Join me today for Episode 904 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Orange Man's Lightning Network
- BTC Mining and AI Coexisting
- Banning Roaring Kitty Cats
- Wavelake's Ticketbot Announced
- Ainsley Costello's People Pleaser
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
Circle P:
https://primal.net/p/npub1ugnq57hn8va6xqr5zywy2eunem6c624583vkt0dmv40ep7tnnxkqrr898l (faster)
email: [email protected] (slower)
Product: Comfrey
One full root for 20$
Or root cutting for 1$ each
Buyer pays shipping
[[Episode 726]]: https://fountain.fm/episode/15491737864
The King Ranch Donation Page:
https://www.givesendgo.com/Kingranch
Music:
Ainsley Costello's People Pleaser
https://wavlake.com/track/93c0ef53-acac-4c5a-8dc3-3cad85432dd3
Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/trump-becomes-first-president-to-accept-bitcoin-lightning-payments-for-campaign-donations
https://cointelegraph.com/news/core-scientific-coreweave-3-5b-ai-contract
https://decrypt.co/233610/etrade-ban-roaring-kitty-gamestop-holdings-48-percent-wsj
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/06/04/bitcoin-layer-2-ark-protocols-team-forms-new-firm-as-lightning-network-competitor/
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://www.cnbc.com/bonds/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/biden-vetoes-crypto-custody-institutions/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/michael-saylor-agrees-to-40m-settlement-in-d-c-income-tax-case/
https://zine.wavlake.com/introducing-ticketbot/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/amethyst-v0-87-2/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/wasabi-wallet-v2-0-8/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/corny-chat-v2024-05/
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Twitter:
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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/
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. Uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 4th day of June. We are already halfway through the year. Are you freaking kidding me? Really? We're halfway through the year. It's the 4th day of June 2024.
This is episode 904 of Bitcoin. And, what do we got going on today? Well, it's just gonna be it's gonna be a regular news show because I did a special cut out show for you guys yesterday. And I figured there's there's some news that that we probably need to touch on, so that's why I'm doing a Tuesday show. Anyway, but before we get into that, one of the reasons that I did not bring a show on Friday is because I was out in a little podunk town called Afreda, Washington, and I was part of well, I went to a hearing, a public hearing at a court, concerning this issue around the King Ranch in Washington state, and it is some some ranchers that are being done dirty.
I mean, just flat ass being done dirty. In fact, they're being done so dirty by the state of Washington that I'm putting up the givesendgo.com/kingranch donation page. I I don't wanna get into this just yet. I'm in communication with a couple of people, the the some of the lawyers. I've met the Kings. They were all out there. It was a it was like literally standing room only for this hearing that went south like a duck in winter. And I I don't wanna talk about it yet because one of the people that I wanna bring on that's describing that will be able to describe just how bad this is, that's going on with the Kings, is gonna be their lawyer. And I want she wants to come on the show. I wanna bring her on the show. We're working out a date and time.
And she is the person that we really need to talk to about just how bad this is. But for a primer of what's going on, I'm gonna read to you for those that can't see, you know, because you're not on ZapStream, I'm gonna read to you what this donation page, says. Support King Ranch and Agriculture in Washington. The King Ranch, a multi generational family operated cow calf beef operation is under unprecedented legal attack by the state of Washington. The state has brought civil and criminal actions against the Kings related to historic ranching practices and is seeking to unlawfully cancel their grazing leases that are critical to the operations of the family ranch.
The allegations are based upon the improper application of the law. The state alleges that historic man made stock watering ponds are now wetlands. The state ignores that these stock ponds are allowed, under statute, are a historic customary ag practice used for permit exempt stock watering and King's Stockwater Rights as a whole, in defending their personal ranch. The Kings are also defending the rights of all ranchers and farmers. The harsh arbitrary action being pursued by the state could not only drive the kings out of business, but if left unchecked would allow the state to shut down farming, ranching, and other agricultural activities across the state. Stockwatering is a non permitted allowed practice under statute, yet the state is ignoring ag rights and the law.
The state has no authority to take the actions that they are taking, and they must be stopped. Ranchers should not be faced with criminal prosecution for normal ranching operations. Please help support the Kings as they struggle to pay ever mounting legal bills. Your gift of any amount will help bring justice to the situation and stop the injustice in its tracks. Alright. Without getting into it, they're being prosecuted at the criminal level. This isn't just getting sued. They want they are trying to bring criminal charges against the Kings, which means jail time and fines.
It's not the state suing somebody and saying we want all your money. They want their time. They want them cooling their heels in a physical jail cell. These are criminal charges that they're facing for doing nothing more than what they've done for the last 70 years, which predates mister King himself. Mister and missus King took on the ranch from mister King's father, and the King Ranch has been doing the same thing for decades. And now all of a sudden, hello, Insta Rule. Yeah. They're being prosecuted under criminal charges at the state level, And their legal fees are getting out of hand. They've got they had to hire a lawyer, one of their ranch hands to high had to hire their own lawyer.
They have 5 specialists that the state of Washington required them to have, but would not pay for, so they have to pay for these quote unquote experts out of pocket. Right? If you want to save help save ranching, consider donating to the give send go dotcomforward/kingranch. And my family companies have donated some money to this, endeavor as well. Alright. I promise I will bring you the interview with the people that are connected to the King Ranch situation as soon as I can get them recorded. I swear to God, I I will because this is a this is an issue that I feel that I just cannot let go of. Okay.
