Join me today for Episode 991 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Every Ethereum Transaction Soon to be Reversible
- Run Away From Ethereum
- Genius Tries the "Bitcoin Hail Mary"
- Secretary Musk?
- Sec. Hegseth to Defend BTC?
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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[00:00:00]
David Bennett:
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 10:0:3 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 13th day of November 2024, and this is episode 991 of Bitcoin and 9 more to go until we hit the big one zero zero zero. Seems like everything is going up today. We passed through $93,000 on the price of Bitcoin. And, of course, people are taking a little bit of profit at this point. How could you expect them to not?
One thing that I've noticed about the psychology that's at play on myself is that I'm seeing, like, these really vicious swings where I I see the the price of Bitcoin change by $500 and then change right back to another $500 up. And then it's, like, $380 down. And then it's, like, you know, $600 up and the $450 down. I mean, these moves of multiple 100 of dollars within, like, seconds of each other is honestly, it's kind of freaking me out because I've never seen it before. Sure. I've seen moves. I've seen, like, a $150 here go down 200.
But 5, you know, 500, $600 moves in within seconds of each other to the down to the up, it makes it look like it's really volatile. However, when you look at that from the standpoint of what what's the price now versus what the price was, your the actual volatility hasn't really changed all that much. But we're we've got other things to talk about. And you're not at first, you're not going to be happy because I'm going to read not 1 but 2 news stories about Ethereum. And it's not because I'm switching switching the way I feel about Ethereum. It is still a dog with fleas. It was still built to bilk money out of people's wallets.
It is a fraud. It is a scam. But I get the feeling that if for anybody who's, you know, coming into the space because of the bull run, because it always happens, and they're thinking about Ethereum, if if you're one of those people, if you're new to Bitcoin and to the Bitcoin and podcast, it I feel that it's my duty to go through this shit again as to why you want to stay as far away from Ethereum as humanly possible. If you ask me how I know, it's because I too once thought Ethereum was, man, I got this Bitcoin stuff. I could buy some of this Ethereum. It's these smart contracts and all yeah. It's all bullshit. It has always been bullshit.
It's all crap. They don't mean what they say. Ethereum and the people behind it keep changing all kinds of stuff. They've changed consensus models. They've changed security models by going from proof of work to proof of stake. They change everything. They change the guts. They change the feathers. They change everything, all the gory stuff. It changes, and this is an issue. And I held Ethereum for probably 9 months. And it was the summer of 2016 because I got in at 2015. The summer of 2016, I had already had my fill with the absolute BS that I was hearing off of Ethereum podcasts.
I'd already seen the lights. It didn't take me very long, but it did take me a length of time. I have a bad feeling that the new people that are coming into the space are going to do the exact same shit that a lot of people did where they're looking at the price of Bitcoin versus the price of Ethereum and other shit coins and say, well, it's like silver. This used to be the argument of Litecoin, right, which was a a direct fork of Bitcoin. That Litecoin was the silver to Bitcoin's gold. This is the wrong way to think about it, especially when it comes to Ethereum.
Now the first one I want to talk about, this first news story is titled Ethereum Researcher Unveils Time Machine or even smarter smart contracts. Now that sounds like I'm going to be seeing the praises of Ethereum. And nothing nothing nothing could be further from the truth. But Braden Lindria is writing it for Cointelegraph. You'll you'll figure it out when we get there. Check this shit out. A time machine that allows Ethereum users to reverse smart transactions on the blockchain has been created by Ethereum researcher in Smart Transactions cofounder, Vlad Zamfir, which now makes certain transactions less immutable.
Let's pause. They can now make certain transactions less immutable. The whole point behind Bitcoin was that nobody nobody can change the chain. Nobody can say, hey, you know, it's for 5 years. Remember that transaction you made where you bought that motorcycle? Yeah. We're gonna undo that because Bitcoin transactions are immutable. They cannot be changed. That's what immutable means, cannot be changed. And the whole idea behind all the shit coins that came after Bitcoin was that we're going to be better than Bitcoin. See, our chain is even less immutable than Bitcoin, and it was all a load of garbage. But here we have the Ethereum folk starting to telegraph to the world that they are absolutely not interested in any form of security model for their blockchain.
The smart transactions also allow users to set specific conditions for transaction timing and execution. STXN's cofounder Anuj Das Gupta told Cointelegraph at the DevCon conference in Bangkok, STXN is like a time machine because it allows us to guarantee the future when it comes to smart contracts, he said. The feature will be supported in Ethereum virtual machine compatible blockchains and come in handy or could come in handy for the thousands of crypto users who fat finger transactions on chain. Okay. Now that pausing to say that seems to be their reasoning. Oh, we've got to make sure that if you make a mistake, that we can undo that.
Nothing could be further from the truth. They don't give a shit if you screwed up. Oh, well, I didn't mean to send 10 Ethereum. I only meant to send 1. But I fat fingered it, so I've gotta be able to get that transaction back. They are not in it for you. They are in it to make the regulators happy, whether they're United States regulators, Chinese regulators, European Union regulators. It doesn't matter. They want to be able to look at the regulators and say, we can change anybody's transaction at will. Let's continue. The feature will be or rather, Ethereum smart contracts are no longer limited by what was known at the time that they were written.
We believe that this is an important solution to the tension between flexibility and immutability when it comes to blockchains, end quote. STXN's newly appointed CEO, Boris Mamalek, or I guess that's how you pronounce it, compared blockchain immutability to when Internet users started sending emails in the late 1900. Once a message was sent, it wasn't possible to unsend it. Well, maybe you should be careful of what you say. But then then Google's Gmail made an undo toggle giving a short window to unsend an email which unlocked a bunch more utility and opportunity. He said smart transactions aim to solve the problem in web 3, Das Gupta added.
It allows us to time travel forward backward in the transaction sequencing flow, opening up a lot more utility just like that unsend button. Uh-huh. STXN is building this time machine feature into clean app, which was founded by Mam Yuk in 2 2013. It's an app to report an opportunity to clean something for others to complete in exchange it for blockchain rewards. Said transactions will be reverted when malicious actors are caught. I'm starting to actually even lose this is me talking, not not the article. I'm starting to lose what this article is actually even talking about. Did you catch that? What malicious actors are caught? What the hell is going on here?
An, report an opportunity to clean something for others to complete in exchange for blockchain rewards? I I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means. And I think what's happening here is that Braden Lendria is also probably having some difficulty understanding what they're trying to do in Ethereum. Let's continue. If there's a malicious use of the app, we can go back and claw back the blockchain rewards so that somebody got or the sorry. Claw back the blockchain rewards that somebody got as a result of malicious use. So it's a force multiplier. It opens up utility. How do you know it was malicious?
What who gets to say what's malicious? You see the the how problematic this is? STXN is looking to integrate this time machine feature into other matchmaking applications such as a decentralized Uber. Okay. Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap have this matchmaking feature, but it only supports swaps, Das Gupta noted. STXN's role is to build the infrastructure that allows users to build matchmaking applications on top of. Das Gupta and Mamluk want STXN to support all kinds of decentralized matchmaking applications. The announcement follows STXN's partnership with Ethereum infrastructure firm, Consensus, back in July.
Most of what I just read doesn't even make sense. Alright? Really, the the the big part of this is up at the front. Up at the front, we now know what they're talking about is being able to go back in time and undo certain transactions under certain circumstances. This breaks all manner of ethics. This has nothing at all to do with what Ethereum sought to figure out when it when it was basically riding Bitcoin's coattails. If if you are still thinking that Ethereum is going to solve some problem, it is not. The only problem it solves is for the regulators.
They are just rebuilding what we already have, as far as legacy financial institutions and regulation is concerned, into a digital format. They want to be this is what I think. They want to be the bedboard, the backboard, the base layer of CBDCs, the central bank digital currencies. Because how would a central bank not love to say, hey. Well, at least under certain circumstances, we can basically go change that dude's transaction because we think he's malicious. We don't like him. And however you define maliciousness, I don't know. That's not part of the consensus rules. And when you start doing shit where you have 2 different things at play, one is a blockchain's consensus rules, and we're already seeing Ethereum change all that. And they've been changing all that so that they can start the second part of the decision making process of what is and what is not immutable, and that is a regulatory body that's formatted or for or formulated from human beings and their minds, what they want, what what what their issues are. So now we have a very mutable, not immutable, but a very mutable blockchain coupled together with human greed, human ignorance, humanity in general.
