was consistently pricing Trump's odds higher than the polls. Remember, the market knows what the polls and analysts are saying. Markets incorporate all existing information, but Polymarket disagreed with the pollsters.
The only explanation that analysts could come up with this for this was Polymarket is biased. They didn't have the humility to imagine maybe, just maybe, that Polymarket knew something that was not being captured by the polls. Polling sucks. This is a well established no. And in the pre internet era, polling was much more accurate. Landline poll response rates were often above 60%. Today, poll responses rate around 5%. This means pollsters are getting massive sampling biases and there's no possible way to correct for these biases without baking in clumsy statistical corrections. Plus, pollsters who are ultimately selling a product and have reputations to keep frequently herd their estimates together to avoid being an outlier, which fucks up poll aggregation.
Plus, Trump is special. He's uniquely divisive in American politics. So for 3 elections in a row, we have seen massive polling errors that underestimate his support, the so called, quote, shy Trump voter effect. Poly Market presumably believed that the polls were missing this. The pollster said, no, we've updated our models and corrected for it. Polymarket said, I don't buy it. And Polymarket was right. Now again, Polymarket did not say the election was 90% for Trump to win. 62% is not a sure thing, and elections are genuinely uncertain. But what irks me is that there was not even a tinge of curiosity from the media about the delta. Maybe Poly Market knows something we don't.
Maybe there's information we're missing that's not being captured in the polls. Remember, Trump massively outperformed his polls all across the country in both red states and blue states. He sweeped every single swing state and even won the popular vote, something most people thought was impossible. Are you really so confident that there was no way to detect this? The sentiment of tens of millions of Americans that didn't involve the same old pollsters running the same old internet surveys? This is what being a student of the markets teaches you. Markets are smart.
But they don't explain themselves. They just show you the outcome. And that brings us to the second way that Polymarket outperformed the media. Number 2. Polymarket called the election in real time, way before the media did. The inscrutability of markets came in full force on election night. Polymarket moved quickly and violently before a single swing state was ever called. According to Polymarket, the election was over by midnight while the mainstream media was milking the drama until this election was officially called at 6 AM the next morning. Why was this?
Well, first, polymarket saw an important correlation that the mainstream media was not willing to explain to their viewers. You see, polling errors are seldom random. They are usually correlated across states. So when traders saw that Trump was massively outperforming his polls in states that were not themselves competitive, picking up huge vote shares in New York City, which is clearly blue, or Florida, which is cleanly red, this means that there must be a massive polling miss across the country. Poly Market immediately picked up on this and realized that the swing states could not possibly be competitive anymore.
Polymarket priced Trump to win Pennsylvania at 90% by 11:30 pm, when only a small portion of the Pennsylvania vote had been counted. Prediction markets don't wait for pageantry or pundits. It doesn't care if it invalidates the sacred ritual of waiting for the votes to be counted. Remember in 2020, when Fox News called Arizona early, which turned out to be correct, and viewers were outraged? Trump vowed to boycott the network over it. This reinforced the lesson. The networks must never sit there and dutifully count up the votes. Don't be too clever. But markets don't care about drama.
They only care about outcomes. Obviously, it would be incredibly difficult to explain to a CNN viewer that the election is over. The polling error is non in noncompetitive states is too big. Kamala is doomed, and you should go to sleep and not bother to wait for swing states. It goes against the narrative that the media has been reinforcing for months. The public wants simple, explainable stories, and everyone knows how the narrative is supported or supposed to go. You wait for the swing states and until one of the little colored bar crosses that 270 count line.
At 12:51 AM, the New York Times was still showing this dramatic chart and headline. By then, poly market already had Trump priced in at 98% to win. So election watchers dutifully stayed up through the night so the media could complete its empty ritual of filling up the bars. PolyMarkets traders have no loyalty to narrative and no incentive to play up the drama for ratings. They just call it straight. Shane Kopplin, PolyMarkets founder, said that Trump's campaign team was reading Polymarket to try to understand how to actually interpret the odds. The media even had the gall to complain that Trump was declaring victory when his electoral count was at 267.
At that point, the poly market odds were so low that they registered as 100%. The beauty of markets is they respond instantly to new information. The fastest trader who incorporates the information gets the prize, profit. This is something traditional media fundamentally is not set up to even do. They have to filter events through layers of interpretation, narrative making, and internal politics. Recall Murdoch's intercession into the 2020 Arizona call The decentralized nature of Polymarket bypasses all this bullshit It lets information flow without any interference There is a lot to reflect on from last night This election was a resounding reprimand of the Democratic Party, a rejection of the expert class, and an immune response against arrogant media. But for Poly Market, it was a night of pure vindication.
For me, the lesson is this. The next time something important is going on in the world, skip the op eds and check Polymarket. Alright. So that is Juraj. And, honestly, you know, if I got to eat crow, I can do it on air. I was wrong about Polymarket. And I'm going to actually go back and start looking at some of the other things that Polymarket does. That doesn't mean I'm gonna bet. I hate gambling. Like, I run away from gambling like the plague. It is bad enough to try to do something stupid like start a podcast. Okay. I gamble enough, but I just don't gamble with money.
I mean, like, $20 bills. Sure. I'm gambling with with my ability, you know, to make, you know, to, you know, make paycheck by working for some university or I don't know, like, I don't know, work in retail at Ross Dress For Less or something like that. That said, I can't gamble with money. For instance, me and one of my very best friends who ended up being best man at my wedding, We got so good at playing pool in college because we just played pool together all the time. That's all we I mean, it's not that all we did, but we played so many games of pool that we started getting good. We didn't realize that we were getting good.
And one day, a couple of, like, I don't know, like blue collar worker I mean scruffy looking motherfuckers come up to us. I mean, you know, like tattoos everywhere and beards down to the middle of the chest and clearly like 10, 12 years older than either one of us come up to us and say, Hey, I'll bet you $20 for this table because all there was only 3 tables and we were at 1 and we had had the table all night long. They wanted to play pool. And we were like, look, we'll we'll do that except we're not gonna do it for money. Whoever loses buys the other team a round of drinks, and they get the table.
They they agreed. We wiped the fucking floor with our ass to the point that they left mad. We played 3 games in a row with these guys and we it wasn't it wasn't that we just beat them. We beat them so badly that they were actually visibly pissed. And this is the kind of pissed off from the kind of people you don't want to see pissed off. That's how good we got. And yet no matter and we kept getting better. And we and at that point, we realized, shit. We could we can get all of our drinks paid for by just going and playing pool at a bar somewhere. And that's what we did for months, months months months. We paid for almost no drinks.
And yet after all that time, you know what we never did? We never laid a 20, a 10, a 5, a 50, or a $100 bill on the table. We never bet cash. We would only ever play for drinks. People begged us to play for cash, and we're like, no. It doesn't mean that we're morally superior. It's just that neither one of us had a gambling instinct. We don't like it. It's like I would rather take $20 bill, put it in a brown paper bag, soak it in diesel, light it on fire, and throw it out the window before I go to Vegas and do something stupid like play roulette. And that is my bias against Polymarket.
And that bias came up clearly over the last 2 weeks. And now I gotta eat a little bit of crow. And, again, I'm a big boy. I don't mind. Crow might actually taste good with a little salt and pepper. But I have to go back and look at poly market. I've gotta start looking at what else these people are betting on. And, honestly, if you are the gambling type, I still advise you to not gamble. But that doesn't mean that maybe we shouldn't start taking very, very seriously in his analysis on Poly Market. I can admit to being wrong. That's okay.
But we've got other stuff to do because I wasn't the only one that was thinking Polymarket was full of shit. For the same reasons that Jarrah brought up, for only foreigners could actually invest in it. What do they know, right? Well, here comes France. You thought France was stupid enough. Now that we know we know about poly market, France is not listening to to any of the arguments that is making, which is not the only person making. But France, no matter who's telling them anything about Polymarket, is so pissed off that they are considering a ban on the crypto betting platform, Polymarket.
Helen Parks, Cointelegraph. Woo hoo. France's gambling regulator is considering banning the cryptocurrency prediction platform, Polymarket, which has made headlines on user demand around the 2024 presidential election in the United States. The National Gaming Authority of France, the Aporte National des Juis Whatever. I can't pronounce French. Is investigating PolyMarkets operation and compliance with French gambling laws, Bloomberg reported on November 7th. Wow. Talk about being butthurt. Quote, we are familiar with this site and are currently examining its operations and its compliance with the French legislation on gambling, a spokesperson for the ANJ confirmed to Cointelegraph.
And previously, a crypto focused publication, the big whale, reported that the ANJ is expected to ban access to Polymarket for French users in the very near future. Launched in 2020, Polymarket is a decentralized prediction market platform that allows users to bet on real world event outcomes using cryptocurrencies. The betting platform has seen huge success in 2024 amid the US election hype reaching $2,500,000,000 in bets in October. Wow. That's a lot of money. Although Polymarket is headquartered in New York, the platform is currently inaccessible by US residents. However, people in other parts of the world, like France, have been using it actively.
For example, a sued anonymous trader and an alleged French national placed at least $20,000,000 worth of bets supporting Donald Trump as the next US president. Nicknamed Freddy 9999, the Polymarket user is expected to see nearly $50,000,000 in profits across 4 identified accounts, according to Bloomberg. Polymarket is subject to France's gambling laws despite being related to cryptocurrency. Even if Polymarket uses cryptocurrencies in its operations, it remains a betting activity. And this is not legal in France, the source reportedly said.
According to William O'Rourke, partner at ORWL Avocats, Polymarket consists of betting money on something random and not strictly the definition of gambling, So it's like a sports bet. He stated, quote, unlike financial companies, yeah, like, where no gambling goes on at all, the ANJ has the power to block the platform even though Polymarket does not specifically target French users, end quote, whatever, dude. Polymarket has played a role in the 2024 US presidential election. According to CEO Shane Copeland, Trump's campaign team literally found out they were winning from Poly Market.
I don't know if that last part's true, but, hey, that would be funny if it did. Alright. So why is France butthurt? I have my gut feeling is that they're not all that butthurt about the fact that, Trump won the election. I think what's really occurred here is that poly market came up. It was, like, plastered over all these news outlets and everybody was talking about it. And now the gaze of the you know, of of not just France. It's gonna be other countries too. But now that now they've they've captured the gaze of governments, and that's exactly the one thing you don't ever want in your net. Right? You don't want that fish on your line. You don't want that butterfly in your net. You do not want to capture the gaze of a government, no matter how big and no matter how small. You just don't want it Because then you get butt hurt people like France who's, like, going, oh, shit. Something that we can regulate that we're not regulating?
Something we can make illegal that we haven't yet? My god. What are we doing? Let's rush to the exits and let's make sure that this shit never actually ever works again for our people. Well, good luck with that. Because I don't think poly market is going away. No matter what I've said about it in the past, I am very clearly wrong and that poly market now has completely ensconced itself in utility when it comes to betting on stuff like the United States presidential elections. But I wonder if Polymarket has this bet. In fact, I'm going to go find out. Hold on. Okay. So I just checked Polymarket, and no, we do not have a bet on this following story.
Decrypt Adrian Zmudzinski. SEC chairman Gensler is likely to resign after the Trump win. According to an analyst, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission could soon see a new chairman following Donald Trump's win. Analyst Marcus Thelen, the CEO of crypto research firm 10x Research, wrote in a research note that recent history suggests that Gary Gensler is likely to resign in the near future amid the impending regime change. The SEC's chairman would just be following in the steps of his predecessors. The SEC chairman typically resigns when a new president takes office aligning with the incoming administration's preferences.