Circle P is open for business, speaking of farming. If you wanna farm some of the finest biomass producing plants in the world, well, you're gonna be farming some concrete. And you don't have to have a whole farm to do it. You can do it in your backyard, front yard, side yard, that little devil strip between the sidewalk and the street. If you know what if you know, you know. Alright? That's what I'm I hate the devil strip. They're generally useless. But if you bake a big old flower bed full of comfrey out of that son of a bitch, you will get 100 of pounds a year of high nitrogen containing plant material. When I mean 100 of pounds, I'm not it's not hyperbole.
It ain't hubris. No. No. No. This is the highest producing biomass plant on the planet as far as we know. And you cut it and it comes back. And you cut it and comes back. And if you want to start that shit going so that you can have plenty of mulch, plenty of stuff for your compost pile, you're gonna get in touch with the Circle P vendor known as She She. His in pub for Noster, which is the best way to order his confre, will be in the show notes. If you don't wanna do that, it's she she, s h I s h I. The number's 21m. She she 21m atprotonmail.com.
It'll take a little slower for the order to come through, but, hey. It'll get it to you. One full root, which will grow really really fast out of the ground, right out of the gates is $20. Or you can get the slower growing root cuttings, but once they're established, it's comfrey, brother brothers and sisters. You ain't got nothing to worry about. And they're $1 each. I highly recommend getting at least 20 of them. Okay? He will ship them, but the buyer pays shipping. If you want to learn more about Confrey, episode 726 of Bitcoin, and there you go.
Circle p is now done. Ladies and gentlemen, mister president, Trump has become the 1st president to accept Bitcoin lightning payments for campaign donations. Now, no matter how you feel about the orange man, you can love him, you can hate him, If you're like me, you just don't give a shit. But what I do care about is the fact that here we have a presidential candidate who is clearly pandering. Okay. That's okay. I mean, that's I've I've come to accept the fact that all candidates, no matter whether they're president or all the way down to just a city level, you know, I don't know, city council guy running for office, they're all going to pander.
Alright? But at least at least, we have this guy pandering on the Lightning Network, and this is rather different. Most people don't do this, but let's find out more from Nick Hoffman, Bitcoin Magazine, in a historic move Donald Trump has become the 1st American president to accept Bitcoin Lightning Network payments for campaign donations. The announcement marks a significant step in the integration of Bitcoin into mainstream politics. Trump's campaign has partnered with OpenNode. See, this is the part that freaks me out, is that I know OpenNode. If you've been listening to this show, you've heard me mention OpenNode on several occasions over the past at least 3 or 4 years, but they've partnered. Trump's campaign has partnered with open node, a leading Bitcoin and lightning network provider to facilitate the donations. Quote, OpenNode is proud to partner with Anadot to bring Bitcoin into the political donation process, OpenNode told Bitcoin Magazine, quote, this is a perfect marriage of OpenNode's leading Bitcoin tech stack and Anadot's robust platform for political and nonprofit organizations.
The Trump campaign's adoption of our solution is a powerful proof point of how political campaigns and nonprofits across the country can seamlessly accept Bitcoin donations. Last weekend, while speaking at a Libertarian party convention, Trump emphasized his dedication to fostering a Bitcoin friendly environment. Quote, he's already served 11 years. We're going to get him home, president Trump spoke of Ross Ulbricht. Being the 1st president in United States history to accept Bitcoin for campaign donations underscores Trump's broader strategy to appeal to the over 50,000,000 cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors in the country by aligning himself with the Bitcoin community.
Petering. Petering. We call it petering. The leading presidential candidate has further positioned himself as a forward thinking leader who embraces technological advancements and financial freedom. Oh, bullshit. It's pandering. He's not forward thinking. He's got a guy on his staff who said, look, hey, man. I think I could here, I think this this is what happened. He's got a guy on his staff, came up to him and said, hey, dude. Look. You can't you can't discount this crowd of people. Maybe 50,000,000 people in the United States are cryptocurrency enthusiasts. We gotta throw them some kind of boat. I guarantee you president Trump's like, you know what? Fine. I'll I'll back off from my position. If we can if I can get a few more votes out of this, fine.
But none of these people actually care about Bitcoin. Please don't think that orange man's gonna get into office and sit down in the chair and immediately everything is gonna be fine because the I that is not going to happen. Alright? He doesn't care. He doesn't care about you. He doesn't care about me. He doesn't care about Bitcoin. He doesn't care about our financial future. He cares about himself like every politician under the sun. He's no better nor no worse. Well, okay. Maybe he's slightly better than than diaper man. I mean, at least he can form freaking cogent sentences.
Right? But other than that, I I I don't I don't wanna put any stock into any politician because I've just ceased trusting politicians, whether they're in this country or any other country. I don't care. Please do not make the mistake of thinking that Trump actually gives shit 1 about Bitcoin. I guarantee you he doesn't think about it at all. But let's move over to mining world. Bitcoin miner Core Scientific strikes a $3,500,000,000 artificial intelligence partnership. It's AI, bitches. Cointelegraph Helen Parks gonna tell us all about it. Core Scientific, one of the largest Bitcoin mining companies in the United States, is betting on artificial intelligence amid challenges associated with the most recent Bitcoin having.
Yeah. Running scared, are we? Core Scientific took to x or Twitter on June 3rd to announce a $3,500,000,000 deal with AI cloud provider, CoreWeave. As part of the contract, Core Scientific will provide an additional 200 megawatts of infrastructure to host CoreWeave's high performance computing 8 or, sorry, high performance computing operations. Pausing to say I told you this was going to happen last year I did I don't remember where I did it because I've got 904 episodes or 903, 904 after this one. But I told you this shit was going to happen. I told you that mining facilities were going to start hosting AI.