And now they can basically talk to each other and do whatever it is that they want. If you want to make sure that at one point or another, you have nothing, then by all means, throw every single dime you have into Ethereum. But do not come running to me or anybody else in the Bitcoin world that told you to stay as far away from it as possible because we're not done yet. This is written by Sam Kessler out of CoinDesk. Stanford proposal for reversible Ethereum transactions divides the crypto community. Now this came out September 28th. I saw it then. I even spoke about it on the show. I basically said I you know, I've seen these reversible transactions, this thing out of Stanford. I'm not gonna read it. But now I feel that I must actually read this because this reversibility in Ethereum is now a theme.
It's not just a one off. It's several different people from several different places just picking apart Ethereum, which was it was bred to be picked apart. There was nothing about the consensus group, the Ethereum group, the software, the wallet software, none of it. None of it was built to actually ever be immutable. So let's check this one out. A group of Stanford University blockchain researchers divided the crypto community last week with a research proposal that would entertain the possibility of creating reversible transactions on Ethereum. The proposal was welcomed by those who believe crypto status quo poses barriers to mainstream adoption, but it was panned by others for a its suggestion that a decentralized set of judges should be used to arbitrate transaction disputes.
Implicit in the proposal was a question. In an industry where the next $100,000,000 theft is an inevitability, does protecting users require compromising on core principles? A key tenet of blockchains like Ethereum is the concept of immutability. The idea that transactions cannot be reversed once they are finalized. Immutability is heralded as an important feature for cryptocurrencies because it curtails the ability of banks, governments, and other central authorities to come in and alter a change a chain's ledger. But immutability can also be a major user experience bummer. If you get scammed, are the victim of a hack, or just screw up and send funds to the wrong address, you have zero recourse to recover your losses.
But oh, sorry. In terms of on chain thefts, the Stanford researchers noted in their paper that in 2020, $7,800,000,000 was stolen. And in 2021, that amount doubled to 14,000,000,000. According to the researchers, had there been a way to reverse the offending transactions as in traditional finance, the damage could have been greatly reduced. But not everyone is convinced. Ethereum builders tend to create new tokens by writing code that follows certain predefined standards. These standards act like templates. Developers can clone a token template, change a couple of parameters, and build out a brand new cryptocurrency that is automatically compatible with most of mainstream Ethereum apps.
The Stanford proposal extends the ERC20 and the ERC 721 token standards used by most Ethereum based currencies and non fungible tokens. The new standards, the ERC20 r and ERC 721r, would allow for transactions to be wound back if they are disputed within a brief window of time. Quote, within the short dispute period, a sender can request to reverse a transaction by convincing a decentralized set of judges to first freeze the disputed assets and then later convincing them to reverse the transaction, the researcher explained in their paper. When one of the researchers, Kaylee Wang, posted a tweet thread describing the proposal, she set off a firestorm across crypto Twitter.
On the critical end, it was the mention of a decentralized set of judges that seemed to strike a nerve. Many contend that a system like the one proposed in the paper simply wouldn't work. Quote, decentralized court systems using your proposed justice model already exists, like something called Claros. And, unfortunately, they are rife with corruption, astroturfing, and manipulation by founders or early token holders, tweeted Fatman, a pseudonymous crypto sleuth. Others thought that the involvement of human judges undermine the entire point of decentralized finance, where code is supposed to remove the requirement that transactions be permissioned by central authorities.
Quote, it all comes back to whether we want permissioned or permissionless DeFi, tweeted Avenji Gavonoy, the CEO of crypto market maker, Wintermute. Quote, in my opinion, permission DeFi is an oxymoron. Might as well get back to databases run by legacy banks. Recent events haven't changed my opinion on this at all, added Gavoy, whose company lost a $160,000,000 in an exploit earlier this month after losing 15,000,000 to a separate exploit back in June. In addition to raising some technical nitpicking, Luke Youngblood, the cofounder of the decentralized finance firm, Lunar Labs, framed his criticism of the proposal through a regulatory lens. Quote, it also creates a regulatory slash censorship choke point where governments and other regulators can potentially reverse crypto transactions.
So it violates the censorship resistance and immutability that blockchains offer offers, he said in a message. The researchers noted in the email correspondence with CoinDesk. They were surprised by the level of engagement their paper received. It's just early stage research, they said. The intention was to have a constructive discussion of this approach to preventing theft. This work is certainly not a fully fleshed token standard. Far from it, they continued. Many other critics, moreover, seem to misinterpret the proposal. According to the researchers, quote, one misunderstanding which surprised us is that people thought the proposal is to make all transactions reversible on a layer 1 blockchain or to replace the regular ERC 2721 standards, they wrote. And this is not the case.
The paper is simply a proposal for a token standard that people can use or not just like any other token standard, end quote. The researchers admit, however, the challenges of designing a fair system for arbitrating distraction sorry, transaction disputes. Quote, if there is no way to architect a judicial system, then this proposal will not work. Designing a fair judicial system or proving that one does not exist is an open question for the community to think about. Even as the proposal received criticism in some corners of the crypto community, it has also earned a considerable amount of support.
And guess who comes out of the woodwork? A guy named Emin Gun Sareer, the creator of the Avalanche blockchain, called the proposal a great idea, noting that it was similar to the one he'd suggested previously and suggesting it that it should be deployed more widely. Reading criticism around corruptible judges, Daniel Goldman, an engineer at Ethereum scaling company Offchain Labs, noted, quote, those outcrying against this seem unaware of how many widely used ERC 20 tokens, today have centralized admins with complete power to arbitrarily rug its holders they can mint, burn, freeze, etcetera, and get little to no pushback for it, end quote.
Goldman's characterization of the Stanford proposal sounds almost like a clean needles program for permission defi. If decentralized finance applications already build human level or control levers into their products, it'd be better that those levers be clearly specified. Quote, they aren't talking about replacing the ERC 20 standard itself. If you're not a fan of centralized or governable ERC twenties, don't use them, Goldman tweeted. Quote, hell, even having a literally centralized standard would be a net win. A net win.
A a literally centralized standard would be a net win for the sake of transparency. Anyone who's done the work of inspecting token contracts to figure out how centralized they are knows how tricky and annoying it is, end quote. Brent Xu or Zhu, the founder of the blockchain, Yumi, took issue with the tender of the criticism surrounding the proposal. Considering that you guys struck a huge nerve in crypto Twitter shows that this idea is worth exploring. The community needs to continue to explore the flaws and merits of a design before immediately casting it aside, he tweeted. Above all, the researchers suggest that before coming to conclusions, people should do them a favor of reading the paper.
Okay. Well, maybe I should read the paper. But I'm not going to. Because all this is, between these two stories, it should be very clear, very clear to everybody that all that's being talked about is the ability to reverse, regulate, and have human intervention into each and every transaction at one point or another. Now I get what they say. Hey. If you don't wanna use the ERC 20 r, and I I presume that the r in ERC 20 r means reversible, then use just nothing but the ERC 20 token. Yeah. Well, you know, it wasn't that long ago that they took proof of work away and replaced it with proof of stake.
When do they take ERC 20 token standards out? And for those of you who did not know, very soon after Ethereum the Ethereum blockchain launched, the the there was something called the DAO hack. I will get into it, but a bunch of people put a bunch of their freshly minted Ethereum tokens into a pool to fund a a company. And it was one of the it was one of the first DAOs, decentralized autonomous organization, d a o, DAO. Right? That's what that means. What happened? Well, somebody, because Ethereum was never secure, has never been secure, and will never be secure, hacked all those Ethereum tokens.
So what was the response? They found the point in the Ethereum blockchain where that transaction never occurred. It was the transaction right before the Dow hack transaction, and they they took the entire chain and wound it back to that point. None of the Ethereum users were asked if they wanted to do this. Anybody who made a transaction after that hack was shit out of luck because the transaction just got reversed. God only knows what problems that call, you know, caused at the time. And right after that, after they rolled back the blockchain to the block right before the DAO hack, sometime after that, we had the birth of Ethereum Classic, which was a fork of the Ethereum chain that left the hack of the DAO in.
They didn't roll it back out. So you already had a split in the Ethereum community of a whole bunch of people who were saying this is not this is not right. We should not be rolling back these transactions. I'm sorry that the DAO got hacked. Hey. Live and learn. That was that was the attitude that the people that built Ethereum classic or forked Ethereum Classic off of Ethereum, that's the attitude that they had. Sorry for you. We're gonna go on. Since then, Ethereum Classic is basically dead. You know? But and and the the main chain of Ethereum continues on, and it still does not have the information of the Dow hack that happened I think in late 2015.
It still doesn't have that information in the block chain. So even before all of this even before these these morons start talking about reversible single transactions of particular token types, remember that they had the power and they proved they proved that they had the power by actually physically rolling back the blockchain. So I'm just going to put it to you before we run the numbers. If you want to make sure that you have absolutely no idea what your money is worth and have and to risk every chance of it just being taken away from you or you being told that you have to use it in certain ways or can't use it at all, then by all means, buy as much Ethereum as you possibly can. You're going to get robbed one way or another.
