Join me today for Episode 994 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- MicroStrategy Buys a Metric Ton of Bitcoin
- Marathon Breaks Out the MSTR Playbook
- Goldman Sachs Spins Out "Crypto Platform"
- Lawmakers Beg Treasury: DO SOMETHING!
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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Articles:
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/11/18/michael-saylors-microstrategy-added-additional-51780-bitcoin-for-46b/
https://www.theblock.co/post/327008/mara-convertible-notes-bitcoin
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/would-jesus-be-bitcoins-biggest-fan-a-holy-take
https://cointelegraph.com/news/goldman-sachs-spin-out-crypto-platform-report
- 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://www.theblock.co/post/327064/lawmakers-urge-treasury-crack-down-on-crypto-mixers-amid-tornado-cash-sanctions
https://decrypt.co/292080/crypto-lender-polter-finance-hack-drains-funds
https://atlas21.com/poland-presidential-candidate-promises-a-strategic-bitcoin-reserve/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/are-retail-investors-behind-the-bitcoin-price-surge-this-bull-run
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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 AM on the dot Pacific Standard Time. It's the 18th day of November 2024.
And this is episode 994 of Bitcoin and only 6 shows left till the big turn over to 4 digits. I'm telling you, man. I'm telling you, I just honestly, I'm proud of myself. The yeah. Like, if if I got nothing, at least I got persistence. I will give myself that. I will at least pat myself on the back for having the persistence of somebody who's probably, I don't know, psychopathically challenged. I'm I'm just saying. Okay. So, I have been invited to be a brief speaker at the Whitman County Cattlemen's Association annual dinner in a couple of days. Been asked to speak about the King Ranch issue.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, I did an interview with Tony, one of the lawyers of the King Ranch. And I'm gonna try to, bring up which episode that was. Oh, man. You're being weird. My my obsidian is being weird. Hold on. It's here somewhere, I can find it. Hold on. Oh, good Lord, it's just not happening for me, hold on. There it is, finally, episode 943 of Bitcoin and is entitled The Ranch Wars, The King Ranch. And it's if you listen to that episode, it's it's a rather long interview that I did with King Ranch one of the King Ranch lawyers about their fight against the what's going on with Washington state, basically just taken a huge swipe out of this family. And even if they win this court these court cases, the King Ranch may not survive because of the expense incurred on all the legal troubles that they've, been handed.
They were simply just minding their own business, doing businesses, as usual on their ranch for the last 70 years. You know, it's a multigenerational ranch. Nothing has changed. And all of a sudden, out of the woodwork comes the Department of Ecology and a couple of other, Washington state based entities that decided to basically destroy this family's life. So the president of Whitman County Cattlemen Association contacted me earlier today and asked me if I would briefly speak on the King Ranch issue. So I'm going to be able to to do that as an outsider because I'm going to be speaking to a bunch of ranchers, and I am no hat, no cattle.
So I find it, I'm actually taking this as an honor that I'm respected at least enough around these parts, to at least have some semblance, you know, of knowing what I'm talking about when it comes to these kinds of issues. But wish me luck on that, and, I will report back to you exactly what happens at that dinner. That dinner is usually really fun. It's kinda like a beef steak, only it's just it's not exactly a beef steak, but mounds of beef will be served and beer, lots and lots of beer, which is probably what charged Michael Saylor to buy an additional 51,780 Bitcoin for the price tag of $4,600,000,000.
That's $1,000,000,000 with a b. Yes. The start he's actually doing the thing that he said he was gonna do. We'll get into it. Steven Alfer from CoinDesk. Self described Bitcoin development company, MicroStrategy, has added to its Bitcoin stack, purchasing 51,780 tokens for $4,600,000,000 over 6 days that ended Sunday. Okay. With the latest purchase, the company, which began buying Bitcoin in August of 2020, he's been in the game for, you know, over a cycle, now holds 331,000 200 BTC acquired for about $16,500,000,000 Now at the current price, right around the $90,000 level, those holdings are worth just a hair less than $30,000,000,000.
4 years. Went from a, what, a $1,000,000,000 market cap company, MicroStrategy, back in the day, was $1,000,000,000 when he started doing this. The market cap or rather, the the general valuation of MicroStrategy stands right now at somewhere around 70,000,000,000 dollars. That's amazing to me. In either event, the fund to fund this latest purchase, MicroStrategy tapped its at the market share issuance program, selling 13,600,000 shares for the $4,600,000,000. The company has about another $15,300,000,000 worth of stock that it can sell under the current program according to a regulatory statement released Monday morning. I might have been wrong. It might not be a $1,000,000,000 valuation 4 years ago. It might have been 10. That sounds a little that sounds more right. So let's say that. It was $10,000,000,000 in 2020, and now it's 70,000,000,000. That's still a 7 x. Nobody else has been able to affect that kind of change in their company's valuation.
I I mean, I in, you know, either not only a long time, but certainly not over the past 4 years. That's for damn sure. But over the weekend, executive chairman Michael Saylor took to Twitter to tease the morning purchase, in a disclosure, and he says what does he say? He says, I think sailertracker.com needs even more green dots. It's just a graph of the price of Bitcoin, and the green dots are all the dates that he bought Bitcoin. And lord have mercy, this dude buys Bitcoin like all the freaking time. It's kinda kinda sick, honestly. Anyway, just one week ago, the company announced that it had purchased 27,200 Bitcoin for $2,000,000,000, thus putting the buys over the past few weeks to about 72,000 BTC for $6,600,000,000.
And how is micros or MicroStrategy faring today? Well, they're up 8.71% on their stock price. They're chilling out, hovering around $370 a share. And if I look at my trading view chart all the way back to their high in March of 2000. But we're going all the way back to March of 2000 as their all time high. Their all time high topped out at $333 per share. And, yes, that is adjusted for all the stock splits and whatnot that they've done over the many years. And now they're chilling out at $370. So from all time high in 2,000 of 333, adjusted $333.
They're now chilling out at 370. They'd never announced any new products or well, okay. They probably back in the early days as they were building the company up. Yeah, I'm sure they were announcing new products. But over the past 4, 5 years and and longer than that, MicroStrategy has just been doing what MicroStrategy had always done. They have they have computer programs for business intelligence. They I'm sure they offer it as a offer it as a service. They probably have a very large customer service program that helps their the the people that have actually bought their software and how to work it. I'm sure there's training sessions. It it it they haven't introduced, like, brand It it it they haven't introduced, like, brand new software packages in the last 4 years. They haven't really done anything than what they've always done yet.
The valuation of the company is 7 x what it was before he started buying Bitcoin. Honestly, that's rather amazing. And I think other people are starting to see that it's amazing too. Why? Well, because Mara, that's right, Marathon, the Bitcoin miner, well, they've announced a $700,000,000 convertible note sale with the intention to acquire more Bitcoin. That convertible note thing, Michael Sailor started that. You don't have to be a fanboy to at least have, you know, some acknowledgment here that this is a Michael Sailor move straight up out of the Michael Sailor playbook. And this is out of the block is written by Adam James.
Mara Holdings announced its intention to offer $700,000,000 of convertible senior notes in a private offering to qualified institutional buyers. That means you retail plebs out there have no ability to, take part of this. The company plans to use the net proceeds to repurchase a portion of its existing convertible notes and acquire yet more Bitcoin. The senior notes intended to be offer offered would be due 2030, while the notes it would buy back with proceeds would be due 2026 according to a press release. Mara expects to grant the initial purchasers of the due on 20 30 notes an option to purchase up to an additional $105,000,000 in aggregate principal amount of the notes.
The notes will be unsecured senior obligations of Mara and will bear interest payable semi annually in arrears on March 1st September 1st each year, starting in 2025. They will mature on March 1st, 2030 unless earlier repurchased, redeemed or converted. The additional Bitcoin acquired will be for general corporate purposes, the company announced, quote, which may include working capital, strategic acquisitions, expansion of existing assets, and repayment of additional debt and other outstanding obligations, end quote. Mara, which was formerly known as Marathon Digital, reported Q3 earnings results earlier this week. The largest publicly traded miner missed their estimates, but improved from the Q2.
Right. So that's that's the end of that. But I find this paragraph or this sentence up above, rather telling. Let's read it again. The additional Bitcoin acquired will be used for general corporate purposes. And that may include working capital, strategic acquisitions, and expansion of existing assets, as well as repayment of additional debt and other outstanding obligations. So the difference here is that they're actually acquiring Bitcoin to use, not not to just sit on, or at least, according to the statement. I mean, I'm not in the minds of the guys down there at at Mara. I've never met any of them. So I can only go by what their statement says. And this is a direct quote that they are intending to actually utilize the Bitcoin. And as we know, Michael Saylor doesn't really utilize the Bitcoin other than huddling it, which is, no matter who says what, that is a an acceptable use of Bitcoin. So I'm not saying anything bad about that. I'm just saying that the guys at Mara, which I'm not huge fans of, because, you know, well, they will block wallets and they have blacklists and they won't mind certain transactions from certain wallets. And I'm kinda done with that part.
But I find it kinda fascinating that they're changing the playbook a little bit from what Michael Saylor's doing and intend to actually utilize Bitcoin instead of just sitting on it. So we'll have to see how that works out. But you gotta ask yourself, what would Jesus do? Well, maybe Mark Mason will tell us with his piece out of Bitcoin Magazine entitled, would Jesus be Bitcoin's biggest fan? A holy take. Did you know? The Bible is practically a financial thriller? Yep. It's got more money talk than a Wall Street boardroom. Over 23100 verses on cold hard cash. That's right.
The good book might as well have been called the good ledger with more mentions of money than heaven and hell put together. So in the spirit of financial enlightenment and a dash of divine humor, let's ponder a celestial question. Would Jesus have been a Bitcoin enthusiast? In the cosmic comedy of finance, Bitcoin burst onto the scene like a rebellious angel, vowing to overthrow the old guard of dusty banks and sneezy central bankers with its blockchain chariot and peer to peer prowess. Bitcoin promised a financial utopia, freedom from restrictive permissions, the tyranny of borders, and the inflationary antics of print happy central banks. But as this digital David takes on the Goliath of traditional finance, one can't help but wonder, would Jesus be sporting a Satoshi Nakamoto T shirt?
Jesus had a lot to say about wealth, and not all of it was about giving it away. He was into fairness, helping the needy and not letting your left hand know what your right hand's up to, basically, the 1st century version of anonymous transactions. Enter Bitcoin. With its knack for bypassing the money changers of today, looking at you, central banks, could Bitcoin be the modern answer to ancient prayers? But let's not convert all our loaves and fishes into Bitcoin just yet. Jesus also warned about the love of money being the root of all kinds of evil. And with Bitcoin's roller coaster value, it's more bipolar than a Galilean storm.
Would JC be cool with something that turns investors into overnight millionaires or leaves them crying into their keyboards? Divine verdict? Probably not. Jesus was all about helping the little guy, and Bitcoin's decentralized gospel sings a similar tune. It's a financial lifeline for the unbanked masses promising escape from the clutches of overbearing governments and hyperinflation hellfires. But here's the heavenly hiccup. Bitcoin's not exactly the Robinhood of crypto. Its kingdom is a tad unequal with a few digital disciples holding the lion's share of the coins.
