Episode 1136 of Bitcoin And . . . is LIVE!
Topics for today:
Product: Tallow Soap
Website: https://soapminer.com/
nostr Profile: https://nostrudel.ninja/#/u/npub1zzmxvr9sw49lhzfx236aweurt8h5tmzjw7x3gfsazlgd8j64ql0sexw5wy
Twitter Profile: https://x.com/soapminer1
Discount code: Use "BITCOINAND" in the Cart's Coupon Code box for 10% off total purchase
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/07/28/bitcoin-zooms-to-usd120k-eth-nears-usd4k-as-trump-s-eu-tariff-deal-lifts-risk-sentiment
https://bitcoinnews.com/markets/christies-1-billion-bitcoin-division/
https://decrypt.co/332270/arizona-man-pleads-guilty-in-13m-crypto-ponzi-scheme-faces-up-to-15-years
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/td-cowen-can-strategy-will-purchase-17000-bitcoin-without-equity-dilution
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/07/29/mara-holder-of-nearly-usd6b-btc-raises-usd950m-to-buy-more-bitcoin
https://www.theblock.co/post/364599/bakkt-stock-plummets-after-announcing-pricing-of-75-million-public-offering-to-buy-bitcoin
https://atlas21.com/lightning-network-targets-5-of-stablecoin-flows-by-2028-says-voltage-ceo/
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Topics for today:
- I'm Bakkt!
- Christies' $1B BTC Unit
- Trump Bends EU Over His Knee
- Bitcoin Lollipops, Lollipops Everywhere
- Lightning Network To Handle $9 Billion in Stablecoins
Circle P:
SoapMinerProduct: Tallow Soap
Website: https://soapminer.com/
nostr Profile: https://nostrudel.ninja/#/u/npub1zzmxvr9sw49lhzfx236aweurt8h5tmzjw7x3gfsazlgd8j64ql0sexw5wy
Twitter Profile: https://x.com/soapminer1
Discount code: Use "BITCOINAND" in the Cart's Coupon Code box for 10% off total purchase
Today's Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/tornado-cash-trial-defenses-digi-forensicshttps://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/07/28/bitcoin-zooms-to-usd120k-eth-nears-usd4k-as-trump-s-eu-tariff-deal-lifts-risk-sentiment
https://bitcoinnews.com/markets/christies-1-billion-bitcoin-division/
https://decrypt.co/332270/arizona-man-pleads-guilty-in-13m-crypto-ponzi-scheme-faces-up-to-15-years
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/td-cowen-can-strategy-will-purchase-17000-bitcoin-without-equity-dilution
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/07/29/mara-holder-of-nearly-usd6b-btc-raises-usd950m-to-buy-more-bitcoin
https://www.theblock.co/post/364599/bakkt-stock-plummets-after-announcing-pricing-of-75-million-public-offering-to-buy-bitcoin
https://atlas21.com/lightning-network-targets-5-of-stablecoin-flows-by-2028-says-voltage-ceo/
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find me on nostr
npub1vwymuey3u7mf860ndrkw3r7dz30s0srg6tqmhtjzg7umtm6rn5eq2qzugd (npub)
6389be6491e7b693e9f368ece88fcd145f07c068d2c1bbae4247b9b5ef439d32 (Hex)
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DavidB84567
StackerNews:
stacker.news/NunyaBidness
Podcasting 2.0:
fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
Apple Podcasts:
tinyurl.com/unm35bjh
Mastodon:
https://noauthority.social/@NunyaBidness
Support Bitcoin And . . . on Patreon:
patreon.com/BitcoinAndPodcast
Find Lightning Network Channel partners here:
https://t.me/+bj-7w_ePsANlOGEx (Nodestrich)
https://t.me/plebnet (Plebnet)
Music by:
Flutey Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 06:51AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the July. Holy crap. This year is going by fast. 2025, and this is episode eleven thirty six. As best as I can tell, it's episode eleven thirty six of Bitcoin, and I am back from vacation, which is why I can't kinda tell what episode I'm on. Even though I'm fairly well organized in my episodes, I haven't been able to transfer over all the data from my laptop computer, which I take to do the show when I'm on the road. I haven't been able to get all that consolidated with my giant Obsidian file that keeps track of, like, every show that I've ever done.
Well, at least since I started using Obsidian. And if you're not using Obsidian as a note taker, you should probably should probably consider at least looking into it. It is free, and you can support the developers if you so choose. And it's it's it's it's a nice it's a nice little bag of bag of tools, but not here to talk about Obsidian. We've got several pieces of news that's going on right now, and we're gonna get right back into it. And, hopefully, I don't fumble around because I only did two shows when I was on vacation. I wanted to do more, but, honestly, man, it was so ridiculously gorgeous up in the San Juan Mountains Of Colorado and didn't realize just how badly my batteries needed to be recharged. But they have been recharged, and we're gonna start with Bitcoin seemingly zooming almost to a $120,000 as Trump's EU tariff deal lifts a little bit of risk sentiment.
Okay. Yeah. Well, and who's writing it, but none other than Shara Malwa out of coindesk.com. Markets kicked off the week with a renewed wave of optimism after US president Donald Trump confirmed a tariff deal with the EU, scaling levies down to 15% from the previously threatened 30%. So the announcement sent the S and P 500 futures up point 3% and Dow contracts higher by a 180 points and Bitcoin itself to nearly a 120,000 for the first time in nearly two weeks. Two weeks. Sounds just like a parakeet. Just under 5% shy of its all time high, Bitcoin, which had spent the past week trading between a 114,000 and a 119,000, neared the barrier as traders interpreted Trump's tariff rollback as a signal of reduced macro uncertainty.
Quote, Bitcoin maintained a resilient range and rebounded to a 119,000 after old wallets with tens of thousands of BTC began transferring funds to exchanges, which led some traders to fear a market correction, Nasar Al Aqchar, chief strategy officer at CoinW, told a Telegram group, quote, numerous institutions continue to onboard into the crypto industry and utilize reserve strategies showcasing strong demand against recent surges of stock prices. So it's not really as much about the Bitcoin price here as that that's a side effect of what the real news about the EU tariffs were, is that from what I understand, Trump basically forced the British Empire to its knees. Well, I I mean, that's The UK part. Right? So not really the EU. I'm just saying that the old world basically bowed to the new.
And that's kind of a huge deal because from what I understand, they're not gonna they don't get to tariff us. We get to tariff them at 15%. That's kind of a big switch. And it's one more it's one more signal that the EU is dying. And the EU needs to die. It really does. It's done nothing but cause trouble. It's people are suffering very greatly at this point, and it's all because of unelected bureaucrats that have been put in positions of power over the nations that make up the European Union. And it's just that in my opinion, France needs to be France. You know, why can't Spanish people have their own Spain?
What what's so great about the European Union? You cop they copied The United States after the fact. We already saw what we needed to do at the in the with The United States. And then EU is like, oh, let's make this thing called the EU and then we'll have a centralized currency and, but they did it wrong. They did it. And and The United States isn't exactly, you know, not all that outside of a dog and pony show itself sometimes, but at least the states can like, Colorado is definitely Colorado. It it is different. It's completely and wholly legally different than Texas.
And it's like it's almost as if the EU has been homogenized to the point that everything looks the same. And I'm not talking about buildings. I'm not talking about food. I'm not talking about culture. I'm talking about the politics. I'm talking about the economics. I'm talking about this this modern bullshit that we've made for ourselves. And if if the EU survives any longer than ten years from now, I will be horrified and surprised at the same time. But I thought that that was really interesting when I heard that. At first, I thought it was complete bullshit. But it does seem that that Trump found Europe's pain point and put them on their knees.
And it's gonna be interesting to see how all this shit plays out. But meanwhile, strategy's making a play And TD Cowan says now this is TD Cowan. They're saying that Strategy will be able to purchase 17,000 Bitcoin without any equity dilution whatsoever according to Oscar Zaringa Perez writing for Bitcoin Magazine's strategy. The world's largest corporate Bitcoin holder has raised $2,500,000,000 through the IPO of its brand new preferred stock named Stretch, pricing 28,000,000 shares at $90 apiece, surpassing the initial $500,000,000 target. And this marks the biggest equity IPO of 2025 so far according to TD Cohen, which also noted that the structure allows strategy to continue accumulating Bitcoin without dilution of existing common stock shareholders.
Strategy now holds 607,770 BTC worth about $80,000,000,000 with a market cap of $114,000,000,000 By offering a wide assortment of Bitcoin backed securities designed to appeal to discrete classes of investors, strategy acts as a funnel for institutional capital flows into Bitcoin, said TD Cowan's Lance Vitanza and Jonathan Naravet as they wrote in a note to clients, quote, it's a it's a sound business model that has attracted many new entrants. No one is likely to match, let alone beat strategy's cost of capital advantage, end quote.
The STRC or stretch stock offer it well, rather, it offers a variable in annual dividend starting at 9% payable monthly in cash and is designed to maintain a trading price near a $100 of value. The company then retains redemption rights once listed and offers protections like repurchase options and dividend accrual for shareholders. Strategy continues positioning itself as the institutional gateway to Bitcoin. TD Cowen analysts noted that the firm's cost of capital advantage and projected that it could add another 17,000 BTC over the next decade without any dilution of shareholders whatsoever.
This move aligns with strategy's aggressive Bitcoin accumulation plan. Yes. We know. But it's the it's the TD Cowan saying that there's there's not gonna be any dilution of shareholders. I suppose if they keep building brand new products, then they won't be diluting common shareholders because they're not going to be printing MSTR stock or which is the com their common stock. They they built all these different instruments, and I've talked about this before. It's a it's an interesting play. And it's like the it's like the meme. It's like, this is an interesting play, Cotton. Let's see if it let's see if it works out for them. That's all I can really say because I don't know what I've nobody's ever seen this. Not like this. I mean, I'm sure that somebody could probably dig up an example that looks like it, but not to this degree.
Maybe they've done it like, you know, like, like somebody's, like, you know, created one or maybe two. This dude is I think he's on his way to May building five. Five. Count them. Five different stock offerings that do not sell or rather cause to be printed MicroStrategy's original common stock, which is MSTR. But again, I have to ask, where the hell does the money come from? Did you see the NVIDIA chart? Is in fact, did you see the NVIDIA chart not as a chart of price, but as a percentage comparison to The United States GDP. It's 12% more.