Let's run the numbers. West Texas Intermediate Oil is up 0.59% to $68.52, roughly where it was yesterday. Brent Norsey, likewise, up 0.67 percent to 7237. Natural gas is up 2 a quarter. Gasoline is up scant to a buck 96 a gallon. All of your shiny metal rocks are not doing well at the moment. Gold is down 3 quarters of a point to $2,588. Wow. It's I'm sure the Peter Schiff is not having a good day. Silver, likewise down, but only by a third of a point. Platinum is down a half a point. Copper is down 1 and a third, and palladium is down 1 and a quarter. Ag, what's going on in ag?
It's pretty much evenly mixed today. Biggest winners, chocolate, 3.81% to the upside. Biggest loser today looks like it's gonna be sugar, 0.89% to the downside. Live cattle, well, they're they're down 0.04%. Lean hogs are down 0.4%. Feeder cattle, unchanged. The Dow has risen by a third of a point, the S and P by a quarter of a point, the Nasdaq, 0.14% to the upside, and the S and P Mini up 0.13. Well, what else is up? Bitcoin at 92. I it's weird saying these numbers. $92,800. That is a 1.84. Again, I'm having problems with these numbers. A $1,840,000,000,000 market cap, and you can get 36 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,781,533.61 of. And fees are the same today as they were yesterday. Point 14 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis. And there are finally over 106 blocks carrying 273,000 transactions waiting to confirm at high priorities of 22 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority gonna get you in at 19.
Hash rate is 720 0.9 exahashes per second, so we've got plenty of security to protect the chain. Countdown 2,000. Yep. That's from yesterday's show. Golf winch, 6,777 sats. Dude, thank you, my friend. Golf winch. He says, thank you for the best Bitcoin podcast in the universe. Get your daily dose with David. Stay informed and always watch your information diet. Golf winch, I like the way that your marketing mind works. Thank you. I appreciate it. Dark with 2121 says, good show. And great point about the US government telegraphing the shit out of their intentions towards Bitcoin. Their inability to move swiftly on anything other than seizure is something to consider. Well, yeah, absolutely. God's death with 537 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. I've led all the horses I know to water, and only 2 have sipped. None have gulped.
Pies to play before 20 says, if anyone I've tried orange pilling in the past, which encompass my entire extended family, ask about Bitcoin at Thanksgiving, I will calmly say, go fuck yourself. You didn't listen when sats were cheap. I might add Bitcoin to the list of things I'd no longer discuss with family, especially those boomers who are too stupid to comprehend. I tried explaining it till I was blue in the face. At this point, they can fuck off. I understand that sentiment. Pies, I I I I do. I understand the sentiment. Now that you're there, just take one breath.
Close your eyes and think. Is it worth it? If they come to you and finally ask, will you really stonewall them? I hope the answer is no. And I, you know, and again, I do recommend that nobody in this audience goes to thanksgiving or Christmas and rubs anybody's nose in it. Even though I'm absolutely certain that you've had your nose rubbed in it, walk the higher road. Pies to play with 420 says, thank you, sir. No, thank you. And wartime 333 says, cheers. And that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use Genius Group.
Their stock pumps amid micro strategy like Bitcoin Treasury Plan. Liz Napolitano writing this one from decryp.c0. AI firm, artificial intelligence firm, Genius Group, has announced that it will top up its coffers with Bitcoin, revealing a MicroStrategy inspired treasury reserve asset shortly after the digital asset's price soared to yet another all time high. The company plans to purchase $120,000,000 in Bitcoin as part of its latest business plan, holding the token as a long term reserve asset. Ultimately, Genius Group aims for Bitcoin to make up 90% of its treasury reserves. Quote, we see Bitcoin as being the primary store of value that will power exponential technologies.
Genius group tech director Thomas Powell said in in Tuesday in a statement, oh my god. We see Bitcoin as being the primary store of value that will power exponential technologies. I don't know whether that suits speak or really good marketing. I honestly I'm I'm kind of, stammering here. Anyway, the firm's stock price skyrocketed on Tuesday following the news, jumping by, get this, 79% as of this writing to a current price of a buck 13 per data from Google Finance. It briefly touched a daily high of a buck 41 earlier on Tuesday. Genius stock, also known as GNS, that's the ticker, listed on the NYSE American remains down 82% for the year. This is a hail Mary if I've ever seen. Genius Group's corporate strategy shift comes amid a crypto market surge triggered by former president Donald Trump's reelection last week.
Bitcoin soared to 89,864 on Monday. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Genius Group's adoption of this new policy follows the recent restructuring of its board to include experts in blockchain, and you guessed it, Web 3 Technologies. The company is modeling its new bitcoin based corporate strategy after that of micro strategy. Wow. Okay. You know what? I don't need to read another word. This company's probably a joke. It it probably is. There's probably some short term gains to be had because people are just kinda dumb. But when you've got a situation that your stock price is up 79% to a buck 13, but it's still down 89% from its earlier highs, and you've got a complete board restructuring of the company, Yeah.
No. This is hail Mary. And it may work. You never know. It may work for them. They're still early enough where it may it it may overcome whatever ills they're having. Clearly, they're having some ills, but we're moving on to Trump tapping Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to slash the government with Doge, a newly created department of government efficiency. Yeah. I know. Helen Partz, Cointelegraph. The US president-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new government agency named the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, d o g e, aimed at reducing federal spending and cutting regulations. Pausing to say, what?
How embarrassing is this? Are you serious? I mean, look. No. No. I I I don't hate orange man. I don't. I don't understand why people do. I've never really seen him be a Nazi. I've never seen him line a 140,000 people up against a wall and shoot them. I've never seen that. I've never seen him send people off to the gas chambers. I've never seen him shoot anybody in the head. No. No. No. No. I don't think orange man is quite as bad as people make him out to be. But are you freaking kidding me? The department of Doge.
This is absolutely embarrassing. It's not terrifying. I don't give a shit that much about it, but it is an absolute embarrassment. And not that the United States government isn't embarrassing enough all by itself, but, really, this is just insult to injury at this point, continuing, the new organization will, quote, dismantle government bureaucracy slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies, Trump stated. Pausing to say, now that shit I actually agree with. But, to appoint Elon Musk, the doge lover, over a department named doge and having Doge pump $5,000,000,000 in market cap minutes after this announcement, it makes me physically ill. But, quote, this will send shock waves through the system and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people, Elon Musk said in the announcement.
The newly created Doge will provide advice and guidance from outside of the government. It will also partner with the White House and Office of Management and Budget to drive large scale structural reforms and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before. Doge's task includes addressing waste in the United States government's $6,500,000,000,000 in annual spending. According to the official data from the US government, it has spent $6,750,000,000,000 in fiscal year 2024 with federal spending increasing by $617,000,000,000 over the same period last year.
Quote, I look forward to Elon and Vivek making changes to the federal bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency and, at the same time, making life better for all Americans, Trump stated. Since Trump's presidential win, the price of Dogecoin, Musk's favorite cryptocurrency, saw a massive rally surging roughly 150% since election day. Oh, for the love of god. On November 12th, Dogecoin briefly served to above 40 United States pennies for the first time since May of 2021, according to data from CoinGecko. Please don't buy this shit. Okay? I'm I'm going to skip a couple of paragraphs to talk about price action in Doge because it's bullshit.
But Musk leads Musk's lead position at Trump's Doge builds on the growing relationship between the 2 since the CEO reinstated Trump's x account in November of 2022. In August, Trump said that he would consider putting Musk in his cabinet or an advisory role starting in January 2025 if he wins. Musk's Doge co lead, Ramaswami, is known for his pro cryptocurrency stance in November. Blah blah blah blah. Okay. We don't need either. Because what I wanna know is if this is the department of governmental efficiency and it is a true honest to god department, we have the department of the treasury.
We have the department of the interior. We have the department of education. And each one of the people that leads those departments is called a cabinet member, otherwise known as the secretary. So we have the secretary of the interior that is the head person at the department of the interior. And that means all of USDA, the forestry service, you name it. Same thing with education. The secretary of education is the head of the department of education. So does that mean does that mean that we have 2 secretaries of doge?
Is Musk literally going to be called the secretary of doge? The doge secretary? See, this is why it hurts so bad when I have to bring you these kinds of news stories. It's just because it's happening. It's like I heard somebody in my mind as they are listening to this podcast, even though nobody's listened to it yet except for me because I'm recording it right now. I heard in my mind somebody screaming out in the dark. It doesn't matter. Yes. It does. If this is an actual freaking department of the United States government, yes. It does matter because there's payroll. Because there's there's yet another layer of bureaucracy or at least another, you know, addition of of bureaucracy.
