Episode 883 of Bitcoin And . . . is LIVE!
Topics for today:
- Elon's Beef With Brazil
- China Dives Into BTC Spot ETFs
- Japanese Company Shuns Yen, Wants Bitcoin
- Muntiny+ Lightning Addresses Are LIVE!
- Bhutan to 5X Their BTC Mining
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
Circle P:
npub1zaza8djf4usave5w2jc2374ymytcgk63cddju3fwe8t787h395ususgvvm
nostr handle: @Oak Grove
Product: Black Soldier Fly Larvae
Location: DFW area
(01:06) The Circle P: Dubravko's Black Soldier Flies
(04:43) Brazil;s Beef With Elon
(14:35) China's largest fund applying for a Bitcoin ETF
(18:13) MetaPlanet adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet
(29:00) SEC Waits On ETF Options
Articles:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2ygp5pdqlo
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/chinas-largest-funds-spot-bitcoin-etf-hong-kong
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/04/09/metaplanet-shares-soar-as-japanese-firm-mimics-microstrategy-on-bitcoin-buying/
https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-defers-decision-bitwise-grayscale-bitcoin-etf-options
https://decrypt.co/225388/binance-ceo-richard-teng-headquarters
- 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/mutiny-wallet-v0-6-2/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/bhutan-to-upgrade-bitcoin-mining-in-himalayas-as-halving-looms/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/hwi-v3-0-0/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/bitcoin-plus-plus-austin-2024/
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Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin Ant, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, casting, 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 two systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system. And that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:35 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 9th day of April 2024, and this is episode 800 and 83 of Bitcoin. And the circle p is open for business. The circle p is where I bring you plebs just like you with stuff that plebs like you build and sell as goods and services. And today up is Dubravco, also known as at Oak Grove on Noster. That is at Oakgrove, o a k g r o v e. You know, like trees, like oak trees. It's oak grove and he's selling black soldier fly larvae.
Now, I did a partial show on black soldier fly larvae and I can't remember the number of it. I'll see if I can find it here in a second. But I can give you the skinny on black soldier fly larvae. If you've got kitchen waste, if you've got, I don't know, like excess chicken manure, if you've got excess organic waste of some kind, black soldier fly having a black soldier fly bin is really advantageous for a couple of reasons. 1 is the larvae, yes, they're maggots. But they're black soldier fly maggots. They're not house flies. They're completely different kind of fly.
And I I want to make sure that that's that that's, you know, very put up put up front very quickly Because a lot of people go, ew, flies. I don't want flies. Oh, no flies. Yeah. Well, if they were house flies, yeah, because they're pestilence. But black soldier flies are different. They are a fly, but the adults don't have a mouth and they don't have an anus. Which means that while they're adults, they're doing one thing they're trying to look to have sex because they want to make babies. Right? That the only thing that eats and poops is the actual larvae. And if you've got them contained in a bin and do it outside, you're gonna get all the benefits. And when they finally, you know, do their thing and become adults, you don't have to worry about them because they're not going around garbage cans and putting their feet on nasty stuff and then getting on you. Right? So the pestilence issue is not an issue at all. But while they're larvae, they will mow through all kinds of stuff fat, like scraps of meat, which you don't put into a compost pile. In fact, all the stuff that you wouldn't put in the compost pile like scraped off plates of food that's where you put in the the black soldier fly bin and they'll convert that to some of the coolest most nutritious compost amendment or soil amendment that you can find And they do it very very quickly. In fact, you throw a plate of food in a full size, you know, black soldier fly bin.
It's gone in 24 hours. If probably, you know, for one plate of food is probably if you've got like, you know, thousands of these things in a bin outside, it's gone in, I don't know, a couple of hours. But just consider using black soldier fly because once they are larvae and they decide to did they want to get out of their bin? If you put a ramp up there for them, they'll crawl up the ramp all by themselves. And if you put a bucket under the ramp they collect themselves. They're self harvesting fat and protein sources for your chickens. If you've got, you know, big fish, If you've got they make great animal feed. I wouldn't feed them to the pets but like, you know, chickens chickens go nuts for them. Ducks, if you've got like yard fowl, dude, you can't feed them anything more nutritious than black soldier fly larvae. And they harvest themselves after they've taken care of all your food waste. It's amazing.
Get a hold of Oak Grove. He's in the Dallas Fort Worth area. He will ship them. I don't know how far he ships them to, but it's Oak Grove. His in pub and his handle will be in the show notes. Thank god for podhome.fm because now all my show notes actually work. Now, let's get into the news. Brazil and Elon are having a bit of a tussle. Elon is, taking some some offense at some of the things that Brazil's Supreme Court is doing. What the hell is going on here? Well, we'll just let the BBC tell it to you the way that Marco Oi wants to tell it to you. Brazil Supreme Court Judge Opens Inquiry Into Elon Musk.