And I don't actually I don't necessarily think it's all of a bad thing. But let's continue here. The announcement says that the deal is expected to generate a total cumulative revenue for Core Scientific of over $3,500,000,000 during the initial 12 year term of the contract. They signed a 12 year contract. By god, this better not be a fad. Of course, scientific is gonna survive. The estimated average annual revenue from the contract is expected to be roughly $290,000,000. The infrastructure provided CoreWeave amounts to a significant share of Core Scientific's resources accounting for about 18% of its total operating infrastructure. In addition to its 745 megawatts of operational infrastructure, Core Scientific's owned 372 megawatts of partially built infrastructure at its 2 Texas data centers as of April 2024.
The latest contract is not the first deal between the two companies. In March 2024, Core Scientific agreed to provide up to 16 megawatts of data center infrastructure to support AI and high performance computing operations in another multi year contract with CoreWeave. Formerly known as Atlantic Crypto, CoreWeave was founded in 2017 by Michael Intrator, Brian Ventura, and Brianne McBee. Wow. These, sorry, these names sound fake. I I'm sure they're fine people and I'm being a dick by saying it, but there's something about all those names that make me think they're AI generated. But whatever. The company stated that none of its founders had prior experience in the cloud sector before launching CoreWeave. Instead, they came from backgrounds in trading energy futures.
This is important. In May of 2024, CoreWeave raised $7,500,000,000 debt facility from Blackstone, Magnatar, and Coahu. According to the Wall Street Journal, the the raised value of the company is $19,000,000,000 Core Scientific's increasing bets on AI cloud infrastructure come amid pressures associated with the 4th Bitcoin halving, which reduced Bitcoin miner rewards from 6.25 BTC per block to 3.125 on April 20, 2024. As the halving hasn't triggered a significant spike in BTC price in the immediate aftermath, mining firms have been looking for additional sources of revenue to power their operations. Quote, our expanding relationship with CoreWeave creates a pathway for Core Scientific to diversify our business model and balance our portfolio between mining and alternative compute hosting, positioning us to maximize cash flow and minimize risk while maintaining our significant exposure to Bitcoin's potential upside, Core Scientific CEO Adam Sullivan said. The news arrived several months after emerging from bankruptcy in January of 2024, concluding its 13 month restructuring process.
Okay. Look. I I get that it it's sort of like Trump. You either love AI or you hate AI or you're kinda like me, you you kinda don't care. But but I I'm kind of interested in where AI is going. I don't believe the hype of people saying that AI doesn't do anything, but I also don't believe the hype that AI is going to do everything for us. Okay? I don't think AI is going to come and kill us, but I don't think it's going to make the world automatically a better place. It's just a tool, but it happens to be a tool that can create revenue as a second stream of revenue for people like miners, people who already their their their entire business model is not Bitcoin mining.
It's rack space and the ability to put megawatts of power into that rack space. And that can be anything. That could be Bitcoin miners. It can be servers. It can be data hosting, it can be AI and high performance compute. And there's gonna be a lot there there's gonna be a lot there's gonna be a lot of universities that are small size that are gonna go under because of student well, students just there's there's an enrollment cliff that that people in academia are looking square in the face of, and it's happening. Right? There's not a the amount of students coming into college is not what it used to be. And a lot of that has to do with student loans.
Right but no matter how it happens there's gonna be a lot of universities that start having to sell off their assets and what they'll probably start selling off is racks and racks and racks of high performance computing power because a lot of these schools have them. They're going to end up or or maybe they just want to divest themselves of having to maintain the infrastructure and offshore their high compute or high performance compute or AI stuff to people like Core Scientific. And Core Scientific is doing the proper thing as a business. They are looking for multiple streams of revenue. So therefore, I don't hate Core Scientific for doing this. However, if they were going to tell me that they were gonna start mining some shit coin, I would not be happy simply because that's gonna come back to bite.
But in either event, I'm not all I'm not gonna get all loopy about Core Scientific doing this. Alright? And I don't I honestly don't think y'all should either, but, hey, you know, more power to you. Okay. Now, this one, I'm not gonna read very much of it, but it is Michael Rea, from Wavelake. They sent an email out today formally announcing the introduction of their system called TicketBot. And now if you have not heard about what's going on with this, you might wanna listen up. Let's get into this one. As you may have heard, Wave Lake is throwing its 1st concert in Nashville in July.
We thought this might be a good opportunity to build and test out a new kind of ticketing system built on technology that we think is pretty cool. Bitcoin and Nostr. What we built was ticketbot, an open source proof of concept ticketing system that works better for artists and fans. While the easiest way to RSVP to this event is via the Wavelake app, we've designed the tickets in a way that would enable any client to purchase and receive a ticket as long as it understands how to speak the basic protocol of Nostr. The potential here is great.
Imagine an artist having the ability to sell tickets to preferred individuals at scale using prior engagement as a way to filter out the true fans from the resellers. This that's the most important sentence in this entire thing. We'll come back to that. Tickets could be verifiable using cryptography. Once sales are open to the public, the availability of tickets could be transparent for all to see. And any secondary market sellers would not have to be locked into a specific website. And all of this is possible. Of course, we didn't build all these niceties into ticket bot. It is an experiment after all. But we had all these features and use cases in mind when we started designing the project.
And the potential is all there. Our intention now is to see how this nascent version operates in the wild. And assuming that it works, as we think that it should, build further onto this idea. Because if it works, it could mean a whole new way to buy and sell tickets to concerts. So the background and motivation ticketing has been broken for a long time and over the past decade it seems to have just gotten worse we now appear to be reaching a tipping point just last month a cadre of high profile artists including Billie Eilish and Sia published an open letter calling for reform in the ticketing industry quote, the current system is broken predatory resellers and secondary platforms engage in deceptive ticketing practices to inflate ticket prices and deprive fans of the chance to see their favorite artists at a fair price, end quote.