I I hope that they are able to cut $2,000,000,000,000 of spending because it's most likely worthless. But, honestly, this is just buffoonery. It's buffoonery. I don't care who says what. You're just you'll you'll yell at me going, oh, you want it just because you got Trump Derangement Syndrome doesn't mean you're blah blah blah. No. I don't have Trump Derangement Syndrome. I don't think he's a bad guy. I I certainly don't think he's a fucking Nazi. That's for damn sure. But Doge, the depart honestly, I I I you know what? I'm I'm done. I'm done. I'm I'm going on. Pete Hegseth. Oh, thank god. We're getting to we're getting to secretary of defense, stuff here from the block and James Hunt. Let's read the headline.
Pete Hegseth, who said Trump is making Bitcoin great again, Nominated for the secretary of defense. Calm down. Bitcoin advocate, army veteran, and Fox and Friends weekend co host, Pete Hegswith, has been nominated for secretary of defense by president-elect Donald Trump. Hegseth has publicly expressed support for the crypto industry in recent years discussing his personal investment in cryptocurrencies and highlighting Bitcoin's value in its lack of government control. Speaking after crypto exchange Coinbase's IPO back in April of 2021, Hegseth described it as just the tip of the iceberg for cryptocurrency.
Quote, crypto has arrived. Bitcoin is not a person. It's not a company. It's not a place. It's tougher to stop than you think, and that finite supply in a world of printing money is very, very powerful, he said at the time, as noted by Van Eck, head of digital asset research, Matthew Siegel. Quote, look at Trump making Bitcoin great again, Heggs has said on a Monday in an interview with Fox Business following the Republicans US presidential election victory as bitcoin surged above $80,000 for the first time. Quote, all it took was signaling to that market that they weren't going to be overregulated.
Trump embraced them. End quote. Asked if he intended to sell any of his Bitcoin holdings, amid the price spike, Hogg says said, I did sell some pretty high, but I'm holding a bunch as well, so I feel good, end quote. Further, quote, I am honored to announce that I have nominated Pete Hegseth to serve in my cabinet as the secretary of defense, the president-elect said in a Trump Vance transition statement on Tuesday, quote, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete has spent his entire life as a warrior for the troops and for the country. He is tough, smart, and a true believer in America first. With Pete at the helm, America's enemies are on notice. Our military will be great again, and America will never back down, end quote.
Hegseth is an army veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan, and, god forbid, Guantanamo Bay, earning 2 bronze stars in the combat infantry men's badge according to his website. He is also the author of New York Times bestseller, Battle for the American Mind. However, however, most high level nominees for the US federal government such as the defense secretary require senate confirmation to officially assume their roles. The block earlier reported that Trump had chosen Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Strive Enterprises cofounder Vivek Ramaswamy to lead his new department of government efficiency amid a surge in the price of the must supported namesake meme coin.
And they're still not talking about whether or not this means he's going to be a secretary. I've never even heard of co secretaries, so this is gonna be very interesting. But not everyone is happy about Hegseth's nomination. You guessed it. Pocahontas coming out of the woodwork, Elizabeth Warren. She recently won a 4th term in the senate after defeating the crypto friendly Republican candidate, John Deaton, one of the first to criticize his potential appointment. Quote, a Fox and Friends weekend co host is not qualified to be the secretary of defense, Warren said in a post on Twitter. Quote, I lead the senate military personnel panel.
All 3 of my brothers served in uniform. Oh, well, let's throw in the the authority back in our face. Are we there, you freaking fake Indian? I respect every one of our service members. Donald Trump's pick will make us less safe and must be rejected, end quote. She also criticized Trump's department of government efficiency plans. However, others disagreed with Warren's stance, pointing to Hegseth's more than 15 year military record in qualifying him for the role. Yeah. Okay. You know, honestly, I hate it when I have to agree with, somebody like Elizabeth Warren who flat ass lied to every single American and every citizen of the world when she said that she was Native American.
She's got, like, I don't know, 4% Native American genes, which guess what? That's pretty much how it's going to look across the demographic of all citizens in the United States. At one point or another, somebody married a Native American. Right? She said she was, like, 1 eighth, like, I don't know, squaw or something like that. I can't remember. Don't don't get all pissed off at me. But she lied. And yet she still has a point. Is this guy even remotely qualified? Has he been a general? I mean, is it let's see. Is he a general? Hold on. See, it says Pete Pete.
Did I actually see general there? Hold on. I'm just scrolling up to the top here. This just says Pete. Actually, I'll do I'll do it this way. Pete. Heggswith or whatever his name is. Pete Heggseth. 44 years old. Okay. Pete Hegseth. Alright. What's your Wikipedia? Let's see what your, see what your rank highest rank is. Major. He's a major. I'm sorry, but no. Admiral or general? I I'm I'm sorry. Maybe Pete knows better, but you we live in a world that we have to actually look at and say, that is never going to happen. And the the whole thought that we're, like, rah rah ing the secretary of defense because he likes Bitcoin, now we look like buffoons.
This does this is not a good look. Right? It's just not a good look. Please look somewhere else. Right? I I don't need somebody in command of the military who is who we're rah rah ing simply because he likes Bitcoin? No. Does he does he know strategic maneuvering? Does he know how to fight an enemy? Does he know how to do so at a global scale that includes the army, the air force, the marine corps, and the navy in a concerted effort and a coordinated exercise to be able to get what he wants? I don't know because I to tell you the truth, I don't think major cuts it. I don't think that there's enough there in commanding lots of people in actual battle to be able to say that this would make a good secretary of defense. Not that we haven't had some shitty ones before, but this is not the way to go about picking your secretary of defense.
I really hate it that I have to agree with the lady that lied about her native American background. But crux version 24.11.0 has been released. Experimental tamper detection tool and other improvements. Krux, k r u x, is open source firmware for building do it yourself Bitcoin signing devices using off the shelf parts. It runs on Kendrite k 210 devices like the m five stick v and may Mayex? Amigo? I don't know. I've never heard of that. Turning them into air gapped devices that can sign transactions for single sig and multisig wallets. I've never heard of this.
I've never heard of it. But if you are a user of it, let me know how it works for you. But this release contains a new experimental tamper detection tool, a flash map tool for visualizing the regions of device memory. It fixes a vulnerability related to the import of Python modules from an SD card, adds a wonder w m simulator, a japanese translation, and a few other reliability and quality of life improvements. So if you were a user of that, you may actually want to go check that out. And I've just lost one of the other things that I wanted to talk about And that is Liana version 8.1. It has been released. It's an improved setup process. It's got new templates and bit box 02 support.
Liana, l I a n a, is a bitcoin wallet that uses mini script output descriptors with extensive use of relative time locks, the op underscore csv. It features a time locked recovery path for all of your coins and can be used for inheritance, decaying multisigs, and generally safer backups available on Windows Mac and Linux. This release introduces support for Taproot descriptors on BitBox 0 2 devices and includes a new installation process with setup, templates, and examples. Additionally, the wallet's syncing state display has been reworked.
Okay. So there you go for today, and that is the 13th November 2024. This is episode 991 of Bitcoin. And stay safe out there, folks. Oh, and I did, yeah, I did not bring you the story of the dead body that was found in a park somewhere in Montreal or somewhere in somewhere up there in, I guess, French speaking, Canadian. It was a crypto influencer that had been abducted in June of this year, and they just now found his body, which apparently was in a bad state of decomposure. Now I don't mean to rain on y'all's parade for the last of this show. I'm simply stating this as a fact that has happened to remind everybody out there, don't wear swag.
If you're going to wear Bitcoin swag, you damn well want to wear the swag that only a deep seated long time veteran of Bitcoin could easily understand. Don't wear the orange Bitcoin shirt in the parking lot outside of Bitcoin conferences. This is going to get you hurt. And I'd I'm I'm not saying that tongue in cheek. I actually mean this. I for I have never understood the fascination of getting all Bitcoin up and going outside thinking that you aren't a massive target, and that was when the price was $8,000 a coin. Is when I first started going, yeah, you may not wanna do this shit.
This is not a good idea. And here we are at $92,800 on the freaking dot. And if you are thinking that you're gonna pull that bitcoin shirt out of your closet, you're gonna wear it proudly to make the world understand that bitcoin is a thing, you may end up in the back of a black van with no windows in it with a fucking ice cream cone painted on the side because it was used for even more nefarious bullshit than to separate you from your Bitcoin, which you've clearly telegraphed to everyone who saw you. Please rethink that.