In the beginning, Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, and it was good. Fast forward a few millennia, in Internet years anyway, and Bitcoin's disciples are spreading the good news far and wide. Like Jesus' OG crew, they're on a mission to liberate the financial faithful from the Romans I mean, the central banks of our time. But instead of crosses, they bear the mark of Bitcoin, preaching the blockchain gospel of hope and financial freedom. Despite being crucified by critics more times than we can count, bitcoin keeps rising from the dead. Its resilience mirrors the biblical tales of underdogs and persecuted heroes, proving that sometimes faith and a good encryption algorithm can move mountains or at least market gaps. Picture this, Jesus mulling over the bitcoin craze. It's not just water into wine. It's transforming the financial system. Would he be a fan? You bet.
Jesus, with his knack for shaking up the status quo, might just see Bitcoin as the lows and fishes of the digital age, multiplying financial access for the masses and sticking it to those temple money changer types, aka the centralized banks of today imagine Jesus in today's digital marketplace you'd likely be intrigued by bitcoin's potential to empower the least among us after all here's a technology that transcends borders cuts out the financial middlemen, and offers a beacon of hope to those sidelined by traditional banking systems. Bitcoin's blueprint for a more inclusive economy might just get a celestial thumbs up. But would he dive head first into the speculative whirlpool?
Probably not. However, he might champion the underlying principles, freedom, equality, and the chance for everyone to participate in the global economy. Jesus the Carpenter was all about building things up, not tearing them down. In that light, Bitcoin could be seen as a tool, not just for wealth creation, but for forging stronger communities through shared economic opportunity. As we tread the ethereal pathways of cryptography and conscious, let's ponder a Jesus inspired approach, balancing our digital dollars with acts of kindness, generosity, and a commitment to uplifting others. The ledger of life isn't just about accruing Bitcoin. It's about the wealth of our actions and the currency of our character. So while diversifying your earthly portfolio, remember the most precious investment of all, love and goodwill.
After all, in the grand scheme of the universe, those are the assets that yield the highest return. And who knows? In the grand interconnected network of humanity, we're all part of a greater blockchain. Each of us a link in a chain of acts of kindness stretching out into eternity. Now that's an investment strategy even Jesus might endorse. Interesting words. I've pondered the whole nature of Bitcoin and whether or not it is some kind of divine thing because we don't know who the hell Satoshi Nakamoto is. And as long as a mystery remains, you will get religious fervor.
You you it it it that's that's the mystery of the church. That's why the Catholic church is the way the Catholic church is. They're not idiots. They understand they understand how mystery can pull at the deepest heartstrings of humans. And we feel it with this new structure because we don't know who built it. We know who we know some of the people who have been building it, but we don't know we don't know the genesis. And without that mystery, you don't get people writing about would Jesus buy Bitcoin. I find it fascinating. I've said several several words over my thoughts of the Tower of Babel and what that parable well, it's not really a parable, but what that story actually meant.
Because I think it when I look at it, I do look at it as like a parable. Where God got angry at a bunch of people trying to build a tower to heaven so that they could become gods themselves, and he said, no. I'm just gonna make you speak all different language. And then boom, everybody was struck down with speaking a different language. My contention is is that he didn't that there was a lot of probably different languages at the time, but he destroyed their money. Yeah. He turned, like, one one type of money into several different types of money, thereby creating the very first foreign exchange of currency.
And nobody knew what everybody else's currency was valued at. And then we have problems for 1000 of years. Until we get one single global currency that everybody, whether or not they speak anybody else's language other than their own, we all understand what it means. We all understand the inherent value of Bitcoin. We all understand that it's probably gonna take a couple of 1,000 satoshis to get a cup of coffee. Right? Now some countries might charge more for that coffee than others, but you get my drift. I don't have to speak Italian to do business in satoshis with somebody from Italy.
Right? I I I don't have to do that. And because we're both dealing in this one currency, we neither one of us have to depend on a foreign exchange. I don't have to convert USD into Italian lira, and the person in Italy doesn't have to do the reverse. We're speaking a a single language. And that's probably the most important thing for markets to be able to do. How much noise has been introduced by foreign exchange, different currencies, in essence, different languages? And I think Bitcoin fixed that problem, but it will be up to us to figure out how to actually put it to work for us.
Goldman Sachs might be trying to put some of this stuff to work for them. They have been staunch haters of Bitcoin, I don't know, forever. Well, they're gonna try this again, it looks like. Alex O'Donnell tells us more out of Cointelegraph. Goldman Sachs to spin out a crypto platform, according to a report. Yeah. Because they just can't sit on the sidelines any longer, I guess. Goldman Sachs is preparing to spin out its cryptocurrency platform to create a new company, brand spanking new company, focused on creating and trading financial instruments on blockchain networks, Bloomberg reported on November 18th. That would be today. The investment bank is speaking to potential partners to add to the platform's capabilities and develop new offerings, Matthew McDermott, Goldman's global head of digital assets, told Bloomberg.
Tradeweb Markets, an electronic trading platform, will reportedly be among the new entity strategic partners. McDermott said, the spinout is expected to be completed in the next 12 to 18 months pending regulatory approvals. Plans are reportedly still in the early stages. Quote, it's in the best interest of the market to have something that is industry owned, McDermott told Bloomberg. In July, McDermott said Goldman Sachs is preparing to launch 3, 3, count them, 3, tokenized products later this year in the United States and Europe following a major uptick in interest from clients.
McDermott reportedly said that Goldman Sachs plans to create marketplaces for tokenized real world assets and would focus on the fund complex in the United States and European debt markets according to the report. He added that the investment bank plans to target financial institutions rather than retail because, you know, y'all suck with its new products and will likely rely exclusively on permissioned blockchains. Well, of course, of course, because they're not blockchains. Those are ledgers. Those are Excel spreadsheets. There's no there's no security there, ladies and gentlemen. So I wouldn't touch one of these products with a 10 foot pole with a stick of dynamite on the end of it. But he said that the RWA marketplace would differentiate itself with the speed of execution and by expanding the type of assets that can be used as collateral.
McDermott attributed the renewed momentum in crypto to the ongoing proliferation of exchange traded funds for digital assets. Almost a dozen Bitcoin ETFs have been listed since January when the US regulators finally relented and gave everybody what they wanted. I'm just paraphrasing there. But Goldman Sachs has been among the largest buyers of Bitcoin ETFs in 2024. And I told you about that last week. Demand is surging for tokenized RWAs offering low risk yield from treasury bills and other money market instruments. I'm gonna try not to rant. Tokenized US Treasury debt commands approximately 2,400,000,000 in total value locked in as of November 14th according to rwa.xyz.
Okay. Let's get back up here to where he says let's see. McDermott, this guy from Goldman Sachs, said that they're preparing to launch 3 new tokenization products later this year in the United States and Europe. Then he reportedly or he goes on to say that they plan to create marketplaces, plural, for these tokenized real world assets, that's what the RWAs mean, and would focus on the fund complex in the United States and European debt markets. He added that the investment bank plans to target financial institutions with new products that will rely exclusively on permission blockchains.
He said the RWA marketplace would differentiate itself with the speed of execution and expanding the types of assets that can be used as collateral. This sounds an awful lot an awful lot like it's not a foreign exchange. Okay? I'm not saying that. However, it's striking me that with the amount of shitcoins that are on the market, and you should stay away from all of them, that somebody is desperate to pollute the entire ecosystem with enough noise that we never get to see speak a singular language. The forces they're gonna say it. The forces of evil are working against us. We need to be able to start understanding each other clearly, not just when we form sentences or we're speaking in public or recording podcasts.
While that's important, that's that's not what that's not what's of of utmost importance here. Being able to speak the language of value re requires that I have a single money. That's the most important thing. That's that is one of probably the top five things that has held humanity back from the greatness that we could achieve is that I have no idea what 2 lira buys, not without looking at a foreign exchange, which means they can introduce. And I when I say they, I mean the people that own the foreign exchange and their friends who have their ear bent to them to tell them, you know, you should probably make it to where blah blah blah. And these are where the noise induction conduits lie.
The noise of the markets is induced in many places, but one of the biggest places is the differential of value between 1 US dollar, 1 Argentine peso, one Italian lira, and so well, actually, I don't even I think they just use euros in in Italy now. I I have I don't think they've used lira for a while, but you get them adrift. And the European Union and the euro, they somebody back in the day probably was trying to reach for that singular currency because of this. The problem is is that that currency is held and controlled by, in my opinion, people that do not really relish what humanity could actually do.
Right? Now I won't rant anymore about that. I'm just saying that if we look at Bitcoin, if we look at exchange of value as a language, and nothing but a language, how difficult is it to actually do business all across the world with all aspects of humanity if you have a 173 or a 176 different currencies? Not so easy, is it? How many languages do you know? I mean and I'm talking verbal languages. Like, I mean, like, are you trilingual, bilingual, quadrilingual? There are some people that I know that speak 6 languages, but I know very few of them. Most people in the United States are unilingual. We understand English. People around the world laugh at us because of it, but it is what it is, whether you wanna laugh about it or not.
English is not the universal language. Although, while it is spoken in, you know, very many countries in the world, it is not a universal language and neither is Mandarin. Right? Neither is Spanish. But these three languages comprise probably the most the most speaking that people will do on this planet, yet there's 3 languages. And never forget German. Always gotta remember the Germans. But if we can speak a singular language of at least value, I'm not I'm not I'm not a proponent of of English being the only language spoken on the planet. I think that that's a dumb idea. However, the language of value, I have no problem in saying that it's vitally important for humanity to move forward that we have a singular currency, a value that is the same value to somebody in China as it is to somebody in Germany, as it is to somebody in Argentina, as it is to somebody posted in the wastelands of Antarctica, yet a science thing. Right?
We need a singular money. And that's that's all we need because language is tied to your culture. Money, we gotta we gotta get that shit out of we gotta get shit out of state hand. We gotta get money out of religious hand. We gotta get money out of cultural hands. We've got to just be able to have one thing that everybody on the planet understands. And we have more of a chance of that with Bitcoin than anything else. Let's run the numbers. West Texas Intermediate Oil is up almost 3 points today, probably because Ukraine is going to get long range missiles that they can fire into Russia.
This is a bad idea, ladies and gentlemen. I can I wish I shouldn't laugh about it because it's just the horror that is probably going to, come out of this, but this is this is not a good situation? But Brett Norsese is also up about 3 points. It's up to $73.12. Natural gas bucking the trend of always going negative when crude oil goes positive is up almost 4 percentage points. That may have something to do with I heard Russia turned off the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to, Germany and, I guess, the rest of Europe. I don't know if that has anything to do with it, but gas is up 3 a quarter percent.
It's back over $2 to $2.1 United States penny. Gold is doing well today as are all the metal rocks. Wow. 1.65 percent for gold, to the upside, $2,612.50. Silver is up 2.6%. Platinum is up 3.14. Copper is up 1 and a third. Palladium is up 6.7%. My god. And all of the agricultural futures are doing well today. Biggest winner, what do we got? We've got sugar up 2.87%. Cocoa or chocolate is down 2 2 thirds percent. Live cattle is up a 3rd. Lean hogs are up almost a half point. Feeder cattle are up almost well, actually, just over one full percentage point. The Dow is unchanged right now. The S and P is up a half point. Nasdaq is up point 8%, and the S and P Mini is up point 16%.
We had a brief rally earlier this morning. We're chilling out at 90,860 dollars. We were up to damn near, like, 91,500 or 91,600. But I guess since you sell the news when they announced that Michael Saylor had bought, you know, a whole shitload of Bitcoin, I guess people wanted to sell him their Bitcoin. I don't know because we got a dump out of it. But we're still at a $1,800,000,000,000 market cap, and that means that we can purchase 34.8 ounces of the shiny metal rock known as gold with our one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,783,852 and a third of, and fees are low.
