Join me today for Episode 993 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Alby Hysteria Needs to Stop
- 18 States Sue the SEC and it's Commissioners
- RFK to Head Health and Human Services
- The Pennsylvania BTC Strategic Reserve
- Gold Man-Sacks' $710 Million BTC ETF Stash
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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Articles:
Alby: https://primal.net/e/note12x8mmpezhgn0y5tns3kq2xvjx459tvup8xjpa8cu5hxy8znfp3rs87q4sx
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/18-states-sue-sec-over-unconstitutional-overreach-digital-assets
https://decrypt.co/291834/gary-gensler-sec-chair-been-proud-to-serve
https://www.theblock.co/post/326769/trump-nominates-bitcoin-friendly-rfk-jr-us-secretary-of-health
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/11/15/trump-names-former-sec-chair-jay-clayton-to-doj-office-the-same-office-that-prosecuted-sbf/
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://value4value.info/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
- https://geyser.fund/project/thebitcoinandpodcast
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/microstrategys-bitcoin-strategy-wont-work-as-well-for-other-companies
https://cointelegraph.com/news/goldman-sachs-holds-710-million-bitcoin-etfs
https://decrypt.co/291821/pennsylvania-strategic-bitcoin-reserve
https://opensats.org/blog/m1sterc001guy-receives-lts-grant
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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 10:47 AM Pacific Standard Time. It is the 15th day of November 2024.
This is episode 993 of Bitcoin, and only 7 episodes left till the big one thousand. 1,000. Gonna switch from 3 digits to 4. I can't wait. Should be exciting. But, you know, hey. It's not gonna have a party. Everybody keeps saying, what are you gonna do for the 1,000? And I'm like, man, I'm just happy that you guys are still listening to me at show 1,000. To me, that's actually gift enough, but we've got lots and lots of stuff to cover this morning. I want to get started. However, talking about Albi. Get Albi or Albi Hub or however you've you've come to know the Albi Wallet. Things have changed.
And some people are I I some people are losing their minds about it because I think they don't understand what's going on, even though I've explained it on the show before, but that doesn't mean everybody listens. Otherwise, there dude, we probably would be having a party somewhere for the 1,000th show. But I'm going to go through this again. Okay? Because some people are losing their minds and making all kinds of weird I don't know. I think they're making weird assumptions about what's actually occurring and what they are doing to mitigate this problem. But it's not a problem.
We knew what was coming down the pipe. I've told you about this on several occasions. And you everybody's had more than ample opportunity to figure out what they're going to do. Now, other people are rightly they're not pissed off. They are actually moving Alby because they from Alby as a wallet for Lightning because they have a certain lifestyle that they don't wanna interrupt. And I'm gonna get into that here, and I'm gonna use my friend, Corn DeLorean, as an example. Because he he was one of the ones that was good enough to send me the email that he got from Albie, where he screenshotted it for me so that I can read.
Because I did not get this this email. And I think I did not get this email because I'm already on Albib, which I've told you about. We're we're gonna get into this. I swear to god, I promise. Just bear with me for a second. Let's read the email that Korn Delorean got. It says, hi. We're reaching out to inform you that the Alby shared wallet service now keep that in mind, not Alby, but Albi's shared wallet service will be discontinued on January 4th 2025. To continue enjoying permissionless and inexpensive payments, it's time to transition to your your own Albie Hub.
Find all the details here and here, of course, is a link. Please note that new limits on the shared wallet service will take effect on November 22, 2024. Move to Albi Hub and enjoy a self custodial wallet without any payment limits. You can have access to all of Albi's services, including your Lightning address. You get priority support for Albi cloud users. There's exclusive access to AlbiGo, our new mobile app. Even more direct app connections. One place for all your Bitcoin payments. Take control of your bitcoin. Your hub is waiting in your Albie account. Join a personal onboarding session to get all of your questions answered. Best regards, your Albie team.
Okay. So now that was that was the email that Korn Delorean opened this morning. Here's what his response was. He says, I just got Albie's email this is on Noster, by the way. Just got Albie's email about officially ending their custodial wallet service in January. End of an era. Can't really justify the cost of AlbiHub or running fully self custodial just for Zaps, though. Okay. So if you're confused, I'm gonna try to level this out. Now I'm going to have to make the assumption that everybody that's listening to me at least knows what Alby is and was.
But probably, I'm going to make the assumption that you don't know what it's become or going to become. Alright. So it's lightning wallet. It's a browser extension that I've been using in my Brave Browser for years now, honestly. It allows me to sign in to any Nostr client with my n pub and insect because it manages my keys. It's given me a lightning wallet and a lightning address so that people could give me zaps. And a few months ago, I started getting messages from Alby that they were saying, hey. Hey. Hey. Our custodial.
Where their custodial wallet service, their lightning wallet service that is custodial is going to have to go away for various reasons. Now I think it's because nobody at at the on the Albie team wants to get in trouble with the United States justice department because them doing business with me is the toxic United States citizen that I am, and I talked about that shit at length yesterday, that maybe that scares them a little bit. And, honestly, I can't blame them. Nobody wants to do business with American citizens when it comes to financial stuff because people have a tendency to get their homes raided, get thrown in jail. So it makes sense for them to say, we're not going to custody your sats any longer.
But they gave us Albie Hub, h u b, Albie Hub, the Albie Hub. What is it? Well, it's a it's a self custodial version of exactly the same service that they've been offering for the last couple of years which is a great set of services. I love Albie. I am I am a huge fan. I'm a big user. I've been a long term user and there's a reason why. I don't use shit services. I don't talk about crap services. Albie's not a sponsor of the show, by the way. So please understand that. I'm doing this out of my own volition to make sure that we set the record straight for some people. The self custodial service comes in 2 flavors.
1, you can rent for satoshis a lightning channel. You can do that through the Albi hub. Right? That's only if you do not host your own lightning node. That's the other flavor, and that's the flavor that I'm using. Alright. So I have a lightning node and several channels open, both incoming liquidity of satoshis and outgoing liquidity of satoshis on my start 9 server pure or server 1. I can't remember which one I've got. It doesn't really matter. I've got a full blown lightning node and let therefore lightning address. I've got everything that I need that I can do self custodial self custodially here at my house.
I can access my node, my Lightning wallet, my Lightning node, everything about my Lightning experience I can access from anywhere in the world on my phone. AlbyHub can connect directly to my lightning node. And therefore, my lightning wallet that is part of the lightning node that you when you spin up a lightning node, there is a lightning wallet associated with it. AlbieHub, you simply are authorizing it to have access to that lightning wallet that's on your lightning node. And then your entire lightning node and all of its channel liquidity becomes your self custodial AlbieHub self hosted Lightning Wallet.
That's the second flavor. Let's go back to the first flavor. And this is where people they didn't lose their mind, but they but some people got a shock to the system. Now I don't know if it's because they weren't listening to what Albie had been saying over the last 6 months, but I'm going to assume that they just didn't get the message because the message that they did get was a 20 or at least one person got a 21,000 satoshi charge that drained some that drained that directly from their wallet to pay for the Albi Hub service because they were not using their own lightning node. They were renting a channel or something.
If it because I did not get char I have never been charged by Albi for anything for anything, which is amazing considering the amount of services that they offer me. Right? So the least I can do is give back just a little bit by by making sure that people understand what's going on. So those people are kind of freaking out, and I honestly can't blame them. 21,000 satoshis just waking up to that is kind of like a punch in the gut. I get it. So the only way that you can escape those charges is by using your own lightning node. And this brings me to a point.
I've stopped I kinda stopped talking about it, so it's sort of maybe it's my you know, I'll take a little bit of the blame here. But the importance of running your own bitcoin full node and your own lightning node is it's important to do. I understand that many people don't want to learn how to do that. And Korndelorian is one of those people. And I understand what Korndelorian is saying here. In fact, let me go and, get down here. Let's see where he's wait. Wait. Hold on. Well, I had it. I had it somewhere in here. Yeah. Let's see. Well, he didn't say okay. He didn't say anything other than the fact that he was basically trying coin OS, which is another lightning wallet or something like that. I can't remember exactly. Yes. He he's got this little note or on his note in Nostril, he's got a picture of, like, it's a meme and it says, paying 21,000 sats per month for AlbieHub or switching to CoinOS.
And it shows a whole bunch of Nostra users, like the little stick figures, cramming through the switching to CoinOS. For for Korn, I understand because he's made it clear that he doesn't wanna learn how to run a lightning node. And even if he already knows, because it's not that hard, he doesn't wanna manage the channels. He doesn't wanna go out and find channel partners. He's like, dude, I got a whole life. That one, I get. I I understand that. But there are many people who have the capacity and the time and even have a smidgen of desire to not only learn how Lightning Network works and how to do even basic channel management. I don't even do all that much channel management. And just I've got, like, 10 or 15 channels and it just they just they just work.
Right? I don't have to fiddle around with it. But I did have to go find channel partners. That did take time. But because I went through that time, I don't have to pay the 21,000 satoshis per month to be able to zap people on Noster. And I get all of the other benefits that Albie Hub gives me, like giving my wife her own Albie wallet. And it took me exactly one minute using my own Albie Hub. And now her lightning wallet on her phone, which is powered by Albi Go, which is a the simplest lightning wallet that's mobile that I've ever seen in my life, it's got 2 buttons. And it shows it gives you a receive button to get satoshis and a send button to pay invoices, and it shows you what your balance is. That's it. But her entire experience, her entire wallet is sitting on my start 9 with the Albi Hub because I use their friends and family app on Albi Hub which is serve which is a service running on my start 9.
And I just said I want to set up a wallet. And it said, sure. What's the name of the wallet? I was like, my wife's name wallet. And then it's like, sure. Here's a QR code. Go get her phone. Spin up Albie Albie Go on her phone and connect the wallet. Boom. It was done. And then I sent her a 1,000 sats just to so that she can play around with it. Took less than a minute. And I'm my lightning node is her wallet, except she only sees her balance. She doesn't see the balance of the entire node. She can only send the sats that are authorized in her wallet that I set up for her earlier today. She can't just spend the she doesn't even know what the entire balance of my lightning note is. And even if she did, she can't spend anything other than the 1,000 sats that are authorized on her phone. And if somebody else sends her sats, then I don't get to spend her sats and she can spend whatever sats that that she gets by herself and she can send whatever sats that she has in her balance. And her balance is completely and wholly separate from my balance on my lightning node even though it's my own Lightning node that's powering her wallet. And I'm not paying for that as a service.
I could charge her, but she's not that interested. Okay? So I'm not gonna be doing that. And then I'm gonna be setting up my kids after they get home from school today with their own lightning wallets that are based on AlbiHub. So what I'm getting at here in a very long, long winded way is that instead of just saying, oh my god. Everybody's bailing out of Albie, I want you to say, take a breath, sit back, relax for a few minutes, and just say, exactly what is going on here? Now if I've explained it and if you missed something, then go back and listen to what I've said again. There's no reason to run away from Albie just because they are taking their self custody wallet away.
They don't wanna get in trouble. That's my that's my estimation. I know inside baseball. But if I were them, I wouldn't wanna service United States citizens at all because I don't wanna end up with a home raid by the Department of Justice in whatever country that they happen to be in, which I think is several different countries in either event. Albie is not broken. Albie is not going away. You do have to adjust the what what it is that you want. If all you want to do is zap and you don't want to run a Lightning node, I understand that. But I honestly think this is a very good time to be able to learn For very very cheaply how to run a lightning network node.
I mean, okay, start 9 may be more expensive than you want to pay for. Do you have an old laptop hanging around? You can put the start OS which is the operating system for the start 9. You can put it on an old laptop. Do you have a raspberry pi hanging out? You can get myNodebtc and start a full a bitcoin full node and then run start running a lightning node after you download done the initial download of the main chain. Right? This these are good things for us to know. Otherwise, people like me who know how to do this are going to charge people like you who refuse to actually do it. And if you're one of the people out there that will do it or already does it, then skip what I'm saying. But if you aren't the person that wants to learn how to do it, then you are going to be depending on me to do it for you and I'm going to charge you to do that.
Self cuss self custody means work. Decentralization means that as individuals, we need to take ownership of everything that is Bitcoin, everything that is Lightning, and soon to be everything that is eCash. We're going to have to put in the work if we don't want people like Gary fucking Gensler to do the work for us or people like him or people in his circle. Please understand that. Albie's not going away. It's not. Okay. So that's it for that's it for Albie. Let's get into the rest of the news. 18 United States states are suing the SEC over the unconstitutional overreach on digital assets according to Fox Business.
Eleanor Tarrant or Tarrant is writing it on Thursday afternoon, this was yesterday, by the way, just yesterday yesterday afternoon, 18 states filed to sue the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it's 5 commissioners by name, by the way, accusing them of unconstitutional overreach and unfair persecution of the $3,000,000,000,000 cryptocurrency industry under the leadership of agency chief Gary Gensler, Led by Kentucky attorney general Russell Coleman, the lawsuit was jointly filed in a Kentucky district court in partnership with 17 other attorney generals from Nebraska, Tennessee, West Virginia, Iowa, Texas, Mississippi, Montana, Arkansas, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, or Missouri, Indiana, Utah, Louisiana, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Florida.