This happened previously with Jay Clayton, who was appointed by Trump resigning before Joe Biden's inauguration. And before that, Barack Obama's pick, Mary Jo White, resigned the day of president Trump's inauguration. Quote, this practice allows the new president to appoint a chair who aligns with their policy objectives. If these historical patterns hold, Gary Gensler may resign in December or January with the new SEC chair potentially confirmed by April or May. Appointed by president Joe Biden in 2021, Gensler has led the SEC in aggressive crackdowns on US crypto exchanges, decentralized finance projects, and software developers, which has been perceived by many as a hostile stance towards the sector.
His term is set to last until 2026. Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he would fire Gensler if elected and suggested that crypto startups would be living in hell if he didn't return to office and help change the course of American regulation. Quote, I pledge to the Bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' anti crypto crusade will be over. I noticed he didn't mention Elizabeth Warren. Anyway, it will end and it will be done, end quote. According to decrypt analysis, however, regulatory protocols established that the president could not remove Gensler from his position without cause. Still, the new president would have the authority to demote him from the role of chairman and appoint another SEC commissioner in his place.
US Republican representative French Hill recently said that the SEC should have new leadership next year regardless of which party controls the White House. He said that Gensler's fearmongering at the SEC is unconstitutional and misuses the agency's regulatory authority. I'm not sure if it's unconstitutional because I'm pretty sure that in the constitution of the United States, there's not one single word written about the Securities and Exchange Commission. I don't think that that was the apple in Ben Franklin's eye at the time that him and the rest of the founding fathers were pinning the constitution.
Okay? So I'm not sure where they get this unconstitutional shit. Just because he's a dick or somebody's a dick doesn't automatically make them unconstitutional. People bandy that word around way too much. And you know who uses that word unconstitutional the most? You wanna guess? Yeah. You're right. The people that have never read the constitution of the United States. Exactly. That's exactly right. Alright. So like I said, I checked Polymarket to see if there was bets on Gary Gensler either resigning or getting fired or what whatever. Right? I I guess he can't get fired, but he could get demoted. Nothing. There's nothing. Nothing on Polymarket is associated with the name Gary Gensler or or the SEC.
There's nothing there. I can't find it. I type in SEC. There's no bets. Type in Gensler. No bets. I type in Gary Gensler. No bets. There's nothing. However, I did find this. There's a bet on that if Trump wins, will he pick Jamie Dimon for treasury secretary? Okay. Now this looks like it's it's up on January 20, 2025, which would be inauguration day. Right now, the chances that Trump picks Jamie Dimon as secretary of the treasury is standing at 6%. So if I just say, you know what? I'm just going to believe Polymarket. That means that there's no way in hell Jamie Dimon becomes our treasury secretary. Doesn't mean that it will happen or won't happen. I'm just saying that I'm I'm going to just I'm gonna take a little leap of faith and say maybe maybe I should put my attitude in my back pocket and just listen to what Poly Market is trying to say and see if it works out. So there's a 6% chance that Jamie Dimon becomes treasury secretary, a 94% chance that he does not.
But other people have other things in mind. The SEC's Mark Ullieda has a strong chance of becoming the next chairman of the SEC According to a lawyer, and this is written by Helen Parks, Cointelegraph, as Donald Trump prepares to take office as president, the cryptocurrency community is speculating on the most likely candidate to lead the SEC. And Mark Ueda, an SEC commissioner, has been seen as a strong candidate for the role according to crypto attorney, Jake Chernivsky, in a Twitter post on November 6th. Commissioner Uyeda is known for criticizing the crypto regulatory approach by current SEC chair Gary Gensler, having in October called his policies a disaster for the entire industry. That's a direct quote.
Appointed as an SEC commissioner on June 30, 2022, Uyeda has consistently opposed enforcement driven regulation for crypto, earning support from industry advocates seeking a more collaborative approach. Trump pledged to fire Gensler on his very first day of presidency, day 1. And the crypto community has since speculated that SEC commissioner, Hester Pierce, may be a potential contender for the chair. Pierce was appointed by Trump during his first presidency on January 11, 2018. However, the chances that Pierce will take the lead are very low, Chernivsky said, adding that he doubts whether she'd be willing to even take it. He wrote, quote, being chair is pretty hard. Thankless, it's a miserable job.
Some commissioners might want it, like Ueda, but others might feel they've done their time and are ready to move on to greener pastures, end quote. Many in the crypto community called Pierce crypto mom as she has criticized the criticized the SEC for its restrictive policies stifling innovation. Pierce also reportedly or and repeatedly urged the SEC to restore open communication with the industry. At the time of writing, Pierce has not provided any remarks on her Twitter profile following Trump's victory. According to Chernivsky, Trump might want to opt for someone other than Ueda to lead the SEC. Quote, I expect Trump may prefer to bring in someone new, you know, of his own, Chernivsky stated.
Additionally, the lawyer highlighted that Trump's top crypto policy priority must be ending Biden's attempt to destroy the industry via regulation by enforcement. According to Chernivsky, that means dropping the SEC's unjustified enforcement actions against major crypto firms and the tornado cash prosecution by the Department of Justice. Fucking a. I hope so. That would be nice. That's the end of the article. But let's put our hands together and pray, brothers and sisters, that maybe, just maybe, the tornado cash guys will be released from this Kafkaesque type hell. And if you don't know who Kafka is, I recommend that you go read The Trial by Franz Kafka. It will blow your mind. Alright. Let's run numbers.
CNBC Futures and Commodities. Oil is up 1%. West Texas Intermediate coming in at $72.39. Brent, North Sea just over a point, up 75.68. Natural Gas doing its thing. It's down 2 and a half percent. Gasoline is up 3 quarters of a percent to $2.5 a gallon. All of your shiny metal rocks are having a whoop de doo day. Gold is up 1.14% to 2706.70 pennies. Silver is up 1.7% to 3187. Platinum is up 0.84%. Copper rallying like a mofo, 4.31% to the upside. But palladium sucking the swamp water 1% down. Ag is pretty much mixed. Biggest winner today is chocolate. Wow. 7 and 1 third points to the upside. I wonder what's going on there. Biggest loser today is lumber, 0.7% to the downside. Live cattle up 0.15%.
Lean hogs down 1 a quarter. Feeder cattle, basically moving sideways slightly in the green. The Dow is up. Ma'am, yeah, it's moving sideways right now. Why? Why? Because we we're done with the election, so everything should be bright and and and and funky. Right? No. No. No. No. No. No. The Fed meeting, they're going to make a statement on what they're going to do with interest rates today. And by the time you hear this, it's probably already a done freaking deal. It's supposed to be 11:30 AM my time, which is a couple of hours away. We'll see. We'll we'll we'll we'll have to see. But the Fed is going to say something about what they're going to do with interest rates today.
So if you're wondering why some of the legacy markets are kinda moving sideways, that's probably why. Because the S and P futures are up well, actually, S and P is up 2 thirds of a point. And the Nasdaq is up 1 and a third, and the S and P mini is up 1 5th of a point. So maybe there are some people who are saying, fuck it. I don't care what the hell happens, LFG. Price of Bitcoin is $76,190. That is a $1,512,000,000 market cap. We can now purchase 28.4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,778,886.74 of.
Fees? Fees are low. 0.04 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis, and there are 71 blocks carrying a 178,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 5. Count them. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 3. And mining hash rate is at 720.9 exahashes per second on a rolling 1 week average. Okay. Value for value, ladies and gentlemen. Here is the ask. And I'm reading this one from value for value dot info if you are interested in how this works and some of the ways that Adam Curry has suggested that people go about asking for other people's value. Because, basically, I'm asking you for money. I better have a damn good reason to do that. He's got this whole thing of value for value dot info.
Value, the number 4, value all written together, dot info. Go check it out. Because you'll there you will find particular ways that Adam Curry is thinking about it. And this one way is called content format, where he says, there isn't one content format when it comes to value for value. When it comes to podcasting, including your listeners into the feedback and content creation loop is tried and tested. By including your audience into the feedback loop, you create something bigger than yourself. Something participatory and reciprocal.
From shoutouts to numerology and honors to badges, many things can be added to your content in creative ways that include your audience into the content creation process. One of the ways that I do it on this show is to read your boostograms no matter how many sats you give me. Sometimes I read boostograms that somehow or another got through into my feed without even sending me a single sat. But God's death is not one of those people. With 537 sats, he says, thank you, sir. Not one more day. Exactly. Not one more day. Not one more day. Not one more day. Pies to play with 420. Gives me a whole bunch of emojis.
And then he comes back with another 4:20 that says, hashtag not one more day, hashtag free Ross. If you don't know what the hell we're talking about, it's this. The incoming Trump administration needs to call Biden, and they also need to call MSNBC and all of the mainstream media outlets and say that we've issued a challenge to the Biden administration to pardon or commute Ross Ulbrich's sentence today, not tomorrow, not in December, not wait until January 10th or January 11th or all the way up until Trump has to actually sit in the seat. No. They've got to do it now. Otherwise, they risk having egg all over their face and the albatross around the entire party of the Democrats that says, we don't give a shit about your freedom.
We will stick you in jail for having a website. And we don't care about your mom, and we don't care about the fact that your girlfriend may or may not hopefully, Ross Ulbricht had a girlfriend and she hasn't walked out on him. But I can't imagine that kind of stress of sitting in fucking solitary confinement for whatever it is, 23 hours a day. I don't think I'm not sure if he's with general population. I I also don't I don't really know. If somebody can tell me his circumstances, is he in solitary? Is he having to spend that much time by himself? Because that will drive you to be a lunatic, honestly. I'm just saying that if Trump were to issue that statement and make sure that everybody in the world knows that he issued that challenge to the Biden administration and that the Biden administration didn't say, you know what? We're not gonna wait a single more day. And they actually commuted a sentence or full pardoned Ross Ulbricht, everybody wins. Democrats get to save face.
Trump gets a win. Ross Ulbricht gets to go hold his mom. Not one more day. Not a single day more. This is ridiculous. Just saying. Join the not one more day by adding hashtag not one more day and hashtag free Ross to every single thing that you post. Okay. Maybe not everything, but whatever. God's desk says, thank you, sir. Not one more day. Again, not one more day. Not one more day. Not one more day. Not one more day. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use Cypherpunk, Aud Noster, put out a note that has the text of something that was written by someone else, namely, Eric s Raymond.
And I'm I've never heard this guy's name before, but I want to read you this piece because I read it. And now that I know what Eric s Raymond's background is, it's kind of poignant considering that he is a Linux and open source developer of apparent legend. Legendary status, like epic kind of shit. So who is he? Well, the one thing that I know about him at this point, other than the fact that he's been an open source and a Linux developer for years years years, he wrote an essay called The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Now that I have heard of. I just didn't know that it was written by a guy named Eric s Raymond. So why am I bringing this all to you?
Because he's got a few thoughts about the election, the United States presidential election. And I thought it odd that somebody who is steeped in open source software development, Linux, Cypherpunk, had these words to say. I hear Kamala Harris has conceded. For just a moment, I'm going to abandon the high decoupling rationalist stance I normally post from and talk about what I personally wanted from this election and now hope that I might get. For me, a good outcome in this election meant not Trump winning, but his enemies losing.
I am not MAGA and not a tribal conservative of either the old school or the new school kind. I'm a libertarian and have some serious differences with substance with Trump and his partisans. Also, I've never much liked Trump as a person. He's vulgar and under control. He talks and postures too much. And I think the charge that he's a narcissist has some weight, but he chooses his enemies well. I will also admit that I think better of Trump now than I did 3 months ago. He has demonstrated literal courage under fire, which is an important quality in a man who may need to make life or death decisions about the fate of a nation.