That's right. A Brazilian Supreme Court Judge from Brazil has opened an inquiry into the American citizen, Elon Musk, after the multi multi billionaire said that he would reactivate accounts on the social media platform, Twitter, that the judge had ordered to be blocked. Mister Musk posted on the platform that the restrictions had been lifted because the court order was unconstitutional. He also called for Justice Alexandre de Morres to resign or to be impeached. If Twitter fails to comply with the order, it will be fined 100,000 rias, or about $20,000 a day.
In his decision, Judge Morris wrote that Mr. Musk had launched a, quote, disinformation campaign against the Supreme Court. The platform's global government affairs team, said that the company was not allowed to say which accounts were affected. But mister Musk has since posted that Twitter will publish everything demanded by Morris and how those requests violate Brazilian law. God, this is getting stupid fast. The profiles, I'll get it, like, hold on. Don't don't don't don't think, I'm not on anybody's side here. Everybody in this on this in this entire fight sucks. Hold on. Just give me a check. Give me a chance here. Now the profiles are believed to have been linked to far right movements, which posted content related to riots on the 8th January last year.
When thousands of supporters of Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country's congress, the supreme court and the presidential palace. Judge Morris gained prominence after his decisions to restrict social media platforms in the country. He is also investigating mister Bolsonaro for and his supporters for their roles in the alleged attempted coup d'etat. On Saturday, the former president posted a video of a meeting he had with mister Musk, in Saturday back on May 2022. Hours earlier, mister Bolsonaro also called on his supporters to gather on the 21st April.
Meanwhile, Brazil's communications minister, Paulo Pimenta, criticized mister Musk, posting in capital letters. He went all caps on this that, quote, social networks are not a lawless land, end quote. We will not allow anyone, regardless of the money and power they have, to affront our homeland, he added. If Twitter decides to disobey the order, the platform could be blocked temporarily according to Bruna Santos, who is the global campaigns manager at non profit organization Digital Action. Musk acted to provoke the Brazilian judiciary. I think there's a real chance that Twitter might get blocked.
Okay. So so here's the context. Bowl scenario has been acquitted of all these crimes in Brazil. He's the president. He he got taken to task, you know, last year I think at the end of 2022 and then throughout 2023. Gets elected president again after this judge basically said, no. He's okay. And he's a corrupt son of a bitch. Bolsonaro is not a good guy. So this judge, who's clearly also in the pocket of Bolsonaro scenario and therefore not a good guy, decided, yeah, let's just no. He's good. He's good. He's good. He's good. Well, a whole bunch of people in Brazil were like, oh f that. No. No. No. No. No. This guy's a criminal and they started basically throwing out all the stuff proving that Bolsonaro is corrupt and criminal and whatever. It's not my country. They can do what the Brazilians can do what they want. I'm not making any judgments over there, except that Bolsonaro is clearly not a good guy. Alright. We don't have good guys over here in the United States too. They're easily identifiable, as well as Europe. So I'm not saying anything about Brazil. I'm just saying this particular dude is not a good dude in either event. Right? This guy, still president, clearly corrupt, Now his pocket judge on the Supreme Court for Brazil has told an American citizen and an American company what they are going to do in Brazil and has basically threatened these fines. Which leads me to the question, how does another country find a company that's not a Brazil that country's, you know, like flying that national flag?
And while I know that it's clearly done, I'm just not sure how it is that it sure, I guess if it's one country if it's not in a, you know, United States company and it's between 2 different countries, whatever. But it seems odd that the United States would allow this kind of this kind of thing to go on with their companies going, no dude. Screw you. Go go pound sand is what I would kind of expect. But here's the other thing, and I'm pretty sure that this whole thing stems from the fact that Twitter has offices in Brazil. My question is, do you need them? Does Twitter, does Facebook, does YouTube, does Google Do you really have to have offices in these countries?
I mean, it's not like they're gonna be able to build a better Google in Ecuador or a better Facebook. I don't like either one of those, but I'm just saying they're the FAANG companies cannot be replicated by Ecuador, San or, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Brazil, Argentina. They just don't have the money. They don't have they don't have the brainpower. Sure. I was sure they probably got the brainpower, but they don't have enough brains throughout all the branches to be able to bring this together because they ain't got the money. They're they're not going to produce something like Facebook that has the reach of Facebook. They're not going to produce something like Twitter that has the reach of Twitter. It's not going to freaking happen.
It's just not. So therefore, my question becomes, why even bother having offices in these countries because at that point, you've got employees that can be arrested. Just get them out. Now I know it's you're naive. Nah, well, yeah a little bit. But it doesn't make any sense. Sure. If they wanna build another Twitter, let them. Brazil then at that point falls off the face of the planet news wise. Why? These are the only outlets. The social media is the only outlets from people to people. And if people from one country aren't talking to people in the other countries, the people in the other countries don't really know what the hell is going on with Brazil except by, what, mainstream media. And I don't trust those guys either.