Fees are low. 0.09 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis. Last night, there were only 34 blocks. It was low. I mean, low. But we now have 98 blocks carrying 300,000 unconfirmed transactions, and rates have gone back up. High priorities, you're gonna have to spend 29 satoshis per vbyte to get your transaction confirmed. Low priority standing at 24 satoshis per v byte. Hash rate is at 741.1 exahashes per second, so the security model of the Bitcoin blockchain is remaining high, and that is over a 1 week rolling period. Now the numbers.
Did you know that only 4% of people give value back? And that's okay. Some will give little. Some will give a lot. That's just the way it seems to be. Somehow, however, it all works out in the end. And what am I talking about? I'm talking about value for value. And you can go find the entire story of the value for value ecosystem at value, the number 4, value all shoved together, dot info, I n f o. And that's where I'm that's how I'm starting to try to bridge over into reading what's going on over there on Fountain. But I'm not gonna be able to do that today, I don't think, unless fountain decides to oh, yes. Thank thankfully, fountain has come back. Fountain had a problem and was not showing the generosity that the listeners have shown me for our Amish Armageddon, which was Friday's, Bitcoin. And I got a tamarack mat with 50,000 sats.
Tamarack mat, dude, god bless you, brother. He says stack attack. Golf winch, 6,777. Satoshi says, smash the boost button, my man. Chad f of 5,555 says, great Albi hub coverage at the beginning of the episode. I've been using Albie with PC 2.0 apps for years and this change to Albie is what I've always wanted. As a listener, I can now boost in PC 2.0 apps with my own node. This has never been possible until now with AlbiHub. AlbiHub requires some work to get set up, but it is an extremely powerful tool if you see their vision. Thanks for help fighting some of the FUD. Yeah. You're welcome, Chad f. Because, honestly, I think this Albie thing is still a little bit out of hand. There I I actually saw somebody say that it doesn't matter it it it's still custodial if you change it over to your own node. No.
What I will say is that, yes, it's possible that you could consider the rails of Albi Hub custodial. And let me explain that. I have, like, it's [email protected]. Right? That's my my email looking lightning address that I put in to places where if I get zapped, it's gonna go over those rails. Now Alby owns that rail. Let's let's not fool ourselves. They own the rail. But I have multiple avenues for people to give me satoshis. And if for whatever reason, Albie decides, you know what? I really don't like you, none of you. You can go kiss off and we're gonna deactivate your lightning address. Fine. I'll go get another one and I'll plug it into my node.
My node is self custodial. The satoshis that you give me, when they hit that node, become self custodial. There's no other custody about it. I'm the one in charge. Nobody can tell me what to do with those satoshis. Alright? Once I have them in my possession, they are self custodial. Now let's just remind you, the [email protected] lightning address is custodial. Because one of these days, I'll be what what happens if they just decide that they either don't like me or somehow they all get transcended up into heaven and nobody's left to run, you know, run Alby? Yes. That is an issue. But because I own my own node, I don't have to worry about the Satoshis. I don't have to worry about the liquidity.
Alright? I I have Satoshis coming in. I've got Satoshis going out. My liquidity is fine. I'm custody that. So I can change how people interact with my lightning node to whatever I want. That is non custodial by definition. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Joeyddee with 3333. Sat says well, he just basically gives me the peace sign. Chad f with another 420 says, you mentioned running start 9 on an old PC. DeLorean and Spencer made a 17 minute DIY setup video. Okay. That's good to know. And, by the way, if you have Fountain app, which is my go to podcasting 2.0, enabled podcast app. This is how many people give me boostograms. This is how many people get me their satoshis.
If you go with, like, when I announce the show on Noster and Twitter and the rest of it, I will have the link to that show, to that particular episode directly in those notes and or tweet or whatever we wanna call it. When you go there, you'll be able to find where Chad f has 2 or no no he's got at least one other, URL in here that, that he's provided so that you can see DeLorean and Spencer and their 17 minute DIY setup for running a start 9 on an old PC. And I highly recommend that people start learning how to do that. BTC master 1,021 says allsats matter at allsatsmatter.com.
I'm still not sure what's going on because I always forget to go look at what all stats matter dot com is. But, hey, you know, you you you put it in here, I'm probably going to read it. Okay. So user 115-56842 with a 1000 says, extra spicy rants this s episode. Motivated to reboot failed full node and get my value for value business up and running. You'll know when I ask to be included in the circle k. Now that's a circle p. I'm good with my word. Look up MSTRQ3rd earnings call to see Sailor at his best. I have not seen that yet. I'm gonna have to go do that. Bitcoin Sandy with a 1,000 says 1,000 fire. Rocking hard.
Still the best. Pies to Pleb, 420. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. God's death, 537. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Bitcoin Sandy with 500 says, great show as always. Yegro with 121 says, install ABBYY on your lightning node is not enough to avoid the charge you're referring to. The charge actually happens when a user links their custodial, Albie, to their newly installed hub. When they do this, the hub automatically drains their custodial account and uses it to open a new lightning channel for the hub. I've pointed this out to the Albie team months ago, multiple times, and asked them to put extra confirmations to make people aware of what's going to happen. It appears that they did not listen.
I'm gonna tell you, Yeager, that never happened to me. That that never happened to me. I I if I was going to use one of their lightning channels that I can rent, then, yes, that was definitely going to happen to me. But when I pointed AlbieHub to my lightning network node, I lost no Satoshis. Right? So just keep that in mind. CryptoNeck with 210 says, good session, Hugh Jane huge Hugh Janice. Yeah. It's yeah. Okay. 100 Sat says, yo. Let's see here. Who else we got? Chris Hartsell with a 100 says, yeah, just move my Albie Sats to fountain. Not only is it prohibitively expensive to set up a node unless you have capable hardware at your disposal. But even with a good Internet connection, start 9 is Tor only, which never seems to work when I need it, but does when I don't. Chris, I don't know what to tell you, man. My I've gotta start 9. I'm I get Satoshis all the time.
I I don't know what's going on. But, again, you know, hell, yeah. Your your mileage may vary, but we've got other fish to fry. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use lawmakers urge treasury crackdown on crypto mixers amid tornado cash sanctions. Sarah Wynne starts us off from the block. US lawmakers press the Treasury Department to do their part to look into illicit finance through crypto mixing services, particularly tornado cash. Democrats Democratic representatives Sean Cassin of Illinois led the letter sent to treasury alongside representative Steven Lynch, Brad Sherman well, of course, Brad Sherman, Bill Foster, David Scott, Emanuel Cleaver, and Joyce Beatty or Beatty. I can't pronounce it.
Kaston, Sherman, Foster, and Cleaver in particular have been critical of crypto and its use by bad actors. Yes. Because all of humanity is waiting to do the rest of humanity harm. That's been that way since we fell out of the trees and shaved all the hair off of us. Treasury Office of Foreign Asset Control, or OFAC, designated Tornado Cash as a sanctioned entity back in August of 2022 barring people in the US and firms looking to operate in the United States from financial interactions with it. Critics in the crypto industry argued that Tornado Cash is not a person.
No. It's a software. And they criticized Treasury's move and argued it didn't have the authority to sanction the mixer. The lawmakers pushed back and said crypto mixers present serious national security risks despite sanctions, quote, Tornado Cash has remained online and continues to function as decentralized smart contracts, the lawmaker said in the letter last week. Wait a minute. Hold on here. Despite okay. Despite sanctions. I'm I'm sorry. I thought for some reason, I just had that they got the guy that supposedly built tornado cash and, I don't know, man. It's like this it's software.
The software is just going to run. See, this was what these people do not understand. They can't control this. The only way you can control this is to shut down the Internet worldwide. And like I've said many times before, if you really wanna see cities burn to the ground, by all means, shut off the Internet. They requested the treasury to address questions about crypto mixers by December 2nd, including an estimate of tornado cash activity since August of 2022, whether sanctions have led to an increase in suspicious activity reports, and if additional sanctions are under consideration.
I don't know what other sanctions you can put. And whatever. Quote, will the treasury department consider imposing a secondary sanctions on non US persons and cryptocurrency exchanges based outside of the US for interacting with mixed funds from Tornado Cash? The lawmakers asked in the letter. God. The fucking hubris here. Earlier this year, representatives Castor or Kaston, Foster, Cleaver, and Sherman introduced a bill to temporarily block financial institutions for 2 years from conducting any transactions with funds that have gone through crypto mixers while treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and others, conduct a study on their illicit uses. Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Let's read this one again. This is from these morons up on the hill. The question to treasury, will the treasury department consider imposing secondary sanctions on non US persons and cryptocurrency exchanges based outside of the United States for interacting with mixed funds from Tornado Cash. We have we have no business telling a Frenchman whether or not that they can interact with Tornado Cash. I don't even think the French government should say shit about it, but it certainly shouldn't be the United States dictating terms to non US citizenry.
If you are on our soil, you've got you've got jurisdiction. But you can't tell some poor dumb schmuck in the northern climes of fucking Norway whether or not they can use tornado cash. And what are you gonna do? Send an aircraft carrier to go wipe Hans off the face face of the planet with a fucking drone attack? Screw you, Sherman. People like this, they just need to go away because the this hubris, this unmitigated fantasy that these people have that they are rulers of the entirety of all populations of this planet is dangerous.
These are dangerous people. Brad Sherman may look like a nerd, but he is one of the most dangerous people walking the planet right now if for no other reason than this attitude that he gets to dictate what somebody in El Salvador does. Ridiculous. But we're not done. We're not done crypto lender poulter Shuts down after a hack drains nearly all the funds Stop using DeFi lending shit unless you are certain that they are a Bitcoin only company. If you have to get a loan, if for whatever reason you want to put up Bitcoin for a loan, then go check out the guys over at Unchained Capital. They've been nothing but a Bitcoin company ever since their inception. They've never dealt in shitcoins.
If you've gotta do it, do it with somebody who is Bitcoin only. Because otherwise, you get this. Decentralized lending platform, Poltor Finance, suffered a devastating exploit on the Phantom blockchain shit chain, I should say, essentially wiping out most of its assets. Aw. The breach, discovered early Sunday, involved the manipulation of the platform's token pricing mechanisms, leaving its users in shock. Well, we've been warning you about going into shitcoins for, like, 10 years, but nobody ever listens to us. The act the attacker began by funneling funds through, you guessed it, Tornado Cash, an Ethereum based coin mixer that conceals the origin of funds.
These assets were then bridged or transferred from Ethereum to the Fantom network where the exploit was then executed. Once the breach was identified, Poltor Finance took immediate action by pausing its platform to contain the damage and notified key bridge operators. And I guess bridge operators are these guys that allow tokens to be exchanged for 1 it's like this is foreign exchange, honestly. But, anyway, sued anonymous founder of Poulter fight, finance known as witch ghost fired a police report in Singapore following the breach. Oh, filed, not fired. Filed a police report following the breach. The hack resulted in losses exceeding 16,100,000 SGD or approximately $6,000,000 in United States dollars.
The newly deployed smart contract on the platform was exploited, causing unauthorized transactions to drain user assets, said the report. The founder also reported personal losses of $223,000, While the police report claims total losses of around 12,000,000, other reports from web 3 security firm suggest the actual amount stolen was closer to $7,000,000 According to Defi Llama data, Polter Finance's total value locked was approximately 9,700,000 before the attack indicating substantial losses. In a statement on Twitter, the team wrote, quote, we've identified wallets involved and traced it to Binance.