I went to see him speak, and I saw a man much calmer and more together than I was expecting. But I'm not really posting about Trump today. And the only other thing I'm going to say about him is that his most valuable quality is that he enrages evil people into unmasking themselves. I have believed for decades that the central problem of American politics is defeating the Gramsian long march through our institutions. Covert and not so car covert Marxists have waged a remarkably successful memetic war. It has many manifestations. Blatant bias in the mainstream media, welfare statism, DEI, climate alarmism, transgender ideology, open borders.
But the goal is always the same, to cripple and destroy the main enemy, the United States of America and everyone in it who loves liberty. Trump's victory is the worst defeat of the Gramscians in my lifetime. They went all in with an unprecedented campaign of lies, vitriol, hate propaganda, lawfare, and election rigging. He beat them anyway, and for that, he has my respect. What I want from the immediate aftermath of this election is to rejoice in their agonized screaming. What I want from Trump and Republican control of both houses is follow through.
Number 1, impose election security measures so we can't be frauded again. 2, abolition of every federal firearms law and regulation, including the disbandment of the ATF. We must restore the proper constitutional order in which the government is frightened of the people, not the reverse. 3, massive cuts in the reach and power of the administrative state. No unelected bureaucrat should ever have the power to effectively make law. And finally, number 4. A concerted and conscious attempt to drive the communist and communist tools out from everywhere that they have burrowed into our institutions, perhaps starting with the complete defunding of any educational institution that harbors academic marxists.
Yes. I know many of these people don't know their communist tools. I'm past caring. I've been ready to throw them out of helicopters with my own hands since about 2014, hoping against hope that something would happen to make that kind of violence unnecessary. Now, maybe, we have a path to defeating them peacefully. I'm not sure Trump fully understands this necessity himself. But there are people close to him, notably Elon Musk and Ron Paul, who I'm pretty sure do. The first thing that we need to do is be able to name the enemy. Conservatives have been cowards about this ever since the ArmyMcCarthy hearings a few years before I was born.
They became afraid to speak out explicitly to oppose communist infiltration. And we have been paying an increasing price for that cowardice through my entire lifetime. Conservatives? MAGA people? If you really want to make America great again, make defeat of the Gramscians your cause. Name the enemy. Expose them. Defeat them. They have crippled, divided, and corrupted us for far too long. It's time to take our country back. Alright. That's the end of that note. So what the hell is a Gramsian? I'll give you the definition. Gramsians are people who are influenced by the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist, theorist, philosopher, and linguist.
Of all things, a linguist. Why does that matter? Why does it matter linguist and philosopher combined with Marxist theory? What's so dangerous about that? Because words matter. Language matters. Grammar matters. I've talked about this before. Words can cast a spell. That's why they call it spelling. They can program you to think a certain way. They can program you to act in certain other ways. This shit is real. It's not a bunch of hooey. It's not a bunch of woo woo. It's all David thinks magic exists. No, man. The magic has always been with us. Our influence upon one another.
It's how that's affected that matters. The tools in which we use to affect one another. How do you know what the hell I'm talking about? Because I speak words to you. You decode those words in your brain, which means that your brain is touching the words I speak to you. If you don't think that that does not have an effect upon you and what you're going to do later on today, you're fooling yourself. And it ain't just me. It's anyone you talk to. Ever talk to somebody who is in a viciously good mood and it's infectious? That's a spell.
Might as well be magic. I don't care. I don't give a shit. Ever been around somebody who's so down in the dumps that you want to you would chew your leg off to get out of the fucking bear trap and bleed as you run away as fast as you can, as far as you can. Have you ever experienced that? That's a spell. And that's just the two ends of diametrically opposed ends of a spectrum. Being so happy that you wanna be around that person and somebody's so fucking sad that you want you either want to kill them or you want to leave as fast as you can. If now think about all the shades of gray. What you might how you might think about an election. The words that kept being used in this election.
He's a Nazi. Orange man. He's a Nazi. I didn't see him do a single thing that suggested he's a Nazi. There are several people that I've asked exactly what, like, like, people that I'm very, very close to will say something like, oh, well, you know, you know, he's just a Nazi. Okay. How? What did he do? And they get so mad. It's almost instant that you would dare that you would dare question anything that they had to say. Because, well, surely you've listened to MSNBC too. Surely you sit down and watch the cackling witches of The View. How do you not know that he's that he's a Nazi? How do you not know this? Are you stupid?
That's a spell. They've been programmed. You need to either call it, I've been put under a spell, I've been bewitched, I've been programmed. It doesn't matter, because it all boils down to words. And that's why Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist theorist, philosopher, and linguist should matter to you as we were reading that particular piece by a libertarian who is absolutely relishing, says it, wrote the sentence. He's relishing in the agony that the left is experiencing at this moment. Although I will say this, You know what I have not seen? Of course, then again, understand this.
I don't watch MSNBC or any of the mainstream news. I will listen to NPR so that I can get enemy chatter. You know what you know you know what I've heard them say so far? Almost nothing. Last 2 days. NPR is I haven't heard anybody losing their mind. I haven't heard anybody crying. But that's the only thing that could be considered mainstream media that I listen to. Other than that, I'm on Nostar. I don't go to Facebook. I don't go to TikTok. I don't go to Instagram. I am complete I I I guess I'm bubbling myself or insulating myself. You could say that, but maybe what it is is that I've knocked down those walls because I don't give a shit about that crap anymore.
Nostra really did save save a lot of my ability to be happy. My ability not to worry about what these fucking people are thinking all the goddamn time. It's ridiculous. Yet, I find it fascinating that a Linux guy who's a cypherpunk free and open source software developer and libertarian I might have said that twice actually wrote down the words that he's relishing the mind losing of the left. Of course, I haven't seen it, but then again, I'm not in a position to see it. If you guys have seen it, you know, let me know. Let me know, is it actually happening? Is the left actually losing their mind? Because I honestly don't know.
I I knew last time that that Trump got elected. I saw that shit, but I am certainly not seeing it yesterday or or today. Okay. I just I just found it odd that somebody who is libertarian and cypherpunk would be saying such things. He even hinted the fact that he's been thinking about throwing these people out of helicopters since 2014. Well, that's a very violent way of looking about things. Right? And here's my bent on that is that I would rather not see violence, But I would much rather or more rather not see the following: People who think that you're going to be able to affect anything with a protest.
I'm sorry. You marching around, carrying a sign, in a circle, with a bunch of other motherfuckers out there in the middle of freezing weather doesn't make me change my mind one iota either way. Either I was already on your side and I'm laughing at you for for protesting because it's not going to do a goddamn thing, or I'm completely against your viewpoint and I don't give a fuck about it because your protesting is not going to do a goddamn thing. You want to make sure nothing changes? Go grab your ass assigned, go hang out with some friends in front of a building, walk around and say, when what do we want something? When do we want it? Now.
No. You're not going to get that something and you sure as shit ain't going to get it now. Protesting is over. It doesn't work. I'm just I'm telling you this because if shit doesn't change in the West, Just and I'm just focused on the West. If we don't change our attitudes, if we don't start kicking people out of their offices into the street, if we don't start barraging them and embarrassing them and making them look like the fools that they are, nothing will ever change. You know, the world pretty much can't the rest of the world can't stand the West and the only reason we don't know it is because the West pretty much owns all of the manufacturing.
Now and I'm not talking about, like, you're gonna go, oh, well, that's China. No. No. No. No. The reason China has manufacturing is that people in the United States and the rest of the west are basically designing shit, but they don't mind using slave labor to get it produced. That's why China has manufacturing. If it wasn't for us actually saying we need to design and build this, they wouldn't have manufacturing. The west controls the world's thought. It has for decades. And the rest of the world really doesn't like us. They like the the Ghana?
Yeah. They don't like us. El Salvador pretty much has been under the thumb by the United States for decades as is the rest of Latin America. They don't really appreciate that, by the way. I'm just saying. Shit's gonna get ugly if we don't turn this boat around. And while it's not going to be protest, and I would rather not see violence, we've got to come up with something that is more extreme than protest, but I don't want to line people up for a firing squad either. So what can we do? You know what they used to do? They used to physically drag people out of their office.
They used to tear their clothes off in the street, in public, around a huge crowd of people, and they would pour hot tar on them, and then they would pour chicken feathers on them, and then they'd set their ass on a fucking rail. And a whole group of people, like, carrying a coffin would run them out of town. And if they ever showed their face back there again, shit would get really really ugly. That's the way that we used to do it. That's being in between. Just looking like a fool out in 2 degree weather in Wisconsin carrying a sign that says, what do we want? I don't know. When do we want it? What next week? That doesn't work. Straight up killing people is gonna cause way huge problems.
But this can if we can figure out a way to continuously mock and make fun of and ridicule these people all day long, then maybe the spell will be cast. And maybe those people will go, you know what? If I don't actually change what I'm doing here, this could get ugly. And I kinda think that that's where we need to be. I really do. I honestly really, really do. Okay. Let's do one more. I'm gonna do this one. Trump's biggest boon to crypto would be passing the Bitcoin act according to CoinShares. CoinDesk Will Canny is writing this one. Here's a nice little picture of Trump buying hamburgers at Pub Key.
I love my guys over at Pub Key. Okay. Donald Trump's admin is likely to provide a more positive environment for cryptocurrencies. And one of the most anticipated developments is the possible adoption of the Bitcoin act, asset manager Coinshare said in a research blog. Quote, this proposal would establish Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset with the United States government acquiring up to 5% of Bitcoin's total supply, wrote James Butterfield, head of research at CoinShares. That would give Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, a similar role to gold.
With a recognized position within the National Reserve, it would also gain greater legitimacy. Cynthia Lummis, a senator from Wyoming, introduced legislation earlier this year calling for the establishment of a strategic Bitcoin reserve to reduce the country's national debt by buying 1,000,000 BTC over 5 years. The bill entitled boosting innovation, technology, and competitiveness through optimized investment nationwide or the Bitcoin Act. Oh, god. I hate it when they do that. Was introduced in the senate in July. President-elect Trump promised to establish a Bitcoin reserve in the run up to the election and Lummis reiterated the plan on Twitter following his victory. Quote, if implemented, the Bitcoin act could drive institutional and governmental interest in Bitcoin potentially accelerating its growth and pushing its value to new heights, Butterfield wrote.
CoinShares noted that Trump has been a critic of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Gary Gensler, his chairman, particularly in regard to the agency's approach to crypto. His administration is expected to appoint new SEC leaders, which could lead to a period of more crypto friendly regulation. Broker Canaccord said that changes in the SEC posture, along with the passage of a crypto industry regulatory framework, could lead to much wider adoption of digital assets by the mainstream financial services industry. The broker noted that while the president can't fire an SEC commissioner, a reshuffle is possible, and one more crypto friendly replacement would be Hester Peirce, it said in a research report on Wednesday. Yeah. I wouldn't hold your breath. If these changes were to happen at the SEC, it would benefit the whole industry and in particular Coinbase and Galaxy Digital, Canaccord said. Yeah. Because they're being sued by the SEC. That that that's why. Okay.
So that's the end of the article. But something was said in here, that I've been thinking about for the past couple of days. And I'm sure, you know, guys that are out there you guys that are out there that are much smarter and wittier than I am have already been thinking about this. We keep talking about bitcoin being in, like, massive amounts of bitcoin, like, let's say, in BlackRock in the Ibit, which basically saw its largest inflow ever yesterday. I can't remember what the number was. I decided not to bring that to you, like, as a as a story. But, yeah, it's like, I don't know. Something something ridiculous, like $4,100,000,000 worth of inflows yesterday. I I don't know. Like I said, I didn't look too hard into it, but I've seen 5, like, headlines that say that Ibit, you know, BlackRock's Ibit, Bitcoin ETF, and all the rest of the ETF saw their largest inflows ever, ever yesterday.