So, this is why we noster. Noster cuts through all of this noise. And, oh, by the way, I forgot. Now, I was getting all on Brazil's, Brazil's ass. Now I need to get on Elon Musk's ass. How the hell is Elon Musk? Got the wherewithal to tell Brazil what is constitutional in Brazil and unconstitutional in Brazil. And I know he's actually talking about the Brazilian constitution, which makes it even more laughable because as far as I know, Elon Musk doesn't spend a whole lot of legal time down there in Brazil. Sure. Does he have lawyers? Yeah. But he doesn't have enough lawyers for every like he would have to have one lawyer that is a specialist in constitutional shit for every single country on the face of the planet. He doesn't have that.
Do you have any idea what kind of payroll that would look like? Even if you assign 2 or 3 countries to each one of your lawyers, your payroll would still be like out way out of whack. It would be just disgusting to have to cut those paychecks. I don't think he's got that. So I think it's laughable that Elon Musk is telling Brazil what they can and can't do. Honestly, just shut just shut Twitter off in Brazil. Just be preemptive about it. See how they like it. I mean, I don't like Twitter. I don't I'm not a fan of Elon Musk. Not a fan of Bolsonaro. Basically, I hate them all.
But but but I'm just saying I'm just saying I don't think Americans or British people or Canadian people or, you know, El Salvadoran people or Brazilian people or the Egyptians have the right to look at some other country and tell them how they're going to operate whether it's their elections their constitution, whatever, right? But now we come back to the Nostra issue The people in Brazil, and honestly everybody in every country because we're all going authoritarian, we're all going totalitarian. If you wanna be able to talk to people in the future, you better start figuring out how to use Noster. At least learn how to do it. It doesn't cost you nothing.
It doesn't. We, you know, we do donate to the developers. Many of us do. But you're not required to. It's an open protocol. And if you don't understand what that means please learn what it means. It just means that there's no there's no CEO of Nostra. Nobody nobody's gonna be able to shut it down. It's like Bitcoin. So start learning how to use it now. Please. Especially if you're in a country that's starting to tip over the edge into some really weird George Orwell Aldous Huxley kind of crap. It will save your ass later. Trust me now. Now, on to China. China's largest fund has applied for a spot Bitcoin ETF in Hong Kong.
Bitcoin Magazine Vivek Sin is writing some of China's biggest asset managers are using Hong Kong subsidiaries to enter the Bitcoin ETF market, according to recent reports. Securities Times reported on Monday that financial giants like Harvest Fund and Southern Fund have submitted applications via their Hong Kong arms and are awaiting regulatory approval. The move reflects growing institutional interest despite China's previous hostility towards Bitcoin. Harvest Fund manages over $230,000,000,000 in total assets. Southern Fund oversees 280 $1,000,000,000 in total assets.
Approval of Bitcoin ETF products from such influential institutions could significantly validate Bitcoin in the eyes of both Chinese regulators and Chinese investors. The news is also a testament to the evolving landscape of bitcoin in China despite its previous crackdown on bitcoin trading as well as mining. The country is now witnessing a shift. While the mainland remains cautious, Hong Kong has adopted a more open approach attracting the attention of Chinese funds. By leveraging Hong Kong subsidiaries, major funds can gain exposure to bitcoin in a compliant manner. The location provides a legal loophole for Chinese companies to participate in the burgeoning bitcoin asset class.
Industry insiders are abuzz with anticipation as they predict a significant milestone in Bitcoin. Hong Kong's first ETFs could potentially launch this quarter this quarter of 2024. Not next quarter, cause we're in Q2. And they're talking about a Q2 launch. Which would be what? Right around the same time as the halving. Could be interesting. Finishing up, financial leaders are eager to meet surging investor demand for Bitcoin access. ETFs offer a regulated onramp for both institutional as well as retail players. So this loophole issue with this loophole issue, I don't understand it.
Hong Kong was taken over by China. And China has left some loopholes to be able to do things that you wouldn't be able to do financially on Mainland China. I find this very interesting. Why would you do that? Unless China, the Mainland Chinese, not the people, but the government, Basically, the government is saying we ourselves have to keep something open. I find this extraordinarily interesting that they haven't just told Hong Kong, dude, everything you do is now the way that we do it on Mainland China. Which means that they wouldn't know they would not have allowed this. They would not even think about asking.