The stock price of NVIDIA or actually the the it's not really the stock price as much as the the the whole, the whole caboodle, like all outstanding shares at whatever share price. Its entire capital stack of NVIDIA, that company with all lights, wells, bells, and whistles involved is worth 12% more or 12% of The United States GDP. It's it's it's insane when you think about it that way. And I had made a note on Noster that basically said, if you've ever wanted to know where all the money they printed went, well, look here. This is one of the money sinks that there is. And this is what it ends up looking like.
We we end up with these companies that are highly inflated, highly overvalued, simply because somebody who was very, very close to the money spigot had to figure out a place to put their money. And, they don't seem to be that interested in real estate anymore. I think they've bought what they were gonna buy, and now they're just estate anymore. I think they've bought what they were gonna buy, and now they're just looking for any other place that they can to stack their cash. And now you've got here comes Sailor. Let's get away from NVIDIA and let's look at Sailor. He's actually actually offering product after product after product.
I think there's one that has no yield, and all the rest have variable yields. And they it's like it's like a different flavored lollipop, but they're all lollipops. They're all a ball of sugar on a stick that you shove in your mouth and you suck on and aggravate your pancreas and other other organs. It's all the same. It's just different numbers. Everybody's like, oh, man. This new stock offering. I'm like, no. It's just a way for him to actually not dilute his shareholders. And that's what TD Cohen is saying, that they could actually go ahead and buy up to 17,000 BTC without any shareholder original shareholder dilution. Actually, I think that number is probably a lot higher. And that really depends on the externalities of how much money or rather how much trust is the market going to have every single time Michael Saylor decides to spin up a new flavored lollipop.
I'm not putting the guy down. It's actually rather brilliant. It's just I see steam running out. And if he does it in a way where he can just coast and do something spectacular that doesn't have anything to do at all with offering a new stock offering, then strategy is gonna do very, very well. But if they can't keep the momentum going and they keep generating these debt instruments, I don't know man. It's gonna be pretty ugly dude. Let's move on to Mara, holder of nearly $6,000,000,000 of BTC. So they already have 600 or $6,000,000,000 of Bitcoin just chilling out on their balance sheet.
They've been able to raise almost $1,000,000,000 more to buy yet more Bitcoin. This is coming out of Jamie Crowley out of CoinDesk. Mara has completed a $950,000,000 offering of 0% convertible senior notes due 02/1932, with a majority of the proceeds earmarked to purchase additional Bitcoin, Pausing just to say this is just the strategy play. Alright, so strategy has already got like four or five products that we just got finished talking about it. Different flavors, same lollipop. This is the same lollipop and a different flavor from a different manufacturer of lollipops.
We got a lot of lollipop manufacturing going on. Again, like I said, we'll have to see how it goes. But the offering, which could expand to $1,150,000,000 if underwriters exercise their options in full, they announced this, by the way, yesterday. So I'm a little late to the game. But net proceeds of approximately $940,500,000 will be used to retire 19,400,000.0 of the existing 1% notes that are due next year, 2026. Funds capped call transactions to mitigate dilution risk and support general corporate initiatives. I guess that's marketing. Anyway, the capped calls were priced priced with a strike of $24.14 per share, representing 40% premium to Mara's $17.24 reference price. Mara has long championed the Bitcoin focused treasury strategy, opting to accumulate rather than sell its mined Bitcoin.
The company holds 50,000 Bitcoin valued at nearly $6,000,000,000 ranking it as the second largest Bitcoin holder among public companies according to Bitcoin treasuries. Mara shares closed at $17.16 on Monday. So that's interesting. Did let me make sure that they got the, yeah, $6,000,000,000 in in Bitcoin is held on Mara's balance sheet. Again, different lollipop manufacturer, different flavor, but it's still a lollipop. So the real question becomes, how many licks does it take to get the center of the lollipop? That's actually not what I was gonna say. Just the the old commercial from the seventies just blasted through my head. No. The real question is, how many lollipops will the market endure? And when I just mean I I just when I say endure, all I'm talking about is how much market appetite is there for all these lollipops? Because we can't seem to get away from manufacturing lollipops.
I know it's new. You know, it's only been, like, you know, two or three years since we've seen these debt products come on the market as as far as using them to buy Bitcoin is concerned by, quote, unquote, Bitcoin treasury companies. But I think I really do think we're getting close to we should be getting close to thinking about the end of the lollipop train. There's gotta be another product. Somebody invent a freaking toaster for god's sakes. Because when I say we're getting close to the lollipop train, this is what I'm talking about.
Bakkt, b a k k t, Bakkt. They haven't been in the news in a while, but they are today because of this. Their stock plummets 40% after announcing pricing of $75,000,000 of public offering to buy Bitcoin. Yet another lollipop. This flavor does not seem to be sitting well with the market. Or is it the fact that they don't need another lollipop? I'm just asking, but crypto custody trading in rewards firm Bakkt saw its shares plummet by 40% in premarket trading on Tuesday following a pricing announcement for its $75,000,000 public offering late Monday.
Bakkt stock closed down 4.93% at $17.17 on Monday ahead of the pricing announcement, but has since fully collapsed to $10.17. Bakkt will offer 6,700,000.0 shares of class a common stock at $10 per share along with pre funded warrants for up to 746,000 shares at $9.99 each according to the statement. Well, the sale sale is set to close on or around July 30 pending customary closing conditions. The company estimates that the gross proceeds from the offering will total $75,000,000 before deducting underwriting discounts, commissions, and other expenses.
Bak said that it plans to use the proceeds for general corporate purposes, including Bitcoin and Shitcoin purchases, as well as some working capital. The firm also granted underwriters a thirty day option to buy up to 1.2 no. 1,125,000.000 additional shares of pre funded warrants at the offering price minus fees. Bakkt tapped ClearStreet and Cohen and Company Capital Markets as joint book running managers for the offering. Last month, Bakkt announced that it was looking to raise up to 1,000,000,000 through equity and debt offering to fund a Bitcoin acquisition strategy according to a prospectus filed with the SEC, including sales of Bakkt's class a common stock, preferred stock, warrants, and debt securities, Bakkt previously announced an updated investment policy, quote, to allocate Bitcoin or rather capital into Bitcoin and other digital assets as part of its broader treasury corporate strategy. However, the firm has not yet made any crypto purchases at all. Quote, this initiative is intended to support Bakkt's transformation into a pure play crypto infrastructure company and to enable us to strategically add Bitcoin and other digital assets to our treasury.
Akh Sheh Natta, co CEO of Bakkt said at the time. Founded in 2018, Bakkt is joining a plethora of crypto treasury firms using traditional capital to gain leveraged exposure to assets like Bitcoin. President Trump's Truth Social was reportedly in advanced talks to acquire Bakkt last November. Shit. I forgot all about that one. So another lollipop company. It's just they're all they're really all over the place, man. So let's move on to Arizona. You've heard of Florida Man. Right? Well, Arizona man pleads guilty in a $13,000,000 crypto Ponzi scheme. He faces fifteen years in prison, Vismaya v from Decrypt, a man who posed as a crypto savvy government official. See, this is where the Infiniti scam comes in.
Right? You'll the the the it should it should play it it should explain exactly what an Infiniti scam is. He posed as a crypto savvy government official and helped engineer a $13,000,000 Ponzi scheme while he admitted to being guilty in federal court. Vincent Anthony Mazzotta junior pleaded guilty Monday to one count of money laundering and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice according to a statement by the US attorney general's office for the Central District of California. Mazada helped target victims through a web of crypto investment companies with names such as Mind Capital and CloudNine Capital while working alongside Australian codefendant David Gilbert Safran from 2017 to 2023.
The pair falsely claimed to use automated trading bots powered by artificial intelligence, there's part of the affinity scam, to generate high crypto trading returns that, of course, never materialized. An indictment from December 2023 revealed Mazada operated under several aliases, including Delta Prime, director Vincenzo, etcetera, etcetera, while communicating with victims. The indictment detailed how the conspirators spent investor funds and, of course, dumbass shit like luxury items, private jet charters, Hollywood Hill mansion rentals, personal security details, and high end hotel accommodations.
Okay. They bought nothing. They literally bought nothing. This reminds me of an old Richard Pryor movie where he's inherited, like, I don't know, a billion dollars, like, more money than you knew what to do with, especially in, like, the mid eighties when the movie came out. A billion dollars was a freaking shit ton of money, man. But the will stated you can't have any of it. You'll have a ninety day period to spend he had to spend, like, a $100,000,000, and he couldn't buy anything. And that was he's like, I'm gonna make you spend so much money, you're gonna wanna puke. So what he came up with, Richard Pryor, the character, so that he would be able to get the billion dollars in inheritance, what he came up with was a scheme where he would do things like run for public office, and he would, like, buy food for his, you know, his, like, dinners and and whatnot when he was trying to get people to, like, donate. But the people started donating too much money to him. So he was actually making money off this deal. He can't do that. He's got to lose a $100,000,000.
He did everything he could. He finally got rid of the last dollar. You're probably never gonna see the movie. Yes. He gets rid of the last dollar. He doesn't own a single thing on his balance sheet. Last five minutes of the movie, he he basically unlocks the billion dollar thing. It's great. Everybody's happy, But he has to spend all this money, and that's what these guys listen to this. Private jet charter is not buying a private jet. A mansion in the Hollywood Hills, when you rent it, you don't own it. Personal security details, until you stop paying them, you know, those guys are actually hanging around you, but the second you stop paying them, they're gone. They're not yours.
And high end hotel accommodations. They didn't buy anything. They didn't figure out any way to get rid of this money at all except to just let it evaporate. Probably letting evaporate letting evaporate old ladies' life savings because they just don't care. Because people on this planet, not all of them, but I I don't even wanna say most of them. I'm gonna say half of all the people on this planet suck. They don't care about anybody but themselves. And it's really scary because you end up with Mazada and Safran apparently also establishing here's where the real part of the affinity scam comes in, the Federal Crypto Reserve.
Like the Federal Reserve and the fact that that Trump did the whole crypt the, you know, the Bitcoin strategic reserve. So they named this thing Federal Crypto Reserve, and apparently, that's all you have to do to trick little old ladies to give you their money is just name something. Brilliant marketing. I hope these guys burn in hell, but it's brilliant marketing. Anyway, it's a fictitious entity designed to appear as a government backed crypto recovery service. Oh, boy. Victims who had already lost money Jesus Christ.