If you've ever tried to get tickets to a concert that you really wanna see, you've undoubtedly experienced this pain in some way. Even if you're able to score tickets during the primary sale the service fees can be ludicrous. Then there's the secondary markets where professional resellers, I e, scalpers, can gouge customers even further on top of that. These markets are often owned and operated by the very same company selling the primary tickets. If you think that's suspect, you're not alone. What all this boils down to is a system that shortchanges both the artist and the fans while enriching people who have no interest in any part of this relationship apart from what profits they can extract from it.
But now there's a new way to connect. We now have a pretty neat and simple way to give people a portable identity across the web excuse me, Nostr if you're not aware is a communications protocol that uses cryptography to verify messages between individuals without the need for any intermediaries that means I can send you a message signed by my private key and you can easily verify that it came from me without having to check with some centralized system. What's nice about this is we can create a new kind of social network built around these identities. This is already happening with some Twitter like clients, but the big advantage is these new networks don't have to operate within the same boundaries as the social media of the past.
The Wave Lake mobile app, for example, uses Nostra identities to connect listeners to artists by linking the listeners' zaps, micro bitcoin payments, to the artist's songs. With this data, an artist can easily see what identities these zaps come from or came from and potentially use that information to market new music, merchandise, and events to those very same people. TicketBot uses the same mechanism to sell tickets. Someone with a Nostra identity sends a zap in exchange for a ticket and we deliver it to them via an encrypted direct message.
We are also able to record and verify that the ticket belongs to a specific person using their public key. Using this combination of an instantly settled payment and public identity, we can easily link a ticket to a person or at least a particular Nostra identity. Alright. So let me go back here to this to this sentence that there's a tipping point, a cadre. There's a sentence here that I read you that I think is the most important thing and I I had it highlighted, and now for some reason it's freaking gone. Oh, God. Really? Good Lord. Hold on. Hold on.
Oh, here it is. Imagine an artist having the ability to sell their tickets to preferred individuals at scale using prior engagements as a way to filter out the true fans of the resellers. This is a web of trust issue. And what's great about the web of trust issue is that that shit's already been solved by people like HuddlBod and some other people that have installed some some web of trust. But HuddlBod's got on his, on his client for Nostril called Coracle. You can get to it at coracle.social. That's coracle, c o r a l wait wait a use core c l e god yes coreacle dot social go there You can filter out replies, from bots by simply setting your web of trust higher, which means that there there's a calculation that's done. It basically takes into account who you're following and who like hell else you're following and how many of the other people that you're following have muted other people that you're following. And it sort of, in a roundabout way, scores accounts, not on who's a good account, but just who's real.
And like bots, they could they'll never be able to achieve a web of trust score high enough to basically be considered human. Right? In this case, we've got a way to get to print tickets and sell these tickets to known consumers of somebody's music, like Ainsley Costello. Let's just use her as an example. I'm gonna have her song in the show later on, later on in the show. But Ainsley Costello, she sells a ticket and, like, she's got a concert and and all of a sudden she just hired, you know, like everybody else does. For some reason, they end up with these third party companies doing all the ticketing for them. And next thing you know, her tickets cost $500. You can't get in to go see Ainsley Costello even though she's not filling out entire freaking stadiums across the world for the last 15 years.
Still, somehow or another, through fees and secondary markets, Ainsley Costello's tickets are not going to be in the hands of the of the of the people that actually want to go see Ainsley Costello. They're just gonna be in the hands of resellers. Well, they will end up in the hands of somebody who wants to go see Ainslie, but not at a fair price. By the time it's all said and done, by the time the tickets get exchanged through all these different third and intermediary parties, the the it's gonna be $500. Ask me how I know. My daughter has been trying to go see, like, 2 or 3 different bands. There's no way we can afford these tickets to bands that are not that famous.
And there's I can't afford them. I'm not and even if I could afford them, just a matter of fucking principle, I'm not gonna buy those goddamn tickets. I'm not gonna pay $750 for a ticket to go see a band I've never even heard of that is not even that well known. And even if it's the Eagles or, like, I don't know, one of my favorite bands from the, like, the nineties or something like that. I'm I'm not paying $750 to go to for one ticket to go see these people. That's what ticket bot looks like they're trying to solve, is being able to say, hey, I'm Ainsley Costello. I have a ticket for sale.
You listen to my music. I know. Because your Nostra identity continuously zaps my songs. You're first in line to get my ticket for $50 or whatever price I, Ainsley Costello, decide to put on that ticket. This makes sense. And this is the way to basically get what used to be Ticketmaster, and I guess they got bought out. This is what puts them in the ground for the rest of eternity, and it needs to happen. So if at all possible, go check out ticket bot. And that's at well, right now it's at github, github.comforward/wavelakeforward/ticketbot. Go check it out. I'm sure there will be client implementations coming down the pike, but it's early.
We're early on all this. So everybody give them a break. But everybody, please support this notion of ticket bot. I'm tired of watching people that want to go perform get sickened by their own ticket prices that they have no control over. That shit ain't right. It's beyond unfair. This shit ain't right. Just like the situation going on with Roaring Kitty, AKA Deep Fucking Value. He faces an e trade ban as GameStop Holdings surge 48%. Woohoo. This is out of decrypt. Ryan Ozawa is writing it. Famed investor and meme stock celebrity, Keith Gill, better known as roaring kitty, may be dropped from top retail stock trading platform, e trade, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the WSJ said Monday that E Trade, owned by investment giant, Morgan Stanley, is growing concerned about potential stock manipulation around his recent purchases of GameStop. The exclusive report comes as Gill's long dormant account on Reddit posted a screenshot late Sunday of an investment account holding over $200,000,000 worth of GameStop shares and call options. The return of Roaring Kitty to Twitter last month and the deep fucking value account on Reddit yesterday has undoubtedly moved the market.