There would not even be an application probably to be able to do this. But China is leaving the door open to Chinese nationals being able to invest in Bitcoin through a spot Bitcoin ETF. I I don't really kinda know what to say about it other than the fact that China may not be as stupid as we think when it comes to Bitcoin. I'll say that. Now Meta Planet shares soar as a Japanese firm mimics the MicroStrategy Bitcoin buying Plan. This is CoinDesk's Sam Reynolds. Meta Planet, a Web3 infrastructure provider saw its Tokyo listed stock rise 90% in just 2 days after saying it was adding $6,560,000 in Bitcoin to its balance sheet in partnership with Soar Ventures, Morgan Creek Capital, Mark Yusko, and others. The company, which started as a budget hotel operator under the name Red Planet before becoming a web 3 developer, said it was looking to minimizes its exposure to the Japanese yen. Yeah. They don't even want the fiat currency.
Yen, the company wrote in an update to shareholders, has been damaged by Japan's generational long low interest rate environment that has eroded its position as a key global currency. The company's decision to incorporate Bitcoin into its treasury asset is driven by a multifaceted understanding of its potential as a hedge against inflation, a tool for microeconomic resilience and a basis for long term capital appreciation, it wrote. The strategy also mimics that of Tyson's Corner Virginia based MicroStrategy, the software developer that in 2020 said that it would start building up its holdings of bitcoin and since then its stock price has often mirrored the fluctuations in bitcoin's price reflecting investor sentiment toward the cryptocurrency markets.
It is now the largest corporate owner of Bitcoin according to bitcointreasuries.net, holding more than 214,000 valued at about $15,000,000,000 The strategy also mimics that of Tysons Corner, Virginia based micro strategy. Oh, they copied the same. Oh, my God. It's the exact same, paragraph twice. Do y'all need hey, CoinDesk. If you guys need an editor, dude, I'm up. I'll do it. Just pay me some satoshis. I'll I'll edit your shit. That's I mean, that's easy to catch. Anyway, in a post on Twitter, Jason Fang, managing partner and cofounder at Soar Ventures, which participated in the partnership to add Bitcoin to Meta Planet's balance sheet, highlighted it as a way for Japanese investors to get exposure to crypto through a publicly traded company instead of holding the asset itself, which is subject to a high tax on unrealized crypto gains.
This tax is controversial and has been debated and modified by lawmakers since it was first introduced. In June of 2023, Japan's National Tax Agency announced that tokens issued by crypto startups would be exempt from the rules. Bitcoin is currently trading over Nah. We won't get in in that because we know what Bitcoin's got a great big, red dildo on it today, so we're not gonna talk about their price. CoinDesk has the wrong price. So now we see a Japanese company that's named Meta Planet that used to be a budget hotel manager and then they turned into a web3 infrastructure company which is laughable all by itself deciding that they're going to finally do the same thing that MicroStrategy has been doing. So it's now.
Now we're seeing the effect of Michael Saylor's when he gave all those webinars to businesses and invited all the CFOs and said, hey. Here's the way that we do it. This is the way that we interact with Bitcoin. This is how we interact with Bitcoin on our balance sheet. This is how our accounting runs. He gave the whole playbook. It was called the playbook. That's what he said. He's like, I'm giving my playbook to all these CFOs. And he did, like, I don't know. It was like a full 2 days of webinars or one day. I can't remember which it was, but it was a while back. And we were wondering, is anybody does he is he going to fish somebody out of the water on this one?
And nothing happened, and nothing happened and nothing happened and nothing happened and it kept not happening until all of a sudden, we start getting word that these companies are starting to do what Michael Saylor did. But the problem is this, the first company that I told you about, and I cannot remember their name right now, it was a complete joke. It was a complete joke of a company. And they were gonna just start adding, you know, Bitcoin and their stock price raised to this, you know, in insane point that they hadn't experienced in, like, years as far as their chart was concerned. And the very day after, their CEO quit. Just quit and said, this is a classic pump and dump and I don't wanna have nothing to do with it. And if you look at this company's chart, their balance sheet, it was a joke company.
Or it had turned into a joke company. But now we got Meta Planet, which is kind of humorous considering that they were a budget hotel chain operator and then they went to web 3. That doesn't bode well. Kind of a red flag for me, but the company itself is not as bad as this other company that I previously mentioned that is a complete joke or had turned into a complete joke. I think that the wind is actually shifting and that people are or had actually attended Michael Sailor's thing. It is just now that the companies that really need the most help are the ones that are trying to implement the plan.
Some for some of them, it will work. For some of them, it will save their ass. For even fewer of them, it will probably turn the entire company around. And for a couple more, and I'm talking in the short term, it will probably turn them into something that is spectacular. But as time goes on, those numbers will grow and grow and grow and grow and grow. But Michael Saylor's in the middle of a shit storm with Matt O'Dell, which I'm not going to get into because I have no idea what the hell is going on there. You can tell me like in the zap stream. I mean, I know what the gist is about. But honestly, if they want to if they want to fight, I'm just gonna let them fight. Apparently, it's something about Michael Saylor not wanting development on Bitcoin or some such shit. I don't know. I don't know, you know, I don't know Michael Saylor. I have no idea what he's doing. Please don't ask me to describe what the hell is going on with Odell and Saylor because I just we've got other shit to do here. SEC has deferred its decision on bitwise and grayscale Bitcoin ETF options.
