Join me today for Episode 996 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- MSTR's $1.75 Billion Went to $2.6 Billion fast
- Stable Coins are the Reverse Trojan Horse
- Brian Armstrong Hasn't Learned A Thing
- Options' Eye Watering Release
- Hodlbod's Flotilla Released
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://cointelegraph.com/news/micro-strategy-to-sell-2-6-b-in-notes-increasing-from-1-75-b-to-fund-bitcoin-purchases
https://cointelegraph.com/news/grayscale-bitcoin-ether-etfs-reverse-share-split
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/stablecoins-are-not-your-friends
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/11/20/coinbase-delists-wrapped-bitcoin-wbtc-citing-listing-concerns/
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https://www.theblock.co/post/327357/blackrock-bitcoin-etfs-unheard-of-first-day-options-trading-volume-pushes-btc-to-new-all-time-high
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/11/19/russia-bans-winter-cryptocurrency-mining-in-siberia-north-caucasus-and-occupied-ukraine-a87065
https://cointelegraph.com/news/rumble-rises-founder-hints-buy-bitcoin
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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 11:13 Pacific Standard Time. It's the 20th day of November 2024, and this is episode 996 of Bitcoin and only 4 episodes to go, ladies and gentlemen.
4. But we may not get there. Why? Well, because I just heard tell, and I guess I should probably substantiate this by checking it out, that Britain, b r I t a I n, has fired long range missiles into Russia, or rather not not Britain themselves. No. No. No. Ukrainians apparently have used, possibly possibly. It's at this point, seems to be a rumor. I'm just checking, checking, checking, checking. Let's see. Ukraine missiles. Ukraine fires UK made missiles into Russia for the first time, and that's from The Guardian. And as of this time right now, that was printed 31 minutes ago, an hour ago. Ukraine fires UK supplied storm shadow missiles at targets inside Russia. That was Sky News.
Al Jazeera is reporting it, Ukraine. Reuters is reporting it 2 hours ago. So a few hours ago, Britain, by allowing Ukraine to fire long range UK made missiles inside of Russia has now become a nuclear target. Congratulations, Britain, on becoming hot on the targeting list for a nuclear power. United States is there too. Now for those of you who are like, well, dumbass, we were always targets. Well, yes. But I suspect that governments, especially their military people, have what would be known as a hot list, and that would be like a chain this is sort of like the billboard top ten of who's hot in the music industry right now. Well, who's hot to bomb with a nuclear devastating device? Well, right now, it's Britain and the United States.
We'll see if anybody comes anybody else changes into the top five position by being fucking stupid. This is stupid. This war never should have happened in the first fucking place, and it should have ended when there was a peace deal on the table, but Boris Johnson, again, from the United Kingdom, scuttled that little son of a bitch right after. I mean, it was in the 1st month of this conflict, and Boris Johnson told Ukraine, no. You gotta you gotta you gotta clean their chronometers, man. You gotta get in there and you gotta fight. You gotta do all the things to fight.
And, of course, that scuttled a potential peace deal that was on that table just weeks after the conflict had started. For those of you who actually think that Ukraine is, I don't know, a democracy, please remember that their president, Zelensky, suspended elections. Does that sound like a democracy? No. It does not. You know, the United States went through World War 1 or World War 2, and we had change of presidents, and we didn't we didn't suspend elections. We didn't send suspend elections anytime during a time of war for the United States, and yet yet Ukraine has, and they did a lot of other stuff that you would say, not really. Nah. That's not really that no.
That's not a democracy. Right? It doesn't mean that they should be bombed by Russia. I think Russia's being a bunch of dicks themselves, but why is this my problem? Why is this your problem? If you are not Russian and you are not Ukrainian, this is essentially none of your business. It's certainly none of my business, which means that by extension, I should hope that the government that represents me as a citizen of the United States would also say is none of our business. You figure it out. But we all know why. Because Ukraine is one of the most corrupt Eastern European countries that there is, has been for decades.
And, honestly, it's a money laundering operation. Let's be real. For any of the people that think money laundering actually only happens in the back rooms of a bar where there's a poker game going on, and that there's somehow or another a small table in the corner with a money counting device going on. And that's where money laundering occurs. No, dude. Uh-uh. That's not where money laundering occurs. It occurs at banks and the banks have become bigger, and now they're so big for their britches in the money laundering game as far as United States and other western governments are concerned. Now they need whole countries to be able to launder money.
That's what Ukraine is. It's a money laundering operation. It doesn't mean that I want Ukrainians to die. In fact, nobody should have this never should have happened, but it is happening. Right? It doesn't make it any less tearful that Ukraine, at this point, is genetically bottlenecked. They've lost so many of their let's see. The men that had the amount of men that have died in Ukraine that are of childbearing age, and I mean, like, have, like, you know, healthy 20 year old, 30 year old sperm, you know, you're not depending on 70 year olds to get women pregnant. No. No. No. All this entire population of breeding males, and I'm a biologist like, I was trained in biology, so I think in these terms, it doesn't make them any less human. I'm just saying their population of breeding males has been evaporated.
And at this point, they no and nobody's talking about it. Their Ukraine's ability to remain Ukrainian through their bloodlines is gone. It's just gone because they kept fighting this fucking war. And now Britain has decided that they're going to lift this shit off the chain, and everything's gonna be just hunky dory. Right? Well, no wrong. Congratulations to making it to the top five of the hot nuclear target list, Britain. Okay. Back over here into Bitcoin land, we got Microsoft. Are they buying Bitcoin? Apparently, Michael Saylor is going to personally make his case to the board of directors of Microsoft, decrypt Vismaya v, writing this one. Michael Saylor, cofounder and executive chairman of MicroStrategy, will present a Bitcoin investment strategy to Microsoft's board of directors advocating for the world's largest crypto as a treasury asset.
In a November 19th Twitter space, that was yesterday, discussion hosted by Bitcoin ETF Issuer Van Eck. The Bitcoin maximalist announced that he has agreed to deliver a concise 3 minute presentation to Microsoft's leadership. No. Not a lot of time. 3 minutes is almost a blink of an eye when you're doing public speaking, but I digress. The pitch comes amidst a shareholder proposal calling for Microsoft to assess Bitcoin's potential impact on its balance sheet. Quote, the activist that put the proposal together contacted me to present it to the board, and I agreed to provide a 3 minute presentation. That's all you're allowed, and I'm going to present it to the board of directors, End quote, a staunch advocate of Bitcoin, sailor criticized corporations with large cash reserves for burning shareholder value during yesterday's Twitter space discussion.
In his view, Bitcoin can bring great stability to enterprise value. Quote, it would be a lot more stable stock and a much less risky stock if half of the enterprise value of that stock was based upon tangible assets or property like Bitcoin, Saylor said. Saylor, who has led MicroStrategy to become the largest corporate Bitcoin holder with 252,220 BTC I think it's more than that now, guys. I thought yesterday we said something like 311,000, but whatever. He believes that Bitcoin is a necessary asset for companies with large cash reserves. He shared during the discussion that his earlier request for a private meeting with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, to discuss the topic has not yet been accepted.
In October, Saylor directly addressed Microsoft CEO on Twitter saying, quote, if you want to make the next $1,000,000,000,000 for Microsoft shareholders, call me. End quote. Microsoft shareholders are scheduled to vote on whether the company should conduct a formal assessment of Bitcoin as an investment on December 10th. The greater sorry. Greater whatever. The National Center For Public Policy Research introduced the proposal last month, citing MicroStrategy's success with Bitcoin. MicroStrategy stock has outperformed Microsoft by 313% this year alone even though the company operates at a much smaller scale. Quote, MicroStrategy, like Microsoft, is a tech company.
But unlike Microsoft, it holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet, noted NCPPR in the proposal. Despite the push from shareholders and sailors' advocacy, Microsoft's board has recommended voting against the proposal. They don't even wanna look at it. That's what they're saying. We we don't even wanna make the assessment as to whether or not we should assess Bitcoin. That's what they're saying. Whatever. Microsoft maintains that it already evaluates a broad range of investment options. The company's share price traded relatively modestly on Wednesday, increasing a mere half point to $417, Google Finance data shows.
Yes. And there is a lot of hype around MicroStrategy right now because their price just keeps going up. I'm not going to tell you what to do except to buy Bitcoin and hold Bitcoin. That's all you gotta do. Ladies and gentlemen, you don't have to try to do something like, you know what? Maybe I should sell my Bitcoin and buy MicroStrategy stock. If you do that, wow, dude. Stop. Don't know. Just stop doing that shit. Even though even even though it's gonna be hard because this next story says MicroStrategy increases its note sales to $2,600,000,000 for Bitcoin purchases.
I told you yesterday that $1,750,000,000 on the convertible note was not going to hold. It was going to be more than oversubscribed, and it looks like I am being proved correct. Because now I said 3,000,000,000. We'll see if we get there, but they've already increased it to $2,600,000,000. And this is Zoltan Vardy out of Cointelegraph. MicroStrategy said it's increasing its upcoming note sales to $2,600,000,000, signaling bullish expectations for Bitcoin's potential to surpass the $100,000 mark. MicroStrategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder, is set to raise 2,600,000,000 from senior convertible notes at a 0% interest rate to buy more Bitcoin.
The note sale was upsized from a previously announced offering of $1,750,000,000 of aggregate principal amounts of notes the firm shared in a November 20th statement. The 2,600,000,000 offering targets qualified institutional buyers because plebs suck and is expected to close on November 21st subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions. MicroStrategy's note sale could help push Bitcoin's price above the $100,000 mark for the first time in history. The announcement comes as Bitcoin is trading above $93,970, which is up over 37% during the past month.
Holy shit. Well, it looks like I'm probably I'm probably going to be right. I'm thinking we're going to see this convertible note sale at $3,000,000,000, which is what I said yesterday. We'll see. We'll we'll we'll have to see. Definitely are going to have to see. It just I was just reminded by some neuron that misfired in my brain that I had a discussion with my wife and family over the dinner table last night where we enjoyed pan fried ham steak, grits, roasted brussels sprouts, and red eye gravy. And some people are, like, what the hell is red eye gravy? It's essentially butter, flour, which is the base of any good gravy, a bunch of paprika, and day old coffee.
Not coffee grounds, just day old coffee. Liquid coffee. And you make a gravy out of it, and holy shit, it's good. But anyway, the discussion went something like this. My wife looks at me and says, David, you are you guys over at Bitcoin are not doing your job. I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, I had kids she teaches college she's like I had kids in my class looking at charts you know because I've got trading view on my phone I'm sure that these cats do too And I go, yeah. So I mean, well, I mean, they should be listening to what you have to say. But since they're going to waste their money on college and not learn a goddamn thing from you, well, then what did you expect them to do? And she said, no. No. You don't understand. She goes, they were they were talking about Ethereum and Doge. And I go, wait a minute. What? Now my wife is only tangentially interested in Bitcoin simply because her husband is a geek.
Yeah. I'm a nerd. I'm obsessed. I get it. I understand. But but she she tolerates it. Right? There's no way it's just not it'll it'll happen when it happens for her, but I'm not gonna force anything. And yet and yet and yet she tells me that her kids are talking about buying Ethereum and Doge, and she verbalized the following to the class. She said, you don't wanna have any of that. You just wanna buy Bitcoin. And this is here here is the punch line. This one this one kid looks up and said, no. Ethereum is better. It's but it's also based on the same protocol. If you didn't hear me, let me say it again. There is a college age kid that's into cryptocurrency that still thinks that Ethereum uses the same protocol as Bitcoin.