And I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 10:0:3 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 13th day of November 2024, and this is episode 991 of Bitcoin and 9 more to go until we hit the big one zero zero zero. Seems like everything is going up today. We passed through $93,000 on the price of Bitcoin. And, of course, people are taking a little bit of profit at this point. How could you expect them to not?
One thing that I've noticed about the psychology that's at play on myself is that I'm seeing, like, these really vicious swings where I I see the the price of Bitcoin change by $500 and then change right back to another $500 up. And then it's, like, $380 down. And then it's, like, you know, $600 up and the $450 down. I mean, these moves of multiple 100 of dollars within, like, seconds of each other is honestly, it's kind of freaking me out because I've never seen it before. Sure. I've seen moves. I've seen, like, a $150 here go down 200.
But 5, you know, 500, $600 moves in within seconds of each other to the down to the up, it makes it look like it's really volatile. However, when you look at that from the standpoint of what what's the price now versus what the price was, your the actual volatility hasn't really changed all that much. But we're we've got other things to talk about. And you're not at first, you're not going to be happy because I'm going to read not 1 but 2 news stories about Ethereum. And it's not because I'm switching switching the way I feel about Ethereum. It is still a dog with fleas. It was still built to bilk money out of people's wallets.
It is a fraud. It is a scam. But I get the feeling that if for anybody who's, you know, coming into the space because of the bull run, because it always happens, and they're thinking about Ethereum, if if you're one of those people, if you're new to Bitcoin and to the Bitcoin and podcast, it I feel that it's my duty to go through this shit again as to why you want to stay as far away from Ethereum as humanly possible. If you ask me how I know, it's because I too once thought Ethereum was, man, I got this Bitcoin stuff. I could buy some of this Ethereum. It's these smart contracts and all yeah. It's all bullshit. It has always been bullshit.
It's all crap. They don't mean what they say. Ethereum and the people behind it keep changing all kinds of stuff. They've changed consensus models. They've changed security models by going from proof of work to proof of stake. They change everything. They change the guts. They change the feathers. They change everything, all the gory stuff. It changes, and this is an issue. And I held Ethereum for probably 9 months. And it was the summer of 2016 because I got in at 2015. The summer of 2016, I had already had my fill with the absolute BS that I was hearing off of Ethereum podcasts.
I'd already seen the lights. It didn't take me very long, but it did take me a length of time. I have a bad feeling that the new people that are coming into the space are going to do the exact same shit that a lot of people did where they're looking at the price of Bitcoin versus the price of Ethereum and other shit coins and say, well, it's like silver. This used to be the argument of Litecoin, right, which was a a direct fork of Bitcoin. That Litecoin was the silver to Bitcoin's gold. This is the wrong way to think about it, especially when it comes to Ethereum.
Now the first one I want to talk about, this first news story is titled Ethereum Researcher Unveils Time Machine or even smarter smart contracts. Now that sounds like I'm going to be seeing the praises of Ethereum. And nothing nothing nothing could be further from the truth. But Braden Lindria is writing it for Cointelegraph. You'll you'll figure it out when we get there. Check this shit out. A time machine that allows Ethereum users to reverse smart transactions on the blockchain has been created by Ethereum researcher in Smart Transactions cofounder, Vlad Zamfir, which now makes certain transactions less immutable.
Let's pause. They can now make certain transactions less immutable. The whole point behind Bitcoin was that nobody nobody can change the chain. Nobody can say, hey, you know, it's for 5 years. Remember that transaction you made where you bought that motorcycle? Yeah. We're gonna undo that because Bitcoin transactions are immutable. They cannot be changed. That's what immutable means, cannot be changed. And the whole idea behind all the shit coins that came after Bitcoin was that we're going to be better than Bitcoin. See, our chain is even less immutable than Bitcoin, and it was all a load of garbage. But here we have the Ethereum folk starting to telegraph to the world that they are absolutely not interested in any form of security model for their blockchain.
The smart transactions also allow users to set specific conditions for transaction timing and execution. STXN's cofounder Anuj Das Gupta told Cointelegraph at the DevCon conference in Bangkok, STXN is like a time machine because it allows us to guarantee the future when it comes to smart contracts, he said. The feature will be supported in Ethereum virtual machine compatible blockchains and come in handy or could come in handy for the thousands of crypto users who fat finger transactions on chain. Okay. Now that pausing to say that seems to be their reasoning. Oh, we've got to make sure that if you make a mistake, that we can undo that.
Nothing could be further from the truth. They don't give a shit if you screwed up. Oh, well, I didn't mean to send 10 Ethereum. I only meant to send 1. But I fat fingered it, so I've gotta be able to get that transaction back. They are not in it for you. They are in it to make the regulators happy, whether they're United States regulators, Chinese regulators, European Union regulators. It doesn't matter. They want to be able to look at the regulators and say, we can change anybody's transaction at will. Let's continue. The feature will be or rather, Ethereum smart contracts are no longer limited by what was known at the time that they were written.
We believe that this is an important solution to the tension between flexibility and immutability when it comes to blockchains, end quote. STXN's newly appointed CEO, Boris Mamalek, or I guess that's how you pronounce it, compared blockchain immutability to when Internet users started sending emails in the late 1900. Once a message was sent, it wasn't possible to unsend it. Well, maybe you should be careful of what you say. But then then Google's Gmail made an undo toggle giving a short window to unsend an email which unlocked a bunch more utility and opportunity. He said smart transactions aim to solve the problem in web 3, Das Gupta added.
It allows us to time travel forward backward in the transaction sequencing flow, opening up a lot more utility just like that unsend button. Uh-huh. STXN is building this time machine feature into clean app, which was founded by Mam Yuk in 2 2013. It's an app to report an opportunity to clean something for others to complete in exchange it for blockchain rewards. Said transactions will be reverted when malicious actors are caught. I'm starting to actually even lose this is me talking, not not the article. I'm starting to lose what this article is actually even talking about. Did you catch that? What malicious actors are caught? What the hell is going on here?
An, report an opportunity to clean something for others to complete in exchange for blockchain rewards? I I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means. And I think what's happening here is that Braden Lendria is also probably having some difficulty understanding what they're trying to do in Ethereum. Let's continue. If there's a malicious use of the app, we can go back and claw back the blockchain rewards so that somebody got or the sorry. Claw back the blockchain rewards that somebody got as a result of malicious use. So it's a force multiplier. It opens up utility. How do you know it was malicious?
What who gets to say what's malicious? You see the the how problematic this is? STXN is looking to integrate this time machine feature into other matchmaking applications such as a decentralized Uber. Okay. Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap have this matchmaking feature, but it only supports swaps, Das Gupta noted. STXN's role is to build the infrastructure that allows users to build matchmaking applications on top of. Das Gupta and Mamluk want STXN to support all kinds of decentralized matchmaking applications. The announcement follows STXN's partnership with Ethereum infrastructure firm, Consensus, back in July.
Most of what I just read doesn't even make sense. Alright? Really, the the the big part of this is up at the front. Up at the front, we now know what they're talking about is being able to go back in time and undo certain transactions under certain circumstances. This breaks all manner of ethics. This has nothing at all to do with what Ethereum sought to figure out when it when it was basically riding Bitcoin's coattails. If if you are still thinking that Ethereum is going to solve some problem, it is not. The only problem it solves is for the regulators.
They are just rebuilding what we already have, as far as legacy financial institutions and regulation is concerned, into a digital format. They want to be this is what I think. They want to be the bedboard, the backboard, the base layer of CBDCs, the central bank digital currencies. Because how would a central bank not love to say, hey. Well, at least under certain circumstances, we can basically go change that dude's transaction because we think he's malicious. We don't like him. And however you define maliciousness, I don't know. That's not part of the consensus rules. And when you start doing shit where you have 2 different things at play, one is a blockchain's consensus rules, and we're already seeing Ethereum change all that. And they've been changing all that so that they can start the second part of the decision making process of what is and what is not immutable, and that is a regulatory body that's formatted or for or formulated from human beings and their minds, what they want, what what what their issues are. So now we have a very mutable, not immutable, but a very mutable blockchain coupled together with human greed, human ignorance, humanity in general.
And now they can basically talk to each other and do whatever it is that they want. If you want to make sure that at one point or another, you have nothing, then by all means, throw every single dime you have into Ethereum. But do not come running to me or anybody else in the Bitcoin world that told you to stay as far away from it as possible because we're not done yet. This is written by Sam Kessler out of CoinDesk. Stanford proposal for reversible Ethereum transactions divides the crypto community. Now this came out September 28th. I saw it then. I even spoke about it on the show. I basically said I you know, I've seen these reversible transactions, this thing out of Stanford. I'm not gonna read it. But now I feel that I must actually read this because this reversibility in Ethereum is now a theme.