Victims. I'm sorry. I can't do this. Victims who had already lost their money in the initial scheme were then charged more money for investigations into the very companies that had stolen their funds. They got them twice. They got them twice. Holy crap, dude. Experts tell the crypt that the federal crypto reserve tactic represents a particularly cruel form of secondary victimization that exploits victim's desperation and shame after losing money in the initial scam. Quote, crypto recovery scams are very common with scammers targeting victims by claiming they can help recover stolen crypto, said Karen Pujara, founder of scam defense platform Scam Buzzer. Quote, the hope of getting their money back and guilt from making a mistake makes victims vulnerable, Pujara added, noting that their emotional state can lead them to another error, knowingly or unknowingly, causing them to fall for secondary recovery scams.
The expert advised victims approached by recovery services to just not respond, simply block any communications as engaging can expose victims to additional social engineering attacks. Pujara advised investors evaluating AI trading services to apply a simple logic test. Quote, if the returns they are offering are too good to be true, then it's a scam. If someone truly had such a profitable algorithm, they wouldn't be selling subscriptions for just a few $100, end quote. Bazota is scheduled to be sentenced on December 15. He faces up to fifteen years. The case comes amid a surge in crypto related scams targeting a variety of different communities, and last week, a Denver grand jury indicted Colorado pastor Eli Regalado and his wife on 40, count them, 40 felony charges for allegedly orchestrating a $3,400,000 crypto scheme through their online church promising, quote, divine guidance for their worthless INDX coin. Yeah. I brought you that story when that shit broke. And I guess there's 40 felony charges because 40 people fell for it, so they have 40 separate ways to to to get them. And I don't know I don't remember what the hell happened to them, and I honestly don't care. As long as they're burning in a lake of fire for all eternity, that's all I really give a shit about. Because it just it does, man. I mean, reading these stories makes me feel very ill.
Actually, it makes me feel very dirty, and it makes me wanna get clean. I need to get away clean with soapminer.com. It's soapminer.com. Go to soapminer.com and get your handmade beef tallow soap. This oh my god, dude. This stuff is so freaking awesome. We took a bar of the Earl Grey tallow. It was brand new. So, like, I I took a picture of it on Noster while standing in front of the house that we had just got at. It was brand new. Still had its wrapper on it. Right? I had a fan like, I like, which my family has four people in it, and then my sister joined us. And we all use this bar of soap. All of us for, like, almost for almost two weeks.
It barely shrank. Now I'm gonna give you a tip. This goes for this goes for all soap, but it especially goes for tallow soaps, especially these fine finely milled soaps that you get from soapminer.com. Do not let it sit in water. Do not do that. In fact, don't like, if if you put it on the side of the tub, let's say you've got like a little, like, I don't know, like a little flat spot inside your shower or your tub or something like that, and you put it there, and you look at it and it's dry on the top, it's not dry. It's wet on the bottom. It has to be elevated, and they make these little soap pedestals that have these little not only look like like pins. Right? So, it's like a soap dish that's got a whole bunch of pins that's raised out of it. Get one of those.
And your SoapMiner soap will never it won't break, it won't split, it won't ever do anything but be the finest bar of handmade 100% beef tallow soap that you will ever get. In fact, his rough cut tallow soap has exactly three ingredients. It's water, lye, and 100% beef tallow. And when you have one of these bars of soap and you've got five separate people using it and you've got a proper soap pedestal, you will notice that after almost two full weeks of usage, that bar shrinks by maybe 5%. Maybe. And I'm talking about, like, I was washing my hair with it. Twice, like, every single time that I wash my hair. Right?
This is amazing stuff, and you will get 10% off. So if you use the code bitcoin and you'll get 10% off of your entire purchase. Go to soapminer.com and put in bitcoin and in the coupon code. Get your 10% off and buy everything that he's got. He's got lemongrass. He's got orange clove. He's got redacted tallow. He's got the rough cut. He's actually got a couple of lip balms here. He's got tea tree soap. He's got pine tar soap. He's got cedarwood soap, peppermint soap. The only thing that he doesn't have is the Earl Grey tallow. I think that he's gonna have some coming online soon, but these soaps have to cure. You don't just make them and wrap them up and send them off. You actually have to let them sit and settle down. I don't know. I'm not a soap maker, but this is according to my friend SoapMiner. Go get away clean @soapminer.com.
That's soapminer.com. And just to get a little bit more dirty, before we run the numbers, I wanna read you this headline and a couple of things. And I wanna say a couple of things about it. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin. UnitedHealth says 2025 earnings will be worse than expected as high medical costs dog insurers. Insurers like UnitedHealth. I gotta point to this. I promise. The company and the broader insurance industry, so all these insurance companies are grappling grappling, oh my god. Help us all. We're all gonna die with with they're grappling with higher medical costs in Medicare Advantage Plans.
And I guarantee you a whole lot more than that. The report adds to a growing string of setbacks to the company which owns the nation's largest and most powerful insurer and is often viewed as the industry's bellwether insurance company. This is a case of what happens when a snake eats its own tail and it's happening in higher education as we speak as well. It's also happening in agriculture. What do these three things have in common? They cause their own demise. In the case of higher education and agriculture, it's subsidies because the government will just print money and in the case of colleges, they will print student loans and the colleges immediately have a whole bunch more people that would never be able to go to college before be able to go to college.
So they get a shit ton more money. So what do they do? They hire more people, and they raise their, they raise their salaries, and they they forget about the mission of the college. You get more administrators than you do teachers. In health care or rather in agriculture, subsidies do sort of the same thing. They cause land to be monocropped because you can't get crop insurance. You can't get crop insurance unless you plant a certain thing. Now, like wheat. Like, if you were to plant some kind of eighteen twelve genetics of wheat, you're probably not going to get crop insurance. If you're not planting a modern seed like something you could get out of bare crop science, you're not getting crop insurance.
Right? So, if your crop fails, you're out of luck. But, if you do plant exactly what is on the subsidy list like corn and wheat and rye and and modern varieties, you can get wiped out and you will get exactly market price of what was projected your land to actually do. So what does that do? That cut continues to get you to to monocrop your land, and you will always be using this crappy what ends up being crappy seed that has no nutrition, and there's all kinds of downstream effects from it. So here we have UnitedHealth having issues.
Why? There used to be a time when there was no real such thing as health insurance, and I was alive during that time. It was the eighties. In fact, it was the eighties in which you first started seeing, like the very early eighties, when you first started seeing health insurance companies. By the nineties, almost all companies were offering that as a benefit to their employees. Now, because everybody's got insurance, hospitals and, like, the actual medical community started raising their prices because there was money was free flowing. And they raised them, and they hired administrators and not doctors.
And they gave themselves pay raises. And now doctors are basically kinda like bottom barrel getting paid. Some, you know, neurologists and brain surgeons, thoracic surgeons, they're probably gonna be fine, but your general ER doc, you know, your your pediatrician, not not so much, dude. And why? Because health insurance companies because when they came into existence they allowed money to flow and the institution that started getting the money did not respect the institution's original goal and that was to help people remain healthy or get better if they've had an accident. So now UnitedHealthcare is feeling they they've literally caused a situation where even they can't afford the bullshit they caused.
And now we get to run the numbers of legacy markets that have their neck deep in the shit just like UnitedHealthcare does. Futures and commodities. They got West Texas Intermediate Oil up 1.18% to $67.50, which is exactly where it was two weeks ago. So it is oil is trading in a very, very, very tight range. It's just the way it is. But natural gas is actually up 3.75% bucking the trend. Usually, it's in the red when oil is in the green. $3.10 for a thousand cubic feet. And gasoline is up well over two points to $2.17 right now a gallon.
Gold is up a quarter of a point to 3,317. Silver is up point 12%. Platinum is down point one four. Copper is up almost a full point, and palladium is down well, well over a point. Ag is fully in the red today except for our only winner today is sugar, 1.89% to the upside. Biggest loser is gonna be cocoa, 2.5% to the downside. Meanwhile, live cattle down a quarter. Lean hogs down two points. Feeder cattle down point 16%. Dow is essentially sideways, only slightly in the red. Meanwhile, S and P is up point 14%, Nasdaq is up a quarter of a percent, and the S and P Mini is up a quarter of a percent.
And Bitcoin is doing what? A $118,220, so it's actually on the downside this morning. It was up at, like, almost a 119 when I first started the show, but, you know, I'm sure somebody sneezed sideways and now everybody's freaking out. $2,350,000,000,000 of market cap lets us buy 35.5 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,898,807.07 of, and average fees per block are low. Not right now but average fees per block 0.04 BTC taking the fees on a per block basis there are good lord holy shit we've all we've got 20, 35 blocks.
Wow. I haven't seen 61,900 unconfirmed transactions in mempools in quite a while, and they're going at high priority rates of 3 Satoshis per v byte. Low priority is also 3 Satoshis per v byte. And mining is at 892.1 exahashes per second. So leveling off there from as we had dipped down a couple of weeks ago, we came back up and now we are sort of just kinda leveling off. I think everybody's probably in a waiting pattern. And from the last couple of shows, Yodel with 511 sets says, thought you were retiring the podcast for a minute and was sad. Been out of the loop the past couple of weeks. No, Yodel.
I don't know what else the hell to do. I I can't I I I'm probably completely unavailable to do anything other than this show. Mike Clear with twenty one twenty one says, thanks for your time, talent, and treasure. Thanks for yours too. I appreciate that. Progressively worse with 500 says thank you. Psyduck with seven thirty five says Psyduck. Turkey with 500 says absolutely nothing. Luty with 500 says you don't appreciate what you have until it's gone. I appreciate all you do. I appreciate you, sir. Pies with a 100 says a couple of, a couple of emojis that I can't read because my literal Windows operating system is that old. Yeah. Don't give me any shit, bro.
Progressively worse says, oh, wait. Wait. No. That was from July 16. So this one I've already read. That's the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Tornado cash trial enters week three. Defense expert digital forensic witness takes the stand. This is by our good friend Frank Korva from Bitcoin Magazine. Today, on the eleventh day of the tornado cash trial, doctor Edmond, cofounder and partner at Naxo, a digital forensics firm, took the stand for the majority of the day. In his direct testimony, he defined key crypto terms for the court, explained the extent to which Tornado Cash was decentralized, highlighted the precautions Roman Storm and other Tornado Cash cofounders took to prevent bad actors from using the service, and called into question the validity of the analysis presented by two former witnesses.