We are not living up to our educational potential here, ladies and gentlemen. So take that however you wanna take it. Tell other people that we've gotta get off the stick. We gotta do something about this shit. We cannot let qualified human beings think that Ethereum uses the same protocol as Bitcoin. It doesn't. If for whatever reason you're listening to my voice, everything about it is different. Everything. There's nothing nothing similar at all between those two systems. But I digress. Grayscale has completed a reverse share split of both their Bitcoin and Shitcoin number 1 ETFs, Helen Parks, CoinTelegraph.
Grayscale Investments is making moves to improve the cost efficiency of its crypto ETFs through reverse share splits. Shit. On November 19th, Grayscale completed reverse share splits of its 2 crypto ETFs, the Bitcoin mini trust, and that other garbage pile of shit that they do. Grayscale said that the reverse share splits for the ETFs are designed to make the trading of securities more cost effective. Quote, we're constantly looking for ways to evolve our product suite to meet the wants and needs of the investment community. Based on feedback from our clients, we believe this is the right direction and beneficial to our clients and the investment community.
Yeah. Apparently, their customers might have been telling them that their price was just too damn high to custody their Bitcoin, but whatever. Following the reverse share split, which occurred approximately at 10 PM UTC, November 19th, the Grayscale Bitcoin mini trust ETF saw its price per share increase by 5 x. At the same time, the ETF holder saw a proportionate decrease in the number of shares outstanding. That's how a reverse share works. If you so what happened? If you had 5 shares of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, now you have one share of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, but it's priced 5 times more than each of your individual shares when you held 5. Does that make sense?
It's the exact opposite of, stock split. Like, when Microsoft would did a 10 for 1 split of their stock, if you held one share of MicroStrategy for I don't know. Let's say it was $2,000 a share. It wasn't just to make the the number easier. You now have 10 shares, and they're each worth $200. So this was done in reverse. But follow or, additionally, as a result of the splits, investors could hold fractional shares, which can be tracked by the shareholders depository trust company on its internal ledgers or aggregated and sold after determining the number of fractional shares created due to the split. Okay. Well, whoop de do.
Honestly, I think that they're this what it looks like they're doing is I I really think they're they're the people that were saying, look, if you don't want me to sell the rest of my shit and just move it all over to BlackRock, you're gonna have to do something about the percentage that you're getting every single month for me to custody my shares of Bitcoin at Grayscale. If you don't do something about this, and I mean right fucking now, I'm moving my shit somewhere. So if if it's the case that Grayscale charges you by how many shares you have and its value, then this kinda makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, I don't know what they're doing.
But I have a sneaky suspicion that it was the only way that they were able to not technically reduce, how much they get for administrative cost to hold your shit for you as much as it was a way around it. So you see what I mean? I think they're trying to make it cheaper so that people don't bail. Because they've lost I mean, they lost. They lost to BlackRock. They lost to Fidelity. Grayscale was in the Catbird seat just like that dude that used to run Bitmain. I can't remember his name right now, but he decided to go all in, be cash, and he lost. Coinbase is probably next on the chopping block to lose, to be in the catbird seat and not understand that they're in the catbird seat and start doing really stupid shit and then lose.
Grayscale lost. They're gonna try to come back, but I don't think this reverse share split is going to work. And by the way, ladies and gentlemen, stablecoins are not your friends. This is from Shinobi, Bitcoin Magazine. Hello. Stablecoins are often pitched as a stopgap method or a friendly tool for people in the developing world who cannot handle the volatility of Bitcoin. They are framed as something complimentary to Bitcoin, not in competition with it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bitcoiners have commonly used the meme of a Trojan horse to justify many things over the years, rationalizing many shortcomings and compromises made over time as what is necessary to sneak Bitcoin into the legacy systems to ultimately take over and win.
That is exactly what stablecoins are, except in the reverse direction. Stablecoins are the Trojan horse into Bitcoin. Bitcoin's volatility makes using it a challenge if you do not have the net worth to weather it, but there are mechanisms to handle this. Centralized schemes like StableSats by Blink have been built to use Bitcoin collateral to lock in a dollar value without needing to actually hold dollars. Discrete log contracts, or d l c's, offer another mechanism for accomplishing the same thing in a decentralized fashion.
But instead, we are propping up the US dollar. Stablecoins are a solution to volatility, but they are a non Bitcoin native one. They are the US Treasury's trojan horse into the Bitcoin space. They do more to control and prop up the dollar than they do to help Bitcoiners handle the issue of volatility. Stablecoins give the treasury a new lifeline to sell their shit ass treasury bonds. Shinobi didn't say that part, but whatever. Foreign countries have lowered demand and sold existing treasuries for some years now, and stablecoin issuers have stepped up to pick up the slack. The bigger demand grows for stablecoins, the more of a drop in foreign government demand for treasury bonds the US government can handle.
At a time where BRICS, b r I c s, is planning more and more to shift away from their dependence upon the US dollar, stablecoins represent a vehicle to ameliorate this issue. They also, unlike Bitcoin native solutions such as DLCs, present a security risk to hodlers. To my knowledge, aside from the liquid network, every network stablecoins are issued on come hold on. Let me do that again. Every network stablecoins are issued upon come with a seize and freeze functionality built into the smart contract that the issuer uses to create them. Almost all stablecoins support the arbitrary freezing and seizure of user balances on the different networks that they circulate on. Surveillance is another aspect of stablecoin proliferation.
The more that dollar stablecoins are adopted around the world without needing to politically convince any government to officially dollarize, I might add, the more the United States government's ability to directly surveil foreign financial activity. Chainalysis and other companies become a de facto government surveillance system for foreign financial activity with no need to subpoena or gather records first. It's right there in the blockchain. All the while, it propagates the idea that, quote, blockchain is a useful technology disconnected from Bitcoin, pushing the idea to your average person that Bitcoin is simply an asset like gold to invest in. It creates a psychological narrative of invest in Bitcoin.
Use your surveillance money when you need to spend. Overall, stablecoins are going to be one of the most epic unforced errors that have occurred in this entire ecosystem. People need to wake up before it becomes embedded so deeply into their lives and the financial world in general that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle ourselves from. People should be spreading and building on Bitcoin, a money built to enable freedom and sovereignty, not these cheap imitations called stablecoins that are nothing more than an extension of the surveillance and tyranny of the legacy financial system. Holy shit, Brian, AKA Shinobi.
He's right. I didn't think about the surveillance issue. So there's 2 things here. 1st, the surveillance issue that he what what is Shinobi talking about? He's saying that if we can inject if different people that are somehow or another tied to United States Treasury to back their stablecoin projects, if their stablecoins become more and more widely spread amongst foreign countries, not just in the West, Right? Not just Canada, United States, Mexico, or any of the European Union or Australia or New Zealand. Right? That we can start surveilling the activity, the financial activity of the citizenry of those countries, not just their governments. It the granularity here will go down to the citizenry of, let's say, Honduras. Let's take let's pick on Honduras. If they have, like, 3 different stablecoins, they don't, but let's say they did, and they're all backed by US treasuries.
Well, Chainalysis is not just looking at Bitcoin. It's looking at all of the chains. It looks at everything. And their I think that their black box thing is is really faulty. But be that as it may, they're still looking. It's clearly evidence that's, you know, admissible in a United States court of law. And here, they're going to be looking at all of the chain activity of all these stablecoins. So every single pupusa bought or whatever it is they sell in Honduras, they'll be able to know exactly not what was bought, but how much was paid, what time of day, on what day, from what wallet.
The the financial analysis that stablecoins represent at this point is frightening, and I never even thought about it. Thank you, Shinobi, for bringing this up. But here's the other thing that I wanted to talk about. Let me read this again. Instead of propping up the US dollar, stablecoins are a solution to volatility, But they are non Bitcoin native ones. They are the US Treasury's trojan horse into the Bitcoin space. They do more to control and prop up the dollar than they do to help Bitcoiners handle the issue of volatility. Alright. So he had just got finished before this sentence, he had just got finished talking about the meme that we use of the Trojan horse introducing Bitcoin into the legacy financial system.
Shinobi is going in reverse. He's talking about stablecoins being the legacy financial systems' own trojan horse back the other way. Now think of 2 different species walking around in the forest forest, and they both are sick with something, but they're different. Not only are the species different, the viruses that they're infected with are different. And they trade they trade viruses. Now I don't wanna get too deep into this. But after 1,000,000, 100 of 1000000 of years of life being on this planet, the majority of DNA might very well have been introduced through viral interactions with different species along the way.
We used to call it junk DNA, that it really it had it doesn't really do anything. Right? And nothing could be further from the truth because what we're finding out now is that that junk DNA helps make us what we are. Now if we think of it from though from that standpoint, and I I am loathed to say the following, but I just don't know a different way to say it. Maybe the in maybe the induction of legacy financial genetic information, for lack of a better phrase, is a good thing to have inside of the species that is Bitcoin. Because we certainly know that Bitcoin is definitely in the process of completely infecting legacy financial systems.
Why not a feedback loop? Now I'm not saying that it's good. Right? I mean, you can get sick and you could die, but you might get sick and get an immunity to it. It is impossible for me not to think about systems as complex as finance, financial systems, economic systems as living organisms. It's so much easier to think that way because they were created by what? Living organisms. You're going to transfer what you are into everything that you build, whether it's just you building it or a whole shitload of people just like you building it. You're going to induce something into that system that reflects what you are, and you are a living organism.
Same thing here, brothers. It's not outside of the scope to think of it in terms of biological interactions, and the trading of genetic material is key to the speciation or the multitude of species upon this planet. It's absolutely fucking critical. So if we just think there's 2 ways to think here. A, we're gonna stop it. We're gonna stop stablecoins in their tracks. No. You're not. No. You're not. And 2, it's possible that we might actually get something more out of it than we think and something definitely, in my opinion, more out of it than just negative consequences. But the 3rd here's a third thing. We have to be vigilant.
We cannot, like Brian says or Shenobi says, we cannot look at stablecoins as a good thing. I don't like them. I've told you this on many, many, many occasions. However, that doesn't mean that I'm completely against them to the point where they have to be squashed because they won't be. It is a waste of our energy at this point. There's nothing we can do. And we, honestly, we never had a chance. This was always going to happen. And as long as you can accept it, then we can move forward and figure out a way to be vigilant about it and not let it actually overtake somebody like the naked mole rat.
Even he might be learning his lesson. Why? Why do I say that? I'm talking about Brian arms or, yeah, Brian Armstrong here over at Coinbase because they are delisting wrapped Bitcoin. That's right. For all the bullshit that we kept giving wrapped BTC, it looks like finally Brian Armstrong is seeing the light because they're taking wrapped BTC down. And this is out of CoinDesk. It's written by who but Sam Reynolds. Come on, Sam. Tell us what's going on here, brother. Coinbase says it is in the process of removing wrapped Bitcoin or WBTC from its exchange, citing listing standards.
For those of the you that don't know, WBTC is a token that represents Bitcoin on Ethereum. It's not Bitcoin. It's an Ethereum token. It's an ERC 20 token, ladies and gentlemen. They just call it wrapped Bitcoin because you buy them with actual Bitcoin, which never leaves the chain. Right? It's all if you use Bitcoin to buy this garbage, your Bitcoin, which is no longer your Bitcoin because you were dumb enough to sell it, remains on Bitcoin. It cannot go to Ethereum. Okay? If you think I'm wrong, then send Bitcoin to a wrapped BTC address and see what happens. You're not going to like it. But while WBTC is offered by BitGo, other similar products have the same concept. Custody crypto on one end and a representation of the token on its non native blockchain on the other.