That's a lot of states. This is like this is almost like a state level class action lawsuit against a federal agency. I've never seen this occur, ladies and gentlemen. I've never seen this happen. Whether it's cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, suing the EPA, I've never seen 18 attorney generals get together in a room and say, fuck them. We're gonna sue them at the federal level. I've never seen it before. If you've seen it before, please send me a boostagram or get in touch with me on Noster and tell me when that shit occurred because as far as I know, this sets precedent. Anyway, continuing, the complaint was filed in collaboration with crypto advocacy group DeFi Education Fund, which advocates for sound policy in the decentralized finance space. Notably, the lawsuit alleges that the agency's industry wide crackdown on US crypto companies is unconstitutional because it violates fundamental principles of federalism, which ensure that government agencies operate within their constitutionally defined roles.
Gensler, in his capacity as chair, has said that the majority of cryptocurrencies aside from Bitcoin and Ether are securities and therefore fall under the SEC's purview. His position, which the states argue is a broad interpretation of securities laws, has resulted in the agency's enforcement division bringing a myriad of lawsuits against major industry players like exchanges, Coinbase and Kraken, blockchain payments firm Ripple, and software tech company Consensus, among other many others, in fact, for allegedly violating securities law by selling unregistered securities on their platforms. This assertion by Gensler has been met with fervent pushback from the industry, its legal advocates, including the 18 state attorney generals, as well as many members of congress who believe he's extending the agency's reach far beyond the bounds congress intended.
Given the lack of clear rules and an ordained regulating body, crypto participants have been operating in what the AEGs or the attorney generals describe as regulatory limbo. The SEC, of course, did not respond to come or for a comment. But Gensler defended his actions against the industry during a speech at the Practicing Law Institute's 56th Annual Institute on Securities Regulation Conference on Thursday. Quote, court after court has agreed with our actions to protect investors and rejected all arguments that the Securities and Exchange Commission cannot enforce the law when securities are being offered, whatever their form, end quote.
The lawsuit further alleges, however, that by imposing penalties and restrictions on digital asset platforms without a proper regulatory framework, the SEC's actions have introduced significant risks to one of America's fastest growing economic sectors and infringed on states' rights to regulate their own economies. The AEGs noted that congress intentionally refrained from granting broad regulatory authority over digital assets to federal agencies like the SEC, instead allowing states to lead on the issue. But the SEC has ignored this allocation of power. Quote, at the bottom, the SEC's regulatory overreach defies basic principles of federalism and separation of powers.
The SEC's assertion of sweeping jurisdiction without congressional authorization deprives states of their proper sovereign role and chills the development of innovative regulatory frameworks for the digital asset industry, according to the filing states. Quote, still worse, by attempting to shoehorn digital assets into ill fitting federal securities laws and inapt disclosure regimes, excuse me, the SEC is harming the very citizens it purports to protect by displacing better suited state laws that have been carefully designed to ensure consumer protection in the digital asset industry. The SEC's actions, the attorney general's claim, amount to a full scale assault on the United States crypto industry. It is unfortunate that it came to this point, but I'm glad to see states, including Tennessee, taking a stand against Gary Gensler's anti crypto agenda, according to what was said by Republican Tennessee senator Bill Hagerty.
The agency's perceived unfair treatment of the crypto sector sparked nationwide industry campaigns to make its demands for fair treatment heard in the presidential election. Its wish was granted when now president-elect Donald Trump embraced the millions of unsatisfied crypto voters looking for a champion, vowing to prop up the industry and end what he called the Biden administration's war on crypto. Trump received over 20,000,000 in industry donations whilst on the campaign trail. Okay. That's pretty much all we need to know about what's going on here. So 18 states. 18. Not 8.
You know, not 4, not a couple, not 1, but 18. That is quite the chunk of 50 states of the of the United States. That's that is nothing to sneeze at. They're all suing the SEC and, by name, each one of its 5 commissioners. I mean, they're going after everything. And it's amazing because why? Why would I think that it's why would I think that this is amazing? Well, because this is a 10th amendment issue, and the states are tired of having the 10th amendment basically snubbed. What is the 10th amendment of the United States constitution specifically inside the bill of rights? It's the last amendment of the bill of rights. The first ten amendments of the United States constitution was noted, notably called and named, quite rightly, I think, the bill of rights. And here's what the bill of rights did.
The constitution was written, and people were reading it, especially the founding fathers, the people that were going to sign their names to the constitution, which basically built the United States. It's the it's the document that instantiates the United States of America. It builds the executive branch. It builds the judicial branch. It builds the legislative branch. It basically lays down all the groundwork, the architecture behind the government and the structure of the United States. Not just the government, but how the states are, how they interact. What can the government do, what can the government not do, all these kinds of things. And a whole bunch of people said, you know what? We're not signing this.
And by them signing it, they had to have enough signatures of enough people in the colonies at the time to ratify. This the word is ratify the constitution, which basically means they've got enough of a quorum and enough people have signed their name to agree to this document that this is going to become the law of the land. And most of them said, what? Most of them said, fuck you. That's right. For those of you who'd thought that a whole bunch of founding fathers read the constitution of the United States and just thought it was the bee's knees and they were gonna immediately sign their name to it. No. No. No. No. They didn't. They were like, where's our rights?
What? Yeah. Dude, where's our rights? What rights? Oh, do you need a list? Here. We'll we'll list them out for you. And they did. And they wrote 10 amendments that had to go into the document that was the constitution of the United States, and that was named the bill of rights. 1 through 10, the first amendment guaranteed our right to free speech, or rather, guaranteed that our god given right to free speech shall not be infringed by the federal government. The assumption is we already got these rights on all of these that are in the bill of rights. Not that they're given to us, that we already have them, and the bill of rights describes how the federal government cannot infringe upon any one of these rights.
The second is the right to bear arms. It didn't give us the right to bear arms. It basically tells the federal government, you have no authority over a US citizen's right to bear arms. You cannot take them away. You cannot confiscate them. You cannot tell them anything about it at all, and the federal government is already in violation of that right. The third, you can't quarter troops in my house. You can't send cops to my house, say, hey. We gotta sleep here tonight. Fuck you. That's not going to happen. I'm not going to feed you. I'm not gonna give you beds. Screw off. You can go sleep out in the rain for all I give a shit. That's the third one. Right? The 4th one, you can't just take my papers and personal information from me. That's been violated so many times since the instantiation of the war on drugs in the eighties. I can't even speak that we even have that right anymore. But then we get to the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and then we end up at the 10th amendment.
And this is why Roe v Wade failed. And by for all those people that are really pissed about that, the champion of women's bodily autonomy, justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said on multiple occasions that Roe v Wade was unconstitutional the way that case happened. The things written in that case, the opinions given in the case, the outcome of that case, that everything about that case was unconstitutional, not because she hated women and not because she didn't think that women should have rights over their bodily autonomy. No. No. No. No. She was one of the staunchest advocates of women's rights that you would ever find.
And she hated Roe v Wade because it violated the 10th Amendment, and that's why it was unconstitutional. So what does the 10th Amendment say? Basically, the 10th Amendment says this. If if it is not expressly instantiated in the verbiage of the body of the Constitution of the United States, then it is a state's rights issue. That's what Ruth Bader Ginsburg was saying about Roe v Wade. There's nothing expressly in the constitution that says you can have an abortion or you cannot have an abortion because it's not expressly written down in the body of the constitution, then it becomes the right of Oklahoma to make the decision on something like abortion.
It becomes the right of Texas. It becomes the right of California and Oregon and Washington, New York State, New Jersey. Each one of those individual states has the say so. So what this lawsuit is saying is that Gary Gensler's overreach was so broad that it violates the 10th amendment of the constitution of the United States, and most of what he's been able to do should have actually been decisions made at the state level by each one of the individual states. So now that Gary Gensler and his entire SEC and all of his chiefs are being sued, what is Gary Gensler's response?
Well, his resignation may be imminent because the SEC chair says that he's been proud to serve. From decrypt, Will McCurdy, writing, Securities and Exchange Commissioner sorry, securities and exchange commission chair, Gary Gensler, said that he was proud to serve at the agency during a speech amid widespread speculation about his potential resignation, quote, I have been proud to serve with my colleagues at the SEC who, day in and day out, work to protect American families on the highways of finance. He said at the 56th Annual Institute on Securities Regulation yesterday at the Practicing Law Institute in New York. To be clear, Gensler has not officially announced his resignation at the time of writing. However, Gensler's use of the past tense regarding his job comes after president-elect Donald Trump promised to fire Gary Gensler on day 1 at a Nashville Bitcoin conference in July.
Marcus Thelen, CEO of crypto research firm 10x Research, told Decrypt earlier this year that the SEC chairs have historically resigned following the election of a new administration, such as at the start of the Obama and Biden administrations. So that's all we need to know about that. He's making he's talking about his job in the past tense. It's also the situation that we just learned that historically, the chair of the SEC voluntarily resigns his position or her position, whatever, upon the election of a new president. And this happens a lot. There's a lot of resignations that happen, and most of them happen not in, like, oh, I'm so mad. He's not my president. It's not that. It's it's it's sort of tradition.
It paves the way for the new administration to be able to not have to fight so that they, the new administration, can do what the new administration wants to have done. And if people a whole bunch of people are refusing to, you know, step down out of their positions, that becomes a little bit hard. But it's not always the case that everybody in every position automatically resigns. So what happens with the secretary of health and department of human services for the United States? Well, president-elect Trump has nominated Robert f Kennedy junior for the United States secretary of health.
That was postulated, and now it looks like it's actually happened. James Hunt from The Block tells us more. Crypto friendly ex democrat Robert Kennedy junior has been nominated for secretary of health and human services by president-elect Trump. He has been a prominent advocate for cryptocurrency, particularly bitcoin. And during his 2024 presidential campaign, he proposed establishing a Bitcoin strategic reserve to stabilize the US dollar and exempt Bitcoin profits from capital gains tax. RFK also disclosed that a significant portion portion of his personal wealth was invested in Bitcoin and pushed for a light touch regulatory environment for crypto in the US.
However, none none of this has anything to do with the fact that he might head up Department of Health and Human Services, but let's let's forget about that for a second. Quote, I am thrilled to announce Robert f Kennedy junior as the United States secretary of Health and Human Services, Trump wrote in a statement late Thursday, quote, for too long, Americans have been crushed by, get this, crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to public health, end quote. Wow. Industrial food complex.
We've been talking about this in regenerative agriculture for a decade. And it's becoming the the horns have been blowing nothing but louder and louder and louder and louder about what's being done to our food. Remember Texas Slim, the beef initiative? That was like, what, 4 years ago? 3 years ago that he did his, his initial inaugural paper and then did a whole bunch of podcast interviews? He was talking about the same thing. We got 4 people that cut meat in the United States. Four companies. We used to have a meat processor in every county, in every state of the United States except those that were so depopulated, it just didn't make any sense.
But most counties have their own meat processing services. Not anymore. Not unless you're JBS or Tyson or got one of them sweet, sweet federal contracts. You know? It's it's we've been talking about this forever, and now the language is actually set in the announcement that Trump wrote that Kennedy might be the department he that that's his nominee. I mean, as to whether or not he gets he gets confirmed by the senate and the house or whatever, that's another story. But he is now the president elect's choice to head up Department of Health and Human Services. That's huge.
We thought that that was gonna happen, and we all wanted that to happen. If if this was going to occur, if Trump is gonna get, you know, get in, we were all thinking that Kennedy would be the perfect guy for Health and Human Services, and that looks like exactly where he's going to go. I'm honestly amazed. But he's not done, and I'm talking about orange man. Trump has named the former SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Jay Clayton, to the Department of Justice office. That's the exact same office that prosecuted SBF. We're talking about the Southern District of New York, guys.
Nicholas Day for CoinDesk. President-elect Donald Trump said former sec Securities and Exchange Commission chair Jay Clayton would be his US attorney for the southern district of New York heading up the state's department of justice branch. Clayton, who has advised a number of crypto firms since leaving the SEC in December of 2020, oversaw the production of the SEC's DAO report, which claimed jurisdiction over a broad swath of the crypto industry and famously once said he believed most initial coin offerings were securities, a view later echoed by his successor, the current chair of the SEC, Gary Gensler.
Hey. The old boss, same as the new boss. One of Clayton's final actions at the SEC was to sign off on the lawsuit against Ripple Labs. The case is currently winding its way through federal appellate court system after a judge ruled last year that the company had not violated federal securities law in making XRP available to retail traders through exchanges. Yes. Because that judge was bought off. That's my only explanation because I'm sorry. Now here's where I disagree with a lot pretty much most of the crypto industry. In fact, I disagree with 99.9999% of all crypto because it's all securities.