It's not just a one off. It's several different people from several different places just picking apart Ethereum, which was it was bred to be picked apart. There was nothing about the consensus group, the Ethereum group, the software, the wallet software, none of it. None of it was built to actually ever be immutable. So let's check this one out. A group of Stanford University blockchain researchers divided the crypto community last week with a research proposal that would entertain the possibility of creating reversible transactions on Ethereum. The proposal was welcomed by those who believe crypto status quo poses barriers to mainstream adoption, but it was panned by others for a its suggestion that a decentralized set of judges should be used to arbitrate transaction disputes.
Implicit in the proposal was a question. In an industry where the next $100,000,000 theft is an inevitability, does protecting users require compromising on core principles? A key tenet of blockchains like Ethereum is the concept of immutability. The idea that transactions cannot be reversed once they are finalized. Immutability is heralded as an important feature for cryptocurrencies because it curtails the ability of banks, governments, and other central authorities to come in and alter a change a chain's ledger. But immutability can also be a major user experience bummer. If you get scammed, are the victim of a hack, or just screw up and send funds to the wrong address, you have zero recourse to recover your losses.
But oh, sorry. In terms of on chain thefts, the Stanford researchers noted in their paper that in 2020, $7,800,000,000 was stolen. And in 2021, that amount doubled to 14,000,000,000. According to the researchers, had there been a way to reverse the offending transactions as in traditional finance, the damage could have been greatly reduced. But not everyone is convinced. Ethereum builders tend to create new tokens by writing code that follows certain predefined standards. These standards act like templates. Developers can clone a token template, change a couple of parameters, and build out a brand new cryptocurrency that is automatically compatible with most of mainstream Ethereum apps.
The Stanford proposal extends the ERC20 and the ERC 721 token standards used by most Ethereum based currencies and non fungible tokens. The new standards, the ERC20 r and ERC 721r, would allow for transactions to be wound back if they are disputed within a brief window of time. Quote, within the short dispute period, a sender can request to reverse a transaction by convincing a decentralized set of judges to first freeze the disputed assets and then later convincing them to reverse the transaction, the researcher explained in their paper. When one of the researchers, Kaylee Wang, posted a tweet thread describing the proposal, she set off a firestorm across crypto Twitter.
On the critical end, it was the mention of a decentralized set of judges that seemed to strike a nerve. Many contend that a system like the one proposed in the paper simply wouldn't work. Quote, decentralized court systems using your proposed justice model already exists, like something called Claros. And, unfortunately, they are rife with corruption, astroturfing, and manipulation by founders or early token holders, tweeted Fatman, a pseudonymous crypto sleuth. Others thought that the involvement of human judges undermine the entire point of decentralized finance, where code is supposed to remove the requirement that transactions be permissioned by central authorities.
Quote, it all comes back to whether we want permissioned or permissionless DeFi, tweeted Avenji Gavonoy, the CEO of crypto market maker, Wintermute. Quote, in my opinion, permission DeFi is an oxymoron. Might as well get back to databases run by legacy banks. Recent events haven't changed my opinion on this at all, added Gavoy, whose company lost a $160,000,000 in an exploit earlier this month after losing 15,000,000 to a separate exploit back in June. In addition to raising some technical nitpicking, Luke Youngblood, the cofounder of the decentralized finance firm, Lunar Labs, framed his criticism of the proposal through a regulatory lens. Quote, it also creates a regulatory slash censorship choke point where governments and other regulators can potentially reverse crypto transactions.
So it violates the censorship resistance and immutability that blockchains offer offers, he said in a message. The researchers noted in the email correspondence with CoinDesk. They were surprised by the level of engagement their paper received. It's just early stage research, they said. The intention was to have a constructive discussion of this approach to preventing theft. This work is certainly not a fully fleshed token standard. Far from it, they continued. Many other critics, moreover, seem to misinterpret the proposal. According to the researchers, quote, one misunderstanding which surprised us is that people thought the proposal is to make all transactions reversible on a layer 1 blockchain or to replace the regular ERC 2721 standards, they wrote. And this is not the case.
The paper is simply a proposal for a token standard that people can use or not just like any other token standard, end quote. The researchers admit, however, the challenges of designing a fair system for arbitrating distraction sorry, transaction disputes. Quote, if there is no way to architect a judicial system, then this proposal will not work. Designing a fair judicial system or proving that one does not exist is an open question for the community to think about. Even as the proposal received criticism in some corners of the crypto community, it has also earned a considerable amount of support.
And guess who comes out of the woodwork? A guy named Emin Gun Sareer, the creator of the Avalanche blockchain, called the proposal a great idea, noting that it was similar to the one he'd suggested previously and suggesting it that it should be deployed more widely. Reading criticism around corruptible judges, Daniel Goldman, an engineer at Ethereum scaling company Offchain Labs, noted, quote, those outcrying against this seem unaware of how many widely used ERC 20 tokens, today have centralized admins with complete power to arbitrarily rug its holders they can mint, burn, freeze, etcetera, and get little to no pushback for it, end quote.
Goldman's characterization of the Stanford proposal sounds almost like a clean needles program for permission defi. If decentralized finance applications already build human level or control levers into their products, it'd be better that those levers be clearly specified. Quote, they aren't talking about replacing the ERC 20 standard itself. If you're not a fan of centralized or governable ERC twenties, don't use them, Goldman tweeted. Quote, hell, even having a literally centralized standard would be a net win. A net win.
A a literally centralized standard would be a net win for the sake of transparency. Anyone who's done the work of inspecting token contracts to figure out how centralized they are knows how tricky and annoying it is, end quote. Brent Xu or Zhu, the founder of the blockchain, Yumi, took issue with the tender of the criticism surrounding the proposal. Considering that you guys struck a huge nerve in crypto Twitter shows that this idea is worth exploring. The community needs to continue to explore the flaws and merits of a design before immediately casting it aside, he tweeted. Above all, the researchers suggest that before coming to conclusions, people should do them a favor of reading the paper.
Okay. Well, maybe I should read the paper. But I'm not going to. Because all this is, between these two stories, it should be very clear, very clear to everybody that all that's being talked about is the ability to reverse, regulate, and have human intervention into each and every transaction at one point or another. Now I get what they say. Hey. If you don't wanna use the ERC 20 r, and I I presume that the r in ERC 20 r means reversible, then use just nothing but the ERC 20 token. Yeah. Well, you know, it wasn't that long ago that they took proof of work away and replaced it with proof of stake.
When do they take ERC 20 token standards out? And for those of you who did not know, very soon after Ethereum the Ethereum blockchain launched, the the there was something called the DAO hack. I will get into it, but a bunch of people put a bunch of their freshly minted Ethereum tokens into a pool to fund a a company. And it was one of the it was one of the first DAOs, decentralized autonomous organization, d a o, DAO. Right? That's what that means. What happened? Well, somebody, because Ethereum was never secure, has never been secure, and will never be secure, hacked all those Ethereum tokens.
So what was the response? They found the point in the Ethereum blockchain where that transaction never occurred. It was the transaction right before the Dow hack transaction, and they they took the entire chain and wound it back to that point. None of the Ethereum users were asked if they wanted to do this. Anybody who made a transaction after that hack was shit out of luck because the transaction just got reversed. God only knows what problems that call, you know, caused at the time. And right after that, after they rolled back the blockchain to the block right before the DAO hack, sometime after that, we had the birth of Ethereum Classic, which was a fork of the Ethereum chain that left the hack of the DAO in.
They didn't roll it back out. So you already had a split in the Ethereum community of a whole bunch of people who were saying this is not this is not right. We should not be rolling back these transactions. I'm sorry that the DAO got hacked. Hey. Live and learn. That was that was the attitude that the people that built Ethereum classic or forked Ethereum Classic off of Ethereum, that's the attitude that they had. Sorry for you. We're gonna go on. Since then, Ethereum Classic is basically dead. You know? But and and the the main chain of Ethereum continues on, and it still does not have the information of the Dow hack that happened I think in late 2015.
It still doesn't have that information in the block chain. So even before all of this even before these these morons start talking about reversible single transactions of particular token types, remember that they had the power and they proved they proved that they had the power by actually physically rolling back the blockchain. So I'm just going to put it to you before we run the numbers. If you want to make sure that you have absolutely no idea what your money is worth and have and to risk every chance of it just being taken away from you or you being told that you have to use it in certain ways or can't use it at all, then by all means, buy as much Ethereum as you possibly can. You're going to get robbed one way or another.