This move to delist came shortly after Coinbase announced its own version of wrapped Bitcoin called goddamn it. Coinbase c BTC or cbbtc, which exist on the base blockchain. And base is capitalized, which means they're talking about the actual blockchain that is named base. Recently wrapped BTC has come under a considerable amount of scrutiny after BitGo announced it was entering into a joint venture with BitGlobal. We don't give a shit. Okay. So he's not learning his lesson. And I don't need to go any further because we are 35 minutes into the show, ladies and gentlemen. So announcement, Brian Armstrong has not learned any lessons.
That's all that we have to know. He's going to go forward with destroying Coinbase. It's going to happen. Coinbase is going to fall at one point, not not because of Coinbase BTC or his version of wrapped BTC, but because they are clearly not being vigilant. And their their hubristic attitudes are going to land them at the bottom of the tree where they were firmly perched upon just like the dude from bitmain and a whole bunch of other people like Roger Ver. He was had the catbird seat. Hubristic nature came out of him and he fell to the bottom of the tree. After a while, we're gonna look at the bottom of this tree and go, holy shit. There's a lot of dead bodies down there. What are we gonna do? And I just say, fuck it. Set it on fire. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities is showing West Texas Intermediate down 0.6% to 68.95.
Brit, North Sea is down 0.57% to 7289. Natural gas is up, wow, 7%, probably because of the natural gas chicanery going on in Europe and Russia and all that shit. $3.20 per 1,000 cubic feet, and gasoline has risen by a third of a point to 204 per gallon. Just so you know, oil and oil's taking a hit today because inventories in the United States came in as more than expected and offset the fact that oil was increasing yesterday yesterday morning because, well, Ukraine decided to let one of the US long range missiles off the chain into Russia. Anyway, gold is doing well today. 1%. 2655 and a dime for the shiny metal rock. Silver is down point 74. Platinum is down 1 and a third. Copper is up scant. Palladium down 1 and a third.
Biggest winner in ag today looks to be coffee, 4 and a half percent to the upside. Biggest loser, Sugar, 1.68 to the downside. We got live cattle down scant. Lean hogs are up almost 2 full points. Feeder cattle are up point 17%. The Dow is down point 18%. S and P is down a half. Nasdaq is down point 87%, and the s and p mini is up. Scan. What's Bitcoin doing? I don't know. It's just bouncing around. Right now, it's at $94,020. That is a $1,860,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 35.4 ounces of the shiny metal rock with our 1 bitcoin, of which there are 19,784,886.74 of, and fees are modest, yet, well, higher than they have been. Point 14 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis.
There are exactly 100 blocks waiting or carrying 284,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting for clearance at high priority rates of 12 Sudoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna cost you 10. Hash rate, looking good today. 770.2 exahashes per second on a 1 week rolling average. And now we come to time, talent, and treasure. Give me money. If you find it valuable, you give value back in the form of time, or talent, or treasure. That's all there it is. That's all there is to it, really. If you give me your time, you know, for what it is that I do, then maybe, you know, maybe you can help me market the show. You don't have any money.
Maybe you don't have any talent, which I don't believe. I think everybody has talent. But let's just say, you know what? I I I don't wanna do my talent right now, and I ain't got no money, but I do have some time, then go over to, like, Apple Podcast and give The Bitcoin and Show a 5 star review. It say something, like, earth shatteringly cool about it. That helps. It doesn't sound like it does to a lot of people because they're they're you know, people will go, well, just because you get a 5 star review on Apple, it helps? Yeah. It does. Because it resets various algorithms to add one more tick in my 5 star column.
And a lot of other places that leverage Apple Podcasts use those ratings. It helps with show discovery to other people, which allows them to give over their treasure if they don't have time and talent. So they can stream these the more people that stream me 1 satoshi per minute or 10 satoshis per minute is essentially the less money that you have to give me because it's spread out. But the only way it can spread out is for the people that give their time to help promote the show, to get to tell other people, their family, and their friends. Hey. If you wanna know what the hell is going on in Bitcoin on a daily basis, Monday through Friday, you gotta tune in here. And, hey, I'll share you the link so that you don't have to do any extra work. Right? But if you've got treasure and we've spread we've we've increased the amount of people that have treasure that's willing to give, then everybody can actually give less.
Right? Because there's more people to give. It's called the 1,000 true fans model where you got 10,000 people that actually listen to what you have to say. You might be able to depend on 1,000 of those people on a daily basis to give over their treasure even if it's small donations. But if you don't have either time or treasure, but somehow or another you got talent, which yeah. I know. We get it. It's gonna take time. I don't know. If you've got a talent at writing really good, like, marketing content for me, and you can market the show because you're an excellent marketer, then, yeah, that's talent.
And, yes, time. And I've never understood that part. If you've got talent and you're going to apply it to, give value to somebody who's giving you value, you're obviously also giving your time. But, you know, the guys over here that, gave to the show in decentralized autistic organizations, which was Monday's Bitcoin, and Arcerus with 27/18 Satoshis says, Duna. Oh, goody. I get to know what Duna is. Duna, decentralized unincorporated nonprofit association. It's a Wyoming entity type for now, but basically an unincorporated nonprofit with a DAO overlay.
So far, only one has been filed. Arceres, thank you. I appreciate that. See, that's that's helping me that's helping me help you to help me to help you to understand what the hell is going on because now we all know that Duna stands for decentralized unincorporated nonprofit associations. I learn something new every day. Agichute. Agichute? It's not a treaty. We that's the that's the thing. We need they would need to for them to be allies. Right? And I know you're talking about something, like, a little bit different. The thing is is that I'm non binded unless they are actual allies, and they that has to be more that has to be an actual actual treaty between the two countries in question. For them to be allies, we have to have a treaty with Ukraine.
That shit has to be ratified in congress by the duly elected members of congress that are supposedly there to represent me. None of that shit's been done. Honestly, it's this is going to kill way more people than it's already killed if we don't stop it now. But it doesn't look like anybody wants to stop it. We keep coming up with all manner of, well, but what if or what about this and how about we fucking stop it? How about that? I that's what I'm talking either that or let Russia and Ukraine just fucking fight it out Because I'm done with both of these countries. I'm done caring that every 10 years, I gotta worry about my future and the future of my family not ending up as cinders plastered against the bark of a burnt ass tree.
There's no treaty that helps me not think about that. There's no memorandum of understanding that helps me stop thinking about that shit. I've been dealing with fucking Russia since I was a kid. Stop, drop, and roll. Oh, the Russians are going to kill us all. They we are using we have done nothing but use foreign countries to fear monger here in the United States for nothing but one thing, and that's fucking control. And anybody who doesn't understand that at this point, I can't help you. I just can't. Again, there's no memorandum here.
Or if there is a memorandum, it's nonbinding. There's nothing that has been done in the United States Congress that represents me as a citizen of the United States that's locked into legal language that tells anybody anything about my requirement to fucking help the most insanely corrupt Eastern European country that's ever existed and is nothing but a money laundering machine that makes New York gangsters look like they're in diapers. I'm sorry. I'm done with it. God's death with 537 thank you, sir, no thank you. Aggee Choate says, what about Budapest memorandum with this time with 555 sats?
But we've already gone through it. So he may have done that twice. Oggichute, if you did it twice and you need your 555, Stoshis back, you let me know, man, because I will definitely do that for you. User 115-56842 with 500 says, thank you for a podcast that does not suck. Value for value is better than advertising model and it's so powerful. Wait for Wave Lake and the value for value model to catch on to the music industry, thanks to podcast pioneers like you and Adam Curry, the Podfather. Cheers. Damn. Being even close to being compared to the quality of human being that Adam Curry is is an honor, sir. Thank you. I appreciate everything that you just said. Pies to Pleb with 420 says thank you, sir. No, thank you. And there's the weather report.
Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use, Flotilla. Do you know what Flotilla is? Flotilla is a new thing that was released yesterday by my friend, HuddlBod. It is a form of Nostra client. It does the say well, it doesn't do the same thing Nostra clients do. It's a little different. But it's login procedure. You can use Insect Bunker, I believe, but you can definitely use Albi Hub. If you're using Albi Hub to control your private public key pair, then you can log in just like with everything else, with your Albi Hub, management system for that. So what does it do? Well, from what I understand, and I'm looking at it right now, I can it it sort of takes the place of, Discord.
If you know what Discord is, then you kinda already know what my friend HuddleBot is trying to go for with Flotilla. It's flotilla, spelled the way flotilla is spelled, dot social. That's flotilla dot social. I can run an entire chat room as a relay that I have spun up myself on my own, like, for like, let's say, for this instance, my start 9, I can spin up a relay node or noster. And I can tell that relay node to accept certain kind of notes and whatnot like that, and I gotta do a couple of other things. But, essentially, if I do it the right way, I turn it into a flotilla chat room. That's right. The relay, all it does is that chat room.
So if you've got your own like start 9 or maybe, you know, myNode BTC and you've got the ability to put a a Nostra Relay on yours, then you can have your own chat room. Yes. I know you can do this in Discord already, but Discord's centralized. And they can shut you down at the drop of a hat. This allows us to have the same thing but have nobody but the person running the room have the ability to say, hey, you can't be here. Yes. You can do that in Discord. I can have I can spin up a server in Discord and I can ban anybody I want. And I would probably be able to do this in Flotilla too. Not exactly sure because I haven't talked to a Huddl bot about all of its capabilities.
But let's say that I can. Well, that's fine. It's it's my shit. Okay. So there is a nature of centralization. But if I'm doing this on Discord and they don't like and the guys at Discord, the the the managers of of that whole platform, if they don't like me, then my whole server's gone. And everybody on that server is shit out of luck, and they got nothing to say about it. Flotilla fixes this. So go over to flotilla.social. That's flotilla.social. Again, flotilla.flotilla.social. Go check it out and make sure that you give feedback to hodlbod on nostr. Meanwhile, BlackRock Bitcoin ETFs unheard of 1st day options trading volume pushes BTC to new all times high. Did it? I don't know.
I don't know if it was the options, but options trading for a spot Bitcoin ETF did definitely hit the market yesterday, and in the process, push the price of Bitcoin to yet another new all time high. Again, we can't directly know that. Right? So that's a little bit of hubris there. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust is the first spot Bitcoin exchange traded fund to be approved for options, leading to just shy of $1,900,000,000 in notional exposure traded according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Quote, final tally of Ibit's first day of options is just shy of 1,900,000,000 in notional exposure traded via 354,000 contracts.
289,000 of those were calls and the other 65,000 were puts. Let's see. It was according to James Seifert said in a post on Twitter, quote, that's a ratio of 4.4 to 1 of calls versus puts. These options were almost certainly part of the move to the new Bitcoin all time highs today. K. Well, whatever for context. A call option gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy an asset at a specified price within a specified period. If the buyer exercises the call, the call seller must sell the asset. A put option gives the holder the right to sell the asset at a specified price on or before the expiration of that contract. Quote, $1,900,000,000 is unheard of for day 1.