Okay. The April 8th delay decision impacts proposed option trading on the spot Bitcoin ETFs of the New York Stock Exchange, namely those from Bitwise and Grayscale, Braden Lindria from Cointelegraph. According to the April 8th filing, the commission's pushback will impact options trading on Bitwise and Grayscale trusts and any other trust that holds Bitcoin on the NYSE. The commission finds it appropriate to designate a longer period within which to take action on the proposed rule change so that it has sufficient time to consider the proposed rule change.
The securities regulator reached the same outcome for Nasdaq last month which requested options trading on BlackRock's Ishares Bitcoin Trust. If the sorry, excuse me. If god. Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein is one of 2 people who wrote to the SEC requesting the rule change to be approved. In a February 28th letter, Sonnenshine argued that there's no reason to knock back options trading on the spot Bitcoin ETFs as the SEC has already approved Bitcoin Futures ETFs and spot Bitcoin ETFs on the NYSE. Quote, the natural step is the approval of options on spot Bitcoin ETPs. Alright. So that's all we need from that one.
In this particular case, I'm going to side with the SEC because we don't need another derivative product at all, but we certainly don't need it need it just yet. I'm seeing this pattern form on the Bitcoin price charts And there's 100% correlated to this addition of the spot Bitcoin ETFs. You get a spike up on the price on Monday because that's when Ibit decides to buy all of their Bitcoin. And then it bleeds and then it just stops. They do their buy. That buy is complete. They're not buying anymore. The market closes. And all of a sudden, all the people because Bitcoin trades 247 around the globe, all the people that don't give a shit about the grayscale or the Ibit trust or Bitwise or whatever, they just start selling selling it down.
Right? They're it's an arbitrage trade is what's going on. And they just sell it down and it bleeds and it bleeds and it bleeds. And then the next day, we get a spike down just like we're seeing today. It's like it's almost a pattern. It doesn't always happen, but it's happened so often that I'm actually looking at it as a pattern. Now, I wouldn't trade on the pattern, by the way, because this pattern is is going to change. Because it's not going to take long for these guys over at Grayscale and Bitwise and all to figure it all out. To figure it all out.
And they will somehow or another, they will make adjustments. And the people that are buying those shares, which activates the actual buying of the Bitcoin by these, these spot Bitcoin ETFs, they will adjust their behavior as well. So it's a feedback loop. Right? But for right now, it's almost like it's almost like every I wait every Monday. I wait for every Monday. Okay, spike up. There it is. And then we bleed off all week long and then there's problems. And now, you know, we've got the the CPI print coming tomorrow. So there people are freaking out about that shit. It's it's always something, Right? So the only trading strategy that there is, is to buy Bitcoin directly and then hold that Bitcoin directly on a hardware wallet or buy your own keys. Do not keep it on exchanges.
But it really is just buy Bitcoin and hold that Bitcoin securely in a self custodial manner. That's the only trading strategy that there is. Just just saying. But we don't need an options on spot right now because this entire pattern is so brutal that the last thing that you want to do is introduce another variable which are is every variable allows it a completely different attackable game surface to the system that you're talking about. And that's I guarantee you that's why the sec does not wanna see an option on Bitcoin spot ETFs.
And so we're probably not going to get that one for a long time and honestly, good. I think we've got enough on our plate right now. Okay. Over to Binance. Stephen Graves decrypt has this one. Binance CEO are is considering a few jurisdictions for their new Binance headquarters. Binance is set to establish a global headquarters in a reversal of its long standing claim to be a decentralized company that has no official headquarters. Speaking at Paris Blockchain Week, Binance CEO Richard Tang said that the crypto exchange is in talks with a few jurisdictions over the new location.
Quote, where is the value given our suite of products? That's a weird sentence. What is the jurisdiction that has regulations that can cater to our suite of products, our suite of uses, Tang said, adding that staffing processes and taxation agreements are among the multitude of variables that have to be weighed and assessed. The location of Binance's headquarters has long been a vexed question. Under former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, the exchange initially claimed that as a decentralized company, it had no headquarters and that the very notion of offices and headquarters were old concepts.
Quote, is that an office where people sit? I worked from home from the last for the last three and half years, Zau said in 2021, quote, our leadership team, they're not sitting in one office. We don't have a clear place where we can go by most people's normal definitions of a headquarters that we call a headquarters, end quote. As regulatory issues mounted, however, Zhou shifted gears claiming that an answer to the question was coming in due time. But after he stepped down as CEO under the terms of a $4,000,000,000 settlement with US regulators, Richard Tang, his replacement, initially followed the same line.