We've seen some pretty big inflows. Yesterday was its biggest. Okay. So you've got this huge hoard of of of Bitcoin over there, which is I think being custody by Coinbase. So in Coinbase custody is also MicroStrategy, which has a shitload of Bitcoin. Alright. So we got a whole bunch of Bitcoin basically doing nothing over a coinbase. It's not moving. It's not being utilized. It has no utility other than holding and that is a utility. But I'm thinking about mining here. I'll come to it here in a second. Now we've got Senator Lummis and possibly Trump who's saying, let's buy 1,000,000 Bitcoin. We'll just print money. We'll buy it up. It's gonna be great. We're gonna get rid of the national debt because of it. It'll be it'll be awesome. But it's gonna sit there Having essentially other than holding, which is a very real utility, it's not gonna have any of the other utilities. It's not gonna basically be That's why we see right now I'm seeing like like 71 blocks carrying a 150,000 transactions.
You know what it used to be before all this mess? You oh, and 5 satoshis per vByte. Right? I'm not I'm not wanting I I it's not that I'm begging to pay 500 satoshis per vbyte to get a transaction in. That's not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is that as we see more and more of the 21,000,000 Bitcoin start going to heavy duty institutionalized holdings, like the United States government possibly, like iBit definitely, and like Coinbase more than definitely, we have less and less Bitcoin actually performing other functions other than holding well that means that there's less transactions going on and people can get their transactions in to blocks at cheaper and cheaper prices.
What effect are we already seeing? Now, some people will say this is because of the having, David. It has nothing to do with anything else. I disagree. I think it's part. I think the having is part of the issue. But since the having, we've seen huge amounts of Bitcoin being vacuumed up and not have anything done with other than holding which again, hey, that's legal. I can I don't have a problem with that? That's a utility. But it's not being passed as transactions. Right? So now we've seen miners having to go and do stuff like get into ai, right? And, oh, high performance compute to make ends meet.
That's going to get worse. We're going to see even more amounts of Bitcoin vacuumed up by institutions because people have not got off their ass and got some Bitcoin for themselves and put it into their own possession yet. Right? And they're going time guys, the windows kind of starting to close a little bit. Sure, I wouldn't freak out, but if you're if you've never thought about getting Bitcoin or you have friends that are out there that have thought about it and haven't pulled the trigger yet, you probably need to lean harder on them. Because the argument that I'm that I'm making right here is that as we see more of the very, very rare Bitcoin vacuumed up, potentially to be sat on for decades, you're going to have less and less transactions, which means mining is going to look for different ways to make money.
The I think that one, not the only, but one of the ways that we protect Bitcoin in the future is by doing your part and getting a solo miner. Something like a BitX. I think that there's at least one other person out there that's building these things that is not based on BitX. It's done so I think it's done something else. All the one that I really know about is BitX. It's I think what's going to happen is that we're it's gonna be funny. All these institutions are vacuuming up Bitcoin, creating a strain on miners to go look for other sources of income because they're sitting on it. They're not transacting with it. And because they're not transacting with it, blocks are basically, like, you know, easy to get into. So they're damaging the security model of the very thing that they hold.
Won't it be weird if that it turns out that the United States gov United States government's security model for the very thing that they are relying on to get them out of the hole that they've dug is going to be held by Aunt June in France as one of the millions of people that have a single BitX running. That it will be the people. That it will be the citizenry that finally gains control of the very asset that governments are going to depend on in the future. And when I mean gain control, I don't really mean that they get a chance to do what we're not going to be able to tell the u US government what to do with it. But what we are going to do is we are going to be the security model in the future for governments around the world, which means that's a lobby.
That's a worldwide lobby, not just a lobby to the United Congress. You know, you're not just hanging around the halls of French parliament or whatever, trying to get people to do no. No. It's going to be a force the likes of which labor unions have never seen before, a world wide union. Yeah. I know. It probably has its roots in communism, but that's not what I mean and you know it. You know me. I'm not a communist. I don't like that. I'm just saying that the power of the people is going to shine through at one point or another. I think huge mining concerns like Marathon, I think that they're going to migrate away from Bitcoin mining because it's just not gonna be profitable for them.
Yet the security model must be protected. The only people left in line are people that are willing to do things like run Bitcoin full nodes, run lightning nodes, have a bit axe actually mining on something like ocean using their datum or stratumv2. I think the model's gonna kick over. And for the first time in human history, it will be the mass of citizens that are in control of the money or at least in control of security model of the money. Sure. Money has always been private, but that doesn't mean that it was secured by the majority of the citizenry of the world.
The Medicis in Italy? Yeah. They're the 1st central bankers. It was that's a private family. The money was a family money. And all the Italians and all the Sicilians and everybody in the Mediterranean basically traded in the Medici money. And then it went all all over Europe whether you were on the med or not. Right? That was private money. But it was not the security model of that money was not kept kept safe by the citizenry of the world. It was kept safe by a private family, and they hired a whole bunch of mercenaries to help protect it. There's a whole history behind that we don't need to get into. I'm saying that I'm seeing something very very unusual.
Governments of the world are going to buy Bitcoin and they're going to hold Bitcoin. They're not going to actually use it other than hold it, which is a that's a good use case. But there's other use cases and they're not going to engage in those other use cases. At least not at scale. Not to where the miners can be paid. So therefore mining is gonna get kicked down. We're going to see the decentralization of mining And it's not going to happen because a lot of us are out protesting. What do we want? Decentralized mining. When do we want it? Now. That's not gonna do it. What's gonna happen is that there's just not gonna be anybody left to mine, except for us.
Guys with a couple of solo miners just chilling out in the corner. It's gonna be an interesting it's gonna be an interesting century. The rest of this century is going to be on fire. Governments are finally going to learn that they need to respect their citizenry. Why? Because their citizenry is the security model of the money between nations Because they're all using one global money. The tower of Babel has been destroyed. The languages that God forced on all the peoples of the earth because they were trying to build a pedestal to put themselves on to become gods themselves.
It wasn't because they were building a stairway to heaven. That was not the reason God did that. The story of the tower of Babel you should probably read, Right? It's a good metaphor. If you don't believe in God, you don't believe that the Bible is a real thing, at least read it as the metaphor. I believe the tower of Babel represents worldwide commerce. When very many different kind of people got together and they started building this like, and what I mean different kind of people, I'm talking bricklayers, mortar mixers, rock carvers, the people that bake the bread for the people building the tower. All these different types of commerces were coming together and they wanted to put themselves up on this pedestal they were building and become god themselves.
And God said no. And how did he make sure that it never fucking happened? He destroyed commerce. He destroyed commerce by making sure nobody could understand each other's language. They all spoke the same language once. So did he destroy their language? Or did he destroy their money? Because money is a language. Don't think it's not. It has a grammar. It has a spelling. It has a use case. I believe that God destroyed the money, that he turned their money into different types of money, different kinds of currencies. And that the the the site of the Tower of Babel in ancient times became the first foreign exchange because you would have had to do it. You sure as shit didn't understand anybody by language. Now, even your money doesn't talk the same language.
Right? So it introduced all manner of noise and has since completely destroyed commerce. We have commerce. Sure, they're billionaires. But I don't think the commerce that we have today is what it could be had God not struck down the language of money. But guess what? A guy in France, if he uses Bitcoin, he speaks my language and I speak his. I speak the same language as the dude in Buenos Aires. I speak the same language as the dude that's the Bitcoiner in Denmark. The lightning, network user that's up in French Canada doesn't speak very good English. Doesn't matter. I understand exactly what he's saying through value because I understand the currency.
French Bitcoiners understand the exact same currency in the exact same way. For the first time, math has truly become the one true language of this planet. And it manifests itself in money. Russian, I understand it. Whoever they speak in Denmark, I understand Danish, yeah. Whatever. I understand it. I understand German. I understand French. I understand Spanish. I understand Portuguese. I understand whatever they talk and speak in Algeria. Whatever it is that they speak in Zimbabwe. Whatever they speak in Ghana. I I understand Ukrainian. I understand Egyptian. I understand hieroglyphics.
I understand Latin even though it's a completely dead language. It doesn't matter. I understand it all because I understand it through the same language, the language of money. In this case, a money that is not foreign exchange. It doesn't need one. This is one of the things that I never hear people talk about when it comes to Bitcoin. The fact that everybody can understand it no matter what language they speak. And then all of their goods and services become repriced in the exact same currency, which means the value of a web developer for me in Canada is the same as the web developer in Ghana. The only difference, if one of them sucks at it and the other one is really good at it.
But by and large, if they're if they both can deliver the same deliverables at the same time, chances are good. I'm going to not see a difference in price for the first time. Nobody is going to have to, you know, discount themselves and their life because nobody understands their money. The foreign exchange is dead, 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. It is 9:0:2 AM Pacific Standard Time. Not not not Pacific Daylight Time. I I forgot that last Sunday, we finally got our census about us and decided to go back to the old ways of, you know, measuring time.
Maybe, you know, maybe we'll be able to get rid of daylight savings time once and for all this time around. Who knows? I don't I don't know why we're still doing it. It's very confusing. It causes lots of problems. Honestly, it's it's bad. As my dad would say, it's a bad deal, Dave. It's a bad deal. But it is the 7th November 2024 and this is a palindrome episode of Bitcoin and episode number 989. 11 away. 11 away from the 1 thousandth show. Wow. I mean, and honestly, I'm probably not gonna be able to do a lot for it. I'm not gonna be able to throw a party. I you know, it it sucks. But, hey, you know, I have to accept the reality of the situation.
And the reality of the situation is I just don't have enough money to be able to do stuff like that. So all I can ask is that for the 1,000th show coming up that you guys just tune in and listen to it like it's a regular show. I don't want to stop doing the show, so therefore let's treat 1,000 like it's the first episode or something like that. Okay. So we've got, several things going on today, that we're gonna get into, but I kinda wanna do something from Jiraj. [email protected], that is a way to get to him on Nostr. And this is, in fact, a Nostr note. And he's gonna talk about what Polymarket got right.
Now, as you've known, if you've been tuning into the last couple of weeks worth of shows, I've been railing against Poly Market. And some will say, well, you got that wrong too. Well, I don't think it's not that I got it wrong because I wasn't saying that Poly Market was wrong. What I was railing against is that I don't see how degenerate gambling on a presidential election or, well, anything for that matter, can change the outcome of the actual election or portray the data being presented from Polymarket as actual truthful information.
I'm not saying that it was wrong, but I am saying that I had high suspicions that I should probably not be trusting Poly Market. And I did get that wrong. That part I definitely got wrong. And that's okay. I don't mind being wrong. I'm a big boy. I can take it. I wear boxer shorts now instead of, you know, briefs. So I'm I'm totally fine. You know, I'm not gonna, you know, it's almost like the inability to give me a wedgie. You know, I'm just saying. I'm not a kid. I can take being wrong. But given that other people were really looking at Poly Market to say who the hell is actually going to win this thing instead of looking at national polls from I don't know, the AP and National Public Radio or whatever outfit was conducting these polls. I wouldn't trust in those guys either.
But it does look like that poly market got it right and all of the mainstream media polls got it wrong. So let's see if can tell us how that worked, because his post is titled, What Polymarket Got Right That Experts Got Wrong. As the dust settles on the election, there's a story that the Wall Street Journal and New York Times didn't tell you. While the mainstream news was busy with their TV pageantry and hedging on calling key swing states polymarket, the world's biggest prediction market, had already delivered its verdict by midnight Eastern Standard Time declaring Trump was 97% likely to win.