After Twitter post broke a 2 week silence, the price of GameStop stock nearly doubled before the stock market opened the week. That price surge brought a big hit to GME short sellers who stood to lose almost $1,000,000,000 betting against it. Even the unofficial GME tribute meme coin on Solana saw its price skyrocket over a 150%. All of this echoes the meme stock mania that gripped both social media and traditional markets back in 2021, where short sellers of stocks like GME and AMC Entertainment were targeted by Roaring Kitty and other disillusioned investors, boosting their prices and causing significant losses for institutional fund managers. Well, that frenzy caused many investment platforms, including the popular Robinhood app, to frequently halt trading of the suddenly volatile stocks to great uproar and, eventually, hearings on Capitol Hill.
In fact, The Wall Street Journal reports Morgan Stanley employees have been monitoring Gil's e trade accounts since Roaring Kitty resurfaced on Twitter in mid May after more than 2 years of being away. The employees saw he had purchased call options before the tweet and that Gil's trades likely generated profits, thanks to the stock move that his tweet generated. You see where they're going with this? Keith Gill looks like he might have gotten himself into trouble. Bitcoin fixes this, by the way. With GME seeing a new flurry of activity, E Trade appears to be considering pulling the plug on Gill. Based on the Reddit posts, he stands to make a tidy sum if his latest bet, that GME stock will be worth more than $20 on June 21st, turns out to be true.
Those who follow his lead would gain as well. Today alone, the Roaring Kitty account is up 48% or about $85,000,000 according to investment tracker, Unusual Whales, on Twitter. Parent company, Morgan Stanley, engaged its financial crimes unit and external counsel on the market. But the company knows that taking action would mean drawing attention of his meme army. Oh, no. Morgan Stanley employees have been concerned that closing Gil's account could result in the firm losing e trade clients. Yeah. Well, there's probably some other nefarious shit going on as far as what kind of trouble Morgan Stanley could get in. But, you know, they won't. They could. Because that looks to me like a targeted situation.
And generally speaking, that shit is frowned upon. But not in today's world. No. No. No. Not where truckers can get their bank accounts pulled from blowing a horn. We don't live in a world that makes sense anymore. Now, again, I'm not a fan of Keith Gill, but I don't hate him either. I think it's the whole thing is definitely interesting. I will give it that. It's definitely interesting. But, hey, nobody deserves to be like, only you, only you can't trade on E Trade. No, Keith. Not you. Well, Bitcoin fixes this, but it doesn't fix the ability for Keith Gill to buy traditional financial equities on the market. Because Bitcoin does not have that ability.
Noster does not have that ability. You have to go at one point or another, you're going to run through a gatekeeper to buy GME stock. There's no two ways about it. Okay? So Bitcoin, this doesn't fit Bitcoin does not fix this. And we don't want Bitcoin to fix this. That entire circus needs to be thrown into a dumpster, doused with diesel, and lit the fuck on fire because it is representative of of why we have shitty looking strip malls with weeds growing out of the parking lot everywhere in the United States because cheap money has destroyed everything from architecture to agriculture, and it's just going to continue.
This is all bullshit, and Keith is probably going to be rejected and ejected from every trading platform under the sun. He will have to buy his stocks through proxy. And I don't and that I don't even think I don't even know if that's legal. If somebody was caught buying stock in the name of key or for Keith Gill and holding it in another name and guaranteeing in some instrument that they were gonna give the stock to Keith somehow, some way, or at least the profits. I don't even I don't know if that's legal. I and I don't care because it all it's all representative of how we got to where we are.
Let's run the numbers. CNBC, Futures and Commodities. Oil's been taking it on the chin ever since those idiots at OPEC plus telegraphed their intentions to raise oil production, but not until the last part of this year. The the the dumbest move I've ever seen anybody make was committed by the guys in Saudi Arabia, which is the great guts and feathers of all of OPEC. Check this out. West Texas Intermediate is now trading down 1.36 percent to $73.61. Dude, it was at $80 last week. 80. It's now at 73.23. Because the guys at OPEC told the world that they're going to keep their production cuts in place, but will start producing more oil later. And what happened?
The market immediately priced in the fact that they're they might as well just start cranking out their oil. And the reason that they wanted to extend production cuts is because Saudi Arabia and the rest of the OPEC nations want the revenue. Well, you just trashed your revenue. At this point, you might as well just open up the pipes because your your your revenue got got screwed. Because you couldn't keep your big mouth shut. This is I mean, really? Is there like, like a public relations coach that can go over to Saudi Arabia and tell these guys that, you know, how this shit works? Because that was the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Brenton North Sea is down 1.15% to 77.46.
It was at 85 and $84 last week. Natural gas is down 3 and a half. $2.66. Gasoline is down point 14% to $2.33. Gold is down over a point. Silver is down damn near 4 points. Platinum is down 2.8 as is copper. Palladium is down a half. Lumber, what's going on with ag? Everything is in the red except for our biggest winner of the day, coffee. 2.38% to the upside. The rest of it's looking pretty bleeding pretty bad, like chocolate, 2 and a half to the downside. Live cattle is up scant, but lean hogs are down 2.16. Feeder cattle might as well just be moving sideways.