But at Paris Blockchain Week, Tang addressed the plight of Binance executive Tigran Gimbarian, currently jailed in Nigeria and awaiting trial on Monday for money laundering charges. Quote, our utmost priority is to do what we can to bring him home as soon as possible, Tang said. Binance has previously claimed that Gamburian has not violated any Nigerian law and that he has no decision making power in the company. This story reminds me of what I was talking about with the whole Twitter thing. Headquarters are just bad news. And and and c z was right. It's an old concept. And as we enter this brand new world, this brave new world as Aldous Huxley would call it, what?
Headquarters are a liability. Because everything that we are entering into does not help the current power structure retain its structure. As the current power structure sees its dissolution or potential dissolution before its eyes, pretty much like a cornered or trapped animal, they fight harder than they've ever fought before. And they could be vicious and they will be vicious. But if you are attacking something as an individual, as a corpus, and when I mean corpus I mean a structure, a thing that you can point a gun at and shoot a target. If you're attacking the cornered animal from that standpoint, then at that point there's odds whether you win or lose that battle.
The cornered animal that we've got trapped right now is nothing to be messed with. It's nothing to be sneezed at. It's nothing to be laughed at. It's nothing to be joked about. It's nothing to think that is anything but what it is. A very deadly animal. So the only way to combat that is from a decentralized position. And whether it's a Brazilian judge on the Supreme Court or it's a United States president or it's that idiot up in Canada, Justin Trudeau, it doesn't really matter who it is. They're all the trapped animal. And the only way to combat this going forward is to not have offices in countries, is to not have a P. O. Box, is to not have a telephone number, is to not have any way that you can get to the people that can pull plugs or change code.
And if we continuously think that we're going to have offices and we're going to have headquarters, then all we're doing is weakening our position as an offensive move and we'll have to remain on the defensive forever and ever and ever. And almost every general will tell you that's ever been in battle whether you're talking about Chinese generals from 4000 years ago or fucking general Patton in the 1940s that will tell you the same shit. An army that is in constant defense will eventually lose through attrition, through morality or or or sorry, not morality. Morale being depleted, the whole ball of wax.
You if you can't get an offensive going on and stay on the offensive, your army has no hope in winning and whatever structure or situation that army is fighting for will fall. Just so we gotta keep that in mind. I don't like the fact that Binance is looking for a headquarters. It's going to make them easy. Gonna make them easy targets. They're already fairly easy targets. We've got to figure out a way to think differently. That's all I gotta say. Now, numbers. Let's run them. Alright. Futures and commodities. We got, West Texas Intermediate. 1 doll no. What God. You know, start this again.
Futures and commodities. West Texas Intermediate crude is up 1 and a half points to $85.14. Brent Norsee is down 1.16% to $89.30. Natural gas is up half a point to $1.85. Wow. It hasn't been that high in a while. Gasoline has fallen 0.2 percent to $2.74. Every single one of your shiny metal rocks are doing very well today, including gold, which is up half a point $2,362. Silver is up a half point. Platinum is up point 8. Copper is up a quarter of a point, and palladium is up 3 and a half. Ag is mostly in the red today. Biggest winner today is chocolate. 3.28% to the upside. Biggest loser up 3 quarters of a point. And feeder cattle are up one full point. Legacy markets are not doing well because they're waiting on CPI numbers to tell they want mommy and daddy to hold their hand and tell them what to do, even though mommy and daddy pretty much lies through the CPI, but whatever. The Dow is down a half a point. S and P is down a third. NASDAQ is down, a 5th of a point. And the S and P mini is down a 5th of a point as well.
Now let's get into Clark Moody's dashboard. $68,370 is still a $1,340,000,000,000 market cap. 19,677,780 and a half bitcoin in circulation. Hash rate is we're we're losing April 20th. We're losing 4 20, guys. We gotta slow the miners down because they're operating at an average of 614 exahashes per second, over the last 2016 blocks. Average fees have decreased again to 0.18 BTC per block. Halving estimate is April 19th 2024 and the block space percentage for ordinals is 1.6 percent. Now, mempool. How many blocks do we got? A 178 blocks carrying a 153,000 unconfirmed transactions.
Fees are up a little bit today. 4.6. No, God. 4.6. Sorry guys. 46. Satoshis per vbyte is what it's going to cost you for a high priority. 37 is what it's going to cost for low priority, and anything under 4 satoshis per vbyte is going to be purged from mempools around the world. Mempool.spaceforward/mining is showing 624 point 0.8xahashes per second. Guys, you'll not hear me say this very often, but this is one of the times that I wish we had lower hash rates. I really, really wanna see 69420 on 420 2024. I mean, like all the planets aligning around the eclipse. Yeah, if you didn't know that Saturn and Jupiter were just on the left hand side of the sun in the northern hemisphere.