Let's run the numbers. West Texas Intermediate Oil is up 0.59% to $68.52, roughly where it was yesterday. Brent Norsey, likewise, up 0.67 percent to 7237. Natural gas is up 2 a quarter. Gasoline is up scant to a buck 96 a gallon. All of your shiny metal rocks are not doing well at the moment. Gold is down 3 quarters of a point to $2,588. Wow. It's I'm sure the Peter Schiff is not having a good day. Silver, likewise down, but only by a third of a point. Platinum is down a half a point. Copper is down 1 and a third, and palladium is down 1 and a quarter. Ag, what's going on in ag?
It's pretty much evenly mixed today. Biggest winners, chocolate, 3.81% to the upside. Biggest loser today looks like it's gonna be sugar, 0.89% to the downside. Live cattle, well, they're they're down 0.04%. Lean hogs are down 0.4%. Feeder cattle, unchanged. The Dow has risen by a third of a point, the S and P by a quarter of a point, the Nasdaq, 0.14% to the upside, and the S and P Mini up 0.13. Well, what else is up? Bitcoin at 92. I it's weird saying these numbers. $92,800. That is a 1.84. Again, I'm having problems with these numbers. A $1,840,000,000,000 market cap, and you can get 36 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,781,533.61 of. And fees are the same today as they were yesterday. Point 14 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis. And there are finally over 106 blocks carrying 273,000 transactions waiting to confirm at high priorities of 22 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority gonna get you in at 19.
Hash rate is 720 0.9 exahashes per second, so we've got plenty of security to protect the chain. Countdown 2,000. Yep. That's from yesterday's show. Golf winch, 6,777 sats. Dude, thank you, my friend. Golf winch. He says, thank you for the best Bitcoin podcast in the universe. Get your daily dose with David. Stay informed and always watch your information diet. Golf winch, I like the way that your marketing mind works. Thank you. I appreciate it. Dark with 2121 says, good show. And great point about the US government telegraphing the shit out of their intentions towards Bitcoin. Their inability to move swiftly on anything other than seizure is something to consider. Well, yeah, absolutely. God's death with 537 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. I've led all the horses I know to water, and only 2 have sipped. None have gulped.
Pies to play before 20 says, if anyone I've tried orange pilling in the past, which encompass my entire extended family, ask about Bitcoin at Thanksgiving, I will calmly say, go fuck yourself. You didn't listen when sats were cheap. I might add Bitcoin to the list of things I'd no longer discuss with family, especially those boomers who are too stupid to comprehend. I tried explaining it till I was blue in the face. At this point, they can fuck off. I understand that sentiment. Pies, I I I I do. I understand the sentiment. Now that you're there, just take one breath.
Close your eyes and think. Is it worth it? If they come to you and finally ask, will you really stonewall them? I hope the answer is no. And I, you know, and again, I do recommend that nobody in this audience goes to thanksgiving or Christmas and rubs anybody's nose in it. Even though I'm absolutely certain that you've had your nose rubbed in it, walk the higher road. Pies to play with 420 says, thank you, sir. No, thank you. And wartime 333 says, cheers. And that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use Genius Group.
Their stock pumps amid micro strategy like Bitcoin Treasury Plan. Liz Napolitano writing this one from decryp.c0. AI firm, artificial intelligence firm, Genius Group, has announced that it will top up its coffers with Bitcoin, revealing a MicroStrategy inspired treasury reserve asset shortly after the digital asset's price soared to yet another all time high. The company plans to purchase $120,000,000 in Bitcoin as part of its latest business plan, holding the token as a long term reserve asset. Ultimately, Genius Group aims for Bitcoin to make up 90% of its treasury reserves. Quote, we see Bitcoin as being the primary store of value that will power exponential technologies.
Genius group tech director Thomas Powell said in in Tuesday in a statement, oh my god. We see Bitcoin as being the primary store of value that will power exponential technologies. I don't know whether that suits speak or really good marketing. I honestly I'm I'm kind of, stammering here. Anyway, the firm's stock price skyrocketed on Tuesday following the news, jumping by, get this, 79% as of this writing to a current price of a buck 13 per data from Google Finance. It briefly touched a daily high of a buck 41 earlier on Tuesday. Genius stock, also known as GNS, that's the ticker, listed on the NYSE American remains down 82% for the year. This is a hail Mary if I've ever seen. Genius Group's corporate strategy shift comes amid a crypto market surge triggered by former president Donald Trump's reelection last week.
Bitcoin soared to 89,864 on Monday. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Genius Group's adoption of this new policy follows the recent restructuring of its board to include experts in blockchain, and you guessed it, Web 3 Technologies. The company is modeling its new bitcoin based corporate strategy after that of micro strategy. Wow. Okay. You know what? I don't need to read another word. This company's probably a joke. It it probably is. There's probably some short term gains to be had because people are just kinda dumb. But when you've got a situation that your stock price is up 79% to a buck 13, but it's still down 89% from its earlier highs, and you've got a complete board restructuring of the company, Yeah.
No. This is hail Mary. And it may work. You never know. It may work for them. They're still early enough where it may it it may overcome whatever ills they're having. Clearly, they're having some ills, but we're moving on to Trump tapping Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to slash the government with Doge, a newly created department of government efficiency. Yeah. I know. Helen Partz, Cointelegraph. The US president-elect Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new government agency named the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, d o g e, aimed at reducing federal spending and cutting regulations. Pausing to say, what?
How embarrassing is this? Are you serious? I mean, look. No. No. I I I don't hate orange man. I don't. I don't understand why people do. I've never really seen him be a Nazi. I've never seen him line a 140,000 people up against a wall and shoot them. I've never seen that. I've never seen him send people off to the gas chambers. I've never seen him shoot anybody in the head. No. No. No. No. I don't think orange man is quite as bad as people make him out to be. But are you freaking kidding me? The department of Doge.
This is absolutely embarrassing. It's not terrifying. I don't give a shit that much about it, but it is an absolute embarrassment. And not that the United States government isn't embarrassing enough all by itself, but, really, this is just insult to injury at this point, continuing, the new organization will, quote, dismantle government bureaucracy slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies, Trump stated. Pausing to say, now that shit I actually agree with. But, to appoint Elon Musk, the doge lover, over a department named doge and having Doge pump $5,000,000,000 in market cap minutes after this announcement, it makes me physically ill. But, quote, this will send shock waves through the system and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people, Elon Musk said in the announcement.
The newly created Doge will provide advice and guidance from outside of the government. It will also partner with the White House and Office of Management and Budget to drive large scale structural reforms and create an entrepreneurial approach to government never seen before. Doge's task includes addressing waste in the United States government's $6,500,000,000,000 in annual spending. According to the official data from the US government, it has spent $6,750,000,000,000 in fiscal year 2024 with federal spending increasing by $617,000,000,000 over the same period last year.
Quote, I look forward to Elon and Vivek making changes to the federal bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency and, at the same time, making life better for all Americans, Trump stated. Since Trump's presidential win, the price of Dogecoin, Musk's favorite cryptocurrency, saw a massive rally surging roughly 150% since election day. Oh, for the love of god. On November 12th, Dogecoin briefly served to above 40 United States pennies for the first time since May of 2021, according to data from CoinGecko. Please don't buy this shit. Okay? I'm I'm going to skip a couple of paragraphs to talk about price action in Doge because it's bullshit.
But Musk leads Musk's lead position at Trump's Doge builds on the growing relationship between the 2 since the CEO reinstated Trump's x account in November of 2022. In August, Trump said that he would consider putting Musk in his cabinet or an advisory role starting in January 2025 if he wins. Musk's Doge co lead, Ramaswami, is known for his pro cryptocurrency stance in November. Blah blah blah blah. Okay. We don't need either. Because what I wanna know is if this is the department of governmental efficiency and it is a true honest to god department, we have the department of the treasury.
We have the department of the interior. We have the department of education. And each one of the people that leads those departments is called a cabinet member, otherwise known as the secretary. So we have the secretary of the interior that is the head person at the department of the interior. And that means all of USDA, the forestry service, you name it. Same thing with education. The secretary of education is the head of the department of education. So does that mean does that mean that we have 2 secretaries of doge?
Is Musk literally going to be called the secretary of doge? The doge secretary? See, this is why it hurts so bad when I have to bring you these kinds of news stories. It's just because it's happening. It's like I heard somebody in my mind as they are listening to this podcast, even though nobody's listened to it yet except for me because I'm recording it right now. I heard in my mind somebody screaming out in the dark. It doesn't matter. Yes. It does. If this is an actual freaking department of the United States government, yes. It does matter because there's payroll. Because there's there's yet another layer of bureaucracy or at least another, you know, addition of of bureaucracy.