The Dow moving sideways. S and P is down a quarter. The Nasdaq, it's up a 10th or no, down a 10th. And the S and P mini is down 1 and a quarter percent. Luke why did I say Luke? Clark Moody dashboard. We're looking at a price of Bitcoin, $70,590 a coin. Market cap is $1,390,000,000,000. Bitcoin can now buy with your 1 bitcoin 30.4 ounces of shiny metal rocks. Money supply has it, 19,707,642.99 BTC in circulation as we speak, and average fees per block are 1 quarter of 1 Bitcoin. How many blocks you ask? Well, I'll tell you. You see, there's 220 blocks carrying 312 unconfirmed 1,000. Sorry. 312,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priorities of 36 satoshis per vbyte.
That's gonna be about 3 and a half bucks per standard transaction and low priorities at 27 satoshis per vbyte. Anything under 7 and a half being purged from mempools around the world. Hash rate flashing 606.7 exahashes per second, so slowly climbing back up like the way we were. Now, from the flippening, which was episode 902 of Bitcoin, and I got Nat gas immersion, 20,000 satoshis. Thank you, sir. No, dude. Thank you. Letter 6173 with 5,000 says based AF as always. I appreciate it. Dubravko with 1770 says no. Yeah. He says, alright. So regulatory authorities are part of the executive branch and should be treated as such.
Food, drugs, monetary products, the environment, and how many other parts of ours fall into the gaze and under their gaze and control. The Dow chemical spill and aftermath story will give a great anecdote on how the industry actors that actually employ the government employee watchers really are the customers. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. That's George Carlin. And for anybody who wonders, George Carlin was not a comedian. George Carlin was a public speaker. He was told you were told he was a comedian, but he wasn't.
George Carlin was not a comedian. Get that to your head. He was a public speaker. Alright. 2x with a 1,001 says, wonder what you thought of Japan's national my number card IDs coming to Apple Wallet. I don't see the advantage. Driving license cards, paper docs weigh less than phones and fit snugly into a pocket, And these systems should surely be developed as open protocols for our expensive locator devices. Anyway, thanks for another one. See you on the flip. Alright. 02zx, it's bad and it has nothing to do with it being more portable or less portable than paper. That's they just want digital IDs.
And they're we're going to get digital ID's. And it's going to be up to individuals to decide whether or not they want to take part in the systems that require those digital IDs. That's just the way it's gonna happen. That's why I say, move out of the cities. Get out as fast as you can. Get out far enough away that you are outside of anything that could be considered incorporated land of a city. Please do that. If you can. I understand if you can't. I right now, I'm kinda stuck in a small city, but at least it's a small city. Right?
You know, I'm not gonna move to Seattle. I don't wanna live in Dallas. I'm never gonna go and live in Houston. You know, if I if I go back to Texas and I, like, live in Central Texas, I ain't living in Austin. I will live I will live an hour outside or 30 minutes outside of Austin. That's where I would feel comfortable. Because that shit lights up on fire because people get pissed off. Woah, Nelly. You don't wanna have nothing to do with that. Jory x McKee 666, the number of the beast. It seems like we're getting much closer to the then suddenly part of the story. Yep. Owen 2 500. As always, thank you. No. Thank you. Ghost of Whitman 333.
Shit coins are scams. Yes. That's true. God's death with 237. And keep us posted on the riot takeover. Yeah, I will. God's death again, 237. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And from the Lost Forest Gardens of Europe, which was yesterday's show, that was episode 903. Dubravko boosted me 42,500 sats. Brother, this is another episode that is evergreen. See what I did there? And needs to be boosted by you. Here is another boost from my b s f larvae to do that. Fitfo. User 189-61600 boosted 10,000 sats. Says, thank you, sir, for reading this. I hit you with 10 k proof of work. Gratitude after fungal arbitrage as well. However, it was passed when you would have probably saw the note that I left it to you. If you don't mind, head back and read it. Love how you tie ecology in with BTC, and I wrote an analogy.
I love regarding trees and BTC. Oh, okay. I don't know shit about fountain, so seems like my handle will, in perpetuity, be some giant number. Thanks again, Bitcoin arborist. No. Thank you. I will try to go grab that for another show, but we are running out of time. I do wanna recognize Pies with a 100. I haven't seen Pies in my streams or in my thing for a little while. And he says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And that's gonna do it for the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use Bitcoin layer 2's Ark protocols team forms a new firm as lightning network competitor.
This is out of CoinDesk Jamie Crawley. The team behind Bitcoin layer 2 protocol, Ark, has formed a new company that will build a faster, cheaper payment system on the world's largest blockchain aiming to create a better venue than Lightning Network. Okay. That's all I'm gonna read of this because, Ark, I've been, you know, interested in this for a while, and it was announced a long time ago. See what this guy's see if I can get this guy's name. Well, if I can find oh, Barack, Keckley. Barack Keckley is the creator. And he was on a couple of podcasts talking about the fact that incoming gaining incoming liquidity to, new lightning note operators was so hard that it's sort of a most people are not gonna climb over that cliff.
I tend to agree with them that that's that's a big wall to climb. Getting incoming liquidity, it's easy to have outgoing liquidity. Anybody can do that. But you need somebody connecting with your node that's providing liquidity to you to make the Lightning node operate in the way that it's actually supposed to operate. An arc seeks to to do it a different way, where you have immediate incoming liquidity. Now, I thought that this guy had basically just blown away in the wind. And I because I hadn't heard anything from him in quite a while. But it seems like he's back. And the fact that they've created a firm to build this arc thing, I'm I'm kind of excited. I'm I'm I'm glad to see another layer 2 come on the scene, so keep your eyes out for arc protocol, a r k, like Noah's Ark. Get it? Alright. So now, Diaper Man.