We are still investigating the nature of the exploit. We are in the process of contacting the authorized, end quote. Web 3 security experts think that the root cause of the exploit was linked to a, listen carefully, a price manipulation attack using oracles, which are external data feeds that platforms use to determine token prices smart contract audit from Quill audits shared their findings with decrypt which shows the vulnerability was tied with how Polter Finance calculated the value of the spooky swap boo token.
Yeah. Spooky swap. Boo, b o o. Stay away from this garbage, and you won't ever have to go through this. Quote, the price of the spookyswapboo token in the lending pool was determined by the spot price of the spookyswapv3poolandv2pair calculated based on the token balance ratio in the pool, Quill audits toll decrypt. By artificially increasing the price of the BU token, the hacker could deposit a very small amount, like just one BU token, and withdraw a much larger amount of other assets, effectively draining the platform of its funds. Quote, this case exemplifies a classic oracle manipulation exploit.
The BU token price is manipulated by the attacker using a flash loan, where we heard that before, to artificially inflate the BU token's price. Hankin Unal, senior blockchain scientist at Cybers dotai, told Decrypt. This flash loan business has been the bane of DeFi ever since DeFi ever occurred, and that includes going all the way back to SushiSwap in the summer of, what was it, 2019, 2020, or something like that is when this garbage first started coming out, and every exploit is the same. None of it's been fixed. It's because what they're trying to do doesn't make any sense.
The the amount of piping that goes on here is just begging to be exploited. It's always going to be exploited. There's no fixing, quote, unquote, DeFi. Not until you have a singular token, a singular unit of value that everybody can understand that you don't have to go through this weird machinations and these weird flexings and these weird piping maneuvers to be able to change one bullshit token into another kind of bullshit token where you can inflate the price by getting a flash loan and then draining the entire platform of all of its funds. It's never been fixed, and it's always going to be this way. And every time that you get into this kind of crap, you are at risk of losing everything. And then we have Poland.
That's right. Poland, of all places in the world, Poland, where their press one of their presidential candidates is promising a strategic Bitcoin reserve. On November 17th, Polish presidential candidate, there's no way I can even come close to pronouncing his name, announced his commitment to creating a national Bitcoin reserve if he wins the May 2025 elections. This sounds an awful lot like pandering, but the statement released on Twitter comes in response to a proposal from swap.lyCEO, Lech Wilczynski, who shared the strategic Bitcoin reserve policy model created by the Satoshi Action Fund Group.
And Metzen stated in a tweet, Poland should create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. By the way, this is I can at least pronounce his last name, I guess. Metzen. I can't pronounce his first name, though. So Minson, this this dude running for president, and he looks awfully young, says in a tweet, Poland should create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. If I become the president of Poland, our country will become a cryptocurrency haven with very friendly regulations, low taxes, and a supportive approach from banks and regulators. BTC to the moon. This is pandering.
This guy is probably not going to win. Okay? I I just, like, got a gut feeling. It's great that he's doing it. Hey. More power to this young man. But, dude, when you say BTC to the moon as the last thing you say in a tweet when you're announcing that you want to do the same thing that they're trying to do here in the United States, and now it's like a strategic Bitcoin reserve in El Salvador. And you're just it's it's a different kind it's not the micro strategy playbook. It's the country playbook. We have 2 Bitcoin playbooks going on concurrently right now, and he is on team b. That is the country playbook.
And he just wants a strategic reserve, and I get it. Like I said, more power to him. But something about the way that this tweet is structured and some of his other statements leads me to believe, Poland is probably not gonna get a Bitcoin strategic reserve. But that said, Metzen, who enjoys strong popularity, especially among libertarian voters, seems to aim at positioning Poland at the forefront of the digital asset industry. The proposal follows a growing trend, yes, you you know it, of institutional interest in Bitcoin. And last July, in the United States, senator Cynthia Lummis introduced a bill to establish exactly that, a strategic Bitcoin reserve with the goal of acquiring 1,000,000 Bitcoin over 5 years to hold for at least 2 decades.
There's one other thing that I don't like about what is being said here by this particular candidate. In this tweet, he says, if we if I win, we'll become a cryptocurrency haven with very friendly regulations, low taxes, and a supportive approach from banks and regulators. Alright. Hold on. I want to find something. I'm gonna go to Google Maps and get a map of China. And for those for those of you who know what happened with the Bitcoin ban in China, you probably know what's coming next. That's right. Kazakhstan. What did Kazakhstan as a country promise?
They promised low taxes, a favorable regulatory environment, a cryptocurrency haven, and supportive approach from banks and regulators. And then what did they do after they captured all the Chinese miners that had come across the border after China banned Bitcoin mining, yeah, they got, like, a whole year of no taxes or very low taxes, and then all of a sudden, all that shit went away. And they had already moved there. Alright. So I don't trust politicians. You know that. I don't trust Minson. Somebody says, oh, we're gonna give you everything you want. Yeah? Can I get that in writing like a lease for 20 years? Because, otherwise, I don't believe you. And that's the way that I would be approaching it if I was miners looking to chill out anywhere close to Poland. Now finally, this pump that we saw and we're oh, wow. We're back down to 90,176.
So I guess people are really interested in selling their Bitcoin to Saylor. Whatever. But is this pump, is it just, you know, industry? Is it people like Michael Saylor buying it that's pumping the price? Is it retail? Well, Matt Crosby has a few words to finish finishes us out on Bitcoin Magazine who says, are retail investors behind the Bitcoin price surge this bull run? Let's find out. As bitcoin once again finds itself in price discovery mode, market watchers and enthusiasts are curious. Has retail FOMO set in yet, or is this the retail surge that we've seen in past bull cycles still on the horizon? Using data from active addresses, historical cycles, yada yada yada, we're going to examine what happened.
So one of the most direct signs of retail interest is the number of new Bitcoin addresses created. Historically, sharp increases in new addresses have often marked the beginning of a bull run as new retail investors flood the market. In recent months, however, the growth of new addresses hasn't been as sharp as one might expect. Last year, we saw around 791,000 new addresses created in a single day, a sign of considerable retail interest. In comparison, we now hover significantly lower, although we have recently seen a modest uptick in new addresses. Google Trends also reflects this tempered interest.
Although searches for Bitcoin have been increasing on Google in the past month, they remain far below previous peaks in 2021 and 2017. It seems that retail investors are showing a renewed curiosity, but not yet the fervent excitement typical of FOMO driven markets. We are also witnessing a slight transition of Bitcoin from long term holders to newer shorter term holders this shift in supply can hint at the potential start of a new market phase where experienced holders begin taking profits and selling to newer market participants however the overall number of coins transferred remains relatively low, indicating that long term holders aren't yet parting with their Bitcoin, at least not insignificant volumes.
Historically, during the last bull run-in 2020 to 2021, we saw large outflows from long term huddlers to newer investors, which fueled a subsequent price rally. And currently, the shift is only minor. And long term holders seem largely unfazed by current price levels, opting to hold on to their Bitcoin despite market gains. This reluctance to sell suggests that holders are confident in further upside potential. A key aspect of Bitcoin's latest rally is its spot driven nature in contrast to previous bull runs heavily fueled by leveraged positions. Yes. Because we don't have BitMEX in their 100 x leverage button that you could push so you could wipe yourself completely off the planet. Open interest in Bitcoin derivatives has seen only minor increases, which stands in sharp contrast to prior peaks.
For instance, open interest was significant before the FTX crash back in 2022. A spot market or a spot driven market without excessive leverage tends to be more stable and resilient as fewer investors are at risk of forced liquidations. Yeah. Well, the the degenerates are still out there. I've seen several people been taking short positions over the last couple of days and just getting their clocks cleaned anyway. Interestingly, while retail addresses haven't increased substantially, whale addresses holding at least 100 BTC have been rising. Over the past few weeks, wallets with large BTC holdings have added tens of 1,000 of coins amounting to 1,000,000,000 of dollars in value.
This increase signals confidence among Bitcoin's largest investors that the current price levels have more room to grow even as Bitcoin reaches all time highs. In past bull cycles, we saw whales exit or decrease their positions near market peaks, a behavior that we're not seeing this time. This trend of accumulation by experienced holders is a strong bullish indicator as it suggests faith in the market's long term potential. The conclusion While bitcoin's rally to all time highs has brought renewed attention, we're not yet seeing the telltale signs of widespread retail FOMO.
The subdued retail interest suggests that we may only be at the beginning phase of this rally. Long term holders remain confident, whales are accumulating, and leverage remains modest. These are all indicators of a healthy, sustainable rally. As we continue into this bull cycle, the market structure suggests that the potential for a larger retail driven surge remains ahead. If this retail interest materializes, it could propel Bitcoin to new heights. For more in-depth look at this topic, check out a recent YouTube video here, and then they give a link. Okay. So that's that's Matt Crosby giving his rundown of what he thinks is going on in the Bitcoin market right now.
It it I'm looking every day that I do this show. And even on the weekends, at one point or another, I will look at mempool to see what the rates are. And for weeks, the rates the transaction rates and what I mean, like like, how many satoshis per vbyte is it gonna cost you to actually get one of your transactions confirmed on the blockchain. These these have been low for a long time. I mean, just the fees have been, like, low. We haven't seen I haven't seen, like, 250 blocks stacked up in the mempool in months. Right? It used to be that way.
Yeah. So and not anymore. I mean, we're still sub 100 blocks in the in in, in the mempools In mempools around the world, mempools are always plural. There's not just 1 mempool. I've got a mempool on my node. I've got actually 2 Bitcoin full nodes, and each one of them has a different mempool. Right? So what transactions in one of my nodes may not reflect exactly with the transactions that are waiting in the mempool on my other node because they're 2 different mempools and they have different gossip partners, so they get different transactions loaded into them. It I do wanna just make sure that we know that it's not a mempool.
It's several mempools. But still, on average, you know, these mempools are just you know, they're hanging out, like or at least the one with mempool, dot space. They have a large amount of memory devoted to their mempool, and it looks like, you know, we're still not all that busy. And that has always kinda told me that retail because that's where you know, like, most of retail retail, it's in the past, it's tended to be people that actually know how to do engage in transactions on their own. Okay. Be that as it may, there's a couple of other questions that I gotta ask about retail. Is there enough money for retail to do this, to start buying?
I think people are kinda hurting right now at the retail level. I mean, most of the guys that have a lot of money to spend, since the advent of the ETFs, they may very well just be taking shares in, like, BlackRock's iBit, Bitcoin ETF. Pensions or not pensions. Let's say, retirement accounts. Since now retirement accounts are more and more able to gain exposure to Bitcoin, because they can actually legally purchase any one of 11 or 12 Bitcoin ETFs, then maybe maybe people are just switching from, I'm just I just don't wanna go to Coinbase. I don't wanna I don't wanna go to Cash App. I don't wanna go to River. I don't wanna go to Swan Bitcoin. I don't wanna set any of this shit up. And they call human resources at their company and says, get me into anything that's got exposure to the Bitcoin ETFs.
Is that happening in mass? No. But it's it's going to start happening. Maybe some people are waiting. I am getting the feeling that the landscape has changed enough that we can't just say and or we can't just rely on the older retail metrics that we've been looking at all this time to see what the hell's gonna happen in the future. So as always, I advise caution. We have no idea what the hell is gonna happen. Alright. So just stack your zats, be healthy, eat good food, learn to cook at home, learn to grow your own food if you can. If you have time and if you've got, like, a little patch of dirt in your backyard, consider growing a garden. But of all things that I think is the most important right now is to run your own full node.