For context, BITO did $363,000,000 and that's been around for 4 years, Bloomberg senior analyst Eric Balchunis said on Twitter, quote, and also this is with 25,000 contract position limits. That said, 1,900,000,000 isn't quite big dog level. Yet, though, gold did do $5,000,000,000 today, but give it a few more days or weeks. Okay? The price of Bitcoin touched the 93,900 level for the first time ever earlier Tuesday afternoon. And as we all know, it did it again this morning. As open interest rises, it creates natural buyers and sellers on both sides of that market. This thickens up the market and increases liquidity, which therefore reduces volatility.
Dick previously told the block. They get talking about market structure as expert, Dennis Dick, there. I again, yeah. I'm seeing a I'm seeing a lot of longs and shorts get wiped out on, wrecked bot over there on Noster. I'm not so certain that this wipes out, volatility, guys. I think it actually increases it at least in the short term. World's largest cryptocurrency was trading around. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody gives a shit. We know what the price is. Options on Bitcoin ETFs from Bitwise and Grayscale will begin on Wednesday. That's today. Oh my god. With others expected to follow suit. So now we're gonna have options all over the place. And I guess all the like I said yesterday all the traders have this exciting new product to play with oh they're playing with the bitcoins it's also tiresome It really is. Because it's just I said it yesterday, derivatives in this space.
Sure. They make sense for the legacy financial weirdos that are out there, but they actually don't help what Bitcoin has been doing for people that have been de banked, never banked, poor as dirt, or activist in regimes that don't want them to ever live, much less breathe, much less use that breath to form words that other people can hear. It doesn't help the mission. It doesn't help the mission. Yeah. If you wanna get if all you give a shit about is getting rich and you're an option traders, you're probably gonna get rich. And then after the volatility finally does die down, you know, it's every man for himself. But I've noticed that I'm seeing a lot of volatility, so I'm not sure that Dick Dennis, saying that the volatility is helped, you know, like to squelch the volatility by options. I I I don't see it.
He gets paid a lot more than I do, so he's I guess he's right. But I'm not seeing it. Okay. There was something else that I had to say about this, though. Option okay. I lost it. Oh, well. It happens because we're on we're on to, other other things, like Russia. Let's get back into Russia, but this time, not the Ukrainian crap. Because they're banning winter cryptocurrency mining in Siberia, the North Caucasus, and occupied Ukraine. I guess we are gonna go back to Ukraine. Oh, by the way, this is from The Moscow Times. Does not say who it's written by. Authorities in Russia announced on Tuesday plans to ban cryptocurrency mining in several regions this winter to address electricity shortages.
The ban will affect the, I cannot pronounce it, Irkuk Irkukst region, parts of the Republic of Birisha, and the Zabul region in Siberia, as well as 6 regions in the North Caucasus, including the Republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. I had a teacher named Dagestani once. She was a great English teacher. Anyway, it it will also extend to the occupied Ukrainian region of Don'tesk, Luhansk, and something else and something other. The decision made by a government commission led by deputy prime minister Alexander Novak aims to restrict crypto mining during the heating season, mining in Siberia will be prohibited starting December 1st and ends March 15, 2025 with annual restrictions from November 15th to March 15th through 2031.
In the North Caucasus and occupied Ukraine, mining will face total bans from December of 2024 through March of 2031 with no seasonable seasonal reprieve, the Commissant Business Newspaper reported last week. These restrictions follow new laws signed by president Vladimir Putin on November 1st that regulate crypto mining and create experimental infrastructures for cross border crypto payment cryptocurrency payments. While domestic crypto payments remain banned, some lawmakers view the regulations as a potential tool for bypassing sanctions. Russia, the world's 2nd largest crypto mining hub after the United State. Oh, I didn't know that. Really? Russia?
I don't know about that. Well, let's say they're right. Largest crypto mining hub after the United States consumes 16,000,000,000 kilowatt hours annually for mining. About 1.5% of its total electricity usage according to the energy ministry. And that's 1.5% is right along the lines of, generally speaking, the entire mining industry. It uses 1.5 percent of total world power. So I guess 16,000,000,000 kilowatt hours is right there. I I wish they'd used, like, you know, more like megawatts. I I I honestly don't know why they used kilowatts here. So, anyway, Russia's banning cryptocurrency mining so that people can heat their homes in Siberia, which, from what I understand, gets quite cold.
Now, Rumble. If you didn't see it yesterday, we're gonna talk about it. Felix from Cointelegraph says, Rumble shares rise 9% as its founder mulls over scooping up some Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna do gonna do the micro strategy shit. Rumble, a YouTube alternative favored by the political far right, is the latest company to explore the possibility of adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet. Rumble shares gained as much as 9%, hitting a high of $6.2 in after hours trading on November 19th after its founder and CEO, Chris Pavlovsky, had posed the question on Twitter, which saw strong support from the crypto community.
Quote, should Rumble add Bitcoin to its balance sheet? End quote, Pavlovsky added or asked in a Twitter poll, to which about 29,000 people answered yes. Holy shit. Quote, yes. Happy to help if needed, said Jack Mallor, CEO and founder of Bitcoin payment provider, Strike. Then comes Michael Saylor, chairman of the Bitcoin mining company, MicroStrategy no. Bitcoin buying company, MicroStrategy, offered to discuss how it could be done. And Pavlovsky seems to have accepted. And they show a picture of this tweet where after this guy's poll, Michael Saylor said, yes, I would be happy to help to or happy to discuss why and how with you. And Chris Pavlovsky replies directly to that and says, DM ing you now.
Wow. So maybe he's serious. Rumble shares closed up 2.5% on the day, yada yada yada. Rumble, based in Florida and Ontario, runs a video sharing platform of the same name known for its lenient content moderation policies. Its cloud services arm also hosts the Donald Trump owned social media platform, Truth Social. Rumble has about, wow, 67,000,000 monthly active users and began trading publicly on the Nasdaq in September of 2022. As of September 30th, Rumble's balance sheet of cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities was about $132,000,000 The platform brought in $25,000,000 in revenue in the Q3, and that was up almost 40% on a year over year basis.
Its shares have been down since its q three results were reported last week as the company's revenue did miss analyst estimates by 14%. And its earnings per share fell short of expectations by 20%. Oh, no. If Rumble adds Bitcoin to its balance sheet, it would join a growing list of companies that have taken the plunge this year. Artificial intelligence firm, Genius Group. That's who I was thinking about yesterday. Genius Group took its first steps in its Bitcoin first strategy on November 18th by purchasing a 110 Bitcoin for 10,000,000. It plans to eventually hold 90% of its reserves in Bitcoin.
Meanwhile, the Japan based Meta Planet bought another $11,300,000 worth of Bitcoin with Bitcoin treasuries data showing it holds 4 no. 1,142 Bitcoin. And, of course, medical device maker, Similar Scientific, that has increased their holdings to 1,273. And okay. So here's the thing. It's like what I've said about at least Genius Group is that it looks like a zombie company to me. It's not doing well. It has not been doing well. But Rumble is a little different. And and like Meta Planet and like Simler, they actually have revenue coming in.
And MicroStrategy, for that matter. So if this guy, Pavlovsky, is sincere about wanting to do this, then he might actually be able to not catch up to Michael Saylor, but have enough of an open window that it allows him to get start getting, you know well, not close. But instead of having to squeeze through a closing window, because Rumble has actual revenue, has an actual balance sheet that looks like it's healthy, and even though it's missed its estimates, the window is still open and he doesn't have to squeeze through. He can jump through that son of a bitch right now.
What do you think? Do you think Pavlovsky is going to take the bait? I I shouldn't say it that way because I think having Bitcoin on your balance sheet is a good thing. I don't ever well, I will never think that it is a bad thing. But we have come to the end of the show. And for all those people that are offended by my stance on Ukraine, I can't apologize for that. I believe what I believe. I'm not a terrible person, I promise. I don't like it when people die. But when people are hell bent on killing each other, I'm not going to stand in their way. That is a the worst place if you ever doubt what it's like to stand in between 2 people who are hell bent on killing each other, then go to a bar and wait for 2 chicks to start fighting and then go break that son of a bitch up and see just how many days you spend in the hospital because nothing nothing will tear your ass a new one like getting in between 2 chicks fighting when they're drunk.
Ask me how I know. You don't wanna do that shit. And that's 2 chicks that are drunk at a bar in the United States. I don't want any of my money funding any of this nonsense in Ukraine. I don't want any of my money funding most of the nonsense that the United States gets their hands involved with. But I certainly don't this one. I wanna stay as far away from this as I possibly can, and I'm forced to be right there standing in between 2 countries that are hell bent on killing each other because we, like morons, decided to allow the United States military armament to be flown into Russia.
And we all know that that was actually done by United States either contractors or actual military themselves. There's no way they could have trained Ukrainian troops to be able to function at that level, not in the amount of time that they had. That thing, that system, all of these systems, the Patriot missile system, the attack, all of these systems, they take months of training to understand how to actually operate. You just don't drop it on somebody that has to read a manual and say, have fun staying poor. No. No. It doesn't work that way.
We blasted a long range missile into Russia. We did that. The United States did that. The Ukrainians didn't do that. The faster we all start understanding what that actually means, the faster we can figure out that maybe, maybe, maybe now is the time for a citizen uprising. I mean, a full blown uprising. It there will probably never be a better time to evacuate some of the bullshit that we've got in the governments of the West while the West is completely distracted by Biden's amazingly stupid and shortsighted decision to allow the United States to directly confront a nuclear fucking power by throwing a long range missile directly into their borders. It is an act of war.
It is an act of war that the United States committed. Ukraine, they're already at war. And even if they weren't, if they had done it, it would have still been an act of war by the United States because there's no way that the Ukrainians could have actually done it. Everybody knows we did it. We not only gave them the system, we pushed the button because everybody knows you can't train these people that fast to be able to push the button themselves. The United States has committed an act of war against a nuclear power, and we're only 24 years into this fucking century.
How how why am I supposed to stand up for for Ukraine at this point? Why aren't I standing up against, you know, for the people in Senegal or Gambia or whatever, Nigeria or any of the other places on the planet that all kinds of military activity is going on? Why Ukraine? Why is everybody up in arms about Ukraine? Shit. Taiwan is in this shit. The China is openly telling the world that they're going to take Taiwan in 2027. Yep. Nobody seems to be standing on the fucking corner with I stand with goddamn Taiwan. Nobody cares about Taiwan. No. No. No. No. No. We care about Ukraine, a far flung Eastern European country that's been corrupt for decades and is a money laundering center for huge businessmen and United States and the rest of the West politicians, and yet I'm supposed to shed tears over this shit. No. I'm not going to. I can't. I can't do this shit anymore. I can't pretend that we're doing the right thing. We're not.
We're not helping the Ukrainians. What we've done is we've made sure that the Ukrainians are genetically bottlenecked at this point moving forward. There's no way they can repopulate their country with the genetics that they have left. It's it's a populate it is a numbers game when it comes to populations. It's it's true in every species. You go talk to a some guy who studies fucking bats and talk about what happens if you get below a certain amount of breeding pairs. Go talk to them and they'll tell you, yeah, you got bottleneck. You got problems.
And Ukraine, sorry to tell you guys, they've lost a million of their guys. It's not a heavily populated country to begin with. They're they're not going to be able to have children because of what we've allowed to occur, what Boris Johnson refused to stop in the 1st month of this conflict, what we've been we've been egging this little asshole Zelensky on for years years years now. Go fight them. Go fight them. You can do it. You can do it. And all they've done is bottleneck their genetic population. I don't know, man. So, no. I'm not going to apologize for these particular views because I think that I'm right.