There's a comet next to them in that little cluster. Mercury is on that side. There's, like, one other planet, and I can't remember what is on the side. It's like this, not only did we have a full solar or a full lunar eclipse or whatever you want to call solar eclipse. Full eclipse of the sun, whatever the hell that is. You had a whole shit ton of planets that were grouped really really close to the position of the sun in the sky at that time. It was amazing. Absolutely freaking amazing. Anyway, let's see here. What do we got?
Is that it for that? Yeah. That's it for that. Now, from the show episode well, I can't remember the episode number. I think it was, 882 Wall Street Supplicants. WiseHodl boosted me 10,101 sats, a full palindrome. Thank you, bro. Great show. Yours is the only one with auto download privileges on my fountain app. Wow. Cool, man. A wise huddle with, again, with 21 21 says, pay per queue is legit. Thank you for bringing it up. Ppq.ai. That's ppq. Ai. The bird boosted with 1,000 sats said solid show yet again. Pies with a 1,000, thank you, sir, no thank you. Pies with 999 says no thank you, no thank you. God's death with 337, thank you, sir. No, thank you. Coz Piland 210 says, do you got my DMs on the nosters?
Because I do. There's all kinds of stuff going on in the background over here and it's not about the show. It's other stuff that's external to the show. It's just shit I gotta do and I can't really get to everything all at once. I'm sorry. I will get back to you. I just gotta clear some of this other crap up. The bird with a 100 says, no, thank you. No, thank you. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news. You can use Mutiny Wallet version 0.6.2, Federated Lightning Addresses for Mutiny Plus Users. Holy crap.
Listen up. Providing lightning addresses to a non custodial wallet can be challenging, as they require a web server and constant online presence. To solve this issue, we've integrated Federated Lightning addresses. Excited to announce the preview of Lightning Addresses for Mutiny Plus users. No more invoice requests needed when paying friends by name directly on the makers of Mutiny Wallet. Inspired by Cody Lowe's Hermes project, our new feature uses e cash locked to your pubkey. So only you can spend it when you're back online. The wallet listens for DM's on nostr and unlocks tokens once received.
Man. We've also added blinded authentication tokens to our Hermes server to separate your wallet identity from the name of the lightning address that you registered. We keep your lightning address as private as possible while providing the service. We'll write another article on the technical details of how this works. Fediment is required for this feature to work. So, you gotta add 1 before adding a lightning address. For this first MVP, there's also a requirement that you do not change the federation that you had when you added the lightning address. We will support this in a later release. If you change it, you're going to stop receiving funds from your Lightning address and you'll have to change it back to the original Federation.
So the federation that you chose on mutiny, that you chose when you had that you had going when you chose your lightning address, are locked together. If you change the Fediment, you will lose the ability to get cash. Okay, so keep that in mind. And then they do some thank yous and whatnot. What the hell does it mean? Well, it means that I'm gonna be able to have essentially just be able to get e cash from my because my inpub is registered with Mutiny Wallet. Now, Mutiny Plus is, as far as I know, is is a paid service. I'm not sure about that.
I'm not sure, but I think there's the mutiny wallet, which everybody can get and then there's mutiny plus, which is like a premium kind of thing as far as I know. That's what I think is going on. So, with that said, this may not be just for everybody. It may just be for the people that are paying. But I'll bet you my hat that they release that to the general public after they've tested the living crap out of it because it would be so nice to have this functionality inside Mutiny, which already does a ton of stuff if you're not playing with Mutiny. You might want to pull it down and just kind of set it up and just hang out with it for a little while and see if it's something that's right for you. Now, on to Bhutan, they're ramping up their Bitcoin mining capacity firm are or their investment arm called, Druck Holding and Investments, and BitDeer Technologies Group are planning to ramp up their Bitcoin mining operation to help offset the revenue impact of the upcoming Bitcoin halving.
The planned upgrades will increase the Himalayan kingdoms. Bhutan is a kingdom, it's not a company. It's the kingdom of Bhutan. The Himalayan Kingdom's mining capacity by 500 megawatts for the first half of twenty twenty five, Matt Lingyu Kong, chief business officer of Bit Deere said in an interview. That would bring Bhutan's totally total capacity to 600 megawatts. So Bhutan started with a 100 megawatts. And they liked it so much. Bhutan started with a 100 megawatts and they liked it so much that they're gonna add 5x.
They're gonna add 500 megawatts to come to a total of 6. They didn't even ramp up by half. They were like, no. Hell no man. Let's not even double it. Let's go way past doubling it. Let's 5 x that son of a bitch. Anyway, both DHI and BitDeer remain confident that they can keep their operations efficient even if Bitcoin's price falls following a bitcoin halving. According to Kong, BitDeer boasts one of the industry's lowest expenses per bitcoin mined, costing a minimum of $20,000 per coin to mine. That's actually pretty pretty good return on investment there.