It's not that expensive. It does not cost that much money. I get it. If if a 150 or 200, $250 is way too much for you, then yes. And and I'm not gonna give you any shit about it, not being able to afford $250. Times are tough. And that's what what I've just been saying is that I'm not sure if we've got enough money in retail because everybody's, like, just hanging on by fingernails. So maybe that's what we're seeing. We're not seeing a whole bunch of retail activity because there's just no money left in retail to do a damn thing. Still, it is what it is, and we do not know what the hell this market is going to do. We've seen it do all kinds of weird shit.
Expect it to get even weirder going forward, and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 10 AM on the dot Pacific Standard Time. It's the 18th day of November 2024.
And this is episode 994 of Bitcoin and only 6 shows left till the big turn over to 4 digits. I'm telling you, man. I'm telling you, I just honestly, I'm proud of myself. The yeah. Like, if if I got nothing, at least I got persistence. I will give myself that. I will at least pat myself on the back for having the persistence of somebody who's probably, I don't know, psychopathically challenged. I'm I'm just saying. Okay. So, I have been invited to be a brief speaker at the Whitman County Cattlemen's Association annual dinner in a couple of days. Been asked to speak about the King Ranch issue.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, I did an interview with Tony, one of the lawyers of the King Ranch. And I'm gonna try to, bring up which episode that was. Oh, man. You're being weird. My my obsidian is being weird. Hold on. It's here somewhere, I can find it. Hold on. Oh, good Lord, it's just not happening for me, hold on. There it is, finally, episode 943 of Bitcoin and is entitled The Ranch Wars, The King Ranch. And it's if you listen to that episode, it's it's a rather long interview that I did with King Ranch one of the King Ranch lawyers about their fight against the what's going on with Washington state, basically just taken a huge swipe out of this family. And even if they win this court these court cases, the King Ranch may not survive because of the expense incurred on all the legal troubles that they've, been handed.
They were simply just minding their own business, doing businesses, as usual on their ranch for the last 70 years. You know, it's a multigenerational ranch. Nothing has changed. And all of a sudden, out of the woodwork comes the Department of Ecology and a couple of other, Washington state based entities that decided to basically destroy this family's life. So the president of Whitman County Cattlemen Association contacted me earlier today and asked me if I would briefly speak on the King Ranch issue. So I'm going to be able to to do that as an outsider because I'm going to be speaking to a bunch of ranchers, and I am no hat, no cattle.
So I find it, I'm actually taking this as an honor that I'm respected at least enough around these parts, to at least have some semblance, you know, of knowing what I'm talking about when it comes to these kinds of issues. But wish me luck on that, and, I will report back to you exactly what happens at that dinner. That dinner is usually really fun. It's kinda like a beef steak, only it's just it's not exactly a beef steak, but mounds of beef will be served and beer, lots and lots of beer, which is probably what charged Michael Saylor to buy an additional 51,780 Bitcoin for the price tag of $4,600,000,000.
That's $1,000,000,000 with a b. Yes. The start he's actually doing the thing that he said he was gonna do. We'll get into it. Steven Alfer from CoinDesk. Self described Bitcoin development company, MicroStrategy, has added to its Bitcoin stack, purchasing 51,780 tokens for $4,600,000,000 over 6 days that ended Sunday. Okay. With the latest purchase, the company, which began buying Bitcoin in August of 2020, he's been in the game for, you know, over a cycle, now holds 331,000 200 BTC acquired for about $16,500,000,000 Now at the current price, right around the $90,000 level, those holdings are worth just a hair less than $30,000,000,000.
4 years. Went from a, what, a $1,000,000,000 market cap company, MicroStrategy, back in the day, was $1,000,000,000 when he started doing this. The market cap or rather, the the general valuation of MicroStrategy stands right now at somewhere around 70,000,000,000 dollars. That's amazing to me. In either event, the fund to fund this latest purchase, MicroStrategy tapped its at the market share issuance program, selling 13,600,000 shares for the $4,600,000,000. The company has about another $15,300,000,000 worth of stock that it can sell under the current program according to a regulatory statement released Monday morning. I might have been wrong. It might not be a $1,000,000,000 valuation 4 years ago. It might have been 10. That sounds a little that sounds more right. So let's say that. It was $10,000,000,000 in 2020, and now it's 70,000,000,000. That's still a 7 x. Nobody else has been able to affect that kind of change in their company's valuation.
I I mean, I in, you know, either not only a long time, but certainly not over the past 4 years. That's for damn sure. But over the weekend, executive chairman Michael Saylor took to Twitter to tease the morning purchase, in a disclosure, and he says what does he say? He says, I think sailertracker.com needs even more green dots. It's just a graph of the price of Bitcoin, and the green dots are all the dates that he bought Bitcoin. And lord have mercy, this dude buys Bitcoin like all the freaking time. It's kinda kinda sick, honestly. Anyway, just one week ago, the company announced that it had purchased 27,200 Bitcoin for $2,000,000,000, thus putting the buys over the past few weeks to about 72,000 BTC for $6,600,000,000.
And how is micros or MicroStrategy faring today? Well, they're up 8.71% on their stock price. They're chilling out, hovering around $370 a share. And if I look at my trading view chart all the way back to their high in March of 2000. But we're going all the way back to March of 2000 as their all time high. Their all time high topped out at $333 per share. And, yes, that is adjusted for all the stock splits and whatnot that they've done over the many years. And now they're chilling out at $370. So from all time high in 2,000 of 333, adjusted $333.
They're now chilling out at 370. They'd never announced any new products or well, okay. They probably back in the early days as they were building the company up. Yeah, I'm sure they were announcing new products. But over the past 4, 5 years and and longer than that, MicroStrategy has just been doing what MicroStrategy had always done. They have they have computer programs for business intelligence. They I'm sure they offer it as a offer it as a service. They probably have a very large customer service program that helps their the the people that have actually bought their software and how to work it. I'm sure there's training sessions. It it it they haven't introduced, like, brand It it it they haven't introduced, like, brand new software packages in the last 4 years. They haven't really done anything than what they've always done yet.
The valuation of the company is 7 x what it was before he started buying Bitcoin. Honestly, that's rather amazing. And I think other people are starting to see that it's amazing too. Why? Well, because Mara, that's right, Marathon, the Bitcoin miner, well, they've announced a $700,000,000 convertible note sale with the intention to acquire more Bitcoin. That convertible note thing, Michael Sailor started that. You don't have to be a fanboy to at least have, you know, some acknowledgment here that this is a Michael Sailor move straight up out of the Michael Sailor playbook. And this is out of the block is written by Adam James.
Mara Holdings announced its intention to offer $700,000,000 of convertible senior notes in a private offering to qualified institutional buyers. That means you retail plebs out there have no ability to, take part of this. The company plans to use the net proceeds to repurchase a portion of its existing convertible notes and acquire yet more Bitcoin. The senior notes intended to be offer offered would be due 2030, while the notes it would buy back with proceeds would be due 2026 according to a press release. Mara expects to grant the initial purchasers of the due on 20 30 notes an option to purchase up to an additional $105,000,000 in aggregate principal amount of the notes.
The notes will be unsecured senior obligations of Mara and will bear interest payable semi annually in arrears on March 1st September 1st each year, starting in 2025. They will mature on March 1st, 2030 unless earlier repurchased, redeemed or converted. The additional Bitcoin acquired will be for general corporate purposes, the company announced, quote, which may include working capital, strategic acquisitions, expansion of existing assets, and repayment of additional debt and other outstanding obligations, end quote. Mara, which was formerly known as Marathon Digital, reported Q3 earnings results earlier this week. The largest publicly traded miner missed their estimates, but improved from the Q2.
Right. So that's that's the end of that. But I find this paragraph or this sentence up above, rather telling. Let's read it again. The additional Bitcoin acquired will be used for general corporate purposes. And that may include working capital, strategic acquisitions, and expansion of existing assets, as well as repayment of additional debt and other outstanding obligations. So the difference here is that they're actually acquiring Bitcoin to use, not not to just sit on, or at least, according to the statement. I mean, I'm not in the minds of the guys down there at at Mara. I've never met any of them. So I can only go by what their statement says. And this is a direct quote that they are intending to actually utilize the Bitcoin. And as we know, Michael Saylor doesn't really utilize the Bitcoin other than huddling it, which is, no matter who says what, that is a an acceptable use of Bitcoin. So I'm not saying anything bad about that. I'm just saying that the guys at Mara, which I'm not huge fans of, because, you know, well, they will block wallets and they have blacklists and they won't mind certain transactions from certain wallets. And I'm kinda done with that part.
But I find it kinda fascinating that they're changing the playbook a little bit from what Michael Saylor's doing and intend to actually utilize Bitcoin instead of just sitting on it. So we'll have to see how that works out. But you gotta ask yourself, what would Jesus do? Well, maybe Mark Mason will tell us with his piece out of Bitcoin Magazine entitled, would Jesus be Bitcoin's biggest fan? A holy take. Did you know? The Bible is practically a financial thriller? Yep. It's got more money talk than a Wall Street boardroom. Over 23100 verses on cold hard cash. That's right.
The good book might as well have been called the good ledger with more mentions of money than heaven and hell put together. So in the spirit of financial enlightenment and a dash of divine humor, let's ponder a celestial question. Would Jesus have been a Bitcoin enthusiast? In the cosmic comedy of finance, Bitcoin burst onto the scene like a rebellious angel, vowing to overthrow the old guard of dusty banks and sneezy central bankers with its blockchain chariot and peer to peer prowess. Bitcoin promised a financial utopia, freedom from restrictive permissions, the tyranny of borders, and the inflationary antics of print happy central banks. But as this digital David takes on the Goliath of traditional finance, one can't help but wonder, would Jesus be sporting a Satoshi Nakamoto T shirt?
Jesus had a lot to say about wealth, and not all of it was about giving it away. He was into fairness, helping the needy and not letting your left hand know what your right hand's up to, basically, the 1st century version of anonymous transactions. Enter Bitcoin. With its knack for bypassing the money changers of today, looking at you, central banks, could Bitcoin be the modern answer to ancient prayers? But let's not convert all our loaves and fishes into Bitcoin just yet. Jesus also warned about the love of money being the root of all kinds of evil. And with Bitcoin's roller coaster value, it's more bipolar than a Galilean storm.
Would JC be cool with something that turns investors into overnight millionaires or leaves them crying into their keyboards? Divine verdict? Probably not. Jesus was all about helping the little guy, and Bitcoin's decentralized gospel sings a similar tune. It's a financial lifeline for the unbanked masses promising escape from the clutches of overbearing governments and hyperinflation hellfires. But here's the heavenly hiccup. Bitcoin's not exactly the Robinhood of crypto. Its kingdom is a tad unequal with a few digital disciples holding the lion's share of the coins.
In the beginning, Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, and it was good. Fast forward a few millennia, in Internet years anyway, and Bitcoin's disciples are spreading the good news far and wide. Like Jesus' OG crew, they're on a mission to liberate the financial faithful from the Romans I mean, the central banks of our time. But instead of crosses, they bear the mark of Bitcoin, preaching the blockchain gospel of hope and financial freedom. Despite being crucified by critics more times than we can count, bitcoin keeps rising from the dead. Its resilience mirrors the biblical tales of underdogs and persecuted heroes, proving that sometimes faith and a good encryption algorithm can move mountains or at least market gaps. Picture this, Jesus mulling over the bitcoin craze. It's not just water into wine. It's transforming the financial system. Would he be a fan? You bet.