I think that what we have allowed to happen is evil. And that it probably would have been better for Ukraine had we just everybody been hands off and just let this thing happen. Let the kids in the school yard fight. Just let them fight. Let the 2 drunk chicks rolling around on the barroom floor in a puddle of beer and broken glass from the pitcher that it came from figure it out on their own. It would have been better. It would have been better. And at one point or another, I'll see you on the other side of all this. 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 11:13 Pacific Standard Time. It's the 20th day of November 2024, and this is episode 996 of Bitcoin and only 4 episodes to go, ladies and gentlemen.
4. But we may not get there. Why? Well, because I just heard tell, and I guess I should probably substantiate this by checking it out, that Britain, b r I t a I n, has fired long range missiles into Russia, or rather not not Britain themselves. No. No. No. Ukrainians apparently have used, possibly possibly. It's at this point, seems to be a rumor. I'm just checking, checking, checking, checking. Let's see. Ukraine missiles. Ukraine fires UK made missiles into Russia for the first time, and that's from The Guardian. And as of this time right now, that was printed 31 minutes ago, an hour ago. Ukraine fires UK supplied storm shadow missiles at targets inside Russia. That was Sky News.
Al Jazeera is reporting it, Ukraine. Reuters is reporting it 2 hours ago. So a few hours ago, Britain, by allowing Ukraine to fire long range UK made missiles inside of Russia has now become a nuclear target. Congratulations, Britain, on becoming hot on the targeting list for a nuclear power. United States is there too. Now for those of you who are like, well, dumbass, we were always targets. Well, yes. But I suspect that governments, especially their military people, have what would be known as a hot list, and that would be like a chain this is sort of like the billboard top ten of who's hot in the music industry right now. Well, who's hot to bomb with a nuclear devastating device? Well, right now, it's Britain and the United States.
We'll see if anybody comes anybody else changes into the top five position by being fucking stupid. This is stupid. This war never should have happened in the first fucking place, and it should have ended when there was a peace deal on the table, but Boris Johnson, again, from the United Kingdom, scuttled that little son of a bitch right after. I mean, it was in the 1st month of this conflict, and Boris Johnson told Ukraine, no. You gotta you gotta you gotta clean their chronometers, man. You gotta get in there and you gotta fight. You gotta do all the things to fight.
And, of course, that scuttled a potential peace deal that was on that table just weeks after the conflict had started. For those of you who actually think that Ukraine is, I don't know, a democracy, please remember that their president, Zelensky, suspended elections. Does that sound like a democracy? No. It does not. You know, the United States went through World War 1 or World War 2, and we had change of presidents, and we didn't we didn't suspend elections. We didn't send suspend elections anytime during a time of war for the United States, and yet yet Ukraine has, and they did a lot of other stuff that you would say, not really. Nah. That's not really that no.
That's not a democracy. Right? It doesn't mean that they should be bombed by Russia. I think Russia's being a bunch of dicks themselves, but why is this my problem? Why is this your problem? If you are not Russian and you are not Ukrainian, this is essentially none of your business. It's certainly none of my business, which means that by extension, I should hope that the government that represents me as a citizen of the United States would also say is none of our business. You figure it out. But we all know why. Because Ukraine is one of the most corrupt Eastern European countries that there is, has been for decades.
And, honestly, it's a money laundering operation. Let's be real. For any of the people that think money laundering actually only happens in the back rooms of a bar where there's a poker game going on, and that there's somehow or another a small table in the corner with a money counting device going on. And that's where money laundering occurs. No, dude. Uh-uh. That's not where money laundering occurs. It occurs at banks and the banks have become bigger, and now they're so big for their britches in the money laundering game as far as United States and other western governments are concerned. Now they need whole countries to be able to launder money.
That's what Ukraine is. It's a money laundering operation. It doesn't mean that I want Ukrainians to die. In fact, nobody should have this never should have happened, but it is happening. Right? It doesn't make it any less tearful that Ukraine, at this point, is genetically bottlenecked. They've lost so many of their let's see. The men that had the amount of men that have died in Ukraine that are of childbearing age, and I mean, like, have, like, you know, healthy 20 year old, 30 year old sperm, you know, you're not depending on 70 year olds to get women pregnant. No. No. No. All this entire population of breeding males, and I'm a biologist like, I was trained in biology, so I think in these terms, it doesn't make them any less human. I'm just saying their population of breeding males has been evaporated.
And at this point, they no and nobody's talking about it. Their Ukraine's ability to remain Ukrainian through their bloodlines is gone. It's just gone because they kept fighting this fucking war. And now Britain has decided that they're going to lift this shit off the chain, and everything's gonna be just hunky dory. Right? Well, no wrong. Congratulations to making it to the top five of the hot nuclear target list, Britain. Okay. Back over here into Bitcoin land, we got Microsoft. Are they buying Bitcoin? Apparently, Michael Saylor is going to personally make his case to the board of directors of Microsoft, decrypt Vismaya v, writing this one. Michael Saylor, cofounder and executive chairman of MicroStrategy, will present a Bitcoin investment strategy to Microsoft's board of directors advocating for the world's largest crypto as a treasury asset.
In a November 19th Twitter space, that was yesterday, discussion hosted by Bitcoin ETF Issuer Van Eck. The Bitcoin maximalist announced that he has agreed to deliver a concise 3 minute presentation to Microsoft's leadership. No. Not a lot of time. 3 minutes is almost a blink of an eye when you're doing public speaking, but I digress. The pitch comes amidst a shareholder proposal calling for Microsoft to assess Bitcoin's potential impact on its balance sheet. Quote, the activist that put the proposal together contacted me to present it to the board, and I agreed to provide a 3 minute presentation. That's all you're allowed, and I'm going to present it to the board of directors, End quote, a staunch advocate of Bitcoin, sailor criticized corporations with large cash reserves for burning shareholder value during yesterday's Twitter space discussion.
In his view, Bitcoin can bring great stability to enterprise value. Quote, it would be a lot more stable stock and a much less risky stock if half of the enterprise value of that stock was based upon tangible assets or property like Bitcoin, Saylor said. Saylor, who has led MicroStrategy to become the largest corporate Bitcoin holder with 252,220 BTC I think it's more than that now, guys. I thought yesterday we said something like 311,000, but whatever. He believes that Bitcoin is a necessary asset for companies with large cash reserves. He shared during the discussion that his earlier request for a private meeting with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, to discuss the topic has not yet been accepted.
In October, Saylor directly addressed Microsoft CEO on Twitter saying, quote, if you want to make the next $1,000,000,000,000 for Microsoft shareholders, call me. End quote. Microsoft shareholders are scheduled to vote on whether the company should conduct a formal assessment of Bitcoin as an investment on December 10th. The greater sorry. Greater whatever. The National Center For Public Policy Research introduced the proposal last month, citing MicroStrategy's success with Bitcoin. MicroStrategy stock has outperformed Microsoft by 313% this year alone even though the company operates at a much smaller scale. Quote, MicroStrategy, like Microsoft, is a tech company.
But unlike Microsoft, it holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet, noted NCPPR in the proposal. Despite the push from shareholders and sailors' advocacy, Microsoft's board has recommended voting against the proposal. They don't even wanna look at it. That's what they're saying. We we don't even wanna make the assessment as to whether or not we should assess Bitcoin. That's what they're saying. Whatever. Microsoft maintains that it already evaluates a broad range of investment options. The company's share price traded relatively modestly on Wednesday, increasing a mere half point to $417, Google Finance data shows.
Yes. And there is a lot of hype around MicroStrategy right now because their price just keeps going up. I'm not going to tell you what to do except to buy Bitcoin and hold Bitcoin. That's all you gotta do. Ladies and gentlemen, you don't have to try to do something like, you know what? Maybe I should sell my Bitcoin and buy MicroStrategy stock. If you do that, wow, dude. Stop. Don't know. Just stop doing that shit. Even though even even though it's gonna be hard because this next story says MicroStrategy increases its note sales to $2,600,000,000 for Bitcoin purchases.
I told you yesterday that $1,750,000,000 on the convertible note was not going to hold. It was going to be more than oversubscribed, and it looks like I am being proved correct. Because now I said 3,000,000,000. We'll see if we get there, but they've already increased it to $2,600,000,000. And this is Zoltan Vardy out of Cointelegraph. MicroStrategy said it's increasing its upcoming note sales to $2,600,000,000, signaling bullish expectations for Bitcoin's potential to surpass the $100,000 mark. MicroStrategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder, is set to raise 2,600,000,000 from senior convertible notes at a 0% interest rate to buy more Bitcoin.
The note sale was upsized from a previously announced offering of $1,750,000,000 of aggregate principal amounts of notes the firm shared in a November 20th statement. The 2,600,000,000 offering targets qualified institutional buyers because plebs suck and is expected to close on November 21st subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions. MicroStrategy's note sale could help push Bitcoin's price above the $100,000 mark for the first time in history. The announcement comes as Bitcoin is trading above $93,970, which is up over 37% during the past month.
Holy shit. Well, it looks like I'm probably I'm probably going to be right. I'm thinking we're going to see this convertible note sale at $3,000,000,000, which is what I said yesterday. We'll see. We'll we'll we'll have to see. Definitely are going to have to see. It just I was just reminded by some neuron that misfired in my brain that I had a discussion with my wife and family over the dinner table last night where we enjoyed pan fried ham steak, grits, roasted brussels sprouts, and red eye gravy. And some people are, like, what the hell is red eye gravy? It's essentially butter, flour, which is the base of any good gravy, a bunch of paprika, and day old coffee.
Not coffee grounds, just day old coffee. Liquid coffee. And you make a gravy out of it, and holy shit, it's good. But anyway, the discussion went something like this. My wife looks at me and says, David, you are you guys over at Bitcoin are not doing your job. I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, I had kids she teaches college she's like I had kids in my class looking at charts you know because I've got trading view on my phone I'm sure that these cats do too And I go, yeah. So I mean, well, I mean, they should be listening to what you have to say. But since they're going to waste their money on college and not learn a goddamn thing from you, well, then what did you expect them to do? And she said, no. No. You don't understand. She goes, they were they were talking about Ethereum and Doge. And I go, wait a minute. What? Now my wife is only tangentially interested in Bitcoin simply because her husband is a geek.
Yeah. I'm a nerd. I'm obsessed. I get it. I understand. But but she she tolerates it. Right? There's no way it's just not it'll it'll happen when it happens for her, but I'm not gonna force anything. And yet and yet and yet she tells me that her kids are talking about buying Ethereum and Doge, and she verbalized the following to the class. She said, you don't wanna have any of that. You just wanna buy Bitcoin. And this is here here is the punch line. This one this one kid looks up and said, no. Ethereum is better. It's but it's also based on the same protocol. If you didn't hear me, let me say it again. There is a college age kid that's into cryptocurrency that still thinks that Ethereum uses the same protocol as Bitcoin.
We are not living up to our educational potential here, ladies and gentlemen. So take that however you wanna take it. Tell other people that we've gotta get off the stick. We gotta do something about this shit. We cannot let qualified human beings think that Ethereum uses the same protocol as Bitcoin. It doesn't. If for whatever reason you're listening to my voice, everything about it is different. Everything. There's nothing nothing similar at all between those two systems. But I digress. Grayscale has completed a reverse share split of both their Bitcoin and Shitcoin number 1 ETFs, Helen Parks, CoinTelegraph.