Do I think Gary Gensler overstepped his bounds? Yeah. Most likely. You don't get 18 states attorney generals in a room together agreeing with each other that, yeah, this motherfucker overstepped his bounds without there probably being a situation where Gary Gensler actually did overstep his boundaries. Be that as it may, I believe that even Ethereum is a security. And all the rest of the shit coins, they're all securities. They all pass the Howey test. Why? Because it's the it's the investment of capital with the expectation of profit through the machinations of a third party.
I'm sorry. That's all crypto except Bitcoin. It just is. And, I'm sure somebody's out there go, well, that's why you're not an attorney general. That's not why you're not at the DOJ. No, dude. I ain't got time to waste on trying to get up there. I I know when I see a pink pig. I see a pig. It's the color pink. It's a pink pig. It's not that hard. This is not rocket science. Everybody every economist has made you feel that you're too stupid to make these decisions about what is and what is not a security because it's in their best interest for them to remain in power.
So they make us all try to feel that that we're just dumb as rocks, like we're freaking cavemen that can barely start a fire with a couple of rocks. Right? I mean, it's just it's it's amazing that we have bought in and allowed ourselves to think that we're just never qualified to do anything, and that's bullshit. We need to change that attitude all the way down to, yes, you can run your own lightning node. Guys, it's not that hard. It's not hard at all. It's just not. It's not hard to look at Ripple and go, how is this not a security? Now if the question becomes, why is a security bad?
That is, in fact, another question. But go figure out why it's named the Howey test, h o w e y. He was a Citrus Grove owner in Florida. Look what he did with his security. That's where this test came from. Is it an investment of capital into a situation that purchases shares with the expectation of a profit through the machinations of a third party. If all those answers are yes, congratulations. You've passed the Howie test, and you're a security. Howie ripped off everybody that bought a security from him. That's why this shit went to court. He He was a fucking scammer. His citrus grove was about to go under.
He this was a the how we test came out of a hail Mary that how we made. And guess what? How we basically got to keep a lot of money and be very, very rich until the day he died and the Howie trial was still going on after he died. I'm just saying, look, man, securities are nothing to be, like, you know, playing around with. Just because somebody offers a security doesn't mean that it's above board. Right? There are many things that Gensler Gensler said and did that I actually agree with. I I am agreeing with Jay Clayton here. All of these things are securities except for Bitcoin. It's all bullshit.
So I'm not all that upset that Jay Clayton, who is very much exactly like Gary Gensler, is going to be part of the southern district of New York. He's going to be doing the exact same thing that the SDNY already does. And they've done some stupid shit, and I expect Jay to do some more stupid shit. But as long as they keep the pressure on the shit coins to make them understand that they are selling unregulated securities, that that's the only way to keep this shit under control. If that were to go to away, go away, the scambrian explosion that we saw in 2017 would look like child's play.
Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities. They got oil is down 2 a quarter percent for West Texas Intermediate. It's sitting at $67.17 a barrel. Brenton, North Sea is down 2 points to 7114. Natural gas, going the opposite way as it always does, 1 and a half percent to the upside. Gasoline itself is down 1 and a half percent, back down to 2 doll or sorry, 2. $1.95 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks are mixed today. Gold down a tenth of a point to 25.70.20. Silver is down a half point. Platinum is up, but only by point 13%. Copper is down half. Palladium is up almost 2 full points.
Biggest loser in ag today is lumber. 3.39% to the downside, but everything else is in the green. So the biggest winner today is coffee. No. I take that back. It's rough rice. 2 and a third points to the upside. Live cattle moving sideways. Lean hogs down 1.1%, but feeder cattle are up a whopping 1.5%. The Dow is down 0.86% at this time as is the S and P 500, but it's only oh, wait a minute. No. It's actually down way more. Almost wow. 1 and a half points. Nasdaq is down. Wow. Holy shit. 2.7%, and the S and P Mini is down 1 and a third. What's going on with Bitcoin? It's been struggling today, kinda bouncing around, chilling out right now at 89,740.
That is just under a $1,800,000,000,000 market cap. We can only buy 35 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19,000,000,782,442.99 of. And fees have skyrocketed. Oh my god. It's awful. A quarter of a bitcoin. Actually, 0.27 bitcoin in fees on average on a per block basis. And there are, right now, 105 blocks carrying 280,000 unconfirmed transactions going for a high priority cost of 32 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 25. Earlier, I saw triple digit satoshis per vbyte, but not right now. So mining is at 711.8 exahashes per second.
I'm good with that. I really am. So value for value. It's that time again that I ask for you to smash that donation button. How do you do it? Use podcasting 2.0 enabled applications on your phone. It's that easy. Plus, you get chapters and transcripts. You get all kinds of cool stuff with podcasting 2.0. But the best thing about podcasting 2.0, No deplatforming for me. An increasing number of people are getting deplatformed from all kinds of services, whether you're booted off of YouTube, banned from Twitter, kicked from PayPal, or removed from the swift network like Russia.
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And you can donate through Boostagrams or Streaming Satoshis directly to this show using podcasting 2.0 apps. Like, Fountain is my daily driver. I've also been using what, pod was it PodHome? I can't remember what my other daily what my other driver is on my phone. I don't use it as often as Fountain. But there's, like, 5 that allow you to to send me satoshis, send me notes with those satoshis. You can send me satoshis and just stream them, like, 10 satoshis per minute, a 100 satoshis per minute, 10,000 satoshis per minute if you want to. And no one can stop you and no one can stop me from getting them. And when I do get them, I get them directly into the node that I just opened a wallet for my wife on for the albie hub.
And I'm in complete possession. It's completely self custodial. Nobody tells you whether or not you can support this show, and nobody tells me whether or not I can take your Satoshis or not. What if you're an enemy of the state and you send me money? Well, in the old world, I would have to if I knew that you were an enemy of the state, I'd have to say no and and report you. I can't even do that. I have no idea who the hell is sending me satoshis unless you send me a boostagram. You know, that one I know. But if you're streaming me Satoshis, I have no idea who the hell's giving them to me. State department gives me a phone call and says, mister Bennett, we need to know. Every person that's ever sent you a satoshi, go fish. Here's a copy of the log file for my, you know, my lightning node.
Have fun finding nothing there. That's the way this shit works. And I'm appreciative of everybody that sends me Satoshis, like glimmering with 2,000 satoshi says, greetings from Europe, David. It is true. Bad people rule us, but shine a light on them and they scatter like rats. Foamotronic with the 1,001 sat says nothing. Pies to plug with 420 says, fuck anyone who's offended by this podcast. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. God's death with 537 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Pies to plug with another 420 with cheers and another emoji that I can't read because I have prehistoric operating system. The bird with 500 says, g m. Well, good morning to you too, sir. User 115-568-42 with 500 says, love the tinfoil hat section. The very end of your stinking onion podcast talks about a bitcoin backed financial product.
Did you see the Saylor video about the earnings call for MicroStrategy? Epic description of Sailor's vision for the company and sounds like what you were looking for in the TradFi of the future. Cheers. Cheers to your right back, sir. No. I haven't seen that video. I will look for it. Wartime 333 says stinky because, you know, that's pretty much the name of the episode. Alright. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. And speaking of Michael Saylor, we've got this one out of Bitcoin Magazine written by Vivek Sin. MicroStrategy's Bitcoin strategy won't work as well for other companies. Let's find out why. Look.
I'm not an expert in public markets, but raising money to buy more Bitcoin seems to be the obvious new alpha for public companies. MicroStrategy pioneered this strategy. And now 4 years later, it's the most compelling and successful story in corporate finance. MicroStrategy has been the best performing stock in the last 4 years, beating every United States company, including NVIDIA. That's crazy. Right? All thanks to Bitcoin. I'm sure the CFOs of most public companies are now looking at MicroStrategy and analyzing how they turned a $1,000,000,000 company into a $70,000,000,000 company in just 4 years. And they are thinking about how they can do the same. Well, here's the playbook.
Use profits, equity, and debt to buy more Bitcoin and then tell the world about it loudly. But let's be real. MicroStrategy's bitcoin playbook won't pump stock prices forever, at least not for the other public companies. The arbitrage opportunity is closing rapidly as more firms adopt similar strategies. MicroStrategy enjoys the 1st mover advantage and guru status with Michael Saylor. New corporate BTC buyers lack that credibility and the cult following with bit with bitcoiners. The impact diminishes with each new adopter. Bitcoin's growth is slowing, too.
What? No. Doing a 5 x annually gets harder as the marginalized rising competition for a somewhat fixed BTC supply spells diminishing relative returns. I'm not sure if I actually agree with that. We we got a lot of runway here. But whatever. Let's also remember. Today's investors can get bitcoin exposure easier than when MicroStrategy started. ETFs and funds reduce the impact of new companies holding BTC directly. Now all this means the MicroStrategy playbook is closing fast for public companies. Firms considering it must act quickly to maximize gains before the strategy gets overplayed. To be clear, I'm incredibly bullish on corporations adopting BTC treasury reserves. It's just that early movers will benefit the most.
The impact will wane over time for new adopters. And, of course, regardless of time, companies will continue to benefit from adopting this strategy as the Bitcoin price continues to increase forever, Laura. Forever. It's going up forever, Laura. I I've got, you know, I've got my I've got some peccadillos with this particular particular take, but he's not wrong in the longer term. The playbook is only going to be valid for so long. What now now that brings up a really good question. Well, if this playbook doesn't work after a while, what will?
I don't know other than buy Bitcoin and hold Bitcoin. In fact, that that very well may be it. We may see a reinstantiation of the MicroStrategy playbook after the ETF kind of plays itself out. And what I mean by that is, like, you know, micro like what Vivek was saying. A whole bit you know, MicroStrategy started and some other companies followed suit. They had first mover advantage of buying and holding Bitcoin directly. Now we're gonna see a whole bunch of companies that go, okay. We can do the same thing. We're gonna buy the ETF. No. No. No. Not the same thing. It's not the same thing. It's not the same thing. It's not the same thing. It will not be interpreted as the same thing. It can't be by the very virtue that where that shit's going to go when you report your earnings and your balance sheets and all that kind of shit over to the SEC is going to go in a different column. It's going to be a different asset.
The only way to do that is to actually buy the actual Bitcoin itself. And that's when I think the reinstantiation. There's gonna be a whole bunch of companies that get bogged down in buying ETFs and thinking that they're gonna have the same play that MicroStrategy did and they're not. It'll be the companies on the other side that go, yeah. That didn't work so well. How about this? We buy Bitcoin and we hold Bitcoin. And that's probably going to be what happens when people see how Goldman Sachs has been doing. Because Goldman Sachs isn't holding Bitcoin.
No. No. No. No. No. What Goldman Sachs is doing is they're buying Bitcoin ETFs. $710,000,000 worth of Bitcoin ETFs according to the last SEC filing. Helen Parks, Cointelegraph, Goldman Sachs, a major global investment bank, once critical of Bitcoin, has disclosed significant holdings in Bitcoin exchange traded funds. In a November 14th filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Goldman Sachs reported about $718,000,000 in holdings and 8, count them, 8 bitcoin ETFs. The report disclosed a $461,000,000 investment in BlackRock Spot Bitcoin ETF.
The bank's latest quarterly holdings report revealed that it added $300,000,000 to its Bitcoin ETF portfolio since the Q2, which is a 71% increase. Goldman Sachs entered the spot Bitcoin ETF market in the second quarter, disclosing its 1st BTC ETF purchase in August. And that one was worth $418,000,000 Apart from the $461,000,000 investment in BlackRock's Ibit, Goldman Sachs also now holds 96,000,000 in Fidelity's Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund, 72,000,000 in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, and around 60,000,000 in the Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF. Additionally, Goldman Sachs holds $22,500,000 worth of the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF, 3,000,000 in the arc 21 shares Bitcoin ETF, and about $4,000,000 in the grayscale Bitcoin mini trust ETF, and around 800,000 in the Wisdom Tree Bitcoin Fund.
Apart from the massive, massive Bitcoin ETF investments, Goldman Sachs also revealed a $22,000,000 bullshit gamble on this crap called ether, which is losing its ass against Bitcoin again today. It all like, it's the the ether versus Bitcoin ratio has fallen till something like 0.00 was it hold on. Let me find out where the hell is this pile of garbage at right now. I'll bring it up. It's coming up. It's coming up. Yeah. 0.03371. Ether to BTC ratio is 0.03372 now, apparently. Just to give you, like, like, that post, post election pump.
Yeah. Let's see. It got up to the ether ratio. Bitcoin ratio got up all the way back to 0.041 and then fell over the last 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 days including today. It is falling like a stone. It's falling like a stone and Goldman Sachs pumped $22,000,000 into that shit. They could have just bought Bitcoin. No. But they didn't. They didn't. Anyway, it should be noted that Goldman Sachs is a Bitcoin hater and yet they have to buy Bitcoin. Otherwise, their customers are gonna hate them. In fact, one of the world's largest investment banks, Goldman Sachs, is widely known in the cryptocurrency community for its past criticism of Bitcoin. Back in 2020, Goldman Sachs slammed Bitcoin arguing that it is not an asset class and it is not a suitable investment for the clients.