During the cross examination, the prosecutor or the prosecution prodded doctor Edmond to share details and to provide nuance regarding some of the claims he made and the data he presented in his testimony. In his slides, doctor Edmond described Tornado Cash as a non custodial service that used immutable smart contracts to anonymize transactions. As he introduced crypto specific words and phrases that might have been unfamiliar to the jury, such as cryptographic signatures, smart contracts, and the aforementioned immutable, he defined them in layperson's terms.
He was so thorough in doing so that his efforts became seemingly counterproductive in that he lost some of the members of the jury in the process. Oh, no. That said, he did make a number of notable points in his testimony, including that the Tornado Cash pool contracts had been immutable since 05/18/2020, and that Tornado Cash DAO played a role in governing Tornado Cash as opposed to just Storm and its cofounders, and that a minefield, version oh, I'm sorry. And that a minified or reduced version of the source Tornado Cash user interface source code had existed on GitHub since nearly the onset of the project for the technically inclined to copy and use as they pleased.
Doctor Edmond also noticed that even the UI for Tornado Cash was decentralized in in the sense that it existed on IPFS or the interplanetary file system, which is a peer to peer storage system for sharing data across distributed networks. Doctor. Edmond highlighted the fact that Storm and his cofounders applied a geoblocking system to the UI, making it more difficult for people or entities from certain regions of the globe like North Korea and Cuba to use the user interface. He also noted that the Tornado Cash developers implemented the Chainalysis Sanctions Oracle, a smart contract that includes a list of sanctioned addresses within a month of Chainalysis creating the tools. So within one month of the shitbags over there at Chainalysis creating a tool that none of us really want to see because, you know, reasons, they implemented it, which does not help the prosecution.
It does does does not help the prosecution at all. Doctor Edmond then stated that he'd reviewed wallet associated with the Ronin hack didn't move funds through Tornado Cash. He said that there were a number of hops from the Ronin hack wallet to TornadoCash making the analysis harder to validate. He added that from September 1 to August 8 well, 09/01/2020 to 08/08/2022, 85% of the funds that moved through TornadoCash were unidentified while only 13% were from hacks from DeKalbas or DeKalbua's demonstrations, making the point that the majority of Tornado Cash users weren't necessarily criminals.
Doctor Edmond also critiqued the testimony of Philip Worlau, a blockchain auditor from Anchain dot AI and a witness for the prosecution. Doctor Edmond was particularly critical of mister Werlaw's unique, quote, gas ratio analysis, which tracked crypto deposits and tornado cash. He stated that he doesn't know of this methodology's known error rates and that neither did mister Werlaw. He said as much in his own testimony. Toward the beginning of the cross examination, the prosecution harped on the fact that from December 2020 till August 2022, almost all of the funds that moved through Tornado Cash were put through a router that Storm and his cofounders had set up.
The prosecution showed a slide illustrating Tornado Cash's deposits and withdrawals for the 100 ETH Tornado Cash pool via the router in February 2022, Excuse me. A month in which no funds were processed through said pool directly. While doctor Edmond largely agreed with this being the case, he didn't support the prosecution's claim that the criminals were moving illicit funds through the router because doing so helped them to increase their anonymity. Also during the cross examination, the prosecution stated that the owners of the Tornado Cash organization's GitHub account, Storm and his two cofounders, made the final decisions regarding what was included in The U in the UI, and they added that the source code for the UI wasn't as open source as doctor Edmond claimed it was during his testimony.
To the latter point, the prosecution argued that only providing the minified source code wasn't the same thing as providing the full source code. Doctor Edmond was reluctant to agree with this assessment and settled by stating that under the strict definition of open source the prosecution provided, the Tornado Cash UI wasn't technically fully open source from the onset. The prosecution also asked doctor Edmond whether Storm and the other Tornado Cash developers actually incorporated the geo blocking code. They showed a commit for the code that doctor Edmond had included in his slides and pressured doctor Edmond to share whether or not he knew for sure that the code was merged.
Doctor Edmond said that it was to the best of his knowledge. That's not helpful. With approximately ten minutes left in the trial day, the defense defense then called their second witness of the day, Tyler Alameda, to the stand. Mister Alameda works in cybersecurity at Coinbase and testified to the fact that he once used Tornado Cash to preserve his privacy as he sent funds from his wallets to the Ukrainian war fund. Well, I you just blew it. Then, I mean, if you're gonna your choice, dude. While judge Fayla hadn't allowed much space for the witness to talk about the privacy use case for tornado cash, she did permit mister Alameda to tell the story within just over five minutes that he was on the stand.
So what comes up next? The defense calls more witnesses to the stand tomorrow, one of which will be a custodian for chain analysis. And after that, the defense has stated that it plans to bring approximately four more witnesses to the stand, including potentially Roman Storm himself. And I cannot I cannot be more distrustful of that that no. You do not put the defendant on the stand. You do not put the defendant on the stand. One more time. You do not put the defendant on the stand because you don't know in what ways the prosecution can tear that thing apart.
And if they tear Roman Storm apart, then the defense has no shot. I am nobody's gonna listen to me, but I am begging them to not put Roman Storm on the stand. So some good points were made by this doctor, whatever his name was, Edmond but at that last it looks to me like the prosecution was getting under his skin and I'm crossing my fingers for the boys at Tornado Cash but I don't know at first it sounded good but now I'm a little I'm a little worried as to where this is gonna go. So let's move on to, Lightning Network targets 5% of stablecoin flows by 2028 according to the Voltage CEO. This is out of Atlas '21.
The Lightning Network could witness significant growth in stablecoin volume over the next few years according to the CEO of Voltage. In an interview with Cointelegraph, Graham Kriesic, founder and CEO of Voltage, a payment services provider for the Lightning Network, stated that increased adoption of the layer two network could enable it to handle at least 5% of global stablecoin volume by 2028. Considering that current daily stablecoin volume is around $180,000,000,000 according to Coin CoinGecko, this would translate into the $9,000,000,000 area being transacted via the Lightning Network. However, that volume is expected to grow further in the coming years, especially with the implementation of stablecoin regulations such as the Genius Act in The United States and similar efforts internationally.
Kreesick emphasized that stablecoins will accelerate the adoption of the network, noting that Lightning is the top scalability tool for stablecoins Lightning is the top scalability tool for stablecoins The Voltage founder added, quote, stablecoins are just now starting to come to lightning. And some of the major players like Tether or Circle are not yet live. So the current percentage, or rather volume, is near zero, but will be growing in the second half of this year, end quote. According to Kreesick, Lightning Network adoption will be driven by retail users and developers. Institutional interest is also growing with traditional institutions starting to explore and recognize the value of Lightning for risk management, working capital access, and reduced counterparty risks.
Currently, the Lightning Network is around 14,000 nodes, 44,800 channels, and a capacity of 3,820 worth approximately, we'll call it half a billion dollars at current prices according to Amboss. Although the network's capacity has dropped by 23% since the beginning of the year, Kreesick pointed out that there are fewer total channels, but they are larger in size, which validates capital efficiency and a more optimized network. Access to the Lightning Network measured by the total number of users across exchanges, wallets, banks, and payment platforms is currently above 700,000,000 according to Voltage CEO. Okay. So there's this this stable coin thing is never gonna go away.
In fact, it's going to ride right along Bitcoin sort of the way people used to envision Litecoin riding right next to Bitcoin. The numbers are freaking staggering, and some of the projections that that I've seen in in various, you know, notes on Nostr or actually I was actually I was scanning Twitter yesterday and some of some of it came out then. I don't even remember what the numbers are at this point. But this is not going to go away. It's not. And if you think it is, you're gonna have a bad day. It's I'm not I'm not rah rah rah rah stablecoins. I'm just saying don't expect them to to go away because this is they are going to be a major tool for countries like The United States to enable debt printing the likes of which we've never seen before.
We think we've seen it, but we honestly we we have we have not seen it yet. Not not like what they what they would be able to do. Because when The United States prints money, it doesn't really get to a lot of other places that they would like it to get to, like, you know, Central Kenya or Costa Rica or, I don't know, Brazil. I mean, it does in a little bit of way, but the the majority of the people that that money printing in The United States really affects is Europe and The United States and Australia. Let's just say the West. The rest of the world, yes, it does affect. But remember where they were we were making the argument, hey, when we printed all those stimulus checks, you know, in El Salvador this was pre El Salvador buying getting into Bitcoin, and the El Salvadoran population was completely dollarized.
They they had completely ditched their own fiat currency was using the dollar. They didn't get any stimmy checks. So think about that when we now have this issue of stablecoins, which anybody can use, and anybody is using them and using them a lot. And they're using them mostly in countries that are not Western countries. We're gonna be able to print a whole shit ton more money and not see immediate effects of the people of The United States or Western Europe. For quite some time, it's going to act as a buffer, and they're going to print the living shit out of it. So what do you do?
I would buy some Bitcoin. I really would consider buying some Bitcoin at this point. So last up, here's why you wanna buy Bitcoin because you're gonna wanna have it when you go to auction at Christie's house. The luxury auction house Christie's has launched a 1,000,000,000, that's billion with a b, a $1,000,000,000 Bitcoin division. Yeah. Alex, Larry, Bitcoin news. In a move that combines luxury real estate with digital innovation, Christie's International Real Estate has launched a new division dedicated to digital asset based property transactions.
The company now has reportedly over $1,000,000,000 worth of high end homes for sale that could be bought with digital currencies like Bitcoin and Shitcoin number one with no banks required. Now that's what Alex Larry says, but take it with a grain of salt. The new division based in Los Angeles and led by top real estate broker Aaron Kerman is modernizing how wealthy clients buy and sell property. Crypto is here to stay, Kierman said in an interview, and it's only going to get bigger over the next few years. The division was reportedly born out of a high profile deal where a $65,000,000 Beverly Hills mansion was sold entirely with digital assets.
That transaction proved there was real demand among Bitcoin wealthy buyers for discreet, bank free real estate deals. The $65,000,000 sale showed that ultra wealthy clients are now willing to use Bitcoin for real world high value deals. Now Christie's has assembled an entire team of legal experts, analysts, and financial advisors to support these particular kinds of transactions. The process allows both buyers and sellers to do deals peer to peer, meaning that they can use digital wallets to send and receive payments without ever going through a traditional bank. One of the largest benefits of using Bitcoin in real estate is privacy.