Grayscale Investments is making moves to improve the cost efficiency of its crypto ETFs through reverse share splits. Shit. On November 19th, Grayscale completed reverse share splits of its 2 crypto ETFs, the Bitcoin mini trust, and that other garbage pile of shit that they do. Grayscale said that the reverse share splits for the ETFs are designed to make the trading of securities more cost effective. Quote, we're constantly looking for ways to evolve our product suite to meet the wants and needs of the investment community. Based on feedback from our clients, we believe this is the right direction and beneficial to our clients and the investment community.
Yeah. Apparently, their customers might have been telling them that their price was just too damn high to custody their Bitcoin, but whatever. Following the reverse share split, which occurred approximately at 10 PM UTC, November 19th, the Grayscale Bitcoin mini trust ETF saw its price per share increase by 5 x. At the same time, the ETF holder saw a proportionate decrease in the number of shares outstanding. That's how a reverse share works. If you so what happened? If you had 5 shares of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, now you have one share of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, but it's priced 5 times more than each of your individual shares when you held 5. Does that make sense?
It's the exact opposite of, stock split. Like, when Microsoft would did a 10 for 1 split of their stock, if you held one share of MicroStrategy for I don't know. Let's say it was $2,000 a share. It wasn't just to make the the number easier. You now have 10 shares, and they're each worth $200. So this was done in reverse. But follow or, additionally, as a result of the splits, investors could hold fractional shares, which can be tracked by the shareholders depository trust company on its internal ledgers or aggregated and sold after determining the number of fractional shares created due to the split. Okay. Well, whoop de do.
Honestly, I think that they're this what it looks like they're doing is I I really think they're they're the people that were saying, look, if you don't want me to sell the rest of my shit and just move it all over to BlackRock, you're gonna have to do something about the percentage that you're getting every single month for me to custody my shares of Bitcoin at Grayscale. If you don't do something about this, and I mean right fucking now, I'm moving my shit somewhere. So if if it's the case that Grayscale charges you by how many shares you have and its value, then this kinda makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, I don't know what they're doing.
But I have a sneaky suspicion that it was the only way that they were able to not technically reduce, how much they get for administrative cost to hold your shit for you as much as it was a way around it. So you see what I mean? I think they're trying to make it cheaper so that people don't bail. Because they've lost I mean, they lost. They lost to BlackRock. They lost to Fidelity. Grayscale was in the Catbird seat just like that dude that used to run Bitmain. I can't remember his name right now, but he decided to go all in, be cash, and he lost. Coinbase is probably next on the chopping block to lose, to be in the catbird seat and not understand that they're in the catbird seat and start doing really stupid shit and then lose.
Grayscale lost. They're gonna try to come back, but I don't think this reverse share split is going to work. And by the way, ladies and gentlemen, stablecoins are not your friends. This is from Shinobi, Bitcoin Magazine. Hello. Stablecoins are often pitched as a stopgap method or a friendly tool for people in the developing world who cannot handle the volatility of Bitcoin. They are framed as something complimentary to Bitcoin, not in competition with it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bitcoiners have commonly used the meme of a Trojan horse to justify many things over the years, rationalizing many shortcomings and compromises made over time as what is necessary to sneak Bitcoin into the legacy systems to ultimately take over and win.
That is exactly what stablecoins are, except in the reverse direction. Stablecoins are the Trojan horse into Bitcoin. Bitcoin's volatility makes using it a challenge if you do not have the net worth to weather it, but there are mechanisms to handle this. Centralized schemes like StableSats by Blink have been built to use Bitcoin collateral to lock in a dollar value without needing to actually hold dollars. Discrete log contracts, or d l c's, offer another mechanism for accomplishing the same thing in a decentralized fashion.
But instead, we are propping up the US dollar. Stablecoins are a solution to volatility, but they are a non Bitcoin native one. They are the US Treasury's trojan horse into the Bitcoin space. They do more to control and prop up the dollar than they do to help Bitcoiners handle the issue of volatility. Stablecoins give the treasury a new lifeline to sell their shit ass treasury bonds. Shinobi didn't say that part, but whatever. Foreign countries have lowered demand and sold existing treasuries for some years now, and stablecoin issuers have stepped up to pick up the slack. The bigger demand grows for stablecoins, the more of a drop in foreign government demand for treasury bonds the US government can handle.
At a time where BRICS, b r I c s, is planning more and more to shift away from their dependence upon the US dollar, stablecoins represent a vehicle to ameliorate this issue. They also, unlike Bitcoin native solutions such as DLCs, present a security risk to hodlers. To my knowledge, aside from the liquid network, every network stablecoins are issued on come hold on. Let me do that again. Every network stablecoins are issued upon come with a seize and freeze functionality built into the smart contract that the issuer uses to create them. Almost all stablecoins support the arbitrary freezing and seizure of user balances on the different networks that they circulate on. Surveillance is another aspect of stablecoin proliferation.
The more that dollar stablecoins are adopted around the world without needing to politically convince any government to officially dollarize, I might add, the more the United States government's ability to directly surveil foreign financial activity. Chainalysis and other companies become a de facto government surveillance system for foreign financial activity with no need to subpoena or gather records first. It's right there in the blockchain. All the while, it propagates the idea that, quote, blockchain is a useful technology disconnected from Bitcoin, pushing the idea to your average person that Bitcoin is simply an asset like gold to invest in. It creates a psychological narrative of invest in Bitcoin.
Use your surveillance money when you need to spend. Overall, stablecoins are going to be one of the most epic unforced errors that have occurred in this entire ecosystem. People need to wake up before it becomes embedded so deeply into their lives and the financial world in general that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle ourselves from. People should be spreading and building on Bitcoin, a money built to enable freedom and sovereignty, not these cheap imitations called stablecoins that are nothing more than an extension of the surveillance and tyranny of the legacy financial system. Holy shit, Brian, AKA Shinobi.
He's right. I didn't think about the surveillance issue. So there's 2 things here. 1st, the surveillance issue that he what what is Shinobi talking about? He's saying that if we can inject if different people that are somehow or another tied to United States Treasury to back their stablecoin projects, if their stablecoins become more and more widely spread amongst foreign countries, not just in the West, Right? Not just Canada, United States, Mexico, or any of the European Union or Australia or New Zealand. Right? That we can start surveilling the activity, the financial activity of the citizenry of those countries, not just their governments. It the granularity here will go down to the citizenry of, let's say, Honduras. Let's take let's pick on Honduras. If they have, like, 3 different stablecoins, they don't, but let's say they did, and they're all backed by US treasuries.
Well, Chainalysis is not just looking at Bitcoin. It's looking at all of the chains. It looks at everything. And their I think that their black box thing is is really faulty. But be that as it may, they're still looking. It's clearly evidence that's, you know, admissible in a United States court of law. And here, they're going to be looking at all of the chain activity of all these stablecoins. So every single pupusa bought or whatever it is they sell in Honduras, they'll be able to know exactly not what was bought, but how much was paid, what time of day, on what day, from what wallet.
The the financial analysis that stablecoins represent at this point is frightening, and I never even thought about it. Thank you, Shinobi, for bringing this up. But here's the other thing that I wanted to talk about. Let me read this again. Instead of propping up the US dollar, stablecoins are a solution to volatility, But they are non Bitcoin native ones. They are the US Treasury's trojan horse into the Bitcoin space. They do more to control and prop up the dollar than they do to help Bitcoiners handle the issue of volatility. Alright. So he had just got finished before this sentence, he had just got finished talking about the meme that we use of the Trojan horse introducing Bitcoin into the legacy financial system.
Shinobi is going in reverse. He's talking about stablecoins being the legacy financial systems' own trojan horse back the other way. Now think of 2 different species walking around in the forest forest, and they both are sick with something, but they're different. Not only are the species different, the viruses that they're infected with are different. And they trade they trade viruses. Now I don't wanna get too deep into this. But after 1,000,000, 100 of 1000000 of years of life being on this planet, the majority of DNA might very well have been introduced through viral interactions with different species along the way.
We used to call it junk DNA, that it really it had it doesn't really do anything. Right? And nothing could be further from the truth because what we're finding out now is that that junk DNA helps make us what we are. Now if we think of it from though from that standpoint, and I I am loathed to say the following, but I just don't know a different way to say it. Maybe the in maybe the induction of legacy financial genetic information, for lack of a better phrase, is a good thing to have inside of the species that is Bitcoin. Because we certainly know that Bitcoin is definitely in the process of completely infecting legacy financial systems.
Why not a feedback loop? Now I'm not saying that it's good. Right? I mean, you can get sick and you could die, but you might get sick and get an immunity to it. It is impossible for me not to think about systems as complex as finance, financial systems, economic systems as living organisms. It's so much easier to think that way because they were created by what? Living organisms. You're going to transfer what you are into everything that you build, whether it's just you building it or a whole shitload of people just like you building it. You're going to induce something into that system that reflects what you are, and you are a living organism.
Same thing here, brothers. It's not outside of the scope to think of it in terms of biological interactions, and the trading of genetic material is key to the speciation or the multitude of species upon this planet. It's absolutely fucking critical. So if we just think there's 2 ways to think here. A, we're gonna stop it. We're gonna stop stablecoins in their tracks. No. You're not. No. You're not. And 2, it's possible that we might actually get something more out of it than we think and something definitely, in my opinion, more out of it than just negative consequences. But the 3rd here's a third thing. We have to be vigilant.
We cannot, like Brian says or Shenobi says, we cannot look at stablecoins as a good thing. I don't like them. I've told you this on many, many, many occasions. However, that doesn't mean that I'm completely against them to the point where they have to be squashed because they won't be. It is a waste of our energy at this point. There's nothing we can do. And we, honestly, we never had a chance. This was always going to happen. And as long as you can accept it, then we can move forward and figure out a way to be vigilant about it and not let it actually overtake somebody like the naked mole rat.
Even he might be learning his lesson. Why? Why do I say that? I'm talking about Brian arms or, yeah, Brian Armstrong here over at Coinbase because they are delisting wrapped Bitcoin. That's right. For all the bullshit that we kept giving wrapped BTC, it looks like finally Brian Armstrong is seeing the light because they're taking wrapped BTC down. And this is out of CoinDesk. It's written by who but Sam Reynolds. Come on, Sam. Tell us what's going on here, brother. Coinbase says it is in the process of removing wrapped Bitcoin or WBTC from its exchange, citing listing standards.
For those of the you that don't know, WBTC is a token that represents Bitcoin on Ethereum. It's not Bitcoin. It's an Ethereum token. It's an ERC 20 token, ladies and gentlemen. They just call it wrapped Bitcoin because you buy them with actual Bitcoin, which never leaves the chain. Right? It's all if you use Bitcoin to buy this garbage, your Bitcoin, which is no longer your Bitcoin because you were dumb enough to sell it, remains on Bitcoin. It cannot go to Ethereum. Okay? If you think I'm wrong, then send Bitcoin to a wrapped BTC address and see what happens. You're not going to like it. But while WBTC is offered by BitGo, other similar products have the same concept. Custody crypto on one end and a representation of the token on its non native blockchain on the other.
This move to delist came shortly after Coinbase announced its own version of wrapped Bitcoin called goddamn it. Coinbase c BTC or cbbtc, which exist on the base blockchain. And base is capitalized, which means they're talking about the actual blockchain that is named base. Recently wrapped BTC has come under a considerable amount of scrutiny after BitGo announced it was entering into a joint venture with BitGlobal. We don't give a shit. Okay. So he's not learning his lesson. And I don't need to go any further because we are 35 minutes into the show, ladies and gentlemen. So announcement, Brian Armstrong has not learned any lessons.