Even after Goldman Sachs launched its limited BTC derivatives trading desk back in May of 2021, some of its executives, such as Private Wealth Management chief investment officer, Sharman Musavar Rahmani, remains skeptical of crypto. She said, quote, we do not think of it as an investment class. We're not believers in crypto. And now what? We have 700 and what? 18? Was it what's the total? $710,000,000 of Bitcoin ETFs. They still couldn't stomach to take possession of the actual Bitcoin itself. No. No. No. That's not the way legacy works, and that's the way legacy is going to die. It will be the companies on the other side of all this that say, uh-uh. No. Screw this ETF shit. It's not working for us. We need the Michael Saylor magic. They're going to buy and hold Bitcoin themselves. Maybe it'll happen in Pennsylvania where Pennsylvania lawmakers want a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Ryan s Gladwin writing for Decrypt.
House representatives in Pennsylvania have put forward a bill that would see a strategic Bitcoin reserve introduced at the state level. This is not the federal level. This is the state of Pennsylvania. That's why the name of this episode is Amish Armageddon. Why? Because there's a lot of Amish in Pennsylvania. And, apparently, they want Bitcoin. This comes after noise around a potential national Bitcoin reserve was amplified following Donald Trump securing the reelection as president of the United States. The bill would allow the state treasurer to invest up to 10% of the state general fund, the state's rainy day fund, and the state investment fund all into Bitcoin.
This is a move to protect Pennsylvania's fund from inflation, the legislative memo said, which has eroded the state's purchasing power in recent years. For the general fund alone, this could see Pennsylvania purchase up to 970 $1,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. That's more than what Goldman Sachs has right now. Quote, inflation has impacted Pennsylvania's purchasing power by nearly 20% over the past 4 years, and we need solutions that can offer stability in uncertain economic times, the memo read. Quote, Bitcoin, which has appreciated significantly over the years, can help Pennsylvania keep pace with inflation and economic change, end quote.
In recent years, inflation peaked at 9.1% in June of 2022 and has since fallen to 2.4%, although we know that's bullshit, in September according to the United States inflation calculator, which is not to be believed because it's all lies. This means that dollars held by the state during this time have technically decreased in value. Over the same period, Bitcoin has climbed from 22,900 to 89,150, which is a 289% increase. For now, the bill has simply been introduced to the house with support from Pennsylvania Republicans, Republican representatives, Mike Campbell and Aaron Coffer.
For it to be enacted, the bill has to pass through 8 more stages, including reviews by the house, introduction to and reviews by the senate, and finally an executive action. The state specific Bitcoin move comes as the conversations around a national strategic bitcoin reserve have heated up following Trump's reelection. The Boosting Innovation Technology and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act, simply referred to as the Bitcoin Act, was floated by several US politicians in July and then early August, but then lost steam following Bitcoin's price plummeting. The bill, however, is supported by Trump and senator, Cynthia Lummis from Wyoming. If it was enacted in its current form, it would see the department of treasury purchase 1,000,000 BTC over a 5 year period.
This would total nearly 5% of the total supply of Bitcoin or of Bitcoin, and at its current price would cost approximately $89,000,000,000. Guys, that is a drop in a very large ocean of bullshit fiat currency. Y'all should just go for broke and just buy it all. I mean, why not? I'm I'm kidding, of course. I'm just saying, $89,000,000,000? How much money have we given just to Ukraine? 89 besides, if they were to try I mean, are they even projecting what that price would actually be if they really started buying that amount of BTC over the period of of 5 years? I doubt it. I think it'd be a hell of a lot more than $89,000,000,000. I think it would probably be closer to a 150 to $200,000,000,000 once you start signaling that you're actually buying that shit and pulling it off of the market.
Well, all of a sudden, that price goes higher. So it looks to me like they're saying that they would purchase 1,000,000 BTC at 89 mill at $89,000 per Bitcoin. And that's not what happens. That's not how this works. But even if let's give it a quarter of, a quarter of it, let's say, $250,000,000,000, that's still that's it's not at that point, it's not a drop in the bucket anymore. However, like, what's what's our national, our our yearly budget is, like, what, $6,000,000,000,000? You know, can 8 250,000,000,000 compared to $6,000,000,000,000?
Honestly, guys, this this shit could happen. This shit could happen. And if states start doing it too, I don't know if we're prepared for that mentally. I mean, Bitcoiners. Even if you're holding, like, 1 tenth of 1 Bitcoin, I'm not sure if we're actually mentally prepared for what this shit could actually look like. And I'm not gonna conjecture because last up today is long term support for mister c001guy. And this is from OpenSats. OpenSats is pleased to announce long term support for mister001guy for his continued contributions to the bit Bitcoin ecosystem.
He is the primary maintainer of the Fediment Lightning gateway. Alright. So the the gateway between Lightning and Fediment, that's an important thing. This is all about Lightning and eCash kind of playing together nicely, and mister 001 guy is well, he's the guy. But with the grant that he's getting from OpenSats, he'll be able to enhance gateway features by integrating bolt 12 support, transaction logging, profit tracking and lsp specifications, developing new modules by building federated cosigning solutions using Frost and expanding flexible custody options. Finally, it'll be able to improve usability by developing new debugging tools, refining the user interface, and optimizing federation management. Quote, my goal is to improve Fedimint's Lightning user experience and to bridge the functionality between federated e cache and the Lightning network.
I want Lightning gateways to be an easy tool for node operators to use to expand the utility of their lightning node and to provide lightning payments for their community, says mister c 001 guy. And I want to just I'm gonna end it there, but I'm not getting the show because, again, this is why I think it's important to run a Lightning node. What have you got to lose? Guys, is it really that freaking hard? Is it really so much time out of your day? You know how long it took me to, like, figure out how to run a lightning node? I pushed a button. And then over the next months and all the way up until today, I'm just continuously learning about it.
Through through actually having to figure out why did I not get a payment or why did a payment not send from my node. It's you don't have to know everything about how everything works all at once. That's in that's stupid. I'm sorry. I'm gonna say it. If you think that you need to know everything all at once, you're stupid. You're a stupid person, and you should walk off of a cliff along with the lemmings because there's no way that's practical. This is my journey to lightning node dom. I bought a Raspberry Pi 4. I bought a $100 of software from my node BTC.
I downloaded and flashed an SD chip with the information and I pushed it into the socket into my Raspberry Pi 4. I booted it up and I had a bitcoin lightning node along with a whole bunch of other stuff that the guys from my node BTC put on there. But I had to wait for the initial block download or blockchain download or the I b d or whatever the hell you wanna call it. And that took 2 days at the time. That was, like, 5, 6 years ago. And so but at the end of it, I had a raspberry pi running that I could look at through my computer because it was on my, you know, home network. It was all by itself. It wasn't on my machine. It was its own little mini board computer chilling out there in the corner.
And for months, it was nothing but a bitcoin node. And I thought I was helping the bitcoin network. And I kinda was. I mean, I still think that. Other people don't, but fuck them. I don't give a shit. Whatever they wanna say is fine by me. I think I was helping the Bitcoin network by having yet another node that was going to validate transactions and keep them into a, you know, keep them into its own private mempool that respected the consensus rules of of bitcoin. Right? Well, okay. Well, that only takes you so far. I mean, I learned how to do that because I didn't really have to learn how to do anything but be patient for the initial block download. Okay. So then I'm like okay well what's all this I'm hearing about lightning.
And lo and behold my node BTC enabled me to put on a couple of different lightning applications that would run alongside my Bitcoin full node. And you have to have a Bitcoin full node running before you can run lightning anyway. So I was already halfway there. So I I just said, okay. Well, give me ThunderHub. And ThunderHub comes up and I have no channels, but I do have a lightning wallet address. And I have a Lightning node. It was it it's running in, you know, alongside the Bitcoin full load. It was just that easy, guys. I spent $200 on a 1 terabyte drive and the, and the the software, and I was given, like, a $65 Raspberry Pi 4 at Christmas that I put it on. So for 250 let's say $250.
Got a full note. If $250 is too much for you, I'm I'm not gonna say anything bad. I understand. But if you've got if you wanna learn how to do this, if you wanna learn and not be beholden to somebody else's knowledge, $250 is not that much to spend. In fact that's why I cranked it up to like I think I spent $600 on my. Start nine server. I love it. I love all the other stuff that it does. I have a bitcoin full node and I have a lightning node which I have to have a bitcoin full node for. I've got channels because it's like, you know, while I was having my my node BTC and I cranked up the lightning node, I started asking people, would you open a channel with me so I can find out how this works? And people were, like, sure.
And then I had incoming liquidity. And then I started opening up channels to other people. It it's making a transaction. If you can make a Bitcoin transaction and you know somebody who who has agreed to say, I I would love to have a a node open or a channel open with you, I have a lightning node too. If you've got that person lined up, all you're doing is making a Bitcoin transaction. It's not it's not any different. It's not special. Where people complain about lightning is channel management. I've got, like, 15 channels. Do I every once in a while, I try to rebalance. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But you know what doesn't what doesn't stop?
A continuous inflow of satoshis from podcasting 2.0. Every time I release an episode, it's value for value enabled. And almost immediately, sat start pouring in from that from that episode. I I I didn't have to rack beat my head against a wall or rack my brain to figure out how I needed to switch channels around and and and do channel management in order to get those Satoshis. Channels around and and do channel management in order to get those satoshis. One of these days, it'll happen and I'll have to really go in there and do some surgery. But I I I'm learning how to do that now.
Guys, I've been a lightning node operator for for years. I'm not good at it. I'm not I'm not the I'm not your guy as as far as the guy who knows everything there is to know about lightning. I'm just like you. That's why I'm trying to tell you. You're gonna wanna learn how to do this. You're you don't want to depend on anybody else for another single fucking thing because every time we've done that, we end up in the shit. How do you think we got here? How do you think we're we we've got 4 food processors for meat? Because we didn't give a shit about learning how to do it ourselves or we didn't give a shit about learning why we need to keep a meat processing place happy and profitable in our county.
We just said, fuck it. We just became so apathetic that now there's 4 meat processors. Do we need to talk about pharmaceuticals? Do we need to talk about the fact that there's only really 6 non meat food companies in the United States? Like Kraft? Not even Kraft. Not even owned by Kraft. Kraft is owned by somebody else. Probably Nestle. Nestle is one of the largest food companies in the world. They don't they don't do meat. But they will sell you sugar. They will sell you, like, all manner of carbohydrate products. They will do all of that and twice on Sunday, and they won't give a shit about your pancreas.
How do you think we got here? By not caring, by saying, I've got another life. I don't have time. I'm not that smart. Of course, you're that smart. You can carve out some time. Dude, if I can do it okay. Time for me is a little bit easier to manage, but I'm not all I'm not brilliant. I'm not a mathematician. I'm not a specialist at freaking financial calculus. I got a but I got a lightning node and it works. And I've got it hooked up to my Albi hub. And now we've got Fedimint coming. Well, actually, it's already here. But this dude that I was just telling you about, this, mister c double o one guy, he's connecting Fedimint with lightning. Now we already know that this is already connected. But what does that mean? That means that pretty damn soon, I'm going to have that on my on my start 9 server running alongside my Bitcoin full node, running alongside my Lightning full node, I'm going to have Fedimint and eCash. And they're all gonna be mine. And nobody's gonna be able to tell me what I can and cannot do with them because I'm taking the time to learn how this works.
Please don't depend on me for your lightning liquidity. Don't buy don't pay 21,000 satoshis a month for liquidity on AlbiHub. Get your own lightning network node going. If you want to open up a channel with me, get in touch with me. You know, it's like I I am not one I'm not a node runner that refuses to say, well, I don't take anything under 4,000,000 satoshis. Oh, bullshit. There's nothing wrong with a 1,000,000 satoshi lightning channel. And I'd be happy to to to if you wanna open like, if you get a lightning node open, you throw some Bitcoin on there and you want to open up a 1,000,000 sat channel with me, I will open a 1,000,000 sat channel back up with you. That way, you've got outgoing liquidity of a 1,000,000 sat and you've got incoming liquidity of a 1,000,000 sat and start from there. I can always use more incoming liquidity on my lightning node.
Right? I'm not going to deny you. Right? Besides, I I mean, I guess I could immediately close the channel upon request, but I don't do that. I'm not that I'm not that kind of person. There's a lot of people that are really paranoid about that, but we're all learning here. Right? So don't think that I know more than you. If you want to learn how to do this, if you want to actually be self sovereign, I will do what I can to help you. There's other people out there too. There's entire groups of people on Amboss that are all about opening channels to each other. It's not that hard anymore. When I started, I didn't have any of that.