Many buyers in this space are celebrities, tech entrepreneurs, and digital asset investors who want to remain anonymous. To help with that, Christie's encourages buyers to use LLCs, you know, limited liability companies that are funded directly with digital assets. That makes it harder to trace who owns the property. And in some cases, sellers never even need to meet the buyers in person. Instead, attorneys handle all verification and compliance procedures. Bitcoin provides the privacy and speed that's essential in a luxury retail market.
The new division's property portfolio includes some of the most expensive homes in The United States, and they're all available to Bitcoin investors. While Bitcoin can be wild, Christie's uses real time price feeds and escrow services to reduce risk for both buyers and sellers. The team also does legal checks to make sure that the source of funds are clean. Oh, great. In an effort to comply with, of course, AML KYC, regulators are are starting to pay attention. The Federal Housing Finance Agency has told Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start treating digital assets as an option for mortgage qualification. Yeah. I brought that to you right before I went on vacation a couple of weeks ago.
Christie's is is a big deal, and the next I guarantee you the next person or the next company is Sotheby's, and it's gonna be Domino's from there. These are the Christie's is huge. It is every bit as prestigious and every bit as old as as Sotheby's as an auction house, and of course they don't do just auctions. I mean they've got real estate arms, they probably got auto groups, who knows? They probably own freaking luxury yachts for all I know. All I do know is that when I read this, I was like, I really want to end the show with this because nothing stops the Bitcoin train as well as nothing stops this train. There's there's a difference.
Nothing stops the train of economic destruction, but nothing stops the other train going the other direction which is economic salvation and it looks like Christie's figured it out first when it came to high profile real estate brokers and auction houses. It's gonna be weird. It's gonna be a weird second half of this year, man, and it's probably gonna be a weird 2026. But I'm here right beside you except for those rare occasions when I go on vacation, but I do see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I am your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 06:51AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the July. Holy crap. This year is going by fast. 2025, and this is episode eleven thirty six. As best as I can tell, it's episode eleven thirty six of Bitcoin, and I am back from vacation, which is why I can't kinda tell what episode I'm on. Even though I'm fairly well organized in my episodes, I haven't been able to transfer over all the data from my laptop computer, which I take to do the show when I'm on the road. I haven't been able to get all that consolidated with my giant Obsidian file that keeps track of, like, every show that I've ever done.
Well, at least since I started using Obsidian. And if you're not using Obsidian as a note taker, you should probably should probably consider at least looking into it. It is free, and you can support the developers if you so choose. And it's it's it's it's a nice it's a nice little bag of bag of tools, but not here to talk about Obsidian. We've got several pieces of news that's going on right now, and we're gonna get right back into it. And, hopefully, I don't fumble around because I only did two shows when I was on vacation. I wanted to do more, but, honestly, man, it was so ridiculously gorgeous up in the San Juan Mountains Of Colorado and didn't realize just how badly my batteries needed to be recharged. But they have been recharged, and we're gonna start with Bitcoin seemingly zooming almost to a $120,000 as Trump's EU tariff deal lifts a little bit of risk sentiment.
Okay. Yeah. Well, and who's writing it, but none other than Shara Malwa out of coindesk.com. Markets kicked off the week with a renewed wave of optimism after US president Donald Trump confirmed a tariff deal with the EU, scaling levies down to 15% from the previously threatened 30%. So the announcement sent the S and P 500 futures up point 3% and Dow contracts higher by a 180 points and Bitcoin itself to nearly a 120,000 for the first time in nearly two weeks. Two weeks. Sounds just like a parakeet. Just under 5% shy of its all time high, Bitcoin, which had spent the past week trading between a 114,000 and a 119,000, neared the barrier as traders interpreted Trump's tariff rollback as a signal of reduced macro uncertainty.
Quote, Bitcoin maintained a resilient range and rebounded to a 119,000 after old wallets with tens of thousands of BTC began transferring funds to exchanges, which led some traders to fear a market correction, Nasar Al Aqchar, chief strategy officer at CoinW, told a Telegram group, quote, numerous institutions continue to onboard into the crypto industry and utilize reserve strategies showcasing strong demand against recent surges of stock prices. So it's not really as much about the Bitcoin price here as that that's a side effect of what the real news about the EU tariffs were, is that from what I understand, Trump basically forced the British Empire to its knees. Well, I I mean, that's The UK part. Right? So not really the EU. I'm just saying that the old world basically bowed to the new.
And that's kind of a huge deal because from what I understand, they're not gonna they don't get to tariff us. We get to tariff them at 15%. That's kind of a big switch. And it's one more it's one more signal that the EU is dying. And the EU needs to die. It really does. It's done nothing but cause trouble. It's people are suffering very greatly at this point, and it's all because of unelected bureaucrats that have been put in positions of power over the nations that make up the European Union. And it's just that in my opinion, France needs to be France. You know, why can't Spanish people have their own Spain?
What what's so great about the European Union? You cop they copied The United States after the fact. We already saw what we needed to do at the in the with The United States. And then EU is like, oh, let's make this thing called the EU and then we'll have a centralized currency and, but they did it wrong. They did it. And and The United States isn't exactly, you know, not all that outside of a dog and pony show itself sometimes, but at least the states can like, Colorado is definitely Colorado. It it is different. It's completely and wholly legally different than Texas.
And it's like it's almost as if the EU has been homogenized to the point that everything looks the same. And I'm not talking about buildings. I'm not talking about food. I'm not talking about culture. I'm talking about the politics. I'm talking about the economics. I'm talking about this this modern bullshit that we've made for ourselves. And if if the EU survives any longer than ten years from now, I will be horrified and surprised at the same time. But I thought that that was really interesting when I heard that. At first, I thought it was complete bullshit. But it does seem that that Trump found Europe's pain point and put them on their knees.
And it's gonna be interesting to see how all this shit plays out. But meanwhile, strategy's making a play And TD Cowan says now this is TD Cowan. They're saying that Strategy will be able to purchase 17,000 Bitcoin without any equity dilution whatsoever according to Oscar Zaringa Perez writing for Bitcoin Magazine's strategy. The world's largest corporate Bitcoin holder has raised $2,500,000,000 through the IPO of its brand new preferred stock named Stretch, pricing 28,000,000 shares at $90 apiece, surpassing the initial $500,000,000 target. And this marks the biggest equity IPO of 2025 so far according to TD Cohen, which also noted that the structure allows strategy to continue accumulating Bitcoin without dilution of existing common stock shareholders.
Strategy now holds 607,770 BTC worth about $80,000,000,000 with a market cap of $114,000,000,000 By offering a wide assortment of Bitcoin backed securities designed to appeal to discrete classes of investors, strategy acts as a funnel for institutional capital flows into Bitcoin, said TD Cowan's Lance Vitanza and Jonathan Naravet as they wrote in a note to clients, quote, it's a it's a sound business model that has attracted many new entrants. No one is likely to match, let alone beat strategy's cost of capital advantage, end quote.
The STRC or stretch stock offer it well, rather, it offers a variable in annual dividend starting at 9% payable monthly in cash and is designed to maintain a trading price near a $100 of value. The company then retains redemption rights once listed and offers protections like repurchase options and dividend accrual for shareholders. Strategy continues positioning itself as the institutional gateway to Bitcoin. TD Cowen analysts noted that the firm's cost of capital advantage and projected that it could add another 17,000 BTC over the next decade without any dilution of shareholders whatsoever.
This move aligns with strategy's aggressive Bitcoin accumulation plan. Yes. We know. But it's the it's the TD Cowan saying that there's there's not gonna be any dilution of shareholders. I suppose if they keep building brand new products, then they won't be diluting common shareholders because they're not going to be printing MSTR stock or which is the com their common stock. They they built all these different instruments, and I've talked about this before. It's a it's an interesting play. And it's like the it's like the meme. It's like, this is an interesting play, Cotton. Let's see if it let's see if it works out for them. That's all I can really say because I don't know what I've nobody's ever seen this. Not like this. I mean, I'm sure that somebody could probably dig up an example that looks like it, but not to this degree.
Maybe they've done it like, you know, like, like somebody's, like, you know, created one or maybe two. This dude is I think he's on his way to May building five. Five. Count them. Five different stock offerings that do not sell or rather cause to be printed MicroStrategy's original common stock, which is MSTR. But again, I have to ask, where the hell does the money come from? Did you see the NVIDIA chart? Is in fact, did you see the NVIDIA chart not as a chart of price, but as a percentage comparison to The United States GDP. It's 12% more.
The stock price of NVIDIA or actually the the it's not really the stock price as much as the the the whole, the whole caboodle, like all outstanding shares at whatever share price. Its entire capital stack of NVIDIA, that company with all lights, wells, bells, and whistles involved is worth 12% more or 12% of The United States GDP. It's it's it's insane when you think about it that way. And I had made a note on Noster that basically said, if you've ever wanted to know where all the money they printed went, well, look here. This is one of the money sinks that there is. And this is what it ends up looking like.
We we end up with these companies that are highly inflated, highly overvalued, simply because somebody who was very, very close to the money spigot had to figure out a place to put their money. And, they don't seem to be that interested in real estate anymore. I think they've bought what they were gonna buy, and now they're just estate anymore. I think they've bought what they were gonna buy, and now they're just looking for any other place that they can to stack their cash. And now you've got here comes Sailor. Let's get away from NVIDIA and let's look at Sailor. He's actually actually offering product after product after product.
I think there's one that has no yield, and all the rest have variable yields. And they it's like it's like a different flavored lollipop, but they're all lollipops. They're all a ball of sugar on a stick that you shove in your mouth and you suck on and aggravate your pancreas and other other organs. It's all the same. It's just different numbers. Everybody's like, oh, man. This new stock offering. I'm like, no. It's just a way for him to actually not dilute his shareholders. And that's what TD Cohen is saying, that they could actually go ahead and buy up to 17,000 BTC without any shareholder original shareholder dilution. Actually, I think that number is probably a lot higher. And that really depends on the externalities of how much money or rather how much trust is the market going to have every single time Michael Saylor decides to spin up a new flavored lollipop.
I'm not putting the guy down. It's actually rather brilliant. It's just I see steam running out. And if he does it in a way where he can just coast and do something spectacular that doesn't have anything to do at all with offering a new stock offering, then strategy is gonna do very, very well. But if they can't keep the momentum going and they keep generating these debt instruments, I don't know man. It's gonna be pretty ugly dude. Let's move on to Mara, holder of nearly $6,000,000,000 of BTC. So they already have 600 or $6,000,000,000 of Bitcoin just chilling out on their balance sheet.