That's all that we have to know. He's going to go forward with destroying Coinbase. It's going to happen. Coinbase is going to fall at one point, not not because of Coinbase BTC or his version of wrapped BTC, but because they are clearly not being vigilant. And their their hubristic attitudes are going to land them at the bottom of the tree where they were firmly perched upon just like the dude from bitmain and a whole bunch of other people like Roger Ver. He was had the catbird seat. Hubristic nature came out of him and he fell to the bottom of the tree. After a while, we're gonna look at the bottom of this tree and go, holy shit. There's a lot of dead bodies down there. What are we gonna do? And I just say, fuck it. Set it on fire. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities is showing West Texas Intermediate down 0.6% to 68.95.
Brit, North Sea is down 0.57% to 7289. Natural gas is up, wow, 7%, probably because of the natural gas chicanery going on in Europe and Russia and all that shit. $3.20 per 1,000 cubic feet, and gasoline has risen by a third of a point to 204 per gallon. Just so you know, oil and oil's taking a hit today because inventories in the United States came in as more than expected and offset the fact that oil was increasing yesterday yesterday morning because, well, Ukraine decided to let one of the US long range missiles off the chain into Russia. Anyway, gold is doing well today. 1%. 2655 and a dime for the shiny metal rock. Silver is down point 74. Platinum is down 1 and a third. Copper is up scant. Palladium down 1 and a third.
Biggest winner in ag today looks to be coffee, 4 and a half percent to the upside. Biggest loser, Sugar, 1.68 to the downside. We got live cattle down scant. Lean hogs are up almost 2 full points. Feeder cattle are up point 17%. The Dow is down point 18%. S and P is down a half. Nasdaq is down point 87%, and the s and p mini is up. Scan. What's Bitcoin doing? I don't know. It's just bouncing around. Right now, it's at $94,020. That is a $1,860,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 35.4 ounces of the shiny metal rock with our 1 bitcoin, of which there are 19,784,886.74 of, and fees are modest, yet, well, higher than they have been. Point 14 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis.
There are exactly 100 blocks waiting or carrying 284,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting for clearance at high priority rates of 12 Sudoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna cost you 10. Hash rate, looking good today. 770.2 exahashes per second on a 1 week rolling average. And now we come to time, talent, and treasure. Give me money. If you find it valuable, you give value back in the form of time, or talent, or treasure. That's all there it is. That's all there is to it, really. If you give me your time, you know, for what it is that I do, then maybe, you know, maybe you can help me market the show. You don't have any money.
Maybe you don't have any talent, which I don't believe. I think everybody has talent. But let's just say, you know what? I I I don't wanna do my talent right now, and I ain't got no money, but I do have some time, then go over to, like, Apple Podcast and give The Bitcoin and Show a 5 star review. It say something, like, earth shatteringly cool about it. That helps. It doesn't sound like it does to a lot of people because they're they're you know, people will go, well, just because you get a 5 star review on Apple, it helps? Yeah. It does. Because it resets various algorithms to add one more tick in my 5 star column.
And a lot of other places that leverage Apple Podcasts use those ratings. It helps with show discovery to other people, which allows them to give over their treasure if they don't have time and talent. So they can stream these the more people that stream me 1 satoshi per minute or 10 satoshis per minute is essentially the less money that you have to give me because it's spread out. But the only way it can spread out is for the people that give their time to help promote the show, to get to tell other people, their family, and their friends. Hey. If you wanna know what the hell is going on in Bitcoin on a daily basis, Monday through Friday, you gotta tune in here. And, hey, I'll share you the link so that you don't have to do any extra work. Right? But if you've got treasure and we've spread we've we've increased the amount of people that have treasure that's willing to give, then everybody can actually give less.
Right? Because there's more people to give. It's called the 1,000 true fans model where you got 10,000 people that actually listen to what you have to say. You might be able to depend on 1,000 of those people on a daily basis to give over their treasure even if it's small donations. But if you don't have either time or treasure, but somehow or another you got talent, which yeah. I know. We get it. It's gonna take time. I don't know. If you've got a talent at writing really good, like, marketing content for me, and you can market the show because you're an excellent marketer, then, yeah, that's talent.
And, yes, time. And I've never understood that part. If you've got talent and you're going to apply it to, give value to somebody who's giving you value, you're obviously also giving your time. But, you know, the guys over here that, gave to the show in decentralized autistic organizations, which was Monday's Bitcoin, and Arcerus with 27/18 Satoshis says, Duna. Oh, goody. I get to know what Duna is. Duna, decentralized unincorporated nonprofit association. It's a Wyoming entity type for now, but basically an unincorporated nonprofit with a DAO overlay.
So far, only one has been filed. Arceres, thank you. I appreciate that. See, that's that's helping me that's helping me help you to help me to help you to understand what the hell is going on because now we all know that Duna stands for decentralized unincorporated nonprofit associations. I learn something new every day. Agichute. Agichute? It's not a treaty. We that's the that's the thing. We need they would need to for them to be allies. Right? And I know you're talking about something, like, a little bit different. The thing is is that I'm non binded unless they are actual allies, and they that has to be more that has to be an actual actual treaty between the two countries in question. For them to be allies, we have to have a treaty with Ukraine.
That shit has to be ratified in congress by the duly elected members of congress that are supposedly there to represent me. None of that shit's been done. Honestly, it's this is going to kill way more people than it's already killed if we don't stop it now. But it doesn't look like anybody wants to stop it. We keep coming up with all manner of, well, but what if or what about this and how about we fucking stop it? How about that? I that's what I'm talking either that or let Russia and Ukraine just fucking fight it out Because I'm done with both of these countries. I'm done caring that every 10 years, I gotta worry about my future and the future of my family not ending up as cinders plastered against the bark of a burnt ass tree.
There's no treaty that helps me not think about that. There's no memorandum of understanding that helps me stop thinking about that shit. I've been dealing with fucking Russia since I was a kid. Stop, drop, and roll. Oh, the Russians are going to kill us all. They we are using we have done nothing but use foreign countries to fear monger here in the United States for nothing but one thing, and that's fucking control. And anybody who doesn't understand that at this point, I can't help you. I just can't. Again, there's no memorandum here.
Or if there is a memorandum, it's nonbinding. There's nothing that has been done in the United States Congress that represents me as a citizen of the United States that's locked into legal language that tells anybody anything about my requirement to fucking help the most insanely corrupt Eastern European country that's ever existed and is nothing but a money laundering machine that makes New York gangsters look like they're in diapers. I'm sorry. I'm done with it. God's death with 537 thank you, sir, no thank you. Aggee Choate says, what about Budapest memorandum with this time with 555 sats?
But we've already gone through it. So he may have done that twice. Oggichute, if you did it twice and you need your 555, Stoshis back, you let me know, man, because I will definitely do that for you. User 115-56842 with 500 says, thank you for a podcast that does not suck. Value for value is better than advertising model and it's so powerful. Wait for Wave Lake and the value for value model to catch on to the music industry, thanks to podcast pioneers like you and Adam Curry, the Podfather. Cheers. Damn. Being even close to being compared to the quality of human being that Adam Curry is is an honor, sir. Thank you. I appreciate everything that you just said. Pies to Pleb with 420 says thank you, sir. No, thank you. And there's the weather report.
Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use, Flotilla. Do you know what Flotilla is? Flotilla is a new thing that was released yesterday by my friend, HuddlBod. It is a form of Nostra client. It does the say well, it doesn't do the same thing Nostra clients do. It's a little different. But it's login procedure. You can use Insect Bunker, I believe, but you can definitely use Albi Hub. If you're using Albi Hub to control your private public key pair, then you can log in just like with everything else, with your Albi Hub, management system for that. So what does it do? Well, from what I understand, and I'm looking at it right now, I can it it sort of takes the place of, Discord.
If you know what Discord is, then you kinda already know what my friend HuddleBot is trying to go for with Flotilla. It's flotilla, spelled the way flotilla is spelled, dot social. That's flotilla dot social. I can run an entire chat room as a relay that I have spun up myself on my own, like, for like, let's say, for this instance, my start 9, I can spin up a relay node or noster. And I can tell that relay node to accept certain kind of notes and whatnot like that, and I gotta do a couple of other things. But, essentially, if I do it the right way, I turn it into a flotilla chat room. That's right. The relay, all it does is that chat room.
So if you've got your own like start 9 or maybe, you know, myNode BTC and you've got the ability to put a a Nostra Relay on yours, then you can have your own chat room. Yes. I know you can do this in Discord already, but Discord's centralized. And they can shut you down at the drop of a hat. This allows us to have the same thing but have nobody but the person running the room have the ability to say, hey, you can't be here. Yes. You can do that in Discord. I can have I can spin up a server in Discord and I can ban anybody I want. And I would probably be able to do this in Flotilla too. Not exactly sure because I haven't talked to a Huddl bot about all of its capabilities.
But let's say that I can. Well, that's fine. It's it's my shit. Okay. So there is a nature of centralization. But if I'm doing this on Discord and they don't like and the guys at Discord, the the the managers of of that whole platform, if they don't like me, then my whole server's gone. And everybody on that server is shit out of luck, and they got nothing to say about it. Flotilla fixes this. So go over to flotilla.social. That's flotilla.social. Again, flotilla.flotilla.social. Go check it out and make sure that you give feedback to hodlbod on nostr. Meanwhile, BlackRock Bitcoin ETFs unheard of 1st day options trading volume pushes BTC to new all times high. Did it? I don't know.
I don't know if it was the options, but options trading for a spot Bitcoin ETF did definitely hit the market yesterday, and in the process, push the price of Bitcoin to yet another new all time high. Again, we can't directly know that. Right? So that's a little bit of hubris there. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust is the first spot Bitcoin exchange traded fund to be approved for options, leading to just shy of $1,900,000,000 in notional exposure traded according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Quote, final tally of Ibit's first day of options is just shy of 1,900,000,000 in notional exposure traded via 354,000 contracts.
289,000 of those were calls and the other 65,000 were puts. Let's see. It was according to James Seifert said in a post on Twitter, quote, that's a ratio of 4.4 to 1 of calls versus puts. These options were almost certainly part of the move to the new Bitcoin all time highs today. K. Well, whatever for context. A call option gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to buy an asset at a specified price within a specified period. If the buyer exercises the call, the call seller must sell the asset. A put option gives the holder the right to sell the asset at a specified price on or before the expiration of that contract. Quote, $1,900,000,000 is unheard of for day 1.
For context, BITO did $363,000,000 and that's been around for 4 years, Bloomberg senior analyst Eric Balchunis said on Twitter, quote, and also this is with 25,000 contract position limits. That said, 1,900,000,000 isn't quite big dog level. Yet, though, gold did do $5,000,000,000 today, but give it a few more days or weeks. Okay? The price of Bitcoin touched the 93,900 level for the first time ever earlier Tuesday afternoon. And as we all know, it did it again this morning. As open interest rises, it creates natural buyers and sellers on both sides of that market. This thickens up the market and increases liquidity, which therefore reduces volatility.