I didn't. I didn't have 1,000, you know, a 1,000 people in a group on the lightning network monitoring site called Amboss that I could join and ask, hey, can I get some incoming liquidity and all of a sudden 3 channels are opened up on my lightning network node? So for you, Core DeLorean, try it, please. I'm begging everybody to run their own full bitcoin node and everybody to own and run their own lightning network node because soon we're gonna be able to have those nodes running alongside a shit like Fedimin and e cash and all kinds of stuff. And you're going to want to know how that works. Do it now before you have to learn it later because you will end up having to learn it later, and it will just be a larger body of knowledge that you'll have to absorb.
I'll try to help you, but you can help yourself by doing it now. 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 10:47 AM Pacific Standard Time. It is the 15th day of November 2024.
This is episode 993 of Bitcoin, and only 7 episodes left till the big one thousand. 1,000. Gonna switch from 3 digits to 4. I can't wait. Should be exciting. But, you know, hey. It's not gonna have a party. Everybody keeps saying, what are you gonna do for the 1,000? And I'm like, man, I'm just happy that you guys are still listening to me at show 1,000. To me, that's actually gift enough, but we've got lots and lots of stuff to cover this morning. I want to get started. However, talking about Albi. Get Albi or Albi Hub or however you've you've come to know the Albi Wallet. Things have changed.
And some people are I I some people are losing their minds about it because I think they don't understand what's going on, even though I've explained it on the show before, but that doesn't mean everybody listens. Otherwise, there dude, we probably would be having a party somewhere for the 1,000th show. But I'm going to go through this again. Okay? Because some people are losing their minds and making all kinds of weird I don't know. I think they're making weird assumptions about what's actually occurring and what they are doing to mitigate this problem. But it's not a problem.
We knew what was coming down the pipe. I've told you about this on several occasions. And you everybody's had more than ample opportunity to figure out what they're going to do. Now, other people are rightly they're not pissed off. They are actually moving Alby because they from Alby as a wallet for Lightning because they have a certain lifestyle that they don't wanna interrupt. And I'm gonna get into that here, and I'm gonna use my friend, Corn DeLorean, as an example. Because he he was one of the ones that was good enough to send me the email that he got from Albie, where he screenshotted it for me so that I can read.
Because I did not get this this email. And I think I did not get this email because I'm already on Albib, which I've told you about. We're we're gonna get into this. I swear to god, I promise. Just bear with me for a second. Let's read the email that Korn Delorean got. It says, hi. We're reaching out to inform you that the Alby shared wallet service now keep that in mind, not Alby, but Albi's shared wallet service will be discontinued on January 4th 2025. To continue enjoying permissionless and inexpensive payments, it's time to transition to your your own Albie Hub.
Find all the details here and here, of course, is a link. Please note that new limits on the shared wallet service will take effect on November 22, 2024. Move to Albi Hub and enjoy a self custodial wallet without any payment limits. You can have access to all of Albi's services, including your Lightning address. You get priority support for Albi cloud users. There's exclusive access to AlbiGo, our new mobile app. Even more direct app connections. One place for all your Bitcoin payments. Take control of your bitcoin. Your hub is waiting in your Albie account. Join a personal onboarding session to get all of your questions answered. Best regards, your Albie team.
Okay. So now that was that was the email that Korn Delorean opened this morning. Here's what his response was. He says, I just got Albie's email this is on Noster, by the way. Just got Albie's email about officially ending their custodial wallet service in January. End of an era. Can't really justify the cost of AlbiHub or running fully self custodial just for Zaps, though. Okay. So if you're confused, I'm gonna try to level this out. Now I'm going to have to make the assumption that everybody that's listening to me at least knows what Alby is and was.
But probably, I'm going to make the assumption that you don't know what it's become or going to become. Alright. So it's lightning wallet. It's a browser extension that I've been using in my Brave Browser for years now, honestly. It allows me to sign in to any Nostr client with my n pub and insect because it manages my keys. It's given me a lightning wallet and a lightning address so that people could give me zaps. And a few months ago, I started getting messages from Alby that they were saying, hey. Hey. Hey. Our custodial.
Where their custodial wallet service, their lightning wallet service that is custodial is going to have to go away for various reasons. Now I think it's because nobody at at the on the Albie team wants to get in trouble with the United States justice department because them doing business with me is the toxic United States citizen that I am, and I talked about that shit at length yesterday, that maybe that scares them a little bit. And, honestly, I can't blame them. Nobody wants to do business with American citizens when it comes to financial stuff because people have a tendency to get their homes raided, get thrown in jail. So it makes sense for them to say, we're not going to custody your sats any longer.
But they gave us Albie Hub, h u b, Albie Hub, the Albie Hub. What is it? Well, it's a it's a self custodial version of exactly the same service that they've been offering for the last couple of years which is a great set of services. I love Albie. I am I am a huge fan. I'm a big user. I've been a long term user and there's a reason why. I don't use shit services. I don't talk about crap services. Albie's not a sponsor of the show, by the way. So please understand that. I'm doing this out of my own volition to make sure that we set the record straight for some people. The self custodial service comes in 2 flavors.
1, you can rent for satoshis a lightning channel. You can do that through the Albi hub. Right? That's only if you do not host your own lightning node. That's the other flavor, and that's the flavor that I'm using. Alright. So I have a lightning node and several channels open, both incoming liquidity of satoshis and outgoing liquidity of satoshis on my start 9 server pure or server 1. I can't remember which one I've got. It doesn't really matter. I've got a full blown lightning node and let therefore lightning address. I've got everything that I need that I can do self custodial self custodially here at my house.
I can access my node, my Lightning wallet, my Lightning node, everything about my Lightning experience I can access from anywhere in the world on my phone. AlbyHub can connect directly to my lightning node. And therefore, my lightning wallet that is part of the lightning node that you when you spin up a lightning node, there is a lightning wallet associated with it. AlbieHub, you simply are authorizing it to have access to that lightning wallet that's on your lightning node. And then your entire lightning node and all of its channel liquidity becomes your self custodial AlbieHub self hosted Lightning Wallet.
That's the second flavor. Let's go back to the first flavor. And this is where people they didn't lose their mind, but they but some people got a shock to the system. Now I don't know if it's because they weren't listening to what Albie had been saying over the last 6 months, but I'm going to assume that they just didn't get the message because the message that they did get was a 20 or at least one person got a 21,000 satoshi charge that drained some that drained that directly from their wallet to pay for the Albi Hub service because they were not using their own lightning node. They were renting a channel or something.
If it because I did not get char I have never been charged by Albi for anything for anything, which is amazing considering the amount of services that they offer me. Right? So the least I can do is give back just a little bit by by making sure that people understand what's going on. So those people are kind of freaking out, and I honestly can't blame them. 21,000 satoshis just waking up to that is kind of like a punch in the gut. I get it. So the only way that you can escape those charges is by using your own lightning node. And this brings me to a point.
I've stopped I kinda stopped talking about it, so it's sort of maybe it's my you know, I'll take a little bit of the blame here. But the importance of running your own bitcoin full node and your own lightning node is it's important to do. I understand that many people don't want to learn how to do that. And Korndelorian is one of those people. And I understand what Korndelorian is saying here. In fact, let me go and, get down here. Let's see where he's wait. Wait. Hold on. Well, I had it. I had it somewhere in here. Yeah. Let's see. Well, he didn't say okay. He didn't say anything other than the fact that he was basically trying coin OS, which is another lightning wallet or something like that. I can't remember exactly. Yes. He he's got this little note or on his note in Nostril, he's got a picture of, like, it's a meme and it says, paying 21,000 sats per month for AlbieHub or switching to CoinOS.
And it shows a whole bunch of Nostra users, like the little stick figures, cramming through the switching to CoinOS. For for Korn, I understand because he's made it clear that he doesn't wanna learn how to run a lightning node. And even if he already knows, because it's not that hard, he doesn't wanna manage the channels. He doesn't wanna go out and find channel partners. He's like, dude, I got a whole life. That one, I get. I I understand that. But there are many people who have the capacity and the time and even have a smidgen of desire to not only learn how Lightning Network works and how to do even basic channel management. I don't even do all that much channel management. And just I've got, like, 10 or 15 channels and it just they just they just work.
Right? I don't have to fiddle around with it. But I did have to go find channel partners. That did take time. But because I went through that time, I don't have to pay the 21,000 satoshis per month to be able to zap people on Noster. And I get all of the other benefits that Albie Hub gives me, like giving my wife her own Albie wallet. And it took me exactly one minute using my own Albie Hub. And now her lightning wallet on her phone, which is powered by Albi Go, which is a the simplest lightning wallet that's mobile that I've ever seen in my life, it's got 2 buttons. And it shows it gives you a receive button to get satoshis and a send button to pay invoices, and it shows you what your balance is. That's it. But her entire experience, her entire wallet is sitting on my start 9 with the Albi Hub because I use their friends and family app on Albi Hub which is serve which is a service running on my start 9.
And I just said I want to set up a wallet. And it said, sure. What's the name of the wallet? I was like, my wife's name wallet. And then it's like, sure. Here's a QR code. Go get her phone. Spin up Albie Albie Go on her phone and connect the wallet. Boom. It was done. And then I sent her a 1,000 sats just to so that she can play around with it. Took less than a minute. And I'm my lightning node is her wallet, except she only sees her balance. She doesn't see the balance of the entire node. She can only send the sats that are authorized in her wallet that I set up for her earlier today. She can't just spend the she doesn't even know what the entire balance of my lightning note is. And even if she did, she can't spend anything other than the 1,000 sats that are authorized on her phone. And if somebody else sends her sats, then I don't get to spend her sats and she can spend whatever sats that that she gets by herself and she can send whatever sats that she has in her balance. And her balance is completely and wholly separate from my balance on my lightning node even though it's my own Lightning node that's powering her wallet. And I'm not paying for that as a service.
I could charge her, but she's not that interested. Okay? So I'm not gonna be doing that. And then I'm gonna be setting up my kids after they get home from school today with their own lightning wallets that are based on AlbiHub. So what I'm getting at here in a very long, long winded way is that instead of just saying, oh my god. Everybody's bailing out of Albie, I want you to say, take a breath, sit back, relax for a few minutes, and just say, exactly what is going on here? Now if I've explained it and if you missed something, then go back and listen to what I've said again. There's no reason to run away from Albie just because they are taking their self custody wallet away.
They don't wanna get in trouble. That's my that's my estimation. I know inside baseball. But if I were them, I wouldn't wanna service United States citizens at all because I don't wanna end up with a home raid by the Department of Justice in whatever country that they happen to be in, which I think is several different countries in either event. Albie is not broken. Albie is not going away. You do have to adjust the what what it is that you want. If all you want to do is zap and you don't want to run a Lightning node, I understand that. But I honestly think this is a very good time to be able to learn For very very cheaply how to run a lightning network node.
I mean, okay, start 9 may be more expensive than you want to pay for. Do you have an old laptop hanging around? You can put the start OS which is the operating system for the start 9. You can put it on an old laptop. Do you have a raspberry pi hanging out? You can get myNodebtc and start a full a bitcoin full node and then run start running a lightning node after you download done the initial download of the main chain. Right? This these are good things for us to know. Otherwise, people like me who know how to do this are going to charge people like you who refuse to actually do it. And if you're one of the people out there that will do it or already does it, then skip what I'm saying. But if you aren't the person that wants to learn how to do it, then you are going to be depending on me to do it for you and I'm going to charge you to do that.
Self cuss self custody means work. Decentralization means that as individuals, we need to take ownership of everything that is Bitcoin, everything that is Lightning, and soon to be everything that is eCash. We're going to have to put in the work if we don't want people like Gary fucking Gensler to do the work for us or people like him or people in his circle. Please understand that. Albie's not going away. It's not. Okay. So that's it for that's it for Albie. Let's get into the rest of the news. 18 United States states are suing the SEC over the unconstitutional overreach on digital assets according to Fox Business.
Eleanor Tarrant or Tarrant is writing it on Thursday afternoon, this was yesterday, by the way, just yesterday yesterday afternoon, 18 states filed to sue the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it's 5 commissioners by name, by the way, accusing them of unconstitutional overreach and unfair persecution of the $3,000,000,000,000 cryptocurrency industry under the leadership of agency chief Gary Gensler, Led by Kentucky attorney general Russell Coleman, the lawsuit was jointly filed in a Kentucky district court in partnership with 17 other attorney generals from Nebraska, Tennessee, West Virginia, Iowa, Texas, Mississippi, Montana, Arkansas, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, or Missouri, Indiana, Utah, Louisiana, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Florida.
That's a lot of states. This is like this is almost like a state level class action lawsuit against a federal agency. I've never seen this occur, ladies and gentlemen. I've never seen this happen. Whether it's cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, suing the EPA, I've never seen 18 attorney generals get together in a room and say, fuck them. We're gonna sue them at the federal level. I've never seen it before. If you've seen it before, please send me a boostagram or get in touch with me on Noster and tell me when that shit occurred because as far as I know, this sets precedent. Anyway, continuing, the complaint was filed in collaboration with crypto advocacy group DeFi Education Fund, which advocates for sound policy in the decentralized finance space. Notably, the lawsuit alleges that the agency's industry wide crackdown on US crypto companies is unconstitutional because it violates fundamental principles of federalism, which ensure that government agencies operate within their constitutionally defined roles.