Jesus, with his knack for shaking up the status quo, might just see Bitcoin as the lows and fishes of the digital age, multiplying financial access for the masses and sticking it to those temple money changer types, aka the centralized banks of today imagine Jesus in today's digital marketplace you'd likely be intrigued by bitcoin's potential to empower the least among us after all here's a technology that transcends borders cuts out the financial middlemen, and offers a beacon of hope to those sidelined by traditional banking systems. Bitcoin's blueprint for a more inclusive economy might just get a celestial thumbs up. But would he dive head first into the speculative whirlpool?
Probably not. However, he might champion the underlying principles, freedom, equality, and the chance for everyone to participate in the global economy. Jesus the Carpenter was all about building things up, not tearing them down. In that light, Bitcoin could be seen as a tool, not just for wealth creation, but for forging stronger communities through shared economic opportunity. As we tread the ethereal pathways of cryptography and conscious, let's ponder a Jesus inspired approach, balancing our digital dollars with acts of kindness, generosity, and a commitment to uplifting others. The ledger of life isn't just about accruing Bitcoin. It's about the wealth of our actions and the currency of our character. So while diversifying your earthly portfolio, remember the most precious investment of all, love and goodwill.
After all, in the grand scheme of the universe, those are the assets that yield the highest return. And who knows? In the grand interconnected network of humanity, we're all part of a greater blockchain. Each of us a link in a chain of acts of kindness stretching out into eternity. Now that's an investment strategy even Jesus might endorse. Interesting words. I've pondered the whole nature of Bitcoin and whether or not it is some kind of divine thing because we don't know who the hell Satoshi Nakamoto is. And as long as a mystery remains, you will get religious fervor.
You you it it it that's that's the mystery of the church. That's why the Catholic church is the way the Catholic church is. They're not idiots. They understand they understand how mystery can pull at the deepest heartstrings of humans. And we feel it with this new structure because we don't know who built it. We know who we know some of the people who have been building it, but we don't know we don't know the genesis. And without that mystery, you don't get people writing about would Jesus buy Bitcoin. I find it fascinating. I've said several several words over my thoughts of the Tower of Babel and what that parable well, it's not really a parable, but what that story actually meant.
Because I think it when I look at it, I do look at it as like a parable. Where God got angry at a bunch of people trying to build a tower to heaven so that they could become gods themselves, and he said, no. I'm just gonna make you speak all different language. And then boom, everybody was struck down with speaking a different language. My contention is is that he didn't that there was a lot of probably different languages at the time, but he destroyed their money. Yeah. He turned, like, one one type of money into several different types of money, thereby creating the very first foreign exchange of currency.
And nobody knew what everybody else's currency was valued at. And then we have problems for 1000 of years. Until we get one single global currency that everybody, whether or not they speak anybody else's language other than their own, we all understand what it means. We all understand the inherent value of Bitcoin. We all understand that it's probably gonna take a couple of 1,000 satoshis to get a cup of coffee. Right? Now some countries might charge more for that coffee than others, but you get my drift. I don't have to speak Italian to do business in satoshis with somebody from Italy.
Right? I I I don't have to do that. And because we're both dealing in this one currency, we neither one of us have to depend on a foreign exchange. I don't have to convert USD into Italian lira, and the person in Italy doesn't have to do the reverse. We're speaking a a single language. And that's probably the most important thing for markets to be able to do. How much noise has been introduced by foreign exchange, different currencies, in essence, different languages? And I think Bitcoin fixed that problem, but it will be up to us to figure out how to actually put it to work for us.
Goldman Sachs might be trying to put some of this stuff to work for them. They have been staunch haters of Bitcoin, I don't know, forever. Well, they're gonna try this again, it looks like. Alex O'Donnell tells us more out of Cointelegraph. Goldman Sachs to spin out a crypto platform, according to a report. Yeah. Because they just can't sit on the sidelines any longer, I guess. Goldman Sachs is preparing to spin out its cryptocurrency platform to create a new company, brand spanking new company, focused on creating and trading financial instruments on blockchain networks, Bloomberg reported on November 18th. That would be today. The investment bank is speaking to potential partners to add to the platform's capabilities and develop new offerings, Matthew McDermott, Goldman's global head of digital assets, told Bloomberg.
Tradeweb Markets, an electronic trading platform, will reportedly be among the new entity strategic partners. McDermott said, the spinout is expected to be completed in the next 12 to 18 months pending regulatory approvals. Plans are reportedly still in the early stages. Quote, it's in the best interest of the market to have something that is industry owned, McDermott told Bloomberg. In July, McDermott said Goldman Sachs is preparing to launch 3, 3, count them, 3, tokenized products later this year in the United States and Europe following a major uptick in interest from clients.
McDermott reportedly said that Goldman Sachs plans to create marketplaces for tokenized real world assets and would focus on the fund complex in the United States and European debt markets according to the report. He added that the investment bank plans to target financial institutions rather than retail because, you know, y'all suck with its new products and will likely rely exclusively on permissioned blockchains. Well, of course, of course, because they're not blockchains. Those are ledgers. Those are Excel spreadsheets. There's no there's no security there, ladies and gentlemen. So I wouldn't touch one of these products with a 10 foot pole with a stick of dynamite on the end of it. But he said that the RWA marketplace would differentiate itself with the speed of execution and by expanding the type of assets that can be used as collateral.
McDermott attributed the renewed momentum in crypto to the ongoing proliferation of exchange traded funds for digital assets. Almost a dozen Bitcoin ETFs have been listed since January when the US regulators finally relented and gave everybody what they wanted. I'm just paraphrasing there. But Goldman Sachs has been among the largest buyers of Bitcoin ETFs in 2024. And I told you about that last week. Demand is surging for tokenized RWAs offering low risk yield from treasury bills and other money market instruments. I'm gonna try not to rant. Tokenized US Treasury debt commands approximately 2,400,000,000 in total value locked in as of November 14th according to rwa.xyz.
Okay. Let's get back up here to where he says let's see. McDermott, this guy from Goldman Sachs, said that they're preparing to launch 3 new tokenization products later this year in the United States and Europe. Then he reportedly or he goes on to say that they plan to create marketplaces, plural, for these tokenized real world assets, that's what the RWAs mean, and would focus on the fund complex in the United States and European debt markets. He added that the investment bank plans to target financial institutions with new products that will rely exclusively on permission blockchains.
He said the RWA marketplace would differentiate itself with the speed of execution and expanding the types of assets that can be used as collateral. This sounds an awful lot an awful lot like it's not a foreign exchange. Okay? I'm not saying that. However, it's striking me that with the amount of shitcoins that are on the market, and you should stay away from all of them, that somebody is desperate to pollute the entire ecosystem with enough noise that we never get to see speak a singular language. The forces they're gonna say it. The forces of evil are working against us. We need to be able to start understanding each other clearly, not just when we form sentences or we're speaking in public or recording podcasts.
While that's important, that's that's not what that's not what's of of utmost importance here. Being able to speak the language of value re requires that I have a single money. That's the most important thing. That's that is one of probably the top five things that has held humanity back from the greatness that we could achieve is that I have no idea what 2 lira buys, not without looking at a foreign exchange, which means they can introduce. And I when I say they, I mean the people that own the foreign exchange and their friends who have their ear bent to them to tell them, you know, you should probably make it to where blah blah blah. And these are where the noise induction conduits lie.
The noise of the markets is induced in many places, but one of the biggest places is the differential of value between 1 US dollar, 1 Argentine peso, one Italian lira, and so well, actually, I don't even I think they just use euros in in Italy now. I I have I don't think they've used lira for a while, but you get them adrift. And the European Union and the euro, they somebody back in the day probably was trying to reach for that singular currency because of this. The problem is is that that currency is held and controlled by, in my opinion, people that do not really relish what humanity could actually do.
Right? Now I won't rant anymore about that. I'm just saying that if we look at Bitcoin, if we look at exchange of value as a language, and nothing but a language, how difficult is it to actually do business all across the world with all aspects of humanity if you have a 173 or a 176 different currencies? Not so easy, is it? How many languages do you know? I mean and I'm talking verbal languages. Like, I mean, like, are you trilingual, bilingual, quadrilingual? There are some people that I know that speak 6 languages, but I know very few of them. Most people in the United States are unilingual. We understand English. People around the world laugh at us because of it, but it is what it is, whether you wanna laugh about it or not.
English is not the universal language. Although, while it is spoken in, you know, very many countries in the world, it is not a universal language and neither is Mandarin. Right? Neither is Spanish. But these three languages comprise probably the most the most speaking that people will do on this planet, yet there's 3 languages. And never forget German. Always gotta remember the Germans. But if we can speak a singular language of at least value, I'm not I'm not I'm not a proponent of of English being the only language spoken on the planet. I think that that's a dumb idea. However, the language of value, I have no problem in saying that it's vitally important for humanity to move forward that we have a singular currency, a value that is the same value to somebody in China as it is to somebody in Germany, as it is to somebody in Argentina, as it is to somebody posted in the wastelands of Antarctica, yet a science thing. Right?
We need a singular money. And that's that's all we need because language is tied to your culture. Money, we gotta we gotta get that shit out of we gotta get shit out of state hand. We gotta get money out of religious hand. We gotta get money out of cultural hands. We've got to just be able to have one thing that everybody on the planet understands. And we have more of a chance of that with Bitcoin than anything else. Let's run the numbers. West Texas Intermediate Oil is up almost 3 points today, probably because Ukraine is going to get long range missiles that they can fire into Russia.
This is a bad idea, ladies and gentlemen. I can I wish I shouldn't laugh about it because it's just the horror that is probably going to, come out of this, but this is this is not a good situation? But Brett Norsese is also up about 3 points. It's up to $73.12. Natural gas bucking the trend of always going negative when crude oil goes positive is up almost 4 percentage points. That may have something to do with I heard Russia turned off the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to, Germany and, I guess, the rest of Europe. I don't know if that has anything to do with it, but gas is up 3 a quarter percent.
It's back over $2 to $2.1 United States penny. Gold is doing well today as are all the metal rocks. Wow. 1.65 percent for gold, to the upside, $2,612.50. Silver is up 2.6%. Platinum is up 3.14. Copper is up 1 and a third. Palladium is up 6.7%. My god. And all of the agricultural futures are doing well today. Biggest winner, what do we got? We've got sugar up 2.87%. Cocoa or chocolate is down 2 2 thirds percent. Live cattle is up a 3rd. Lean hogs are up almost a half point. Feeder cattle are up almost well, actually, just over one full percentage point. The Dow is unchanged right now. The S and P is up a half point. Nasdaq is up point 8%, and the S and P Mini is up point 16%.
We had a brief rally earlier this morning. We're chilling out at 90,860 dollars. We were up to damn near, like, 91,500 or 91,600. But I guess since you sell the news when they announced that Michael Saylor had bought, you know, a whole shitload of Bitcoin, I guess people wanted to sell him their Bitcoin. I don't know because we got a dump out of it. But we're still at a $1,800,000,000,000 market cap, and that means that we can purchase 34.8 ounces of the shiny metal rock known as gold with our one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,783,852 and a third of, and fees are low.
Fees are low. 0.09 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis. Last night, there were only 34 blocks. It was low. I mean, low. But we now have 98 blocks carrying 300,000 unconfirmed transactions, and rates have gone back up. High priorities, you're gonna have to spend 29 satoshis per vbyte to get your transaction confirmed. Low priority standing at 24 satoshis per v byte. Hash rate is at 741.1 exahashes per second, so the security model of the Bitcoin blockchain is remaining high, and that is over a 1 week rolling period. Now the numbers.