Dick previously told the block. They get talking about market structure as expert, Dennis Dick, there. I again, yeah. I'm seeing a I'm seeing a lot of longs and shorts get wiped out on, wrecked bot over there on Noster. I'm not so certain that this wipes out, volatility, guys. I think it actually increases it at least in the short term. World's largest cryptocurrency was trading around. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody gives a shit. We know what the price is. Options on Bitcoin ETFs from Bitwise and Grayscale will begin on Wednesday. That's today. Oh my god. With others expected to follow suit. So now we're gonna have options all over the place. And I guess all the like I said yesterday all the traders have this exciting new product to play with oh they're playing with the bitcoins it's also tiresome It really is. Because it's just I said it yesterday, derivatives in this space.
Sure. They make sense for the legacy financial weirdos that are out there, but they actually don't help what Bitcoin has been doing for people that have been de banked, never banked, poor as dirt, or activist in regimes that don't want them to ever live, much less breathe, much less use that breath to form words that other people can hear. It doesn't help the mission. It doesn't help the mission. Yeah. If you wanna get if all you give a shit about is getting rich and you're an option traders, you're probably gonna get rich. And then after the volatility finally does die down, you know, it's every man for himself. But I've noticed that I'm seeing a lot of volatility, so I'm not sure that Dick Dennis, saying that the volatility is helped, you know, like to squelch the volatility by options. I I I don't see it.
He gets paid a lot more than I do, so he's I guess he's right. But I'm not seeing it. Okay. There was something else that I had to say about this, though. Option okay. I lost it. Oh, well. It happens because we're on we're on to, other other things, like Russia. Let's get back into Russia, but this time, not the Ukrainian crap. Because they're banning winter cryptocurrency mining in Siberia, the North Caucasus, and occupied Ukraine. I guess we are gonna go back to Ukraine. Oh, by the way, this is from The Moscow Times. Does not say who it's written by. Authorities in Russia announced on Tuesday plans to ban cryptocurrency mining in several regions this winter to address electricity shortages.
The ban will affect the, I cannot pronounce it, Irkuk Irkukst region, parts of the Republic of Birisha, and the Zabul region in Siberia, as well as 6 regions in the North Caucasus, including the Republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. I had a teacher named Dagestani once. She was a great English teacher. Anyway, it it will also extend to the occupied Ukrainian region of Don'tesk, Luhansk, and something else and something other. The decision made by a government commission led by deputy prime minister Alexander Novak aims to restrict crypto mining during the heating season, mining in Siberia will be prohibited starting December 1st and ends March 15, 2025 with annual restrictions from November 15th to March 15th through 2031.
In the North Caucasus and occupied Ukraine, mining will face total bans from December of 2024 through March of 2031 with no seasonable seasonal reprieve, the Commissant Business Newspaper reported last week. These restrictions follow new laws signed by president Vladimir Putin on November 1st that regulate crypto mining and create experimental infrastructures for cross border crypto payment cryptocurrency payments. While domestic crypto payments remain banned, some lawmakers view the regulations as a potential tool for bypassing sanctions. Russia, the world's 2nd largest crypto mining hub after the United State. Oh, I didn't know that. Really? Russia?
I don't know about that. Well, let's say they're right. Largest crypto mining hub after the United States consumes 16,000,000,000 kilowatt hours annually for mining. About 1.5% of its total electricity usage according to the energy ministry. And that's 1.5% is right along the lines of, generally speaking, the entire mining industry. It uses 1.5 percent of total world power. So I guess 16,000,000,000 kilowatt hours is right there. I I wish they'd used, like, you know, more like megawatts. I I I honestly don't know why they used kilowatts here. So, anyway, Russia's banning cryptocurrency mining so that people can heat their homes in Siberia, which, from what I understand, gets quite cold.
Now, Rumble. If you didn't see it yesterday, we're gonna talk about it. Felix from Cointelegraph says, Rumble shares rise 9% as its founder mulls over scooping up some Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna do gonna do the micro strategy shit. Rumble, a YouTube alternative favored by the political far right, is the latest company to explore the possibility of adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet. Rumble shares gained as much as 9%, hitting a high of $6.2 in after hours trading on November 19th after its founder and CEO, Chris Pavlovsky, had posed the question on Twitter, which saw strong support from the crypto community.
Quote, should Rumble add Bitcoin to its balance sheet? End quote, Pavlovsky added or asked in a Twitter poll, to which about 29,000 people answered yes. Holy shit. Quote, yes. Happy to help if needed, said Jack Mallor, CEO and founder of Bitcoin payment provider, Strike. Then comes Michael Saylor, chairman of the Bitcoin mining company, MicroStrategy no. Bitcoin buying company, MicroStrategy, offered to discuss how it could be done. And Pavlovsky seems to have accepted. And they show a picture of this tweet where after this guy's poll, Michael Saylor said, yes, I would be happy to help to or happy to discuss why and how with you. And Chris Pavlovsky replies directly to that and says, DM ing you now.
Wow. So maybe he's serious. Rumble shares closed up 2.5% on the day, yada yada yada. Rumble, based in Florida and Ontario, runs a video sharing platform of the same name known for its lenient content moderation policies. Its cloud services arm also hosts the Donald Trump owned social media platform, Truth Social. Rumble has about, wow, 67,000,000 monthly active users and began trading publicly on the Nasdaq in September of 2022. As of September 30th, Rumble's balance sheet of cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities was about $132,000,000 The platform brought in $25,000,000 in revenue in the Q3, and that was up almost 40% on a year over year basis.
Its shares have been down since its q three results were reported last week as the company's revenue did miss analyst estimates by 14%. And its earnings per share fell short of expectations by 20%. Oh, no. If Rumble adds Bitcoin to its balance sheet, it would join a growing list of companies that have taken the plunge this year. Artificial intelligence firm, Genius Group. That's who I was thinking about yesterday. Genius Group took its first steps in its Bitcoin first strategy on November 18th by purchasing a 110 Bitcoin for 10,000,000. It plans to eventually hold 90% of its reserves in Bitcoin.
Meanwhile, the Japan based Meta Planet bought another $11,300,000 worth of Bitcoin with Bitcoin treasuries data showing it holds 4 no. 1,142 Bitcoin. And, of course, medical device maker, Similar Scientific, that has increased their holdings to 1,273. And okay. So here's the thing. It's like what I've said about at least Genius Group is that it looks like a zombie company to me. It's not doing well. It has not been doing well. But Rumble is a little different. And and like Meta Planet and like Simler, they actually have revenue coming in.
And MicroStrategy, for that matter. So if this guy, Pavlovsky, is sincere about wanting to do this, then he might actually be able to not catch up to Michael Saylor, but have enough of an open window that it allows him to get start getting, you know well, not close. But instead of having to squeeze through a closing window, because Rumble has actual revenue, has an actual balance sheet that looks like it's healthy, and even though it's missed its estimates, the window is still open and he doesn't have to squeeze through. He can jump through that son of a bitch right now.
What do you think? Do you think Pavlovsky is going to take the bait? I I shouldn't say it that way because I think having Bitcoin on your balance sheet is a good thing. I don't ever well, I will never think that it is a bad thing. But we have come to the end of the show. And for all those people that are offended by my stance on Ukraine, I can't apologize for that. I believe what I believe. I'm not a terrible person, I promise. I don't like it when people die. But when people are hell bent on killing each other, I'm not going to stand in their way. That is a the worst place if you ever doubt what it's like to stand in between 2 people who are hell bent on killing each other, then go to a bar and wait for 2 chicks to start fighting and then go break that son of a bitch up and see just how many days you spend in the hospital because nothing nothing will tear your ass a new one like getting in between 2 chicks fighting when they're drunk.
Ask me how I know. You don't wanna do that shit. And that's 2 chicks that are drunk at a bar in the United States. I don't want any of my money funding any of this nonsense in Ukraine. I don't want any of my money funding most of the nonsense that the United States gets their hands involved with. But I certainly don't this one. I wanna stay as far away from this as I possibly can, and I'm forced to be right there standing in between 2 countries that are hell bent on killing each other because we, like morons, decided to allow the United States military armament to be flown into Russia.
And we all know that that was actually done by United States either contractors or actual military themselves. There's no way they could have trained Ukrainian troops to be able to function at that level, not in the amount of time that they had. That thing, that system, all of these systems, the Patriot missile system, the attack, all of these systems, they take months of training to understand how to actually operate. You just don't drop it on somebody that has to read a manual and say, have fun staying poor. No. No. It doesn't work that way.
We blasted a long range missile into Russia. We did that. The United States did that. The Ukrainians didn't do that. The faster we all start understanding what that actually means, the faster we can figure out that maybe, maybe, maybe now is the time for a citizen uprising. I mean, a full blown uprising. It there will probably never be a better time to evacuate some of the bullshit that we've got in the governments of the West while the West is completely distracted by Biden's amazingly stupid and shortsighted decision to allow the United States to directly confront a nuclear fucking power by throwing a long range missile directly into their borders. It is an act of war.
It is an act of war that the United States committed. Ukraine, they're already at war. And even if they weren't, if they had done it, it would have still been an act of war by the United States because there's no way that the Ukrainians could have actually done it. Everybody knows we did it. We not only gave them the system, we pushed the button because everybody knows you can't train these people that fast to be able to push the button themselves. The United States has committed an act of war against a nuclear power, and we're only 24 years into this fucking century.
How how why am I supposed to stand up for for Ukraine at this point? Why aren't I standing up against, you know, for the people in Senegal or Gambia or whatever, Nigeria or any of the other places on the planet that all kinds of military activity is going on? Why Ukraine? Why is everybody up in arms about Ukraine? Shit. Taiwan is in this shit. The China is openly telling the world that they're going to take Taiwan in 2027. Yep. Nobody seems to be standing on the fucking corner with I stand with goddamn Taiwan. Nobody cares about Taiwan. No. No. No. No. No. We care about Ukraine, a far flung Eastern European country that's been corrupt for decades and is a money laundering center for huge businessmen and United States and the rest of the West politicians, and yet I'm supposed to shed tears over this shit. No. I'm not going to. I can't. I can't do this shit anymore. I can't pretend that we're doing the right thing. We're not.
We're not helping the Ukrainians. What we've done is we've made sure that the Ukrainians are genetically bottlenecked at this point moving forward. There's no way they can repopulate their country with the genetics that they have left. It's it's a populate it is a numbers game when it comes to populations. It's it's true in every species. You go talk to a some guy who studies fucking bats and talk about what happens if you get below a certain amount of breeding pairs. Go talk to them and they'll tell you, yeah, you got bottleneck. You got problems.
And Ukraine, sorry to tell you guys, they've lost a million of their guys. It's not a heavily populated country to begin with. They're they're not going to be able to have children because of what we've allowed to occur, what Boris Johnson refused to stop in the 1st month of this conflict, what we've been we've been egging this little asshole Zelensky on for years years years now. Go fight them. Go fight them. You can do it. You can do it. And all they've done is bottleneck their genetic population. I don't know, man. So, no. I'm not going to apologize for these particular views because I think that I'm right.
I think that what we have allowed to happen is evil. And that it probably would have been better for Ukraine had we just everybody been hands off and just let this thing happen. Let the kids in the school yard fight. Just let them fight. Let the 2 drunk chicks rolling around on the barroom floor in a puddle of beer and broken glass from the pitcher that it came from figure it out on their own. It would have been better. It would have been better. And at one point or another, I'll see you on the other side of all this. 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.
Rumors of UK Missiles in Russia
Ukraine Conflict and Political Dynamics
Conclusion