This was before the media called even a single swing state. All throughout this election, Paula Market was always one step ahead. I want to explain why this is. Because judging from the Twitter responses I was getting last night, most people deeply misunderstand this. There are 2 fundamental things that Polymarket did better than the media. Number 1, Polymarket was more accurate on the forecast going into the election. Let's take the pollsters and analysts. Election poll based models claimed, the race was a dead even fiftyfifty. Polymarket, meanwhile, was pricing Trump with a distinct edge going into the election.
He was priced around 62% to win. If you remember, the mainstream media declared Polymarket or derided Polymarket for this difference. Polymarket should be the same as the modelers, they said. Obviously, it means you can't trust Polymarket. It's priced differently because it's a bunch of Trump loving crypto bros. It's invested in by Peter Thiel. Only foreigners trade on it. It's unregulated, so it must be being manipulated. There's a whale pushing up the price of Trump, and on and on and on and on and on. Implicit in this dismissal is a deep distrust of markets, as though markets cannot be trusted unless affirmatively proven otherwise.
And, of course, if you actually trusted the markets, you might not trust the media anymore. And their whole business model is predicated on you distrusting anyone but them. Why else would you continue to click on their never ending stream of clickbait? But anyone with experience with markets knows. It doesn't fucking matter if a market is composed of Republicans or Democrats or foreigners or whatever. In reality, we know that JPMorgan was using Polymarket, as were some of the largest hedge funds in the world. Most have non US subsidiaries. It was integrated into Bloomberg terminal.
It was being quoted on CNN. And yet the media spoke of Polymarket as though it was 4 Chan. Understand, Polymarket traded $3,600,000,000 on the presidential election. This was the largest election betting market by volume in history and an order of magnitude more than any other election market ever. There was more riding on this than any single modeler's career prospects. Understand, markets work because of how much is riding on getting the answer right. These supposed biases being Trump aligned, crypto pill non Americans didn't skew the market's accuracy.
It seems obvious, in retrospect, that being non American might improve your ability to dispassionately predict an election. But the identities of the betters didn't matter. Prediction markets distill input from many diverse actors to produce prices that transcend biases. Markets don't care about ideology. They only care about being right. And as it turns out, Poly Market was more right than any pollster or modeler. Now I want to be clear what I'm not saying. The difference between 6040 and 5050 sounds big, but it's not. Elections are noisy.
High school statistics will tell you that if you want to tell if a coin is rigged to be 6040 rather than 5050, you would need over 100 coin flips to have 90% certainty. The outcome of Trump won this election does not tell you whether the coin was 6040 or 5050. My point is, not that Poly Market was right and the modelers were wrong They actually didn't disagree with each other by much. I'm making a more subtle point. The market was consistently pricing Trump's odds higher than the polls. Remember, the market knows what the polls and analysts are saying. Markets incorporate all existing information, but Polymarket disagreed with the pollsters.
The only explanation that analysts could come up with this for this was Polymarket is biased. They didn't have the humility to imagine maybe, just maybe, that Polymarket knew something that was not being captured by the polls. Polling sucks. This is a well established no. And in the pre internet era, polling was much more accurate. Landline poll response rates were often above 60%. Today, poll responses rate around 5%. This means pollsters are getting massive sampling biases and there's no possible way to correct for these biases without baking in clumsy statistical corrections. Plus, pollsters who are ultimately selling a product and have reputations to keep frequently herd their estimates together to avoid being an outlier, which fucks up poll aggregation.
Plus, Trump is special. He's uniquely divisive in American politics. So for 3 elections in a row, we have seen massive polling errors that underestimate his support, the so called, quote, shy Trump voter effect. Poly Market presumably believed that the polls were missing this. The pollster said, no, we've updated our models and corrected for it. Polymarket said, I don't buy it. And Polymarket was right. Now again, Polymarket did not say the election was 90% for Trump to win. 62% is not a sure thing, and elections are genuinely uncertain. But what irks me is that there was not even a tinge of curiosity from the media about the delta. Maybe Poly Market knows something we don't.
Maybe there's information we're missing that's not being captured in the polls. Remember, Trump massively outperformed his polls all across the country in both red states and blue states. He sweeped every single swing state and even won the popular vote, something most people thought was impossible. Are you really so confident that there was no way to detect this? The sentiment of tens of millions of Americans that didn't involve the same old pollsters running the same old internet surveys? This is what being a student of the markets teaches you. Markets are smart.
But they don't explain themselves. They just show you the outcome. And that brings us to the second way that Polymarket outperformed the media. Number 2. Polymarket called the election in real time, way before the media did. The inscrutability of markets came in full force on election night. Polymarket moved quickly and violently before a single swing state was ever called. According to Polymarket, the election was over by midnight while the mainstream media was milking the drama until this election was officially called at 6 AM the next morning. Why was this?
Well, first, polymarket saw an important correlation that the mainstream media was not willing to explain to their viewers. You see, polling errors are seldom random. They are usually correlated across states. So when traders saw that Trump was massively outperforming his polls in states that were not themselves competitive, picking up huge vote shares in New York City, which is clearly blue, or Florida, which is cleanly red, this means that there must be a massive polling miss across the country. Poly Market immediately picked up on this and realized that the swing states could not possibly be competitive anymore.
Polymarket priced Trump to win Pennsylvania at 90% by 11:30 pm, when only a small portion of the Pennsylvania vote had been counted. Prediction markets don't wait for pageantry or pundits. It doesn't care if it invalidates the sacred ritual of waiting for the votes to be counted. Remember in 2020, when Fox News called Arizona early, which turned out to be correct, and viewers were outraged? Trump vowed to boycott the network over it. This reinforced the lesson. The networks must never sit there and dutifully count up the votes. Don't be too clever. But markets don't care about drama.
They only care about outcomes. Obviously, it would be incredibly difficult to explain to a CNN viewer that the election is over. The polling error is non in noncompetitive states is too big. Kamala is doomed, and you should go to sleep and not bother to wait for swing states. It goes against the narrative that the media has been reinforcing for months. The public wants simple, explainable stories, and everyone knows how the narrative is supported or supposed to go. You wait for the swing states and until one of the little colored bar crosses that 270 count line.
At 12:51 AM, the New York Times was still showing this dramatic chart and headline. By then, poly market already had Trump priced in at 98% to win. So election watchers dutifully stayed up through the night so the media could complete its empty ritual of filling up the bars. PolyMarkets traders have no loyalty to narrative and no incentive to play up the drama for ratings. They just call it straight. Shane Kopplin, PolyMarkets founder, said that Trump's campaign team was reading Polymarket to try to understand how to actually interpret the odds. The media even had the gall to complain that Trump was declaring victory when his electoral count was at 267.
At that point, the poly market odds were so low that they registered as 100%. The beauty of markets is they respond instantly to new information. The fastest trader who incorporates the information gets the prize, profit. This is something traditional media fundamentally is not set up to even do. They have to filter events through layers of interpretation, narrative making, and internal politics. Recall Murdoch's intercession into the 2020 Arizona call The decentralized nature of Polymarket bypasses all this bullshit It lets information flow without any interference There is a lot to reflect on from last night This election was a resounding reprimand of the Democratic Party, a rejection of the expert class, and an immune response against arrogant media. But for Poly Market, it was a night of pure vindication.
For me, the lesson is this. The next time something important is going on in the world, skip the op eds and check Polymarket. Alright. So that is Juraj. And, honestly, you know, if I got to eat crow, I can do it on air. I was wrong about Polymarket. And I'm going to actually go back and start looking at some of the other things that Polymarket does. That doesn't mean I'm gonna bet. I hate gambling. Like, I run away from gambling like the plague. It is bad enough to try to do something stupid like start a podcast. Okay. I gamble enough, but I just don't gamble with money.
I mean, like, $20 bills. Sure. I'm gambling with with my ability, you know, to make, you know, to, you know, make paycheck by working for some university or I don't know, like, I don't know, work in retail at Ross Dress For Less or something like that. That said, I can't gamble with money. For instance, me and one of my very best friends who ended up being best man at my wedding, We got so good at playing pool in college because we just played pool together all the time. That's all we I mean, it's not that all we did, but we played so many games of pool that we started getting good. We didn't realize that we were getting good.
And one day, a couple of, like, I don't know, like blue collar worker I mean scruffy looking motherfuckers come up to us. I mean, you know, like tattoos everywhere and beards down to the middle of the chest and clearly like 10, 12 years older than either one of us come up to us and say, Hey, I'll bet you $20 for this table because all there was only 3 tables and we were at 1 and we had had the table all night long. They wanted to play pool. And we were like, look, we'll we'll do that except we're not gonna do it for money. Whoever loses buys the other team a round of drinks, and they get the table.
They they agreed. We wiped the fucking floor with our ass to the point that they left mad. We played 3 games in a row with these guys and we it wasn't it wasn't that we just beat them. We beat them so badly that they were actually visibly pissed. And this is the kind of pissed off from the kind of people you don't want to see pissed off. That's how good we got. And yet no matter and we kept getting better. And we and at that point, we realized, shit. We could we can get all of our drinks paid for by just going and playing pool at a bar somewhere. And that's what we did for months, months months months. We paid for almost no drinks.
And yet after all that time, you know what we never did? We never laid a 20, a 10, a 5, a 50, or a $100 bill on the table. We never bet cash. We would only ever play for drinks. People begged us to play for cash, and we're like, no. It doesn't mean that we're morally superior. It's just that neither one of us had a gambling instinct. We don't like it. It's like I would rather take $20 bill, put it in a brown paper bag, soak it in diesel, light it on fire, and throw it out the window before I go to Vegas and do something stupid like play roulette. And that is my bias against Polymarket.
And that bias came up clearly over the last 2 weeks. And now I gotta eat a little bit of crow. And, again, I'm a big boy. I don't mind. Crow might actually taste good with a little salt and pepper. But I have to go back and look at poly market. I've gotta start looking at what else these people are betting on. And, honestly, if you are the gambling type, I still advise you to not gamble. But that doesn't mean that maybe we shouldn't start taking very, very seriously in his analysis on Poly Market. I can admit to being wrong. That's okay.
But we've got other stuff to do because I wasn't the only one that was thinking Polymarket was full of shit. For the same reasons that Jarrah brought up, for only foreigners could actually invest in it. What do they know, right? Well, here comes France. You thought France was stupid enough. Now that we know we know about poly market, France is not listening to to any of the arguments that is making, which is not the only person making. But France, no matter who's telling them anything about Polymarket, is so pissed off that they are considering a ban on the crypto betting platform, Polymarket.
Helen Parks, Cointelegraph. Woo hoo. France's gambling regulator is considering banning the cryptocurrency prediction platform, Polymarket, which has made headlines on user demand around the 2024 presidential election in the United States. The National Gaming Authority of France, the Aporte National des Juis Whatever. I can't pronounce French. Is investigating PolyMarkets operation and compliance with French gambling laws, Bloomberg reported on November 7th. Wow. Talk about being butthurt. Quote, we are familiar with this site and are currently examining its operations and its compliance with the French legislation on gambling, a spokesperson for the ANJ confirmed to Cointelegraph.
And previously, a crypto focused publication, the big whale, reported that the ANJ is expected to ban access to Polymarket for French users in the very near future. Launched in 2020, Polymarket is a decentralized prediction market platform that allows users to bet on real world event outcomes using cryptocurrencies. The betting platform has seen huge success in 2024 amid the US election hype reaching $2,500,000,000 in bets in October. Wow. That's a lot of money. Although Polymarket is headquartered in New York, the platform is currently inaccessible by US residents. However, people in other parts of the world, like France, have been using it actively.