Hardware wallet interface version 3.0.0 has been released. The hardware wallet interface is a Python library and command line tool for interacting with hardware wallets. It provides a standard way for software to work with hardware wallets without needing to implement device specific drivers. This is this should be good for people that are building hardware wallets on a budget. Being able to have a library of stuff that you can interact with the hardware. You know, your hardware wallet can now reach out and do all kinds of other stuff because of things like this. I think this puts more power in the hands of smaller developers that are operating off of much lower budgets than people like, you know, like Coldcard or or, CoinKite. The company behind Coldcard.
And I think that that's good. I think that the more options we have, the better it's gonna be for everybody. Reminder, the Bitcoin plus plus in Austin is taking place on May 1st through 4th. Remember, it's an international Bitcoin developer conference that aims to shine a light on the most interesting and cutting edge advances in Bitcoin protocols and development. Again, that is Bitcoin plus plus It's in Austin and it's coming up quick. May 1st through 4th and it's right there on Town Lake. What do we got here? Bitcoin policy summit 2024 is live right now. It's going on and you can watch it live. It's the conference for policy makers, academics and industry leaders to discuss the opportunities and challenges presented by digital currencies and it's taking place in Washington DC and it's going on today. So what would you imagine that you'd hear if you tune into the live stream? And if you go to my show notes, you'll find this article at like, you know, a whole bunch of links and I'll try to get chapters in this one. I'm still learning how to use pothome.fm, so I didn't have chapters in the last one. But you'll have the link to this story. Okay?
So you'll be able to find out where the the link to the live stream is. So today is welcoming. There's an opening keynote by Natalie Smolensky. There's a talk called resistance money, a philosophical examination of Bitcoin. There is a fireside chat with representative Patrick McHenry. There is what makes Bitcoin valuable given by Mike Brock. There is how I resisted 3 dictators with Bitcoin. Why Russian dissidents use Bitcoin, lessons from Navalny's Foundation. Bitcoin Against Autocracy, A Modern Tool for Freedom, there's Mining in America, a fireside chat with senator Cynthia Lummis.
This is wow. There's all kinds of shit going on here and it's all being streamed live today. Right? It goes all the way to 5 p. M. There's got to be like there's got to be like 25 talks on this son of a bitch today. So, again, if you want to go see that, it'll be in the show notes and it will be linked and you'll be able to get to it live right out of the show. In fact, for the guys over there in zap.stream, I'm just gonna put this schedule right on up here. And there you go. That should do it for the morning roundup. Dad says jokes scientists are studying the effect of cannabis on seabirds.
They've left no turn unstoned. There you go. Alright. So I've got everything in for my portable podcasting studio. It's nice. It's all nice and neat in a pack. Hollabod, if you're listening, check your DMs. I would you you need to be the first one up. I want to come to wherever it is that you want to go. I want to see if if I can set this thing up inside of, like, you know, 5 minutes or 10 minutes, and that we can start rolling inside of 15 or 20 minutes from the time that I walk in the door. That's the test. Please get a hold of me. It's in your DMs, and I don't want to just continuously ping you and ping you and ping you. But again, for anybody who's listening that doesn't know, this rig cost me about, I think after it's all said and done, I'm going to say $11.50 So $11.50.
None of which came out of my own pocket. This was all funds from Zaps and boostagram, streaming satoshis to this show. This 100% was made the money that I used for this was made by this show. Right? I think it's important to be upfront with that because it's not tooting my own horn because you got people other people that are making money hand that that kind of money in a day, right, on their Bitcoin podcast. So it's definitely not about tooting my own horn. In fact, it may actually be looked at as, god, that's embarrassing. But I don't care because it is money that the show made by itself with nobody else involved but me and you.
Well, and at this point, you know, there has to be a, you know, a hosting company, but I'm not going to include those guys right now. Although, I will say good things about podhome.fm. If you're not using podhome.uh, podhome dotfm as your bitcoin host, you might consider it. It's really cool. Pretty slick interface. I have had no problems so far. It's affordable. It's not any more expensive than I was spending on SoundCloud. And I really really love it. And they fixed, you know, they fixed my little problem that I had with show notes, so I'm nothing but grateful. In either event, just between me and you, we did this together. So now I've got the ability to go somewhere that is not my house, that's locked behind this computer, and I can go and take interviews and do interviews other places.
And that's a step up. It should have happened a lot longer than in 5 years that I've been doing this show, but not everybody can be super successful out of the box. And this show is not super out of the box, but it was successful enough to buy an entire roadshow. So I have nothing but you guys to thank for that 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.