Our president is be diapered. Biden follows through with a veto on overturning SAB 121 crypto custody bill. My administration will not support measures that jeopardize the well-being of consumers and investors. Appropriate guardrails that protect consumers and investors are necessary to harness the potential benefits and opportunities of crypto asset innovation, reads Biden's letter to the US House of Representatives, basically saying fucking nothing. There's nothing there other than the fact that he vetoed the bill as he promised to do. President Joe Biden did veto the legislation, that aimed to overturn Securities and Exchange Commission's bulletin, s a b 121.
The veto occurred just hours after banking groups and members of congress sent letters to the president urging him to sign the resolution to overturn SAB 121. The letters claimed that the guidance prevented regulated banking groups from offering custody services, which it would have. Previously, the resolution had passed both the house and the senate with significant majorities, marking the 1st bitcoin and crypto bill to gain bipartisan support in congress. DeVito. The veto. Show title. I ain't living in Austin. Sorry.
I shouldn't have done that. I got distracted by the live chat. Previously, the yeah. Yeah. The veto also follows reports that president Biden's reelection campaign is starting to reach out to the crypto industry players on guidance for crypto policy. Buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are becoming significant talking points for the panderers. Yes. They are. Now here's what's not said in this, is will this is now that he's vetoed it, it goes back to, I guess, the house of representatives because that's where it originated from. And then it got passed out of there, and then it went to the senate, and then it got passed out of there, and then it went to the president's desk, and he vetoed it basically showing his ass.
So now it kick gets kicked back to whichever house of legislation that it came from. If they repass it or or if if both the senate and the house passes the bill again by a 2 thirds majority or more, then it overrides the president's veto. And SAB 121 will indeed become defunct. Let's hope that that's what's going on, but I haven't heard whether or not there's what the appetite is on on Capitol Hill for overturning a presidential veto. Because these things don't come along very often. And if president Biden gets his veto shut down, that's not going to look good for him in the election.
So they may very well lose the Democratic side of this, quote, unquote, bipartisan bill because they will do anything to stay in power. Even the shit that is not good for them in the long run. Anyway, so Michael Saylor is paying a record $40,000,000 settlement in the Washington DC income tax case. Uh-oh. This is the largest ever income tax fraud recovery in the district of Columbia and the 1st lawsuit under the amended false claims act, which encourages whistle blowers to report tax evasion. Sailor was accused of evading over $25,000,000 in income taxes with the help of his company MicroStrategy from 2,005 to 2020.
The lawsuit stated that Sailor and the company asserted that he resided in Virginia or Florida where income tax rates are considerably lower. Quote, Florida remains my home today and I continue to dispute the allegation that I was ever a resident of the District of Columbia. I have agreed to settle this matter to avoid the continued burdens of the litigation on friends, family, and myself, Saylor told the New York Times. I don't know what to make of it. I honestly don't. I just, I don't know. I don't know anything about sailor, so I'm just gonna leave it I'm just gonna leave it there. I'm just gonna leave it there. If if it turns out that he was living in Washington, DC, and he wasn't paying taxes, I wish that he had gotten away with it. That's what I will say.
Because instead of paying the $25,000,000 tax, now he's paying 40,000,000, and it just made things worse. It it's I just I I I hope I I don't know. Like I said, without knowing the man and not knowing whether or not he actually resided in Washington DC, I don't really have shit to say about it. But Amethyst version 0.87.2, data vending machines and gossip model. Okay. Amethyst, by the way, is a Nostra client for Android, in case you're wondering. The new release, 0.87.2, has dropped. This version adds support for data vending for content discovery you can request a job by simply navigating to the 4th tab and choosing 1 of the DVMs It also starts our support for the inbox slash gossip model.
The relay setup screen has been rewritten to support the many types of relays amethyst will amethyst will start to use. Please add your relays as you see fit. If you generated your keys from nip o 6 seed words, you can now type them on the login screen to start the app. We are not generating seeds yet, but this will be available in upcoming versions. We are also moving to deprecate and remove most of the NIP 04 usage in the app. In the future, users will not be able to send new nip o four DMs or direct messages. But the history of past direct messages will be available for as long as we can support it. Okay. So lots of cool stuff coming down the pipe for amethyst.
DVM's are gonna be interesting to see on mobile. Wasabi Wallet version 2.0.8, custom coordinators, Tor Bridges, Repo Transfer, and more. Zk Snacks, the default coordinator in Wasabi Wallet's coin join implementation, shut down the service today. However, the wallet now allows users to connect to different coordinators to continue using the coin join feature. Yay. Yeehaw, bitches. Wasabi Wallet releases version 2.0.8 and introduces GUI support for custom coin joint coordinator selection connection via Tor Bridges, support for tails OS, and WhoNix OS, and the exclude coins from coin joins features and more.
Wasabi Wallet's code repository has been successfully transferred to a new organization. All issues, pull requests, commits, and other data remain intact. Old repository links will be redirected automatically. So there you go. What so here's what's new. Tor bridges support have been added to improve connectivity and privacy for users in restrictive environments. The Hoonix entails OS support, full support for both of them, 2 operating systems renowned for their focus on privacy and security, are both available. Exclude coins from coin joins. Users can now exclude specific coins from participating in coin joins, and this provides greater control over which coins are selected to participate in CoinJoin transactions, allowing users to manage their UTXOs with better flexibility.
GitHub repository transfer. The Wasabi Wallet's code repository has been successfully transferred to a new organization, but we kind of already knew that. And then there's some other other stuff that's going on there. But what I find nice is that even though even though the default coordinator in Wasabi Wallet's coin joint implementation is shut down because of the regulatory environment caused in the United States. They're basically flying the finger flag at all regulators by saying, bitches, it's open source. Use it at your convenience because it's just running. It's just out there. It's a machine running. Nobody knows where it is. Nobody knows where it exists. They don't know what they're doing. It doesn't fucking matter.