Gensler, in his capacity as chair, has said that the majority of cryptocurrencies aside from Bitcoin and Ether are securities and therefore fall under the SEC's purview. His position, which the states argue is a broad interpretation of securities laws, has resulted in the agency's enforcement division bringing a myriad of lawsuits against major industry players like exchanges, Coinbase and Kraken, blockchain payments firm Ripple, and software tech company Consensus, among other many others, in fact, for allegedly violating securities law by selling unregistered securities on their platforms. This assertion by Gensler has been met with fervent pushback from the industry, its legal advocates, including the 18 state attorney generals, as well as many members of congress who believe he's extending the agency's reach far beyond the bounds congress intended.
Given the lack of clear rules and an ordained regulating body, crypto participants have been operating in what the AEGs or the attorney generals describe as regulatory limbo. The SEC, of course, did not respond to come or for a comment. But Gensler defended his actions against the industry during a speech at the Practicing Law Institute's 56th Annual Institute on Securities Regulation Conference on Thursday. Quote, court after court has agreed with our actions to protect investors and rejected all arguments that the Securities and Exchange Commission cannot enforce the law when securities are being offered, whatever their form, end quote.
The lawsuit further alleges, however, that by imposing penalties and restrictions on digital asset platforms without a proper regulatory framework, the SEC's actions have introduced significant risks to one of America's fastest growing economic sectors and infringed on states' rights to regulate their own economies. The AEGs noted that congress intentionally refrained from granting broad regulatory authority over digital assets to federal agencies like the SEC, instead allowing states to lead on the issue. But the SEC has ignored this allocation of power. Quote, at the bottom, the SEC's regulatory overreach defies basic principles of federalism and separation of powers.
The SEC's assertion of sweeping jurisdiction without congressional authorization deprives states of their proper sovereign role and chills the development of innovative regulatory frameworks for the digital asset industry, according to the filing states. Quote, still worse, by attempting to shoehorn digital assets into ill fitting federal securities laws and inapt disclosure regimes, excuse me, the SEC is harming the very citizens it purports to protect by displacing better suited state laws that have been carefully designed to ensure consumer protection in the digital asset industry. The SEC's actions, the attorney general's claim, amount to a full scale assault on the United States crypto industry. It is unfortunate that it came to this point, but I'm glad to see states, including Tennessee, taking a stand against Gary Gensler's anti crypto agenda, according to what was said by Republican Tennessee senator Bill Hagerty.
The agency's perceived unfair treatment of the crypto sector sparked nationwide industry campaigns to make its demands for fair treatment heard in the presidential election. Its wish was granted when now president-elect Donald Trump embraced the millions of unsatisfied crypto voters looking for a champion, vowing to prop up the industry and end what he called the Biden administration's war on crypto. Trump received over 20,000,000 in industry donations whilst on the campaign trail. Okay. That's pretty much all we need to know about what's going on here. So 18 states. 18. Not 8.
You know, not 4, not a couple, not 1, but 18. That is quite the chunk of 50 states of the of the United States. That's that is nothing to sneeze at. They're all suing the SEC and, by name, each one of its 5 commissioners. I mean, they're going after everything. And it's amazing because why? Why would I think that it's why would I think that this is amazing? Well, because this is a 10th amendment issue, and the states are tired of having the 10th amendment basically snubbed. What is the 10th amendment of the United States constitution specifically inside the bill of rights? It's the last amendment of the bill of rights. The first ten amendments of the United States constitution was noted, notably called and named, quite rightly, I think, the bill of rights. And here's what the bill of rights did.
The constitution was written, and people were reading it, especially the founding fathers, the people that were going to sign their names to the constitution, which basically built the United States. It's the it's the document that instantiates the United States of America. It builds the executive branch. It builds the judicial branch. It builds the legislative branch. It basically lays down all the groundwork, the architecture behind the government and the structure of the United States. Not just the government, but how the states are, how they interact. What can the government do, what can the government not do, all these kinds of things. And a whole bunch of people said, you know what? We're not signing this.
And by them signing it, they had to have enough signatures of enough people in the colonies at the time to ratify. This the word is ratify the constitution, which basically means they've got enough of a quorum and enough people have signed their name to agree to this document that this is going to become the law of the land. And most of them said, what? Most of them said, fuck you. That's right. For those of you who'd thought that a whole bunch of founding fathers read the constitution of the United States and just thought it was the bee's knees and they were gonna immediately sign their name to it. No. No. No. No. They didn't. They were like, where's our rights?
What? Yeah. Dude, where's our rights? What rights? Oh, do you need a list? Here. We'll we'll list them out for you. And they did. And they wrote 10 amendments that had to go into the document that was the constitution of the United States, and that was named the bill of rights. 1 through 10, the first amendment guaranteed our right to free speech, or rather, guaranteed that our god given right to free speech shall not be infringed by the federal government. The assumption is we already got these rights on all of these that are in the bill of rights. Not that they're given to us, that we already have them, and the bill of rights describes how the federal government cannot infringe upon any one of these rights.
The second is the right to bear arms. It didn't give us the right to bear arms. It basically tells the federal government, you have no authority over a US citizen's right to bear arms. You cannot take them away. You cannot confiscate them. You cannot tell them anything about it at all, and the federal government is already in violation of that right. The third, you can't quarter troops in my house. You can't send cops to my house, say, hey. We gotta sleep here tonight. Fuck you. That's not going to happen. I'm not going to feed you. I'm not gonna give you beds. Screw off. You can go sleep out in the rain for all I give a shit. That's the third one. Right? The 4th one, you can't just take my papers and personal information from me. That's been violated so many times since the instantiation of the war on drugs in the eighties. I can't even speak that we even have that right anymore. But then we get to the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and then we end up at the 10th amendment.
And this is why Roe v Wade failed. And by for all those people that are really pissed about that, the champion of women's bodily autonomy, justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said on multiple occasions that Roe v Wade was unconstitutional the way that case happened. The things written in that case, the opinions given in the case, the outcome of that case, that everything about that case was unconstitutional, not because she hated women and not because she didn't think that women should have rights over their bodily autonomy. No. No. No. No. She was one of the staunchest advocates of women's rights that you would ever find.
And she hated Roe v Wade because it violated the 10th Amendment, and that's why it was unconstitutional. So what does the 10th Amendment say? Basically, the 10th Amendment says this. If if it is not expressly instantiated in the verbiage of the body of the Constitution of the United States, then it is a state's rights issue. That's what Ruth Bader Ginsburg was saying about Roe v Wade. There's nothing expressly in the constitution that says you can have an abortion or you cannot have an abortion because it's not expressly written down in the body of the constitution, then it becomes the right of Oklahoma to make the decision on something like abortion.
It becomes the right of Texas. It becomes the right of California and Oregon and Washington, New York State, New Jersey. Each one of those individual states has the say so. So what this lawsuit is saying is that Gary Gensler's overreach was so broad that it violates the 10th amendment of the constitution of the United States, and most of what he's been able to do should have actually been decisions made at the state level by each one of the individual states. So now that Gary Gensler and his entire SEC and all of his chiefs are being sued, what is Gary Gensler's response?
Well, his resignation may be imminent because the SEC chair says that he's been proud to serve. From decrypt, Will McCurdy, writing, Securities and Exchange Commissioner sorry, securities and exchange commission chair, Gary Gensler, said that he was proud to serve at the agency during a speech amid widespread speculation about his potential resignation, quote, I have been proud to serve with my colleagues at the SEC who, day in and day out, work to protect American families on the highways of finance. He said at the 56th Annual Institute on Securities Regulation yesterday at the Practicing Law Institute in New York. To be clear, Gensler has not officially announced his resignation at the time of writing. However, Gensler's use of the past tense regarding his job comes after president-elect Donald Trump promised to fire Gary Gensler on day 1 at a Nashville Bitcoin conference in July.
Marcus Thelen, CEO of crypto research firm 10x Research, told Decrypt earlier this year that the SEC chairs have historically resigned following the election of a new administration, such as at the start of the Obama and Biden administrations. So that's all we need to know about that. He's making he's talking about his job in the past tense. It's also the situation that we just learned that historically, the chair of the SEC voluntarily resigns his position or her position, whatever, upon the election of a new president. And this happens a lot. There's a lot of resignations that happen, and most of them happen not in, like, oh, I'm so mad. He's not my president. It's not that. It's it's it's sort of tradition.
It paves the way for the new administration to be able to not have to fight so that they, the new administration, can do what the new administration wants to have done. And if people a whole bunch of people are refusing to, you know, step down out of their positions, that becomes a little bit hard. But it's not always the case that everybody in every position automatically resigns. So what happens with the secretary of health and department of human services for the United States? Well, president-elect Trump has nominated Robert f Kennedy junior for the United States secretary of health.
That was postulated, and now it looks like it's actually happened. James Hunt from The Block tells us more. Crypto friendly ex democrat Robert Kennedy junior has been nominated for secretary of health and human services by president-elect Trump. He has been a prominent advocate for cryptocurrency, particularly bitcoin. And during his 2024 presidential campaign, he proposed establishing a Bitcoin strategic reserve to stabilize the US dollar and exempt Bitcoin profits from capital gains tax. RFK also disclosed that a significant portion portion of his personal wealth was invested in Bitcoin and pushed for a light touch regulatory environment for crypto in the US.
However, none none of this has anything to do with the fact that he might head up Department of Health and Human Services, but let's let's forget about that for a second. Quote, I am thrilled to announce Robert f Kennedy junior as the United States secretary of Health and Human Services, Trump wrote in a statement late Thursday, quote, for too long, Americans have been crushed by, get this, crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to public health, end quote. Wow. Industrial food complex.
We've been talking about this in regenerative agriculture for a decade. And it's becoming the the horns have been blowing nothing but louder and louder and louder and louder about what's being done to our food. Remember Texas Slim, the beef initiative? That was like, what, 4 years ago? 3 years ago that he did his, his initial inaugural paper and then did a whole bunch of podcast interviews? He was talking about the same thing. We got 4 people that cut meat in the United States. Four companies. We used to have a meat processor in every county, in every state of the United States except those that were so depopulated, it just didn't make any sense.
But most counties have their own meat processing services. Not anymore. Not unless you're JBS or Tyson or got one of them sweet, sweet federal contracts. You know? It's it's we've been talking about this forever, and now the language is actually set in the announcement that Trump wrote that Kennedy might be the department he that that's his nominee. I mean, as to whether or not he gets he gets confirmed by the senate and the house or whatever, that's another story. But he is now the president elect's choice to head up Department of Health and Human Services. That's huge.
We thought that that was gonna happen, and we all wanted that to happen. If if this was going to occur, if Trump is gonna get, you know, get in, we were all thinking that Kennedy would be the perfect guy for Health and Human Services, and that looks like exactly where he's going to go. I'm honestly amazed. But he's not done, and I'm talking about orange man. Trump has named the former SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Jay Clayton, to the Department of Justice office. That's the exact same office that prosecuted SBF. We're talking about the Southern District of New York, guys.
Nicholas Day for CoinDesk. President-elect Donald Trump said former sec Securities and Exchange Commission chair Jay Clayton would be his US attorney for the southern district of New York heading up the state's department of justice branch. Clayton, who has advised a number of crypto firms since leaving the SEC in December of 2020, oversaw the production of the SEC's DAO report, which claimed jurisdiction over a broad swath of the crypto industry and famously once said he believed most initial coin offerings were securities, a view later echoed by his successor, the current chair of the SEC, Gary Gensler.
Hey. The old boss, same as the new boss. One of Clayton's final actions at the SEC was to sign off on the lawsuit against Ripple Labs. The case is currently winding its way through federal appellate court system after a judge ruled last year that the company had not violated federal securities law in making XRP available to retail traders through exchanges. Yes. Because that judge was bought off. That's my only explanation because I'm sorry. Now here's where I disagree with a lot pretty much most of the crypto industry. In fact, I disagree with 99.9999% of all crypto because it's all securities.
Do I think Gary Gensler overstepped his bounds? Yeah. Most likely. You don't get 18 states attorney generals in a room together agreeing with each other that, yeah, this motherfucker overstepped his bounds without there probably being a situation where Gary Gensler actually did overstep his boundaries. Be that as it may, I believe that even Ethereum is a security. And all the rest of the shit coins, they're all securities. They all pass the Howey test. Why? Because it's the it's the investment of capital with the expectation of profit through the machinations of a third party.
I'm sorry. That's all crypto except Bitcoin. It just is. And, I'm sure somebody's out there go, well, that's why you're not an attorney general. That's not why you're not at the DOJ. No, dude. I ain't got time to waste on trying to get up there. I I know when I see a pink pig. I see a pig. It's the color pink. It's a pink pig. It's not that hard. This is not rocket science. Everybody every economist has made you feel that you're too stupid to make these decisions about what is and what is not a security because it's in their best interest for them to remain in power.