For example, a sued anonymous trader and an alleged French national placed at least $20,000,000 worth of bets supporting Donald Trump as the next US president. Nicknamed Freddy 9999, the Polymarket user is expected to see nearly $50,000,000 in profits across 4 identified accounts, according to Bloomberg. Polymarket is subject to France's gambling laws despite being related to cryptocurrency. Even if Polymarket uses cryptocurrencies in its operations, it remains a betting activity. And this is not legal in France, the source reportedly said.
According to William O'Rourke, partner at ORWL Avocats, Polymarket consists of betting money on something random and not strictly the definition of gambling, So it's like a sports bet. He stated, quote, unlike financial companies, yeah, like, where no gambling goes on at all, the ANJ has the power to block the platform even though Polymarket does not specifically target French users, end quote, whatever, dude. Polymarket has played a role in the 2024 US presidential election. According to CEO Shane Copeland, Trump's campaign team literally found out they were winning from Poly Market.
I don't know if that last part's true, but, hey, that would be funny if it did. Alright. So why is France butthurt? I have my gut feeling is that they're not all that butthurt about the fact that, Trump won the election. I think what's really occurred here is that poly market came up. It was, like, plastered over all these news outlets and everybody was talking about it. And now the gaze of the you know, of of not just France. It's gonna be other countries too. But now that now they've they've captured the gaze of governments, and that's exactly the one thing you don't ever want in your net. Right? You don't want that fish on your line. You don't want that butterfly in your net. You do not want to capture the gaze of a government, no matter how big and no matter how small. You just don't want it Because then you get butt hurt people like France who's, like, going, oh, shit. Something that we can regulate that we're not regulating?
Something we can make illegal that we haven't yet? My god. What are we doing? Let's rush to the exits and let's make sure that this shit never actually ever works again for our people. Well, good luck with that. Because I don't think poly market is going away. No matter what I've said about it in the past, I am very clearly wrong and that poly market now has completely ensconced itself in utility when it comes to betting on stuff like the United States presidential elections. But I wonder if Polymarket has this bet. In fact, I'm going to go find out. Hold on. Okay. So I just checked Polymarket, and no, we do not have a bet on this following story.
Decrypt Adrian Zmudzinski. SEC chairman Gensler is likely to resign after the Trump win. According to an analyst, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission could soon see a new chairman following Donald Trump's win. Analyst Marcus Thelen, the CEO of crypto research firm 10x Research, wrote in a research note that recent history suggests that Gary Gensler is likely to resign in the near future amid the impending regime change. The SEC's chairman would just be following in the steps of his predecessors. The SEC chairman typically resigns when a new president takes office aligning with the incoming administration's preferences.
This happened previously with Jay Clayton, who was appointed by Trump resigning before Joe Biden's inauguration. And before that, Barack Obama's pick, Mary Jo White, resigned the day of president Trump's inauguration. Quote, this practice allows the new president to appoint a chair who aligns with their policy objectives. If these historical patterns hold, Gary Gensler may resign in December or January with the new SEC chair potentially confirmed by April or May. Appointed by president Joe Biden in 2021, Gensler has led the SEC in aggressive crackdowns on US crypto exchanges, decentralized finance projects, and software developers, which has been perceived by many as a hostile stance towards the sector.
His term is set to last until 2026. Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he would fire Gensler if elected and suggested that crypto startups would be living in hell if he didn't return to office and help change the course of American regulation. Quote, I pledge to the Bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' anti crypto crusade will be over. I noticed he didn't mention Elizabeth Warren. Anyway, it will end and it will be done, end quote. According to decrypt analysis, however, regulatory protocols established that the president could not remove Gensler from his position without cause. Still, the new president would have the authority to demote him from the role of chairman and appoint another SEC commissioner in his place.
US Republican representative French Hill recently said that the SEC should have new leadership next year regardless of which party controls the White House. He said that Gensler's fearmongering at the SEC is unconstitutional and misuses the agency's regulatory authority. I'm not sure if it's unconstitutional because I'm pretty sure that in the constitution of the United States, there's not one single word written about the Securities and Exchange Commission. I don't think that that was the apple in Ben Franklin's eye at the time that him and the rest of the founding fathers were pinning the constitution.
Okay? So I'm not sure where they get this unconstitutional shit. Just because he's a dick or somebody's a dick doesn't automatically make them unconstitutional. People bandy that word around way too much. And you know who uses that word unconstitutional the most? You wanna guess? Yeah. You're right. The people that have never read the constitution of the United States. Exactly. That's exactly right. Alright. So like I said, I checked Polymarket to see if there was bets on Gary Gensler either resigning or getting fired or what whatever. Right? I I guess he can't get fired, but he could get demoted. Nothing. There's nothing. Nothing on Polymarket is associated with the name Gary Gensler or or the SEC.
There's nothing there. I can't find it. I type in SEC. There's no bets. Type in Gensler. No bets. I type in Gary Gensler. No bets. There's nothing. However, I did find this. There's a bet on that if Trump wins, will he pick Jamie Dimon for treasury secretary? Okay. Now this looks like it's it's up on January 20, 2025, which would be inauguration day. Right now, the chances that Trump picks Jamie Dimon as secretary of the treasury is standing at 6%. So if I just say, you know what? I'm just going to believe Polymarket. That means that there's no way in hell Jamie Dimon becomes our treasury secretary. Doesn't mean that it will happen or won't happen. I'm just saying that I'm I'm going to just I'm gonna take a little leap of faith and say maybe maybe I should put my attitude in my back pocket and just listen to what Poly Market is trying to say and see if it works out. So there's a 6% chance that Jamie Dimon becomes treasury secretary, a 94% chance that he does not.
But other people have other things in mind. The SEC's Mark Ullieda has a strong chance of becoming the next chairman of the SEC According to a lawyer, and this is written by Helen Parks, Cointelegraph, as Donald Trump prepares to take office as president, the cryptocurrency community is speculating on the most likely candidate to lead the SEC. And Mark Ueda, an SEC commissioner, has been seen as a strong candidate for the role according to crypto attorney, Jake Chernivsky, in a Twitter post on November 6th. Commissioner Uyeda is known for criticizing the crypto regulatory approach by current SEC chair Gary Gensler, having in October called his policies a disaster for the entire industry. That's a direct quote.
Appointed as an SEC commissioner on June 30, 2022, Uyeda has consistently opposed enforcement driven regulation for crypto, earning support from industry advocates seeking a more collaborative approach. Trump pledged to fire Gensler on his very first day of presidency, day 1. And the crypto community has since speculated that SEC commissioner, Hester Pierce, may be a potential contender for the chair. Pierce was appointed by Trump during his first presidency on January 11, 2018. However, the chances that Pierce will take the lead are very low, Chernivsky said, adding that he doubts whether she'd be willing to even take it. He wrote, quote, being chair is pretty hard. Thankless, it's a miserable job.
Some commissioners might want it, like Ueda, but others might feel they've done their time and are ready to move on to greener pastures, end quote. Many in the crypto community called Pierce crypto mom as she has criticized the criticized the SEC for its restrictive policies stifling innovation. Pierce also reportedly or and repeatedly urged the SEC to restore open communication with the industry. At the time of writing, Pierce has not provided any remarks on her Twitter profile following Trump's victory. According to Chernivsky, Trump might want to opt for someone other than Ueda to lead the SEC. Quote, I expect Trump may prefer to bring in someone new, you know, of his own, Chernivsky stated.
Additionally, the lawyer highlighted that Trump's top crypto policy priority must be ending Biden's attempt to destroy the industry via regulation by enforcement. According to Chernivsky, that means dropping the SEC's unjustified enforcement actions against major crypto firms and the tornado cash prosecution by the Department of Justice. Fucking a. I hope so. That would be nice. That's the end of the article. But let's put our hands together and pray, brothers and sisters, that maybe, just maybe, the tornado cash guys will be released from this Kafkaesque type hell. And if you don't know who Kafka is, I recommend that you go read The Trial by Franz Kafka. It will blow your mind. Alright. Let's run numbers.
CNBC Futures and Commodities. Oil is up 1%. West Texas Intermediate coming in at $72.39. Brent, North Sea just over a point, up 75.68. Natural Gas doing its thing. It's down 2 and a half percent. Gasoline is up 3 quarters of a percent to $2.5 a gallon. All of your shiny metal rocks are having a whoop de doo day. Gold is up 1.14% to 2706.70 pennies. Silver is up 1.7% to 3187. Platinum is up 0.84%. Copper rallying like a mofo, 4.31% to the upside. But palladium sucking the swamp water 1% down. Ag is pretty much mixed. Biggest winner today is chocolate. Wow. 7 and 1 third points to the upside. I wonder what's going on there. Biggest loser today is lumber, 0.7% to the downside. Live cattle up 0.15%.
Lean hogs down 1 a quarter. Feeder cattle, basically moving sideways slightly in the green. The Dow is up. Ma'am, yeah, it's moving sideways right now. Why? Why? Because we we're done with the election, so everything should be bright and and and and funky. Right? No. No. No. No. No. No. The Fed meeting, they're going to make a statement on what they're going to do with interest rates today. And by the time you hear this, it's probably already a done freaking deal. It's supposed to be 11:30 AM my time, which is a couple of hours away. We'll see. We'll we'll we'll we'll have to see. But the Fed is going to say something about what they're going to do with interest rates today.
So if you're wondering why some of the legacy markets are kinda moving sideways, that's probably why. Because the S and P futures are up well, actually, S and P is up 2 thirds of a point. And the Nasdaq is up 1 and a third, and the S and P mini is up 1 5th of a point. So maybe there are some people who are saying, fuck it. I don't care what the hell happens, LFG. Price of Bitcoin is $76,190. That is a $1,512,000,000 market cap. We can now purchase 28.4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,778,886.74 of.
Fees? Fees are low. 0.04 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis, and there are 71 blocks carrying a 178,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 5. Count them. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 3. And mining hash rate is at 720.9 exahashes per second on a rolling 1 week average. Okay. Value for value, ladies and gentlemen. Here is the ask. And I'm reading this one from value for value dot info if you are interested in how this works and some of the ways that Adam Curry has suggested that people go about asking for other people's value. Because, basically, I'm asking you for money. I better have a damn good reason to do that. He's got this whole thing of value for value dot info.
Value, the number 4, value all written together, dot info. Go check it out. Because you'll there you will find particular ways that Adam Curry is thinking about it. And this one way is called content format, where he says, there isn't one content format when it comes to value for value. When it comes to podcasting, including your listeners into the feedback and content creation loop is tried and tested. By including your audience into the feedback loop, you create something bigger than yourself. Something participatory and reciprocal.
From shoutouts to numerology and honors to badges, many things can be added to your content in creative ways that include your audience into the content creation process. One of the ways that I do it on this show is to read your boostograms no matter how many sats you give me. Sometimes I read boostograms that somehow or another got through into my feed without even sending me a single sat. But God's death is not one of those people. With 537 sats, he says, thank you, sir. Not one more day. Exactly. Not one more day. Not one more day. Not one more day. Pies to play with 420. Gives me a whole bunch of emojis.
And then he comes back with another 4:20 that says, hashtag not one more day, hashtag free Ross. If you don't know what the hell we're talking about, it's this. The incoming Trump administration needs to call Biden, and they also need to call MSNBC and all of the mainstream media outlets and say that we've issued a challenge to the Biden administration to pardon or commute Ross Ulbrich's sentence today, not tomorrow, not in December, not wait until January 10th or January 11th or all the way up until Trump has to actually sit in the seat. No. They've got to do it now. Otherwise, they risk having egg all over their face and the albatross around the entire party of the Democrats that says, we don't give a shit about your freedom.