They've been able to raise almost $1,000,000,000 more to buy yet more Bitcoin. This is coming out of Jamie Crowley out of CoinDesk. Mara has completed a $950,000,000 offering of 0% convertible senior notes due 02/1932, with a majority of the proceeds earmarked to purchase additional Bitcoin, Pausing just to say this is just the strategy play. Alright, so strategy has already got like four or five products that we just got finished talking about it. Different flavors, same lollipop. This is the same lollipop and a different flavor from a different manufacturer of lollipops.
We got a lot of lollipop manufacturing going on. Again, like I said, we'll have to see how it goes. But the offering, which could expand to $1,150,000,000 if underwriters exercise their options in full, they announced this, by the way, yesterday. So I'm a little late to the game. But net proceeds of approximately $940,500,000 will be used to retire 19,400,000.0 of the existing 1% notes that are due next year, 2026. Funds capped call transactions to mitigate dilution risk and support general corporate initiatives. I guess that's marketing. Anyway, the capped calls were priced priced with a strike of $24.14 per share, representing 40% premium to Mara's $17.24 reference price. Mara has long championed the Bitcoin focused treasury strategy, opting to accumulate rather than sell its mined Bitcoin.
The company holds 50,000 Bitcoin valued at nearly $6,000,000,000 ranking it as the second largest Bitcoin holder among public companies according to Bitcoin treasuries. Mara shares closed at $17.16 on Monday. So that's interesting. Did let me make sure that they got the, yeah, $6,000,000,000 in in Bitcoin is held on Mara's balance sheet. Again, different lollipop manufacturer, different flavor, but it's still a lollipop. So the real question becomes, how many licks does it take to get the center of the lollipop? That's actually not what I was gonna say. Just the the old commercial from the seventies just blasted through my head. No. The real question is, how many lollipops will the market endure? And when I just mean I I just when I say endure, all I'm talking about is how much market appetite is there for all these lollipops? Because we can't seem to get away from manufacturing lollipops.
I know it's new. You know, it's only been, like, you know, two or three years since we've seen these debt products come on the market as as far as using them to buy Bitcoin is concerned by, quote, unquote, Bitcoin treasury companies. But I think I really do think we're getting close to we should be getting close to thinking about the end of the lollipop train. There's gotta be another product. Somebody invent a freaking toaster for god's sakes. Because when I say we're getting close to the lollipop train, this is what I'm talking about.
Bakkt, b a k k t, Bakkt. They haven't been in the news in a while, but they are today because of this. Their stock plummets 40% after announcing pricing of $75,000,000 of public offering to buy Bitcoin. Yet another lollipop. This flavor does not seem to be sitting well with the market. Or is it the fact that they don't need another lollipop? I'm just asking, but crypto custody trading in rewards firm Bakkt saw its shares plummet by 40% in premarket trading on Tuesday following a pricing announcement for its $75,000,000 public offering late Monday.
Bakkt stock closed down 4.93% at $17.17 on Monday ahead of the pricing announcement, but has since fully collapsed to $10.17. Bakkt will offer 6,700,000.0 shares of class a common stock at $10 per share along with pre funded warrants for up to 746,000 shares at $9.99 each according to the statement. Well, the sale sale is set to close on or around July 30 pending customary closing conditions. The company estimates that the gross proceeds from the offering will total $75,000,000 before deducting underwriting discounts, commissions, and other expenses.
Bak said that it plans to use the proceeds for general corporate purposes, including Bitcoin and Shitcoin purchases, as well as some working capital. The firm also granted underwriters a thirty day option to buy up to 1.2 no. 1,125,000.000 additional shares of pre funded warrants at the offering price minus fees. Bakkt tapped ClearStreet and Cohen and Company Capital Markets as joint book running managers for the offering. Last month, Bakkt announced that it was looking to raise up to 1,000,000,000 through equity and debt offering to fund a Bitcoin acquisition strategy according to a prospectus filed with the SEC, including sales of Bakkt's class a common stock, preferred stock, warrants, and debt securities, Bakkt previously announced an updated investment policy, quote, to allocate Bitcoin or rather capital into Bitcoin and other digital assets as part of its broader treasury corporate strategy. However, the firm has not yet made any crypto purchases at all. Quote, this initiative is intended to support Bakkt's transformation into a pure play crypto infrastructure company and to enable us to strategically add Bitcoin and other digital assets to our treasury.
Akh Sheh Natta, co CEO of Bakkt said at the time. Founded in 2018, Bakkt is joining a plethora of crypto treasury firms using traditional capital to gain leveraged exposure to assets like Bitcoin. President Trump's Truth Social was reportedly in advanced talks to acquire Bakkt last November. Shit. I forgot all about that one. So another lollipop company. It's just they're all they're really all over the place, man. So let's move on to Arizona. You've heard of Florida Man. Right? Well, Arizona man pleads guilty in a $13,000,000 crypto Ponzi scheme. He faces fifteen years in prison, Vismaya v from Decrypt, a man who posed as a crypto savvy government official. See, this is where the Infiniti scam comes in.
Right? You'll the the the it should it should play it it should explain exactly what an Infiniti scam is. He posed as a crypto savvy government official and helped engineer a $13,000,000 Ponzi scheme while he admitted to being guilty in federal court. Vincent Anthony Mazzotta junior pleaded guilty Monday to one count of money laundering and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice according to a statement by the US attorney general's office for the Central District of California. Mazada helped target victims through a web of crypto investment companies with names such as Mind Capital and CloudNine Capital while working alongside Australian codefendant David Gilbert Safran from 2017 to 2023.
The pair falsely claimed to use automated trading bots powered by artificial intelligence, there's part of the affinity scam, to generate high crypto trading returns that, of course, never materialized. An indictment from December 2023 revealed Mazada operated under several aliases, including Delta Prime, director Vincenzo, etcetera, etcetera, while communicating with victims. The indictment detailed how the conspirators spent investor funds and, of course, dumbass shit like luxury items, private jet charters, Hollywood Hill mansion rentals, personal security details, and high end hotel accommodations.
Okay. They bought nothing. They literally bought nothing. This reminds me of an old Richard Pryor movie where he's inherited, like, I don't know, a billion dollars, like, more money than you knew what to do with, especially in, like, the mid eighties when the movie came out. A billion dollars was a freaking shit ton of money, man. But the will stated you can't have any of it. You'll have a ninety day period to spend he had to spend, like, a $100,000,000, and he couldn't buy anything. And that was he's like, I'm gonna make you spend so much money, you're gonna wanna puke. So what he came up with, Richard Pryor, the character, so that he would be able to get the billion dollars in inheritance, what he came up with was a scheme where he would do things like run for public office, and he would, like, buy food for his, you know, his, like, dinners and and whatnot when he was trying to get people to, like, donate. But the people started donating too much money to him. So he was actually making money off this deal. He can't do that. He's got to lose a $100,000,000.
He did everything he could. He finally got rid of the last dollar. You're probably never gonna see the movie. Yes. He gets rid of the last dollar. He doesn't own a single thing on his balance sheet. Last five minutes of the movie, he he basically unlocks the billion dollar thing. It's great. Everybody's happy, But he has to spend all this money, and that's what these guys listen to this. Private jet charter is not buying a private jet. A mansion in the Hollywood Hills, when you rent it, you don't own it. Personal security details, until you stop paying them, you know, those guys are actually hanging around you, but the second you stop paying them, they're gone. They're not yours.
And high end hotel accommodations. They didn't buy anything. They didn't figure out any way to get rid of this money at all except to just let it evaporate. Probably letting evaporate letting evaporate old ladies' life savings because they just don't care. Because people on this planet, not all of them, but I I don't even wanna say most of them. I'm gonna say half of all the people on this planet suck. They don't care about anybody but themselves. And it's really scary because you end up with Mazada and Safran apparently also establishing here's where the real part of the affinity scam comes in, the Federal Crypto Reserve.
Like the Federal Reserve and the fact that that Trump did the whole crypt the, you know, the Bitcoin strategic reserve. So they named this thing Federal Crypto Reserve, and apparently, that's all you have to do to trick little old ladies to give you their money is just name something. Brilliant marketing. I hope these guys burn in hell, but it's brilliant marketing. Anyway, it's a fictitious entity designed to appear as a government backed crypto recovery service. Oh, boy. Victims who had already lost money Jesus Christ.
Victims. I'm sorry. I can't do this. Victims who had already lost their money in the initial scheme were then charged more money for investigations into the very companies that had stolen their funds. They got them twice. They got them twice. Holy crap, dude. Experts tell the crypt that the federal crypto reserve tactic represents a particularly cruel form of secondary victimization that exploits victim's desperation and shame after losing money in the initial scam. Quote, crypto recovery scams are very common with scammers targeting victims by claiming they can help recover stolen crypto, said Karen Pujara, founder of scam defense platform Scam Buzzer. Quote, the hope of getting their money back and guilt from making a mistake makes victims vulnerable, Pujara added, noting that their emotional state can lead them to another error, knowingly or unknowingly, causing them to fall for secondary recovery scams.
The expert advised victims approached by recovery services to just not respond, simply block any communications as engaging can expose victims to additional social engineering attacks. Pujara advised investors evaluating AI trading services to apply a simple logic test. Quote, if the returns they are offering are too good to be true, then it's a scam. If someone truly had such a profitable algorithm, they wouldn't be selling subscriptions for just a few $100, end quote. Bazota is scheduled to be sentenced on December 15. He faces up to fifteen years. The case comes amid a surge in crypto related scams targeting a variety of different communities, and last week, a Denver grand jury indicted Colorado pastor Eli Regalado and his wife on 40, count them, 40 felony charges for allegedly orchestrating a $3,400,000 crypto scheme through their online church promising, quote, divine guidance for their worthless INDX coin. Yeah. I brought you that story when that shit broke. And I guess there's 40 felony charges because 40 people fell for it, so they have 40 separate ways to to to get them. And I don't know I don't remember what the hell happened to them, and I honestly don't care. As long as they're burning in a lake of fire for all eternity, that's all I really give a shit about. Because it just it does, man. I mean, reading these stories makes me feel very ill.