So they make us all try to feel that that we're just dumb as rocks, like we're freaking cavemen that can barely start a fire with a couple of rocks. Right? I mean, it's just it's it's amazing that we have bought in and allowed ourselves to think that we're just never qualified to do anything, and that's bullshit. We need to change that attitude all the way down to, yes, you can run your own lightning node. Guys, it's not that hard. It's not hard at all. It's just not. It's not hard to look at Ripple and go, how is this not a security? Now if the question becomes, why is a security bad?
That is, in fact, another question. But go figure out why it's named the Howey test, h o w e y. He was a Citrus Grove owner in Florida. Look what he did with his security. That's where this test came from. Is it an investment of capital into a situation that purchases shares with the expectation of a profit through the machinations of a third party. If all those answers are yes, congratulations. You've passed the Howie test, and you're a security. Howie ripped off everybody that bought a security from him. That's why this shit went to court. He He was a fucking scammer. His citrus grove was about to go under.
He this was a the how we test came out of a hail Mary that how we made. And guess what? How we basically got to keep a lot of money and be very, very rich until the day he died and the Howie trial was still going on after he died. I'm just saying, look, man, securities are nothing to be, like, you know, playing around with. Just because somebody offers a security doesn't mean that it's above board. Right? There are many things that Gensler Gensler said and did that I actually agree with. I I am agreeing with Jay Clayton here. All of these things are securities except for Bitcoin. It's all bullshit.
So I'm not all that upset that Jay Clayton, who is very much exactly like Gary Gensler, is going to be part of the southern district of New York. He's going to be doing the exact same thing that the SDNY already does. And they've done some stupid shit, and I expect Jay to do some more stupid shit. But as long as they keep the pressure on the shit coins to make them understand that they are selling unregulated securities, that that's the only way to keep this shit under control. If that were to go to away, go away, the scambrian explosion that we saw in 2017 would look like child's play.
Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities. They got oil is down 2 a quarter percent for West Texas Intermediate. It's sitting at $67.17 a barrel. Brenton, North Sea is down 2 points to 7114. Natural gas, going the opposite way as it always does, 1 and a half percent to the upside. Gasoline itself is down 1 and a half percent, back down to 2 doll or sorry, 2. $1.95 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks are mixed today. Gold down a tenth of a point to 25.70.20. Silver is down a half point. Platinum is up, but only by point 13%. Copper is down half. Palladium is up almost 2 full points.
Biggest loser in ag today is lumber. 3.39% to the downside, but everything else is in the green. So the biggest winner today is coffee. No. I take that back. It's rough rice. 2 and a third points to the upside. Live cattle moving sideways. Lean hogs down 1.1%, but feeder cattle are up a whopping 1.5%. The Dow is down 0.86% at this time as is the S and P 500, but it's only oh, wait a minute. No. It's actually down way more. Almost wow. 1 and a half points. Nasdaq is down. Wow. Holy shit. 2.7%, and the S and P Mini is down 1 and a third. What's going on with Bitcoin? It's been struggling today, kinda bouncing around, chilling out right now at 89,740.
That is just under a $1,800,000,000,000 market cap. We can only buy 35 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19,000,000,782,442.99 of. And fees have skyrocketed. Oh my god. It's awful. A quarter of a bitcoin. Actually, 0.27 bitcoin in fees on average on a per block basis. And there are, right now, 105 blocks carrying 280,000 unconfirmed transactions going for a high priority cost of 32 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 25. Earlier, I saw triple digit satoshis per vbyte, but not right now. So mining is at 711.8 exahashes per second.
I'm good with that. I really am. So value for value. It's that time again that I ask for you to smash that donation button. How do you do it? Use podcasting 2.0 enabled applications on your phone. It's that easy. Plus, you get chapters and transcripts. You get all kinds of cool stuff with podcasting 2.0. But the best thing about podcasting 2.0, No deplatforming for me. An increasing number of people are getting deplatformed from all kinds of services, whether you're booted off of YouTube, banned from Twitter, kicked from PayPal, or removed from the swift network like Russia.
The result is always the same. Someone in power doesn't want you to do a certain thing, which is why your access to said thing is being denied. Value for value is an idea that builds upon protocols, not platforms. It is an idea that connects people directly in ways that cannot be shut down. They cannot be censored. They cannot be stopped. Open protocols and open standards allow for a flourishing ecosystem of competing service providers in addition to giving you the option to do everything yourself. And if one of those things you want to do is listen to this podcast, this RSS feed is never going away.
And you can donate through Boostagrams or Streaming Satoshis directly to this show using podcasting 2.0 apps. Like, Fountain is my daily driver. I've also been using what, pod was it PodHome? I can't remember what my other daily what my other driver is on my phone. I don't use it as often as Fountain. But there's, like, 5 that allow you to to send me satoshis, send me notes with those satoshis. You can send me satoshis and just stream them, like, 10 satoshis per minute, a 100 satoshis per minute, 10,000 satoshis per minute if you want to. And no one can stop you and no one can stop me from getting them. And when I do get them, I get them directly into the node that I just opened a wallet for my wife on for the albie hub.
And I'm in complete possession. It's completely self custodial. Nobody tells you whether or not you can support this show, and nobody tells me whether or not I can take your Satoshis or not. What if you're an enemy of the state and you send me money? Well, in the old world, I would have to if I knew that you were an enemy of the state, I'd have to say no and and report you. I can't even do that. I have no idea who the hell is sending me satoshis unless you send me a boostagram. You know, that one I know. But if you're streaming me Satoshis, I have no idea who the hell's giving them to me. State department gives me a phone call and says, mister Bennett, we need to know. Every person that's ever sent you a satoshi, go fish. Here's a copy of the log file for my, you know, my lightning node.
Have fun finding nothing there. That's the way this shit works. And I'm appreciative of everybody that sends me Satoshis, like glimmering with 2,000 satoshi says, greetings from Europe, David. It is true. Bad people rule us, but shine a light on them and they scatter like rats. Foamotronic with the 1,001 sat says nothing. Pies to plug with 420 says, fuck anyone who's offended by this podcast. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. God's death with 537 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Pies to plug with another 420 with cheers and another emoji that I can't read because I have prehistoric operating system. The bird with 500 says, g m. Well, good morning to you too, sir. User 115-568-42 with 500 says, love the tinfoil hat section. The very end of your stinking onion podcast talks about a bitcoin backed financial product.
Did you see the Saylor video about the earnings call for MicroStrategy? Epic description of Sailor's vision for the company and sounds like what you were looking for in the TradFi of the future. Cheers. Cheers to your right back, sir. No. I haven't seen that video. I will look for it. Wartime 333 says stinky because, you know, that's pretty much the name of the episode. Alright. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. And speaking of Michael Saylor, we've got this one out of Bitcoin Magazine written by Vivek Sin. MicroStrategy's Bitcoin strategy won't work as well for other companies. Let's find out why. Look.
I'm not an expert in public markets, but raising money to buy more Bitcoin seems to be the obvious new alpha for public companies. MicroStrategy pioneered this strategy. And now 4 years later, it's the most compelling and successful story in corporate finance. MicroStrategy has been the best performing stock in the last 4 years, beating every United States company, including NVIDIA. That's crazy. Right? All thanks to Bitcoin. I'm sure the CFOs of most public companies are now looking at MicroStrategy and analyzing how they turned a $1,000,000,000 company into a $70,000,000,000 company in just 4 years. And they are thinking about how they can do the same. Well, here's the playbook.
Use profits, equity, and debt to buy more Bitcoin and then tell the world about it loudly. But let's be real. MicroStrategy's bitcoin playbook won't pump stock prices forever, at least not for the other public companies. The arbitrage opportunity is closing rapidly as more firms adopt similar strategies. MicroStrategy enjoys the 1st mover advantage and guru status with Michael Saylor. New corporate BTC buyers lack that credibility and the cult following with bit with bitcoiners. The impact diminishes with each new adopter. Bitcoin's growth is slowing, too.
What? No. Doing a 5 x annually gets harder as the marginalized rising competition for a somewhat fixed BTC supply spells diminishing relative returns. I'm not sure if I actually agree with that. We we got a lot of runway here. But whatever. Let's also remember. Today's investors can get bitcoin exposure easier than when MicroStrategy started. ETFs and funds reduce the impact of new companies holding BTC directly. Now all this means the MicroStrategy playbook is closing fast for public companies. Firms considering it must act quickly to maximize gains before the strategy gets overplayed. To be clear, I'm incredibly bullish on corporations adopting BTC treasury reserves. It's just that early movers will benefit the most.
The impact will wane over time for new adopters. And, of course, regardless of time, companies will continue to benefit from adopting this strategy as the Bitcoin price continues to increase forever, Laura. Forever. It's going up forever, Laura. I I've got, you know, I've got my I've got some peccadillos with this particular particular take, but he's not wrong in the longer term. The playbook is only going to be valid for so long. What now now that brings up a really good question. Well, if this playbook doesn't work after a while, what will?
I don't know other than buy Bitcoin and hold Bitcoin. In fact, that that very well may be it. We may see a reinstantiation of the MicroStrategy playbook after the ETF kind of plays itself out. And what I mean by that is, like, you know, micro like what Vivek was saying. A whole bit you know, MicroStrategy started and some other companies followed suit. They had first mover advantage of buying and holding Bitcoin directly. Now we're gonna see a whole bunch of companies that go, okay. We can do the same thing. We're gonna buy the ETF. No. No. No. Not the same thing. It's not the same thing. It's not the same thing. It's not the same thing. It will not be interpreted as the same thing. It can't be by the very virtue that where that shit's going to go when you report your earnings and your balance sheets and all that kind of shit over to the SEC is going to go in a different column. It's going to be a different asset.
The only way to do that is to actually buy the actual Bitcoin itself. And that's when I think the reinstantiation. There's gonna be a whole bunch of companies that get bogged down in buying ETFs and thinking that they're gonna have the same play that MicroStrategy did and they're not. It'll be the companies on the other side that go, yeah. That didn't work so well. How about this? We buy Bitcoin and we hold Bitcoin. And that's probably going to be what happens when people see how Goldman Sachs has been doing. Because Goldman Sachs isn't holding Bitcoin.
No. No. No. No. No. What Goldman Sachs is doing is they're buying Bitcoin ETFs. $710,000,000 worth of Bitcoin ETFs according to the last SEC filing. Helen Parks, Cointelegraph, Goldman Sachs, a major global investment bank, once critical of Bitcoin, has disclosed significant holdings in Bitcoin exchange traded funds. In a November 14th filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Goldman Sachs reported about $718,000,000 in holdings and 8, count them, 8 bitcoin ETFs. The report disclosed a $461,000,000 investment in BlackRock Spot Bitcoin ETF.
The bank's latest quarterly holdings report revealed that it added $300,000,000 to its Bitcoin ETF portfolio since the Q2, which is a 71% increase. Goldman Sachs entered the spot Bitcoin ETF market in the second quarter, disclosing its 1st BTC ETF purchase in August. And that one was worth $418,000,000 Apart from the $461,000,000 investment in BlackRock's Ibit, Goldman Sachs also now holds 96,000,000 in Fidelity's Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund, 72,000,000 in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, and around 60,000,000 in the Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF. Additionally, Goldman Sachs holds $22,500,000 worth of the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF, 3,000,000 in the arc 21 shares Bitcoin ETF, and about $4,000,000 in the grayscale Bitcoin mini trust ETF, and around 800,000 in the Wisdom Tree Bitcoin Fund.
Apart from the massive, massive Bitcoin ETF investments, Goldman Sachs also revealed a $22,000,000 bullshit gamble on this crap called ether, which is losing its ass against Bitcoin again today. It all like, it's the the ether versus Bitcoin ratio has fallen till something like 0.00 was it hold on. Let me find out where the hell is this pile of garbage at right now. I'll bring it up. It's coming up. It's coming up. Yeah. 0.03371. Ether to BTC ratio is 0.03372 now, apparently. Just to give you, like, like, that post, post election pump.
Yeah. Let's see. It got up to the ether ratio. Bitcoin ratio got up all the way back to 0.041 and then fell over the last 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 days including today. It is falling like a stone. It's falling like a stone and Goldman Sachs pumped $22,000,000 into that shit. They could have just bought Bitcoin. No. But they didn't. They didn't. Anyway, it should be noted that Goldman Sachs is a Bitcoin hater and yet they have to buy Bitcoin. Otherwise, their customers are gonna hate them. In fact, one of the world's largest investment banks, Goldman Sachs, is widely known in the cryptocurrency community for its past criticism of Bitcoin. Back in 2020, Goldman Sachs slammed Bitcoin arguing that it is not an asset class and it is not a suitable investment for the clients.