Did you know that only 4% of people give value back? And that's okay. Some will give little. Some will give a lot. That's just the way it seems to be. Somehow, however, it all works out in the end. And what am I talking about? I'm talking about value for value. And you can go find the entire story of the value for value ecosystem at value, the number 4, value all shoved together, dot info, I n f o. And that's where I'm that's how I'm starting to try to bridge over into reading what's going on over there on Fountain. But I'm not gonna be able to do that today, I don't think, unless fountain decides to oh, yes. Thank thankfully, fountain has come back. Fountain had a problem and was not showing the generosity that the listeners have shown me for our Amish Armageddon, which was Friday's, Bitcoin. And I got a tamarack mat with 50,000 sats.
Tamarack mat, dude, god bless you, brother. He says stack attack. Golf winch, 6,777. Satoshi says, smash the boost button, my man. Chad f of 5,555 says, great Albi hub coverage at the beginning of the episode. I've been using Albie with PC 2.0 apps for years and this change to Albie is what I've always wanted. As a listener, I can now boost in PC 2.0 apps with my own node. This has never been possible until now with AlbiHub. AlbiHub requires some work to get set up, but it is an extremely powerful tool if you see their vision. Thanks for help fighting some of the FUD. Yeah. You're welcome, Chad f. Because, honestly, I think this Albie thing is still a little bit out of hand. There I I actually saw somebody say that it doesn't matter it it it's still custodial if you change it over to your own node. No.
What I will say is that, yes, it's possible that you could consider the rails of Albi Hub custodial. And let me explain that. I have, like, it's [email protected]. Right? That's my my email looking lightning address that I put in to places where if I get zapped, it's gonna go over those rails. Now Alby owns that rail. Let's let's not fool ourselves. They own the rail. But I have multiple avenues for people to give me satoshis. And if for whatever reason, Albie decides, you know what? I really don't like you, none of you. You can go kiss off and we're gonna deactivate your lightning address. Fine. I'll go get another one and I'll plug it into my node.
My node is self custodial. The satoshis that you give me, when they hit that node, become self custodial. There's no other custody about it. I'm the one in charge. Nobody can tell me what to do with those satoshis. Alright? Once I have them in my possession, they are self custodial. Now let's just remind you, the [email protected] lightning address is custodial. Because one of these days, I'll be what what happens if they just decide that they either don't like me or somehow they all get transcended up into heaven and nobody's left to run, you know, run Alby? Yes. That is an issue. But because I own my own node, I don't have to worry about the Satoshis. I don't have to worry about the liquidity.
Alright? I I have Satoshis coming in. I've got Satoshis going out. My liquidity is fine. I'm custody that. So I can change how people interact with my lightning node to whatever I want. That is non custodial by definition. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Joeyddee with 3333. Sat says well, he just basically gives me the peace sign. Chad f with another 420 says, you mentioned running start 9 on an old PC. DeLorean and Spencer made a 17 minute DIY setup video. Okay. That's good to know. And, by the way, if you have Fountain app, which is my go to podcasting 2.0, enabled podcast app. This is how many people give me boostograms. This is how many people get me their satoshis.
If you go with, like, when I announce the show on Noster and Twitter and the rest of it, I will have the link to that show, to that particular episode directly in those notes and or tweet or whatever we wanna call it. When you go there, you'll be able to find where Chad f has 2 or no no he's got at least one other, URL in here that, that he's provided so that you can see DeLorean and Spencer and their 17 minute DIY setup for running a start 9 on an old PC. And I highly recommend that people start learning how to do that. BTC master 1,021 says allsats matter at allsatsmatter.com.
I'm still not sure what's going on because I always forget to go look at what all stats matter dot com is. But, hey, you know, you you you put it in here, I'm probably going to read it. Okay. So user 115-56842 with a 1000 says, extra spicy rants this s episode. Motivated to reboot failed full node and get my value for value business up and running. You'll know when I ask to be included in the circle k. Now that's a circle p. I'm good with my word. Look up MSTRQ3rd earnings call to see Sailor at his best. I have not seen that yet. I'm gonna have to go do that. Bitcoin Sandy with a 1,000 says 1,000 fire. Rocking hard.
Still the best. Pies to Pleb, 420. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. God's death, 537. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Bitcoin Sandy with 500 says, great show as always. Yegro with 121 says, install ABBYY on your lightning node is not enough to avoid the charge you're referring to. The charge actually happens when a user links their custodial, Albie, to their newly installed hub. When they do this, the hub automatically drains their custodial account and uses it to open a new lightning channel for the hub. I've pointed this out to the Albie team months ago, multiple times, and asked them to put extra confirmations to make people aware of what's going to happen. It appears that they did not listen.
I'm gonna tell you, Yeager, that never happened to me. That that never happened to me. I I if I was going to use one of their lightning channels that I can rent, then, yes, that was definitely going to happen to me. But when I pointed AlbieHub to my lightning network node, I lost no Satoshis. Right? So just keep that in mind. CryptoNeck with 210 says, good session, Hugh Jane huge Hugh Janice. Yeah. It's yeah. Okay. 100 Sat says, yo. Let's see here. Who else we got? Chris Hartsell with a 100 says, yeah, just move my Albie Sats to fountain. Not only is it prohibitively expensive to set up a node unless you have capable hardware at your disposal. But even with a good Internet connection, start 9 is Tor only, which never seems to work when I need it, but does when I don't. Chris, I don't know what to tell you, man. My I've gotta start 9. I'm I get Satoshis all the time.
I I don't know what's going on. But, again, you know, hell, yeah. Your your mileage may vary, but we've got other fish to fry. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use lawmakers urge treasury crackdown on crypto mixers amid tornado cash sanctions. Sarah Wynne starts us off from the block. US lawmakers press the Treasury Department to do their part to look into illicit finance through crypto mixing services, particularly tornado cash. Democrats Democratic representatives Sean Cassin of Illinois led the letter sent to treasury alongside representative Steven Lynch, Brad Sherman well, of course, Brad Sherman, Bill Foster, David Scott, Emanuel Cleaver, and Joyce Beatty or Beatty. I can't pronounce it.
Kaston, Sherman, Foster, and Cleaver in particular have been critical of crypto and its use by bad actors. Yes. Because all of humanity is waiting to do the rest of humanity harm. That's been that way since we fell out of the trees and shaved all the hair off of us. Treasury Office of Foreign Asset Control, or OFAC, designated Tornado Cash as a sanctioned entity back in August of 2022 barring people in the US and firms looking to operate in the United States from financial interactions with it. Critics in the crypto industry argued that Tornado Cash is not a person.
No. It's a software. And they criticized Treasury's move and argued it didn't have the authority to sanction the mixer. The lawmakers pushed back and said crypto mixers present serious national security risks despite sanctions, quote, Tornado Cash has remained online and continues to function as decentralized smart contracts, the lawmaker said in the letter last week. Wait a minute. Hold on here. Despite okay. Despite sanctions. I'm I'm sorry. I thought for some reason, I just had that they got the guy that supposedly built tornado cash and, I don't know, man. It's like this it's software.
The software is just going to run. See, this was what these people do not understand. They can't control this. The only way you can control this is to shut down the Internet worldwide. And like I've said many times before, if you really wanna see cities burn to the ground, by all means, shut off the Internet. They requested the treasury to address questions about crypto mixers by December 2nd, including an estimate of tornado cash activity since August of 2022, whether sanctions have led to an increase in suspicious activity reports, and if additional sanctions are under consideration.
I don't know what other sanctions you can put. And whatever. Quote, will the treasury department consider imposing a secondary sanctions on non US persons and cryptocurrency exchanges based outside of the US for interacting with mixed funds from Tornado Cash? The lawmakers asked in the letter. God. The fucking hubris here. Earlier this year, representatives Castor or Kaston, Foster, Cleaver, and Sherman introduced a bill to temporarily block financial institutions for 2 years from conducting any transactions with funds that have gone through crypto mixers while treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and others, conduct a study on their illicit uses. Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Let's read this one again. This is from these morons up on the hill. The question to treasury, will the treasury department consider imposing secondary sanctions on non US persons and cryptocurrency exchanges based outside of the United States for interacting with mixed funds from Tornado Cash. We have we have no business telling a Frenchman whether or not that they can interact with Tornado Cash. I don't even think the French government should say shit about it, but it certainly shouldn't be the United States dictating terms to non US citizenry.
If you are on our soil, you've got you've got jurisdiction. But you can't tell some poor dumb schmuck in the northern climes of fucking Norway whether or not they can use tornado cash. And what are you gonna do? Send an aircraft carrier to go wipe Hans off the face face of the planet with a fucking drone attack? Screw you, Sherman. People like this, they just need to go away because the this hubris, this unmitigated fantasy that these people have that they are rulers of the entirety of all populations of this planet is dangerous.
These are dangerous people. Brad Sherman may look like a nerd, but he is one of the most dangerous people walking the planet right now if for no other reason than this attitude that he gets to dictate what somebody in El Salvador does. Ridiculous. But we're not done. We're not done crypto lender poulter Shuts down after a hack drains nearly all the funds Stop using DeFi lending shit unless you are certain that they are a Bitcoin only company. If you have to get a loan, if for whatever reason you want to put up Bitcoin for a loan, then go check out the guys over at Unchained Capital. They've been nothing but a Bitcoin company ever since their inception. They've never dealt in shitcoins.
If you've gotta do it, do it with somebody who is Bitcoin only. Because otherwise, you get this. Decentralized lending platform, Poltor Finance, suffered a devastating exploit on the Phantom blockchain shit chain, I should say, essentially wiping out most of its assets. Aw. The breach, discovered early Sunday, involved the manipulation of the platform's token pricing mechanisms, leaving its users in shock. Well, we've been warning you about going into shitcoins for, like, 10 years, but nobody ever listens to us. The act the attacker began by funneling funds through, you guessed it, Tornado Cash, an Ethereum based coin mixer that conceals the origin of funds.
These assets were then bridged or transferred from Ethereum to the Fantom network where the exploit was then executed. Once the breach was identified, Poltor Finance took immediate action by pausing its platform to contain the damage and notified key bridge operators. And I guess bridge operators are these guys that allow tokens to be exchanged for 1 it's like this is foreign exchange, honestly. But, anyway, sued anonymous founder of Poulter fight, finance known as witch ghost fired a police report in Singapore following the breach. Oh, filed, not fired. Filed a police report following the breach. The hack resulted in losses exceeding 16,100,000 SGD or approximately $6,000,000 in United States dollars.
The newly deployed smart contract on the platform was exploited, causing unauthorized transactions to drain user assets, said the report. The founder also reported personal losses of $223,000, While the police report claims total losses of around 12,000,000, other reports from web 3 security firm suggest the actual amount stolen was closer to $7,000,000 According to Defi Llama data, Polter Finance's total value locked was approximately 9,700,000 before the attack indicating substantial losses. In a statement on Twitter, the team wrote, quote, we've identified wallets involved and traced it to Binance.
We are still investigating the nature of the exploit. We are in the process of contacting the authorized, end quote. Web 3 security experts think that the root cause of the exploit was linked to a, listen carefully, a price manipulation attack using oracles, which are external data feeds that platforms use to determine token prices smart contract audit from Quill audits shared their findings with decrypt which shows the vulnerability was tied with how Polter Finance calculated the value of the spooky swap boo token.