Actually, it makes me feel very dirty, and it makes me wanna get clean. I need to get away clean with soapminer.com. It's soapminer.com. Go to soapminer.com and get your handmade beef tallow soap. This oh my god, dude. This stuff is so freaking awesome. We took a bar of the Earl Grey tallow. It was brand new. So, like, I I took a picture of it on Noster while standing in front of the house that we had just got at. It was brand new. Still had its wrapper on it. Right? I had a fan like, I like, which my family has four people in it, and then my sister joined us. And we all use this bar of soap. All of us for, like, almost for almost two weeks.
It barely shrank. Now I'm gonna give you a tip. This goes for this goes for all soap, but it especially goes for tallow soaps, especially these fine finely milled soaps that you get from soapminer.com. Do not let it sit in water. Do not do that. In fact, don't like, if if you put it on the side of the tub, let's say you've got like a little, like, I don't know, like a little flat spot inside your shower or your tub or something like that, and you put it there, and you look at it and it's dry on the top, it's not dry. It's wet on the bottom. It has to be elevated, and they make these little soap pedestals that have these little not only look like like pins. Right? So, it's like a soap dish that's got a whole bunch of pins that's raised out of it. Get one of those.
And your SoapMiner soap will never it won't break, it won't split, it won't ever do anything but be the finest bar of handmade 100% beef tallow soap that you will ever get. In fact, his rough cut tallow soap has exactly three ingredients. It's water, lye, and 100% beef tallow. And when you have one of these bars of soap and you've got five separate people using it and you've got a proper soap pedestal, you will notice that after almost two full weeks of usage, that bar shrinks by maybe 5%. Maybe. And I'm talking about, like, I was washing my hair with it. Twice, like, every single time that I wash my hair. Right?
This is amazing stuff, and you will get 10% off. So if you use the code bitcoin and you'll get 10% off of your entire purchase. Go to soapminer.com and put in bitcoin and in the coupon code. Get your 10% off and buy everything that he's got. He's got lemongrass. He's got orange clove. He's got redacted tallow. He's got the rough cut. He's actually got a couple of lip balms here. He's got tea tree soap. He's got pine tar soap. He's got cedarwood soap, peppermint soap. The only thing that he doesn't have is the Earl Grey tallow. I think that he's gonna have some coming online soon, but these soaps have to cure. You don't just make them and wrap them up and send them off. You actually have to let them sit and settle down. I don't know. I'm not a soap maker, but this is according to my friend SoapMiner. Go get away clean @soapminer.com.
That's soapminer.com. And just to get a little bit more dirty, before we run the numbers, I wanna read you this headline and a couple of things. And I wanna say a couple of things about it. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin. UnitedHealth says 2025 earnings will be worse than expected as high medical costs dog insurers. Insurers like UnitedHealth. I gotta point to this. I promise. The company and the broader insurance industry, so all these insurance companies are grappling grappling, oh my god. Help us all. We're all gonna die with with they're grappling with higher medical costs in Medicare Advantage Plans.
And I guarantee you a whole lot more than that. The report adds to a growing string of setbacks to the company which owns the nation's largest and most powerful insurer and is often viewed as the industry's bellwether insurance company. This is a case of what happens when a snake eats its own tail and it's happening in higher education as we speak as well. It's also happening in agriculture. What do these three things have in common? They cause their own demise. In the case of higher education and agriculture, it's subsidies because the government will just print money and in the case of colleges, they will print student loans and the colleges immediately have a whole bunch more people that would never be able to go to college before be able to go to college.
So they get a shit ton more money. So what do they do? They hire more people, and they raise their, they raise their salaries, and they they forget about the mission of the college. You get more administrators than you do teachers. In health care or rather in agriculture, subsidies do sort of the same thing. They cause land to be monocropped because you can't get crop insurance. You can't get crop insurance unless you plant a certain thing. Now, like wheat. Like, if you were to plant some kind of eighteen twelve genetics of wheat, you're probably not going to get crop insurance. If you're not planting a modern seed like something you could get out of bare crop science, you're not getting crop insurance.
Right? So, if your crop fails, you're out of luck. But, if you do plant exactly what is on the subsidy list like corn and wheat and rye and and modern varieties, you can get wiped out and you will get exactly market price of what was projected your land to actually do. So what does that do? That cut continues to get you to to monocrop your land, and you will always be using this crappy what ends up being crappy seed that has no nutrition, and there's all kinds of downstream effects from it. So here we have UnitedHealth having issues.
Why? There used to be a time when there was no real such thing as health insurance, and I was alive during that time. It was the eighties. In fact, it was the eighties in which you first started seeing, like the very early eighties, when you first started seeing health insurance companies. By the nineties, almost all companies were offering that as a benefit to their employees. Now, because everybody's got insurance, hospitals and, like, the actual medical community started raising their prices because there was money was free flowing. And they raised them, and they hired administrators and not doctors.
And they gave themselves pay raises. And now doctors are basically kinda like bottom barrel getting paid. Some, you know, neurologists and brain surgeons, thoracic surgeons, they're probably gonna be fine, but your general ER doc, you know, your your pediatrician, not not so much, dude. And why? Because health insurance companies because when they came into existence they allowed money to flow and the institution that started getting the money did not respect the institution's original goal and that was to help people remain healthy or get better if they've had an accident. So now UnitedHealthcare is feeling they they've literally caused a situation where even they can't afford the bullshit they caused.
And now we get to run the numbers of legacy markets that have their neck deep in the shit just like UnitedHealthcare does. Futures and commodities. They got West Texas Intermediate Oil up 1.18% to $67.50, which is exactly where it was two weeks ago. So it is oil is trading in a very, very, very tight range. It's just the way it is. But natural gas is actually up 3.75% bucking the trend. Usually, it's in the red when oil is in the green. $3.10 for a thousand cubic feet. And gasoline is up well over two points to $2.17 right now a gallon.
Gold is up a quarter of a point to 3,317. Silver is up point 12%. Platinum is down point one four. Copper is up almost a full point, and palladium is down well, well over a point. Ag is fully in the red today except for our only winner today is sugar, 1.89% to the upside. Biggest loser is gonna be cocoa, 2.5% to the downside. Meanwhile, live cattle down a quarter. Lean hogs down two points. Feeder cattle down point 16%. Dow is essentially sideways, only slightly in the red. Meanwhile, S and P is up point 14%, Nasdaq is up a quarter of a percent, and the S and P Mini is up a quarter of a percent.
And Bitcoin is doing what? A $118,220, so it's actually on the downside this morning. It was up at, like, almost a 119 when I first started the show, but, you know, I'm sure somebody sneezed sideways and now everybody's freaking out. $2,350,000,000,000 of market cap lets us buy 35.5 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,898,807.07 of, and average fees per block are low. Not right now but average fees per block 0.04 BTC taking the fees on a per block basis there are good lord holy shit we've all we've got 20, 35 blocks.
Wow. I haven't seen 61,900 unconfirmed transactions in mempools in quite a while, and they're going at high priority rates of 3 Satoshis per v byte. Low priority is also 3 Satoshis per v byte. And mining is at 892.1 exahashes per second. So leveling off there from as we had dipped down a couple of weeks ago, we came back up and now we are sort of just kinda leveling off. I think everybody's probably in a waiting pattern. And from the last couple of shows, Yodel with 511 sets says, thought you were retiring the podcast for a minute and was sad. Been out of the loop the past couple of weeks. No, Yodel.
I don't know what else the hell to do. I I can't I I I'm probably completely unavailable to do anything other than this show. Mike Clear with twenty one twenty one says, thanks for your time, talent, and treasure. Thanks for yours too. I appreciate that. Progressively worse with 500 says thank you. Psyduck with seven thirty five says Psyduck. Turkey with 500 says absolutely nothing. Luty with 500 says you don't appreciate what you have until it's gone. I appreciate all you do. I appreciate you, sir. Pies with a 100 says a couple of, a couple of emojis that I can't read because my literal Windows operating system is that old. Yeah. Don't give me any shit, bro.
Progressively worse says, oh, wait. Wait. No. That was from July 16. So this one I've already read. That's the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Tornado cash trial enters week three. Defense expert digital forensic witness takes the stand. This is by our good friend Frank Korva from Bitcoin Magazine. Today, on the eleventh day of the tornado cash trial, doctor Edmond, cofounder and partner at Naxo, a digital forensics firm, took the stand for the majority of the day. In his direct testimony, he defined key crypto terms for the court, explained the extent to which Tornado Cash was decentralized, highlighted the precautions Roman Storm and other Tornado Cash cofounders took to prevent bad actors from using the service, and called into question the validity of the analysis presented by two former witnesses.
During the cross examination, the prosecutor or the prosecution prodded doctor Edmond to share details and to provide nuance regarding some of the claims he made and the data he presented in his testimony. In his slides, doctor Edmond described Tornado Cash as a non custodial service that used immutable smart contracts to anonymize transactions. As he introduced crypto specific words and phrases that might have been unfamiliar to the jury, such as cryptographic signatures, smart contracts, and the aforementioned immutable, he defined them in layperson's terms.
He was so thorough in doing so that his efforts became seemingly counterproductive in that he lost some of the members of the jury in the process. Oh, no. That said, he did make a number of notable points in his testimony, including that the Tornado Cash pool contracts had been immutable since 05/18/2020, and that Tornado Cash DAO played a role in governing Tornado Cash as opposed to just Storm and its cofounders, and that a minefield, version oh, I'm sorry. And that a minified or reduced version of the source Tornado Cash user interface source code had existed on GitHub since nearly the onset of the project for the technically inclined to copy and use as they pleased.
Doctor Edmond also noticed that even the UI for Tornado Cash was decentralized in in the sense that it existed on IPFS or the interplanetary file system, which is a peer to peer storage system for sharing data across distributed networks. Doctor. Edmond highlighted the fact that Storm and his cofounders applied a geoblocking system to the UI, making it more difficult for people or entities from certain regions of the globe like North Korea and Cuba to use the user interface. He also noted that the Tornado Cash developers implemented the Chainalysis Sanctions Oracle, a smart contract that includes a list of sanctioned addresses within a month of Chainalysis creating the tools. So within one month of the shitbags over there at Chainalysis creating a tool that none of us really want to see because, you know, reasons, they implemented it, which does not help the prosecution.