Even after Goldman Sachs launched its limited BTC derivatives trading desk back in May of 2021, some of its executives, such as Private Wealth Management chief investment officer, Sharman Musavar Rahmani, remains skeptical of crypto. She said, quote, we do not think of it as an investment class. We're not believers in crypto. And now what? We have 700 and what? 18? Was it what's the total? $710,000,000 of Bitcoin ETFs. They still couldn't stomach to take possession of the actual Bitcoin itself. No. No. No. That's not the way legacy works, and that's the way legacy is going to die. It will be the companies on the other side of all this that say, uh-uh. No. Screw this ETF shit. It's not working for us. We need the Michael Saylor magic. They're going to buy and hold Bitcoin themselves. Maybe it'll happen in Pennsylvania where Pennsylvania lawmakers want a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Ryan s Gladwin writing for Decrypt.
House representatives in Pennsylvania have put forward a bill that would see a strategic Bitcoin reserve introduced at the state level. This is not the federal level. This is the state of Pennsylvania. That's why the name of this episode is Amish Armageddon. Why? Because there's a lot of Amish in Pennsylvania. And, apparently, they want Bitcoin. This comes after noise around a potential national Bitcoin reserve was amplified following Donald Trump securing the reelection as president of the United States. The bill would allow the state treasurer to invest up to 10% of the state general fund, the state's rainy day fund, and the state investment fund all into Bitcoin.
This is a move to protect Pennsylvania's fund from inflation, the legislative memo said, which has eroded the state's purchasing power in recent years. For the general fund alone, this could see Pennsylvania purchase up to 970 $1,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. That's more than what Goldman Sachs has right now. Quote, inflation has impacted Pennsylvania's purchasing power by nearly 20% over the past 4 years, and we need solutions that can offer stability in uncertain economic times, the memo read. Quote, Bitcoin, which has appreciated significantly over the years, can help Pennsylvania keep pace with inflation and economic change, end quote.
In recent years, inflation peaked at 9.1% in June of 2022 and has since fallen to 2.4%, although we know that's bullshit, in September according to the United States inflation calculator, which is not to be believed because it's all lies. This means that dollars held by the state during this time have technically decreased in value. Over the same period, Bitcoin has climbed from 22,900 to 89,150, which is a 289% increase. For now, the bill has simply been introduced to the house with support from Pennsylvania Republicans, Republican representatives, Mike Campbell and Aaron Coffer.
For it to be enacted, the bill has to pass through 8 more stages, including reviews by the house, introduction to and reviews by the senate, and finally an executive action. The state specific Bitcoin move comes as the conversations around a national strategic bitcoin reserve have heated up following Trump's reelection. The Boosting Innovation Technology and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act, simply referred to as the Bitcoin Act, was floated by several US politicians in July and then early August, but then lost steam following Bitcoin's price plummeting. The bill, however, is supported by Trump and senator, Cynthia Lummis from Wyoming. If it was enacted in its current form, it would see the department of treasury purchase 1,000,000 BTC over a 5 year period.
This would total nearly 5% of the total supply of Bitcoin or of Bitcoin, and at its current price would cost approximately $89,000,000,000. Guys, that is a drop in a very large ocean of bullshit fiat currency. Y'all should just go for broke and just buy it all. I mean, why not? I'm I'm kidding, of course. I'm just saying, $89,000,000,000? How much money have we given just to Ukraine? 89 besides, if they were to try I mean, are they even projecting what that price would actually be if they really started buying that amount of BTC over the period of of 5 years? I doubt it. I think it'd be a hell of a lot more than $89,000,000,000. I think it would probably be closer to a 150 to $200,000,000,000 once you start signaling that you're actually buying that shit and pulling it off of the market.
Well, all of a sudden, that price goes higher. So it looks to me like they're saying that they would purchase 1,000,000 BTC at 89 mill at $89,000 per Bitcoin. And that's not what happens. That's not how this works. But even if let's give it a quarter of, a quarter of it, let's say, $250,000,000,000, that's still that's it's not at that point, it's not a drop in the bucket anymore. However, like, what's what's our national, our our yearly budget is, like, what, $6,000,000,000,000? You know, can 8 250,000,000,000 compared to $6,000,000,000,000?
Honestly, guys, this this shit could happen. This shit could happen. And if states start doing it too, I don't know if we're prepared for that mentally. I mean, Bitcoiners. Even if you're holding, like, 1 tenth of 1 Bitcoin, I'm not sure if we're actually mentally prepared for what this shit could actually look like. And I'm not gonna conjecture because last up today is long term support for mister c001guy. And this is from OpenSats. OpenSats is pleased to announce long term support for mister001guy for his continued contributions to the bit Bitcoin ecosystem.
He is the primary maintainer of the Fediment Lightning gateway. Alright. So the the gateway between Lightning and Fediment, that's an important thing. This is all about Lightning and eCash kind of playing together nicely, and mister 001 guy is well, he's the guy. But with the grant that he's getting from OpenSats, he'll be able to enhance gateway features by integrating bolt 12 support, transaction logging, profit tracking and lsp specifications, developing new modules by building federated cosigning solutions using Frost and expanding flexible custody options. Finally, it'll be able to improve usability by developing new debugging tools, refining the user interface, and optimizing federation management. Quote, my goal is to improve Fedimint's Lightning user experience and to bridge the functionality between federated e cache and the Lightning network.
I want Lightning gateways to be an easy tool for node operators to use to expand the utility of their lightning node and to provide lightning payments for their community, says mister c 001 guy. And I want to just I'm gonna end it there, but I'm not getting the show because, again, this is why I think it's important to run a Lightning node. What have you got to lose? Guys, is it really that freaking hard? Is it really so much time out of your day? You know how long it took me to, like, figure out how to run a lightning node? I pushed a button. And then over the next months and all the way up until today, I'm just continuously learning about it.
Through through actually having to figure out why did I not get a payment or why did a payment not send from my node. It's you don't have to know everything about how everything works all at once. That's in that's stupid. I'm sorry. I'm gonna say it. If you think that you need to know everything all at once, you're stupid. You're a stupid person, and you should walk off of a cliff along with the lemmings because there's no way that's practical. This is my journey to lightning node dom. I bought a Raspberry Pi 4. I bought a $100 of software from my node BTC.
I downloaded and flashed an SD chip with the information and I pushed it into the socket into my Raspberry Pi 4. I booted it up and I had a bitcoin lightning node along with a whole bunch of other stuff that the guys from my node BTC put on there. But I had to wait for the initial block download or blockchain download or the I b d or whatever the hell you wanna call it. And that took 2 days at the time. That was, like, 5, 6 years ago. And so but at the end of it, I had a raspberry pi running that I could look at through my computer because it was on my, you know, home network. It was all by itself. It wasn't on my machine. It was its own little mini board computer chilling out there in the corner.
And for months, it was nothing but a bitcoin node. And I thought I was helping the bitcoin network. And I kinda was. I mean, I still think that. Other people don't, but fuck them. I don't give a shit. Whatever they wanna say is fine by me. I think I was helping the Bitcoin network by having yet another node that was going to validate transactions and keep them into a, you know, keep them into its own private mempool that respected the consensus rules of of bitcoin. Right? Well, okay. Well, that only takes you so far. I mean, I learned how to do that because I didn't really have to learn how to do anything but be patient for the initial block download. Okay. So then I'm like okay well what's all this I'm hearing about lightning.
And lo and behold my node BTC enabled me to put on a couple of different lightning applications that would run alongside my Bitcoin full node. And you have to have a Bitcoin full node running before you can run lightning anyway. So I was already halfway there. So I I just said, okay. Well, give me ThunderHub. And ThunderHub comes up and I have no channels, but I do have a lightning wallet address. And I have a Lightning node. It was it it's running in, you know, alongside the Bitcoin full load. It was just that easy, guys. I spent $200 on a 1 terabyte drive and the, and the the software, and I was given, like, a $65 Raspberry Pi 4 at Christmas that I put it on. So for 250 let's say $250.
Got a full note. If $250 is too much for you, I'm I'm not gonna say anything bad. I understand. But if you've got if you wanna learn how to do this, if you wanna learn and not be beholden to somebody else's knowledge, $250 is not that much to spend. In fact that's why I cranked it up to like I think I spent $600 on my. Start nine server. I love it. I love all the other stuff that it does. I have a bitcoin full node and I have a lightning node which I have to have a bitcoin full node for. I've got channels because it's like, you know, while I was having my my node BTC and I cranked up the lightning node, I started asking people, would you open a channel with me so I can find out how this works? And people were, like, sure.
And then I had incoming liquidity. And then I started opening up channels to other people. It it's making a transaction. If you can make a Bitcoin transaction and you know somebody who who has agreed to say, I I would love to have a a node open or a channel open with you, I have a lightning node too. If you've got that person lined up, all you're doing is making a Bitcoin transaction. It's not it's not any different. It's not special. Where people complain about lightning is channel management. I've got, like, 15 channels. Do I every once in a while, I try to rebalance. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But you know what doesn't what doesn't stop?
A continuous inflow of satoshis from podcasting 2.0. Every time I release an episode, it's value for value enabled. And almost immediately, sat start pouring in from that from that episode. I I I didn't have to rack beat my head against a wall or rack my brain to figure out how I needed to switch channels around and and and do channel management in order to get those Satoshis. Channels around and and do channel management in order to get those satoshis. One of these days, it'll happen and I'll have to really go in there and do some surgery. But I I I'm learning how to do that now.
Guys, I've been a lightning node operator for for years. I'm not good at it. I'm not I'm not the I'm not your guy as as far as the guy who knows everything there is to know about lightning. I'm just like you. That's why I'm trying to tell you. You're gonna wanna learn how to do this. You're you don't want to depend on anybody else for another single fucking thing because every time we've done that, we end up in the shit. How do you think we got here? How do you think we're we we've got 4 food processors for meat? Because we didn't give a shit about learning how to do it ourselves or we didn't give a shit about learning why we need to keep a meat processing place happy and profitable in our county.
We just said, fuck it. We just became so apathetic that now there's 4 meat processors. Do we need to talk about pharmaceuticals? Do we need to talk about the fact that there's only really 6 non meat food companies in the United States? Like Kraft? Not even Kraft. Not even owned by Kraft. Kraft is owned by somebody else. Probably Nestle. Nestle is one of the largest food companies in the world. They don't they don't do meat. But they will sell you sugar. They will sell you, like, all manner of carbohydrate products. They will do all of that and twice on Sunday, and they won't give a shit about your pancreas.
How do you think we got here? By not caring, by saying, I've got another life. I don't have time. I'm not that smart. Of course, you're that smart. You can carve out some time. Dude, if I can do it okay. Time for me is a little bit easier to manage, but I'm not all I'm not brilliant. I'm not a mathematician. I'm not a specialist at freaking financial calculus. I got a but I got a lightning node and it works. And I've got it hooked up to my Albi hub. And now we've got Fedimint coming. Well, actually, it's already here. But this dude that I was just telling you about, this, mister c double o one guy, he's connecting Fedimint with lightning. Now we already know that this is already connected. But what does that mean? That means that pretty damn soon, I'm going to have that on my on my start 9 server running alongside my Bitcoin full node, running alongside my Lightning full node, I'm going to have Fedimint and eCash. And they're all gonna be mine. And nobody's gonna be able to tell me what I can and cannot do with them because I'm taking the time to learn how this works.
Please don't depend on me for your lightning liquidity. Don't buy don't pay 21,000 satoshis a month for liquidity on AlbiHub. Get your own lightning network node going. If you want to open up a channel with me, get in touch with me. You know, it's like I I am not one I'm not a node runner that refuses to say, well, I don't take anything under 4,000,000 satoshis. Oh, bullshit. There's nothing wrong with a 1,000,000 satoshi lightning channel. And I'd be happy to to to if you wanna open like, if you get a lightning node open, you throw some Bitcoin on there and you want to open up a 1,000,000 sat channel with me, I will open a 1,000,000 sat channel back up with you. That way, you've got outgoing liquidity of a 1,000,000 sat and you've got incoming liquidity of a 1,000,000 sat and start from there. I can always use more incoming liquidity on my lightning node.
Right? I'm not going to deny you. Right? Besides, I I mean, I guess I could immediately close the channel upon request, but I don't do that. I'm not that I'm not that kind of person. There's a lot of people that are really paranoid about that, but we're all learning here. Right? So don't think that I know more than you. If you want to learn how to do this, if you want to actually be self sovereign, I will do what I can to help you. There's other people out there too. There's entire groups of people on Amboss that are all about opening channels to each other. It's not that hard anymore. When I started, I didn't have any of that.
I didn't. I didn't have 1,000, you know, a 1,000 people in a group on the lightning network monitoring site called Amboss that I could join and ask, hey, can I get some incoming liquidity and all of a sudden 3 channels are opened up on my lightning network node? So for you, Core DeLorean, try it, please. I'm begging everybody to run their own full bitcoin node and everybody to own and run their own lightning network node because soon we're gonna be able to have those nodes running alongside a shit like Fedimin and e cash and all kinds of stuff. And you're going to want to know how that works. Do it now before you have to learn it later because you will end up having to learn it later, and it will just be a larger body of knowledge that you'll have to absorb.
I'll try to help you, but you can help yourself by doing it now. 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.
Approaching the 1000th Episode Milestone
Understanding Alby Wallet Changes
The Importance of Self-Custody in Bitcoin