We will stick you in jail for having a website. And we don't care about your mom, and we don't care about the fact that your girlfriend may or may not hopefully, Ross Ulbricht had a girlfriend and she hasn't walked out on him. But I can't imagine that kind of stress of sitting in fucking solitary confinement for whatever it is, 23 hours a day. I don't think I'm not sure if he's with general population. I I also don't I don't really know. If somebody can tell me his circumstances, is he in solitary? Is he having to spend that much time by himself? Because that will drive you to be a lunatic, honestly. I'm just saying that if Trump were to issue that statement and make sure that everybody in the world knows that he issued that challenge to the Biden administration and that the Biden administration didn't say, you know what? We're not gonna wait a single more day. And they actually commuted a sentence or full pardoned Ross Ulbricht, everybody wins. Democrats get to save face.
Trump gets a win. Ross Ulbricht gets to go hold his mom. Not one more day. Not a single day more. This is ridiculous. Just saying. Join the not one more day by adding hashtag not one more day and hashtag free Ross to every single thing that you post. Okay. Maybe not everything, but whatever. God's desk says, thank you, sir. Not one more day. Again, not one more day. Not one more day. Not one more day. Not one more day. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use Cypherpunk, Aud Noster, put out a note that has the text of something that was written by someone else, namely, Eric s Raymond.
And I'm I've never heard this guy's name before, but I want to read you this piece because I read it. And now that I know what Eric s Raymond's background is, it's kind of poignant considering that he is a Linux and open source developer of apparent legend. Legendary status, like epic kind of shit. So who is he? Well, the one thing that I know about him at this point, other than the fact that he's been an open source and a Linux developer for years years years, he wrote an essay called The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Now that I have heard of. I just didn't know that it was written by a guy named Eric s Raymond. So why am I bringing this all to you?
Because he's got a few thoughts about the election, the United States presidential election. And I thought it odd that somebody who is steeped in open source software development, Linux, Cypherpunk, had these words to say. I hear Kamala Harris has conceded. For just a moment, I'm going to abandon the high decoupling rationalist stance I normally post from and talk about what I personally wanted from this election and now hope that I might get. For me, a good outcome in this election meant not Trump winning, but his enemies losing.
I am not MAGA and not a tribal conservative of either the old school or the new school kind. I'm a libertarian and have some serious differences with substance with Trump and his partisans. Also, I've never much liked Trump as a person. He's vulgar and under control. He talks and postures too much. And I think the charge that he's a narcissist has some weight, but he chooses his enemies well. I will also admit that I think better of Trump now than I did 3 months ago. He has demonstrated literal courage under fire, which is an important quality in a man who may need to make life or death decisions about the fate of a nation.
I went to see him speak, and I saw a man much calmer and more together than I was expecting. But I'm not really posting about Trump today. And the only other thing I'm going to say about him is that his most valuable quality is that he enrages evil people into unmasking themselves. I have believed for decades that the central problem of American politics is defeating the Gramsian long march through our institutions. Covert and not so car covert Marxists have waged a remarkably successful memetic war. It has many manifestations. Blatant bias in the mainstream media, welfare statism, DEI, climate alarmism, transgender ideology, open borders.
But the goal is always the same, to cripple and destroy the main enemy, the United States of America and everyone in it who loves liberty. Trump's victory is the worst defeat of the Gramscians in my lifetime. They went all in with an unprecedented campaign of lies, vitriol, hate propaganda, lawfare, and election rigging. He beat them anyway, and for that, he has my respect. What I want from the immediate aftermath of this election is to rejoice in their agonized screaming. What I want from Trump and Republican control of both houses is follow through.
Number 1, impose election security measures so we can't be frauded again. 2, abolition of every federal firearms law and regulation, including the disbandment of the ATF. We must restore the proper constitutional order in which the government is frightened of the people, not the reverse. 3, massive cuts in the reach and power of the administrative state. No unelected bureaucrat should ever have the power to effectively make law. And finally, number 4. A concerted and conscious attempt to drive the communist and communist tools out from everywhere that they have burrowed into our institutions, perhaps starting with the complete defunding of any educational institution that harbors academic marxists.
Yes. I know many of these people don't know their communist tools. I'm past caring. I've been ready to throw them out of helicopters with my own hands since about 2014, hoping against hope that something would happen to make that kind of violence unnecessary. Now, maybe, we have a path to defeating them peacefully. I'm not sure Trump fully understands this necessity himself. But there are people close to him, notably Elon Musk and Ron Paul, who I'm pretty sure do. The first thing that we need to do is be able to name the enemy. Conservatives have been cowards about this ever since the ArmyMcCarthy hearings a few years before I was born.
They became afraid to speak out explicitly to oppose communist infiltration. And we have been paying an increasing price for that cowardice through my entire lifetime. Conservatives? MAGA people? If you really want to make America great again, make defeat of the Gramscians your cause. Name the enemy. Expose them. Defeat them. They have crippled, divided, and corrupted us for far too long. It's time to take our country back. Alright. That's the end of that note. So what the hell is a Gramsian? I'll give you the definition. Gramsians are people who are influenced by the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist, theorist, philosopher, and linguist.
Of all things, a linguist. Why does that matter? Why does it matter linguist and philosopher combined with Marxist theory? What's so dangerous about that? Because words matter. Language matters. Grammar matters. I've talked about this before. Words can cast a spell. That's why they call it spelling. They can program you to think a certain way. They can program you to act in certain other ways. This shit is real. It's not a bunch of hooey. It's not a bunch of woo woo. It's all David thinks magic exists. No, man. The magic has always been with us. Our influence upon one another.
It's how that's affected that matters. The tools in which we use to affect one another. How do you know what the hell I'm talking about? Because I speak words to you. You decode those words in your brain, which means that your brain is touching the words I speak to you. If you don't think that that does not have an effect upon you and what you're going to do later on today, you're fooling yourself. And it ain't just me. It's anyone you talk to. Ever talk to somebody who is in a viciously good mood and it's infectious? That's a spell.
Might as well be magic. I don't care. I don't give a shit. Ever been around somebody who's so down in the dumps that you want to you would chew your leg off to get out of the fucking bear trap and bleed as you run away as fast as you can, as far as you can. Have you ever experienced that? That's a spell. And that's just the two ends of diametrically opposed ends of a spectrum. Being so happy that you wanna be around that person and somebody's so fucking sad that you want you either want to kill them or you want to leave as fast as you can. If now think about all the shades of gray. What you might how you might think about an election. The words that kept being used in this election.
He's a Nazi. Orange man. He's a Nazi. I didn't see him do a single thing that suggested he's a Nazi. There are several people that I've asked exactly what, like, like, people that I'm very, very close to will say something like, oh, well, you know, you know, he's just a Nazi. Okay. How? What did he do? And they get so mad. It's almost instant that you would dare that you would dare question anything that they had to say. Because, well, surely you've listened to MSNBC too. Surely you sit down and watch the cackling witches of The View. How do you not know that he's that he's a Nazi? How do you not know this? Are you stupid?
That's a spell. They've been programmed. You need to either call it, I've been put under a spell, I've been bewitched, I've been programmed. It doesn't matter, because it all boils down to words. And that's why Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist theorist, philosopher, and linguist should matter to you as we were reading that particular piece by a libertarian who is absolutely relishing, says it, wrote the sentence. He's relishing in the agony that the left is experiencing at this moment. Although I will say this, You know what I have not seen? Of course, then again, understand this.
I don't watch MSNBC or any of the mainstream news. I will listen to NPR so that I can get enemy chatter. You know what you know you know what I've heard them say so far? Almost nothing. Last 2 days. NPR is I haven't heard anybody losing their mind. I haven't heard anybody crying. But that's the only thing that could be considered mainstream media that I listen to. Other than that, I'm on Nostar. I don't go to Facebook. I don't go to TikTok. I don't go to Instagram. I am complete I I I guess I'm bubbling myself or insulating myself. You could say that, but maybe what it is is that I've knocked down those walls because I don't give a shit about that crap anymore.
Nostra really did save save a lot of my ability to be happy. My ability not to worry about what these fucking people are thinking all the goddamn time. It's ridiculous. Yet, I find it fascinating that a Linux guy who's a cypherpunk free and open source software developer and libertarian I might have said that twice actually wrote down the words that he's relishing the mind losing of the left. Of course, I haven't seen it, but then again, I'm not in a position to see it. If you guys have seen it, you know, let me know. Let me know, is it actually happening? Is the left actually losing their mind? Because I honestly don't know.
I I knew last time that that Trump got elected. I saw that shit, but I am certainly not seeing it yesterday or or today. Okay. I just I just found it odd that somebody who is libertarian and cypherpunk would be saying such things. He even hinted the fact that he's been thinking about throwing these people out of helicopters since 2014. Well, that's a very violent way of looking about things. Right? And here's my bent on that is that I would rather not see violence, But I would much rather or more rather not see the following: People who think that you're going to be able to affect anything with a protest.
I'm sorry. You marching around, carrying a sign, in a circle, with a bunch of other motherfuckers out there in the middle of freezing weather doesn't make me change my mind one iota either way. Either I was already on your side and I'm laughing at you for for protesting because it's not going to do a goddamn thing, or I'm completely against your viewpoint and I don't give a fuck about it because your protesting is not going to do a goddamn thing. You want to make sure nothing changes? Go grab your ass assigned, go hang out with some friends in front of a building, walk around and say, when what do we want something? When do we want it? Now.
No. You're not going to get that something and you sure as shit ain't going to get it now. Protesting is over. It doesn't work. I'm just I'm telling you this because if shit doesn't change in the West, Just and I'm just focused on the West. If we don't change our attitudes, if we don't start kicking people out of their offices into the street, if we don't start barraging them and embarrassing them and making them look like the fools that they are, nothing will ever change. You know, the world pretty much can't the rest of the world can't stand the West and the only reason we don't know it is because the West pretty much owns all of the manufacturing.
Now and I'm not talking about, like, you're gonna go, oh, well, that's China. No. No. No. No. The reason China has manufacturing is that people in the United States and the rest of the west are basically designing shit, but they don't mind using slave labor to get it produced. That's why China has manufacturing. If it wasn't for us actually saying we need to design and build this, they wouldn't have manufacturing. The west controls the world's thought. It has for decades. And the rest of the world really doesn't like us. They like the the Ghana?
Yeah. They don't like us. El Salvador pretty much has been under the thumb by the United States for decades as is the rest of Latin America. They don't really appreciate that, by the way. I'm just saying. Shit's gonna get ugly if we don't turn this boat around. And while it's not going to be protest, and I would rather not see violence, we've got to come up with something that is more extreme than protest, but I don't want to line people up for a firing squad either. So what can we do? You know what they used to do? They used to physically drag people out of their office.
They used to tear their clothes off in the street, in public, around a huge crowd of people, and they would pour hot tar on them, and then they would pour chicken feathers on them, and then they'd set their ass on a fucking rail. And a whole group of people, like, carrying a coffin would run them out of town. And if they ever showed their face back there again, shit would get really really ugly. That's the way that we used to do it. That's being in between. Just looking like a fool out in 2 degree weather in Wisconsin carrying a sign that says, what do we want? I don't know. When do we want it? What next week? That doesn't work. Straight up killing people is gonna cause way huge problems.
But this can if we can figure out a way to continuously mock and make fun of and ridicule these people all day long, then maybe the spell will be cast. And maybe those people will go, you know what? If I don't actually change what I'm doing here, this could get ugly. And I kinda think that that's where we need to be. I really do. I honestly really, really do. Okay. Let's do one more. I'm gonna do this one. Trump's biggest boon to crypto would be passing the Bitcoin act according to CoinShares. CoinDesk Will Canny is writing this one. Here's a nice little picture of Trump buying hamburgers at Pub Key.