Yeah. Spooky swap. Boo, b o o. Stay away from this garbage, and you won't ever have to go through this. Quote, the price of the spookyswapboo token in the lending pool was determined by the spot price of the spookyswapv3poolandv2pair calculated based on the token balance ratio in the pool, Quill audits toll decrypt. By artificially increasing the price of the BU token, the hacker could deposit a very small amount, like just one BU token, and withdraw a much larger amount of other assets, effectively draining the platform of its funds. Quote, this case exemplifies a classic oracle manipulation exploit.
The BU token price is manipulated by the attacker using a flash loan, where we heard that before, to artificially inflate the BU token's price. Hankin Unal, senior blockchain scientist at Cybers dotai, told Decrypt. This flash loan business has been the bane of DeFi ever since DeFi ever occurred, and that includes going all the way back to SushiSwap in the summer of, what was it, 2019, 2020, or something like that is when this garbage first started coming out, and every exploit is the same. None of it's been fixed. It's because what they're trying to do doesn't make any sense.
The the amount of piping that goes on here is just begging to be exploited. It's always going to be exploited. There's no fixing, quote, unquote, DeFi. Not until you have a singular token, a singular unit of value that everybody can understand that you don't have to go through this weird machinations and these weird flexings and these weird piping maneuvers to be able to change one bullshit token into another kind of bullshit token where you can inflate the price by getting a flash loan and then draining the entire platform of all of its funds. It's never been fixed, and it's always going to be this way. And every time that you get into this kind of crap, you are at risk of losing everything. And then we have Poland.
That's right. Poland, of all places in the world, Poland, where their press one of their presidential candidates is promising a strategic Bitcoin reserve. On November 17th, Polish presidential candidate, there's no way I can even come close to pronouncing his name, announced his commitment to creating a national Bitcoin reserve if he wins the May 2025 elections. This sounds an awful lot like pandering, but the statement released on Twitter comes in response to a proposal from swap.lyCEO, Lech Wilczynski, who shared the strategic Bitcoin reserve policy model created by the Satoshi Action Fund Group.
And Metzen stated in a tweet, Poland should create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. By the way, this is I can at least pronounce his last name, I guess. Metzen. I can't pronounce his first name, though. So Minson, this this dude running for president, and he looks awfully young, says in a tweet, Poland should create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. If I become the president of Poland, our country will become a cryptocurrency haven with very friendly regulations, low taxes, and a supportive approach from banks and regulators. BTC to the moon. This is pandering.
This guy is probably not going to win. Okay? I I just, like, got a gut feeling. It's great that he's doing it. Hey. More power to this young man. But, dude, when you say BTC to the moon as the last thing you say in a tweet when you're announcing that you want to do the same thing that they're trying to do here in the United States, and now it's like a strategic Bitcoin reserve in El Salvador. And you're just it's it's a different kind it's not the micro strategy playbook. It's the country playbook. We have 2 Bitcoin playbooks going on concurrently right now, and he is on team b. That is the country playbook.
And he just wants a strategic reserve, and I get it. Like I said, more power to him. But something about the way that this tweet is structured and some of his other statements leads me to believe, Poland is probably not gonna get a Bitcoin strategic reserve. But that said, Metzen, who enjoys strong popularity, especially among libertarian voters, seems to aim at positioning Poland at the forefront of the digital asset industry. The proposal follows a growing trend, yes, you you know it, of institutional interest in Bitcoin. And last July, in the United States, senator Cynthia Lummis introduced a bill to establish exactly that, a strategic Bitcoin reserve with the goal of acquiring 1,000,000 Bitcoin over 5 years to hold for at least 2 decades.
There's one other thing that I don't like about what is being said here by this particular candidate. In this tweet, he says, if we if I win, we'll become a cryptocurrency haven with very friendly regulations, low taxes, and a supportive approach from banks and regulators. Alright. Hold on. I want to find something. I'm gonna go to Google Maps and get a map of China. And for those for those of you who know what happened with the Bitcoin ban in China, you probably know what's coming next. That's right. Kazakhstan. What did Kazakhstan as a country promise?
They promised low taxes, a favorable regulatory environment, a cryptocurrency haven, and supportive approach from banks and regulators. And then what did they do after they captured all the Chinese miners that had come across the border after China banned Bitcoin mining, yeah, they got, like, a whole year of no taxes or very low taxes, and then all of a sudden, all that shit went away. And they had already moved there. Alright. So I don't trust politicians. You know that. I don't trust Minson. Somebody says, oh, we're gonna give you everything you want. Yeah? Can I get that in writing like a lease for 20 years? Because, otherwise, I don't believe you. And that's the way that I would be approaching it if I was miners looking to chill out anywhere close to Poland. Now finally, this pump that we saw and we're oh, wow. We're back down to 90,176.
So I guess people are really interested in selling their Bitcoin to Saylor. Whatever. But is this pump, is it just, you know, industry? Is it people like Michael Saylor buying it that's pumping the price? Is it retail? Well, Matt Crosby has a few words to finish finishes us out on Bitcoin Magazine who says, are retail investors behind the Bitcoin price surge this bull run? Let's find out. As bitcoin once again finds itself in price discovery mode, market watchers and enthusiasts are curious. Has retail FOMO set in yet, or is this the retail surge that we've seen in past bull cycles still on the horizon? Using data from active addresses, historical cycles, yada yada yada, we're going to examine what happened.
So one of the most direct signs of retail interest is the number of new Bitcoin addresses created. Historically, sharp increases in new addresses have often marked the beginning of a bull run as new retail investors flood the market. In recent months, however, the growth of new addresses hasn't been as sharp as one might expect. Last year, we saw around 791,000 new addresses created in a single day, a sign of considerable retail interest. In comparison, we now hover significantly lower, although we have recently seen a modest uptick in new addresses. Google Trends also reflects this tempered interest.
Although searches for Bitcoin have been increasing on Google in the past month, they remain far below previous peaks in 2021 and 2017. It seems that retail investors are showing a renewed curiosity, but not yet the fervent excitement typical of FOMO driven markets. We are also witnessing a slight transition of Bitcoin from long term holders to newer shorter term holders this shift in supply can hint at the potential start of a new market phase where experienced holders begin taking profits and selling to newer market participants however the overall number of coins transferred remains relatively low, indicating that long term holders aren't yet parting with their Bitcoin, at least not insignificant volumes.
Historically, during the last bull run-in 2020 to 2021, we saw large outflows from long term huddlers to newer investors, which fueled a subsequent price rally. And currently, the shift is only minor. And long term holders seem largely unfazed by current price levels, opting to hold on to their Bitcoin despite market gains. This reluctance to sell suggests that holders are confident in further upside potential. A key aspect of Bitcoin's latest rally is its spot driven nature in contrast to previous bull runs heavily fueled by leveraged positions. Yes. Because we don't have BitMEX in their 100 x leverage button that you could push so you could wipe yourself completely off the planet. Open interest in Bitcoin derivatives has seen only minor increases, which stands in sharp contrast to prior peaks.
For instance, open interest was significant before the FTX crash back in 2022. A spot market or a spot driven market without excessive leverage tends to be more stable and resilient as fewer investors are at risk of forced liquidations. Yeah. Well, the the degenerates are still out there. I've seen several people been taking short positions over the last couple of days and just getting their clocks cleaned anyway. Interestingly, while retail addresses haven't increased substantially, whale addresses holding at least 100 BTC have been rising. Over the past few weeks, wallets with large BTC holdings have added tens of 1,000 of coins amounting to 1,000,000,000 of dollars in value.
This increase signals confidence among Bitcoin's largest investors that the current price levels have more room to grow even as Bitcoin reaches all time highs. In past bull cycles, we saw whales exit or decrease their positions near market peaks, a behavior that we're not seeing this time. This trend of accumulation by experienced holders is a strong bullish indicator as it suggests faith in the market's long term potential. The conclusion While bitcoin's rally to all time highs has brought renewed attention, we're not yet seeing the telltale signs of widespread retail FOMO.
The subdued retail interest suggests that we may only be at the beginning phase of this rally. Long term holders remain confident, whales are accumulating, and leverage remains modest. These are all indicators of a healthy, sustainable rally. As we continue into this bull cycle, the market structure suggests that the potential for a larger retail driven surge remains ahead. If this retail interest materializes, it could propel Bitcoin to new heights. For more in-depth look at this topic, check out a recent YouTube video here, and then they give a link. Okay. So that's that's Matt Crosby giving his rundown of what he thinks is going on in the Bitcoin market right now.
It it I'm looking every day that I do this show. And even on the weekends, at one point or another, I will look at mempool to see what the rates are. And for weeks, the rates the transaction rates and what I mean, like like, how many satoshis per vbyte is it gonna cost you to actually get one of your transactions confirmed on the blockchain. These these have been low for a long time. I mean, just the fees have been, like, low. We haven't seen I haven't seen, like, 250 blocks stacked up in the mempool in months. Right? It used to be that way.
Yeah. So and not anymore. I mean, we're still sub 100 blocks in the in in, in the mempools In mempools around the world, mempools are always plural. There's not just 1 mempool. I've got a mempool on my node. I've got actually 2 Bitcoin full nodes, and each one of them has a different mempool. Right? So what transactions in one of my nodes may not reflect exactly with the transactions that are waiting in the mempool on my other node because they're 2 different mempools and they have different gossip partners, so they get different transactions loaded into them. It I do wanna just make sure that we know that it's not a mempool.
It's several mempools. But still, on average, you know, these mempools are just you know, they're hanging out, like or at least the one with mempool, dot space. They have a large amount of memory devoted to their mempool, and it looks like, you know, we're still not all that busy. And that has always kinda told me that retail because that's where you know, like, most of retail retail, it's in the past, it's tended to be people that actually know how to do engage in transactions on their own. Okay. Be that as it may, there's a couple of other questions that I gotta ask about retail. Is there enough money for retail to do this, to start buying?
I think people are kinda hurting right now at the retail level. I mean, most of the guys that have a lot of money to spend, since the advent of the ETFs, they may very well just be taking shares in, like, BlackRock's iBit, Bitcoin ETF. Pensions or not pensions. Let's say, retirement accounts. Since now retirement accounts are more and more able to gain exposure to Bitcoin, because they can actually legally purchase any one of 11 or 12 Bitcoin ETFs, then maybe maybe people are just switching from, I'm just I just don't wanna go to Coinbase. I don't wanna I don't wanna go to Cash App. I don't wanna go to River. I don't wanna go to Swan Bitcoin. I don't wanna set any of this shit up. And they call human resources at their company and says, get me into anything that's got exposure to the Bitcoin ETFs.
Is that happening in mass? No. But it's it's going to start happening. Maybe some people are waiting. I am getting the feeling that the landscape has changed enough that we can't just say and or we can't just rely on the older retail metrics that we've been looking at all this time to see what the hell's gonna happen in the future. So as always, I advise caution. We have no idea what the hell is gonna happen. Alright. So just stack your zats, be healthy, eat good food, learn to cook at home, learn to grow your own food if you can. If you have time and if you've got, like, a little patch of dirt in your backyard, consider growing a garden. But of all things that I think is the most important right now is to run your own full node.
It's not that expensive. It does not cost that much money. I get it. If if a 150 or 200, $250 is way too much for you, then yes. And and I'm not gonna give you any shit about it, not being able to afford $250. Times are tough. And that's what what I've just been saying is that I'm not sure if we've got enough money in retail because everybody's, like, just hanging on by fingernails. So maybe that's what we're seeing. We're not seeing a whole bunch of retail activity because there's just no money left in retail to do a damn thing. Still, it is what it is, and we do not know what the hell this market is going to do. We've seen it do all kinds of weird shit.
Expect it to get even weirder going forward, and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
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