It's software. It's running. You can use it Whether or not Wasabi controls it or not. Whether or not diaper man Joe Biden or orange man Trump likes it or not. They got shit to say about it. And until we get our little red wagon in fucking order and start realizing that we can start doing things without permission and we can start creating value propositions without a corporate or company structure, without your identity, without your email address or your place of residence or place of business until we figure that out. We're always going to be scared and running with our tail between our legs every time somebody like Gary Gimsler fucking sneezes.
I think I'm starting to see the tides turn on Noster like I saw jb55 says, nim up. Satoshi taught us how. And jb55, creator of Domus on a Nostr client on iOS, He's right. NIM up, which is another way of saying man up, which is also another way of saying saddle up. I mean, figure it the fuck out. Stop creating companies because you're going to make a $1,000,000 and then go shake down some VC guy for $1,500,000,000 valuation on your 3rd seed round. It's all bullshit. And it's not going to end the way you think it's going to end. The only way out of this mess is for the time being to figure out how to have fun staying poor.
Nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to live it. Nobody wants to know about it. But that's the way it is going to be going forward. Anybody who's who creates a company like Arc, that that that's a problem. I mean, I like to see it except it's a problem for the guys behind Arc. It's now an actual entity. It probably has an address. It probably has a phone number. It probably has some kind of articles of incorporation of some kind, whether it's a complete corporate structure or just a DBA, a doing business as. It doesn't matter. There's there's probably papers filed in some office somewhere, which now means that Gary Gensler can send warships out to wherever the hell this guy at Arc is and go bring his ass back to United States justice because he was allowing freedom to occur in a place that was not generally controlled by the United States. You see how this shit works?
Until we figure out literally how to have fun staying poor, we're not really going to move the needle, are we? Just saying. Corny chat version 2024.05 has got UI improvements and Nostra WalletConnect support. Corny chat, if you don't know, is an open source audio space built on Jam that integrates Nostr and Lightning, a publicly running instance of cornychat is accessible at cornychat.com. That's cornychat.com. The following enhancements were made during May of 2024. So here's what's new in the user interface. Start page now has tabs for live rooms, user rooms, my rooms, and scheduled events. You'd start a new room, or start new room will now initialize with a tutorial slide as guidance. So there's a little bit of a brief tutorial on how to use this situation. New my room page added, users can see a list of rooms that they are a member of, they can remove themselves from any room they are in, a room left without an owner will promote the 1st moderator as the owner, a room left without any owners or moderators will be hard deleted.
Personal settings, there's some changes there. Avatar cards, now check nostr in pub for room role level, fix image URI for mature accounts that use legacy paths. God, there's a lot of changes. They've done, user profile displays have been changed. Zap lightning button is now only depicted if the user has a lightning address. Maintenance messages, text chat enhancements, room settings enhancement, room tips. Holy shit, they changed. Corny chat okay. Look, I'm I love Nostra Nests, but I honestly think that corny chat may be a superior a superior product.
I don't wanna say that because I don't wanna shit on on Nostranest because I have loved it so much. But I have to give credit where credit is due. The guys over at CornyChat are just killing it. Absolutely killing it. And that's gonna do it for the morning roundup. So I'm gonna play you guys Aynsley's, Aynlie Costello's new song, People Pleaser. Every zap that you send during the time that you're listening to her song goes directly to Ainsley. It goes directly to her. It doesn't go to me and then I send it to her. It goes directly to her because of time splits. It's gonna be awesome.
Boost it. Boost it hard. If it was what you liked, I'd do it. Even if I wasn't into it. Dad says jokes. 5 aunts rented an apartment with another 5 aunts. Now they're tenants. Alright. So during the song that you just heard from Ainsley Costello, all the zaps that you made during that song, even though you zapped me, are going directly to Ainsley Costello. I don't have to resend them. Okay? When you did the zap, the zap basically bypassed my address and went to the address in the time split that I set up in pod home dot f m. It's podcasting 2.0. If you're not using a modern podcast app, you need to start using a modern podcast app.
Like, Breeze, Fountain, there's a whole bunch of them. Okay? There's like you can go to podcastapps.com, is it? Let me make let me make sure about that. Hold on. Let's see. A pod podcast apps. We'll do podcast index. Let me see here. And apps. Okay. So podcast index.orgforward/apps. There's blueberry. There's Podhome. There's for hosting, there's True Fans, which is a podcast player. There's what else? Where's another pod? Podverse is a podcast player. Podcast Guru is a podcast player, and all of them allow you to zap when you're listening or you're streaming me satoshis or you're giving me boostograms or whatever.
Right? All of those will allow it to come to me unless I've got a time split set up and I have a time split set up for Aynsley Costello, so any of the zaps that you sent during that song go directly to Aynsley Costello. If you did not zap during that song, rewind. Go listen to the song. Relisten to it and then zap her, and she will actually be more reinforced to say, look, to the for all of her music friends that she's trying to onboard onto things like wave lake and podcasting 2.0 and the whole thing, she's gonna have way more ammunition to be able to get these people to leave the abusive relationship that they have with the modern legacy music and entertainment industry and get them over to things like Noster and Bitcoin and Podcasting 2.0 and Zaps and Lightning Network and all of that she's gonna have more ammunition so rewind listen to the song again and send her boostograms or zap her heavily or do whatever it takes. And send this show to all of your friends and tell them to do the very same thing, and I will see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
GitHub repository transfer and regulatory environment discussion
Challenges in the current system and the need for change in approach