I love my guys over at Pub Key. Okay. Donald Trump's admin is likely to provide a more positive environment for cryptocurrencies. And one of the most anticipated developments is the possible adoption of the Bitcoin act, asset manager Coinshare said in a research blog. Quote, this proposal would establish Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset with the United States government acquiring up to 5% of Bitcoin's total supply, wrote James Butterfield, head of research at CoinShares. That would give Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, a similar role to gold.
With a recognized position within the National Reserve, it would also gain greater legitimacy. Cynthia Lummis, a senator from Wyoming, introduced legislation earlier this year calling for the establishment of a strategic Bitcoin reserve to reduce the country's national debt by buying 1,000,000 BTC over 5 years. The bill entitled boosting innovation, technology, and competitiveness through optimized investment nationwide or the Bitcoin Act. Oh, god. I hate it when they do that. Was introduced in the senate in July. President-elect Trump promised to establish a Bitcoin reserve in the run up to the election and Lummis reiterated the plan on Twitter following his victory. Quote, if implemented, the Bitcoin act could drive institutional and governmental interest in Bitcoin potentially accelerating its growth and pushing its value to new heights, Butterfield wrote.
CoinShares noted that Trump has been a critic of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Gary Gensler, his chairman, particularly in regard to the agency's approach to crypto. His administration is expected to appoint new SEC leaders, which could lead to a period of more crypto friendly regulation. Broker Canaccord said that changes in the SEC posture, along with the passage of a crypto industry regulatory framework, could lead to much wider adoption of digital assets by the mainstream financial services industry. The broker noted that while the president can't fire an SEC commissioner, a reshuffle is possible, and one more crypto friendly replacement would be Hester Peirce, it said in a research report on Wednesday. Yeah. I wouldn't hold your breath. If these changes were to happen at the SEC, it would benefit the whole industry and in particular Coinbase and Galaxy Digital, Canaccord said. Yeah. Because they're being sued by the SEC. That that that's why. Okay.
So that's the end of the article. But something was said in here, that I've been thinking about for the past couple of days. And I'm sure, you know, guys that are out there you guys that are out there that are much smarter and wittier than I am have already been thinking about this. We keep talking about bitcoin being in, like, massive amounts of bitcoin, like, let's say, in BlackRock in the Ibit, which basically saw its largest inflow ever yesterday. I can't remember what the number was. I decided not to bring that to you, like, as a as a story. But, yeah, it's like, I don't know. Something something ridiculous, like $4,100,000,000 worth of inflows yesterday. I I don't know. Like I said, I didn't look too hard into it, but I've seen 5, like, headlines that say that Ibit, you know, BlackRock's Ibit, Bitcoin ETF, and all the rest of the ETF saw their largest inflows ever, ever yesterday.
We've seen some pretty big inflows. Yesterday was its biggest. Okay. So you've got this huge hoard of of of Bitcoin over there, which is I think being custody by Coinbase. So in Coinbase custody is also MicroStrategy, which has a shitload of Bitcoin. Alright. So we got a whole bunch of Bitcoin basically doing nothing over a coinbase. It's not moving. It's not being utilized. It has no utility other than holding and that is a utility. But I'm thinking about mining here. I'll come to it here in a second. Now we've got Senator Lummis and possibly Trump who's saying, let's buy 1,000,000 Bitcoin. We'll just print money. We'll buy it up. It's gonna be great. We're gonna get rid of the national debt because of it. It'll be it'll be awesome. But it's gonna sit there Having essentially other than holding, which is a very real utility, it's not gonna have any of the other utilities. It's not gonna basically be That's why we see right now I'm seeing like like 71 blocks carrying a 150,000 transactions.
You know what it used to be before all this mess? You oh, and 5 satoshis per vByte. Right? I'm not I'm not wanting I I it's not that I'm begging to pay 500 satoshis per vbyte to get a transaction in. That's not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is that as we see more and more of the 21,000,000 Bitcoin start going to heavy duty institutionalized holdings, like the United States government possibly, like iBit definitely, and like Coinbase more than definitely, we have less and less Bitcoin actually performing other functions other than holding well that means that there's less transactions going on and people can get their transactions in to blocks at cheaper and cheaper prices.
What effect are we already seeing? Now, some people will say this is because of the having, David. It has nothing to do with anything else. I disagree. I think it's part. I think the having is part of the issue. But since the having, we've seen huge amounts of Bitcoin being vacuumed up and not have anything done with other than holding which again, hey, that's legal. I can I don't have a problem with that? That's a utility. But it's not being passed as transactions. Right? So now we've seen miners having to go and do stuff like get into ai, right? And, oh, high performance compute to make ends meet.
That's going to get worse. We're going to see even more amounts of Bitcoin vacuumed up by institutions because people have not got off their ass and got some Bitcoin for themselves and put it into their own possession yet. Right? And they're going time guys, the windows kind of starting to close a little bit. Sure, I wouldn't freak out, but if you're if you've never thought about getting Bitcoin or you have friends that are out there that have thought about it and haven't pulled the trigger yet, you probably need to lean harder on them. Because the argument that I'm that I'm making right here is that as we see more of the very, very rare Bitcoin vacuumed up, potentially to be sat on for decades, you're going to have less and less transactions, which means mining is going to look for different ways to make money.
The I think that one, not the only, but one of the ways that we protect Bitcoin in the future is by doing your part and getting a solo miner. Something like a BitX. I think that there's at least one other person out there that's building these things that is not based on BitX. It's done so I think it's done something else. All the one that I really know about is BitX. It's I think what's going to happen is that we're it's gonna be funny. All these institutions are vacuuming up Bitcoin, creating a strain on miners to go look for other sources of income because they're sitting on it. They're not transacting with it. And because they're not transacting with it, blocks are basically, like, you know, easy to get into. So they're damaging the security model of the very thing that they hold.
Won't it be weird if that it turns out that the United States gov United States government's security model for the very thing that they are relying on to get them out of the hole that they've dug is going to be held by Aunt June in France as one of the millions of people that have a single BitX running. That it will be the people. That it will be the citizenry that finally gains control of the very asset that governments are going to depend on in the future. And when I mean gain control, I don't really mean that they get a chance to do what we're not going to be able to tell the u US government what to do with it. But what we are going to do is we are going to be the security model in the future for governments around the world, which means that's a lobby.
That's a worldwide lobby, not just a lobby to the United Congress. You know, you're not just hanging around the halls of French parliament or whatever, trying to get people to do no. No. It's going to be a force the likes of which labor unions have never seen before, a world wide union. Yeah. I know. It probably has its roots in communism, but that's not what I mean and you know it. You know me. I'm not a communist. I don't like that. I'm just saying that the power of the people is going to shine through at one point or another. I think huge mining concerns like Marathon, I think that they're going to migrate away from Bitcoin mining because it's just not gonna be profitable for them.
Yet the security model must be protected. The only people left in line are people that are willing to do things like run Bitcoin full nodes, run lightning nodes, have a bit axe actually mining on something like ocean using their datum or stratumv2. I think the model's gonna kick over. And for the first time in human history, it will be the mass of citizens that are in control of the money or at least in control of security model of the money. Sure. Money has always been private, but that doesn't mean that it was secured by the majority of the citizenry of the world.
The Medicis in Italy? Yeah. They're the 1st central bankers. It was that's a private family. The money was a family money. And all the Italians and all the Sicilians and everybody in the Mediterranean basically traded in the Medici money. And then it went all all over Europe whether you were on the med or not. Right? That was private money. But it was not the security model of that money was not kept kept safe by the citizenry of the world. It was kept safe by a private family, and they hired a whole bunch of mercenaries to help protect it. There's a whole history behind that we don't need to get into. I'm saying that I'm seeing something very very unusual.
Governments of the world are going to buy Bitcoin and they're going to hold Bitcoin. They're not going to actually use it other than hold it, which is a that's a good use case. But there's other use cases and they're not going to engage in those other use cases. At least not at scale. Not to where the miners can be paid. So therefore mining is gonna get kicked down. We're going to see the decentralization of mining And it's not going to happen because a lot of us are out protesting. What do we want? Decentralized mining. When do we want it? Now. That's not gonna do it. What's gonna happen is that there's just not gonna be anybody left to mine, except for us.
Guys with a couple of solo miners just chilling out in the corner. It's gonna be an interesting it's gonna be an interesting century. The rest of this century is going to be on fire. Governments are finally going to learn that they need to respect their citizenry. Why? Because their citizenry is the security model of the money between nations Because they're all using one global money. The tower of Babel has been destroyed. The languages that God forced on all the peoples of the earth because they were trying to build a pedestal to put themselves on to become gods themselves.
It wasn't because they were building a stairway to heaven. That was not the reason God did that. The story of the tower of Babel you should probably read, Right? It's a good metaphor. If you don't believe in God, you don't believe that the Bible is a real thing, at least read it as the metaphor. I believe the tower of Babel represents worldwide commerce. When very many different kind of people got together and they started building this like, and what I mean different kind of people, I'm talking bricklayers, mortar mixers, rock carvers, the people that bake the bread for the people building the tower. All these different types of commerces were coming together and they wanted to put themselves up on this pedestal they were building and become god themselves.
And God said no. And how did he make sure that it never fucking happened? He destroyed commerce. He destroyed commerce by making sure nobody could understand each other's language. They all spoke the same language once. So did he destroy their language? Or did he destroy their money? Because money is a language. Don't think it's not. It has a grammar. It has a spelling. It has a use case. I believe that God destroyed the money, that he turned their money into different types of money, different kinds of currencies. And that the the the site of the Tower of Babel in ancient times became the first foreign exchange because you would have had to do it. You sure as shit didn't understand anybody by language. Now, even your money doesn't talk the same language.
Right? So it introduced all manner of noise and has since completely destroyed commerce. We have commerce. Sure, they're billionaires. But I don't think the commerce that we have today is what it could be had God not struck down the language of money. But guess what? A guy in France, if he uses Bitcoin, he speaks my language and I speak his. I speak the same language as the dude in Buenos Aires. I speak the same language as the dude that's the Bitcoiner in Denmark. The lightning, network user that's up in French Canada doesn't speak very good English. Doesn't matter. I understand exactly what he's saying through value because I understand the currency.
French Bitcoiners understand the exact same currency in the exact same way. For the first time, math has truly become the one true language of this planet. And it manifests itself in money. Russian, I understand it. Whoever they speak in Denmark, I understand Danish, yeah. Whatever. I understand it. I understand German. I understand French. I understand Spanish. I understand Portuguese. I understand whatever they talk and speak in Algeria. Whatever it is that they speak in Zimbabwe. Whatever they speak in Ghana. I I understand Ukrainian. I understand Egyptian. I understand hieroglyphics.
I understand Latin even though it's a completely dead language. It doesn't matter. I understand it all because I understand it through the same language, the language of money. In this case, a money that is not foreign exchange. It doesn't need one. This is one of the things that I never hear people talk about when it comes to Bitcoin. The fact that everybody can understand it no matter what language they speak. And then all of their goods and services become repriced in the exact same currency, which means the value of a web developer for me in Canada is the same as the web developer in Ghana. The only difference, if one of them sucks at it and the other one is really good at it.
But by and large, if they're if they both can deliver the same deliverables at the same time, chances are good. I'm going to not see a difference in price for the first time. Nobody is going to have to, you know, discount themselves and their life because nobody understands their money. The foreign exchange is dead, 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.
The Ineffectiveness of Protests
The Global Language of Bitcoin