I I hope that they are able to cut $2,000,000,000,000 of spending because it's most likely worthless. But, honestly, this is just buffoonery. It's buffoonery. I don't care who says what. You're just you'll you'll yell at me going, oh, you want it just because you got Trump Derangement Syndrome doesn't mean you're blah blah blah. No. I don't have Trump Derangement Syndrome. I don't think he's a bad guy. I I certainly don't think he's a fucking Nazi. That's for damn sure. But Doge, the depart honestly, I I I you know what? I'm I'm done. I'm done. I'm I'm going on. Pete Hegseth. Oh, thank god. We're getting to we're getting to secretary of defense, stuff here from the block and James Hunt. Let's read the headline.
Pete Hegseth, who said Trump is making Bitcoin great again, Nominated for the secretary of defense. Calm down. Bitcoin advocate, army veteran, and Fox and Friends weekend co host, Pete Hegswith, has been nominated for secretary of defense by president-elect Donald Trump. Hegseth has publicly expressed support for the crypto industry in recent years discussing his personal investment in cryptocurrencies and highlighting Bitcoin's value in its lack of government control. Speaking after crypto exchange Coinbase's IPO back in April of 2021, Hegseth described it as just the tip of the iceberg for cryptocurrency.
Quote, crypto has arrived. Bitcoin is not a person. It's not a company. It's not a place. It's tougher to stop than you think, and that finite supply in a world of printing money is very, very powerful, he said at the time, as noted by Van Eck, head of digital asset research, Matthew Siegel. Quote, look at Trump making Bitcoin great again, Heggs has said on a Monday in an interview with Fox Business following the Republicans US presidential election victory as bitcoin surged above $80,000 for the first time. Quote, all it took was signaling to that market that they weren't going to be overregulated.
Trump embraced them. End quote. Asked if he intended to sell any of his Bitcoin holdings, amid the price spike, Hogg says said, I did sell some pretty high, but I'm holding a bunch as well, so I feel good, end quote. Further, quote, I am honored to announce that I have nominated Pete Hegseth to serve in my cabinet as the secretary of defense, the president-elect said in a Trump Vance transition statement on Tuesday, quote, Pete, Pete, Pete, Pete has spent his entire life as a warrior for the troops and for the country. He is tough, smart, and a true believer in America first. With Pete at the helm, America's enemies are on notice. Our military will be great again, and America will never back down, end quote.
Hegseth is an army veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan, and, god forbid, Guantanamo Bay, earning 2 bronze stars in the combat infantry men's badge according to his website. He is also the author of New York Times bestseller, Battle for the American Mind. However, however, most high level nominees for the US federal government such as the defense secretary require senate confirmation to officially assume their roles. The block earlier reported that Trump had chosen Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Strive Enterprises cofounder Vivek Ramaswamy to lead his new department of government efficiency amid a surge in the price of the must supported namesake meme coin.
And they're still not talking about whether or not this means he's going to be a secretary. I've never even heard of co secretaries, so this is gonna be very interesting. But not everyone is happy about Hegseth's nomination. You guessed it. Pocahontas coming out of the woodwork, Elizabeth Warren. She recently won a 4th term in the senate after defeating the crypto friendly Republican candidate, John Deaton, one of the first to criticize his potential appointment. Quote, a Fox and Friends weekend co host is not qualified to be the secretary of defense, Warren said in a post on Twitter. Quote, I lead the senate military personnel panel.
All 3 of my brothers served in uniform. Oh, well, let's throw in the the authority back in our face. Are we there, you freaking fake Indian? I respect every one of our service members. Donald Trump's pick will make us less safe and must be rejected, end quote. She also criticized Trump's department of government efficiency plans. However, others disagreed with Warren's stance, pointing to Hegseth's more than 15 year military record in qualifying him for the role. Yeah. Okay. You know, honestly, I hate it when I have to agree with, somebody like Elizabeth Warren who flat ass lied to every single American and every citizen of the world when she said that she was Native American.
She's got, like, I don't know, 4% Native American genes, which guess what? That's pretty much how it's going to look across the demographic of all citizens in the United States. At one point or another, somebody married a Native American. Right? She said she was, like, 1 eighth, like, I don't know, squaw or something like that. I can't remember. Don't don't get all pissed off at me. But she lied. And yet she still has a point. Is this guy even remotely qualified? Has he been a general? I mean, is it let's see. Is he a general? Hold on. See, it says Pete Pete.
Did I actually see general there? Hold on. I'm just scrolling up to the top here. This just says Pete. Actually, I'll do I'll do it this way. Pete. Heggswith or whatever his name is. Pete Heggseth. 44 years old. Okay. Pete Hegseth. Alright. What's your Wikipedia? Let's see what your, see what your rank highest rank is. Major. He's a major. I'm sorry, but no. Admiral or general? I I'm I'm sorry. Maybe Pete knows better, but you we live in a world that we have to actually look at and say, that is never going to happen. And the the whole thought that we're, like, rah rah ing the secretary of defense because he likes Bitcoin, now we look like buffoons.
This does this is not a good look. Right? It's just not a good look. Please look somewhere else. Right? I I don't need somebody in command of the military who is who we're rah rah ing simply because he likes Bitcoin? No. Does he does he know strategic maneuvering? Does he know how to fight an enemy? Does he know how to do so at a global scale that includes the army, the air force, the marine corps, and the navy in a concerted effort and a coordinated exercise to be able to get what he wants? I don't know because I to tell you the truth, I don't think major cuts it. I don't think that there's enough there in commanding lots of people in actual battle to be able to say that this would make a good secretary of defense. Not that we haven't had some shitty ones before, but this is not the way to go about picking your secretary of defense.
I really hate it that I have to agree with the lady that lied about her native American background. But crux version 24.11.0 has been released. Experimental tamper detection tool and other improvements. Krux, k r u x, is open source firmware for building do it yourself Bitcoin signing devices using off the shelf parts. It runs on Kendrite k 210 devices like the m five stick v and may Mayex? Amigo? I don't know. I've never heard of that. Turning them into air gapped devices that can sign transactions for single sig and multisig wallets. I've never heard of this.
I've never heard of it. But if you are a user of it, let me know how it works for you. But this release contains a new experimental tamper detection tool, a flash map tool for visualizing the regions of device memory. It fixes a vulnerability related to the import of Python modules from an SD card, adds a wonder w m simulator, a japanese translation, and a few other reliability and quality of life improvements. So if you were a user of that, you may actually want to go check that out. And I've just lost one of the other things that I wanted to talk about And that is Liana version 8.1. It has been released. It's an improved setup process. It's got new templates and bit box 02 support.
Liana, l I a n a, is a bitcoin wallet that uses mini script output descriptors with extensive use of relative time locks, the op underscore csv. It features a time locked recovery path for all of your coins and can be used for inheritance, decaying multisigs, and generally safer backups available on Windows Mac and Linux. This release introduces support for Taproot descriptors on BitBox 0 2 devices and includes a new installation process with setup, templates, and examples. Additionally, the wallet's syncing state display has been reworked.
Okay. So there you go for today, and that is the 13th November 2024. This is episode 991 of Bitcoin. And stay safe out there, folks. Oh, and I did, yeah, I did not bring you the story of the dead body that was found in a park somewhere in Montreal or somewhere in somewhere up there in, I guess, French speaking, Canadian. It was a crypto influencer that had been abducted in June of this year, and they just now found his body, which apparently was in a bad state of decomposure. Now I don't mean to rain on y'all's parade for the last of this show. I'm simply stating this as a fact that has happened to remind everybody out there, don't wear swag.
If you're going to wear Bitcoin swag, you damn well want to wear the swag that only a deep seated long time veteran of Bitcoin could easily understand. Don't wear the orange Bitcoin shirt in the parking lot outside of Bitcoin conferences. This is going to get you hurt. And I'd I'm I'm not saying that tongue in cheek. I actually mean this. I for I have never understood the fascination of getting all Bitcoin up and going outside thinking that you aren't a massive target, and that was when the price was $8,000 a coin. Is when I first started going, yeah, you may not wanna do this shit.
This is not a good idea. And here we are at $92,800 on the freaking dot. And if you are thinking that you're gonna pull that bitcoin shirt out of your closet, you're gonna wear it proudly to make the world understand that bitcoin is a thing, you may end up in the back of a black van with no windows in it with a fucking ice cream cone painted on the side because it was used for even more nefarious bullshit than to separate you from your Bitcoin, which you've clearly telegraphed to everyone who saw you. Please rethink that.
And I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Bitcoin Price Surge and Market Psychology
Critique of Ethereum and Its Volatility
Ethereum's Historical Rollbacks and Risks
Market Updates and Bitcoin's Current Status
Safety and Discretion in the Crypto World