It does does does not help the prosecution at all. Doctor Edmond then stated that he'd reviewed wallet associated with the Ronin hack didn't move funds through Tornado Cash. He said that there were a number of hops from the Ronin hack wallet to TornadoCash making the analysis harder to validate. He added that from September 1 to August 8 well, 09/01/2020 to 08/08/2022, 85% of the funds that moved through TornadoCash were unidentified while only 13% were from hacks from DeKalbas or DeKalbua's demonstrations, making the point that the majority of Tornado Cash users weren't necessarily criminals.
Doctor Edmond also critiqued the testimony of Philip Worlau, a blockchain auditor from Anchain dot AI and a witness for the prosecution. Doctor Edmond was particularly critical of mister Werlaw's unique, quote, gas ratio analysis, which tracked crypto deposits and tornado cash. He stated that he doesn't know of this methodology's known error rates and that neither did mister Werlaw. He said as much in his own testimony. Toward the beginning of the cross examination, the prosecution harped on the fact that from December 2020 till August 2022, almost all of the funds that moved through Tornado Cash were put through a router that Storm and his cofounders had set up.
The prosecution showed a slide illustrating Tornado Cash's deposits and withdrawals for the 100 ETH Tornado Cash pool via the router in February 2022, Excuse me. A month in which no funds were processed through said pool directly. While doctor Edmond largely agreed with this being the case, he didn't support the prosecution's claim that the criminals were moving illicit funds through the router because doing so helped them to increase their anonymity. Also during the cross examination, the prosecution stated that the owners of the Tornado Cash organization's GitHub account, Storm and his two cofounders, made the final decisions regarding what was included in The U in the UI, and they added that the source code for the UI wasn't as open source as doctor Edmond claimed it was during his testimony.
To the latter point, the prosecution argued that only providing the minified source code wasn't the same thing as providing the full source code. Doctor Edmond was reluctant to agree with this assessment and settled by stating that under the strict definition of open source the prosecution provided, the Tornado Cash UI wasn't technically fully open source from the onset. The prosecution also asked doctor Edmond whether Storm and the other Tornado Cash developers actually incorporated the geo blocking code. They showed a commit for the code that doctor Edmond had included in his slides and pressured doctor Edmond to share whether or not he knew for sure that the code was merged.
Doctor Edmond said that it was to the best of his knowledge. That's not helpful. With approximately ten minutes left in the trial day, the defense defense then called their second witness of the day, Tyler Alameda, to the stand. Mister Alameda works in cybersecurity at Coinbase and testified to the fact that he once used Tornado Cash to preserve his privacy as he sent funds from his wallets to the Ukrainian war fund. Well, I you just blew it. Then, I mean, if you're gonna your choice, dude. While judge Fayla hadn't allowed much space for the witness to talk about the privacy use case for tornado cash, she did permit mister Alameda to tell the story within just over five minutes that he was on the stand.
So what comes up next? The defense calls more witnesses to the stand tomorrow, one of which will be a custodian for chain analysis. And after that, the defense has stated that it plans to bring approximately four more witnesses to the stand, including potentially Roman Storm himself. And I cannot I cannot be more distrustful of that that no. You do not put the defendant on the stand. You do not put the defendant on the stand. One more time. You do not put the defendant on the stand because you don't know in what ways the prosecution can tear that thing apart.
And if they tear Roman Storm apart, then the defense has no shot. I am nobody's gonna listen to me, but I am begging them to not put Roman Storm on the stand. So some good points were made by this doctor, whatever his name was, Edmond but at that last it looks to me like the prosecution was getting under his skin and I'm crossing my fingers for the boys at Tornado Cash but I don't know at first it sounded good but now I'm a little I'm a little worried as to where this is gonna go. So let's move on to, Lightning Network targets 5% of stablecoin flows by 2028 according to the Voltage CEO. This is out of Atlas '21.
The Lightning Network could witness significant growth in stablecoin volume over the next few years according to the CEO of Voltage. In an interview with Cointelegraph, Graham Kriesic, founder and CEO of Voltage, a payment services provider for the Lightning Network, stated that increased adoption of the layer two network could enable it to handle at least 5% of global stablecoin volume by 2028. Considering that current daily stablecoin volume is around $180,000,000,000 according to Coin CoinGecko, this would translate into the $9,000,000,000 area being transacted via the Lightning Network. However, that volume is expected to grow further in the coming years, especially with the implementation of stablecoin regulations such as the Genius Act in The United States and similar efforts internationally.
Kreesick emphasized that stablecoins will accelerate the adoption of the network, noting that Lightning is the top scalability tool for stablecoins Lightning is the top scalability tool for stablecoins The Voltage founder added, quote, stablecoins are just now starting to come to lightning. And some of the major players like Tether or Circle are not yet live. So the current percentage, or rather volume, is near zero, but will be growing in the second half of this year, end quote. According to Kreesick, Lightning Network adoption will be driven by retail users and developers. Institutional interest is also growing with traditional institutions starting to explore and recognize the value of Lightning for risk management, working capital access, and reduced counterparty risks.
Currently, the Lightning Network is around 14,000 nodes, 44,800 channels, and a capacity of 3,820 worth approximately, we'll call it half a billion dollars at current prices according to Amboss. Although the network's capacity has dropped by 23% since the beginning of the year, Kreesick pointed out that there are fewer total channels, but they are larger in size, which validates capital efficiency and a more optimized network. Access to the Lightning Network measured by the total number of users across exchanges, wallets, banks, and payment platforms is currently above 700,000,000 according to Voltage CEO. Okay. So there's this this stable coin thing is never gonna go away.
In fact, it's going to ride right along Bitcoin sort of the way people used to envision Litecoin riding right next to Bitcoin. The numbers are freaking staggering, and some of the projections that that I've seen in in various, you know, notes on Nostr or actually I was actually I was scanning Twitter yesterday and some of some of it came out then. I don't even remember what the numbers are at this point. But this is not going to go away. It's not. And if you think it is, you're gonna have a bad day. It's I'm not I'm not rah rah rah rah stablecoins. I'm just saying don't expect them to to go away because this is they are going to be a major tool for countries like The United States to enable debt printing the likes of which we've never seen before.
We think we've seen it, but we honestly we we have we have not seen it yet. Not not like what they what they would be able to do. Because when The United States prints money, it doesn't really get to a lot of other places that they would like it to get to, like, you know, Central Kenya or Costa Rica or, I don't know, Brazil. I mean, it does in a little bit of way, but the the majority of the people that that money printing in The United States really affects is Europe and The United States and Australia. Let's just say the West. The rest of the world, yes, it does affect. But remember where they were we were making the argument, hey, when we printed all those stimulus checks, you know, in El Salvador this was pre El Salvador buying getting into Bitcoin, and the El Salvadoran population was completely dollarized.
They they had completely ditched their own fiat currency was using the dollar. They didn't get any stimmy checks. So think about that when we now have this issue of stablecoins, which anybody can use, and anybody is using them and using them a lot. And they're using them mostly in countries that are not Western countries. We're gonna be able to print a whole shit ton more money and not see immediate effects of the people of The United States or Western Europe. For quite some time, it's going to act as a buffer, and they're going to print the living shit out of it. So what do you do?
I would buy some Bitcoin. I really would consider buying some Bitcoin at this point. So last up, here's why you wanna buy Bitcoin because you're gonna wanna have it when you go to auction at Christie's house. The luxury auction house Christie's has launched a 1,000,000,000, that's billion with a b, a $1,000,000,000 Bitcoin division. Yeah. Alex, Larry, Bitcoin news. In a move that combines luxury real estate with digital innovation, Christie's International Real Estate has launched a new division dedicated to digital asset based property transactions.
The company now has reportedly over $1,000,000,000 worth of high end homes for sale that could be bought with digital currencies like Bitcoin and Shitcoin number one with no banks required. Now that's what Alex Larry says, but take it with a grain of salt. The new division based in Los Angeles and led by top real estate broker Aaron Kerman is modernizing how wealthy clients buy and sell property. Crypto is here to stay, Kierman said in an interview, and it's only going to get bigger over the next few years. The division was reportedly born out of a high profile deal where a $65,000,000 Beverly Hills mansion was sold entirely with digital assets.
That transaction proved there was real demand among Bitcoin wealthy buyers for discreet, bank free real estate deals. The $65,000,000 sale showed that ultra wealthy clients are now willing to use Bitcoin for real world high value deals. Now Christie's has assembled an entire team of legal experts, analysts, and financial advisors to support these particular kinds of transactions. The process allows both buyers and sellers to do deals peer to peer, meaning that they can use digital wallets to send and receive payments without ever going through a traditional bank. One of the largest benefits of using Bitcoin in real estate is privacy.
Many buyers in this space are celebrities, tech entrepreneurs, and digital asset investors who want to remain anonymous. To help with that, Christie's encourages buyers to use LLCs, you know, limited liability companies that are funded directly with digital assets. That makes it harder to trace who owns the property. And in some cases, sellers never even need to meet the buyers in person. Instead, attorneys handle all verification and compliance procedures. Bitcoin provides the privacy and speed that's essential in a luxury retail market.
The new division's property portfolio includes some of the most expensive homes in The United States, and they're all available to Bitcoin investors. While Bitcoin can be wild, Christie's uses real time price feeds and escrow services to reduce risk for both buyers and sellers. The team also does legal checks to make sure that the source of funds are clean. Oh, great. In an effort to comply with, of course, AML KYC, regulators are are starting to pay attention. The Federal Housing Finance Agency has told Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start treating digital assets as an option for mortgage qualification. Yeah. I brought that to you right before I went on vacation a couple of weeks ago.
Christie's is is a big deal, and the next I guarantee you the next person or the next company is Sotheby's, and it's gonna be Domino's from there. These are the Christie's is huge. It is every bit as prestigious and every bit as old as as Sotheby's as an auction house, and of course they don't do just auctions. I mean they've got real estate arms, they probably got auto groups, who knows? They probably own freaking luxury yachts for all I know. All I do know is that when I read this, I was like, I really want to end the show with this because nothing stops the Bitcoin train as well as nothing stops this train. There's there's a difference.
Nothing stops the train of economic destruction, but nothing stops the other train going the other direction which is economic salvation and it looks like Christie's figured it out first when it came to high profile real estate brokers and auction houses. It's gonna be weird. It's gonna be a weird second half of this year, man, and it's probably gonna be a weird 2026. But I'm here right beside you except for those rare occasions when I go on vacation, but I do see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I am your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Episode Overview
Healthcare Costs and Insurance Industry Challenges
Market Updates and Bitcoin Price
