Join me today for Episode 948 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Replacing Companies With Logic Structures
- Durov Rolls Over: RIP Telegram
- Ripple's Larson Endorses Kackles The Clown
- Jobs Report Burns All Markets
- nostr Reply Guy is Not Your Enemy
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/09/06/ripple-co-founder-among-kamala-harris-new-corporate-endorsers/
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/09/06/us-added-142k-jobs-in-august-likely-setting-stage-for-25-basis-point-rate-cut/
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[00:00:00]
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Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 10:17 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 6th day of September 2024, and this is episode I just had it. I think it's 648.
Is it? Yeah. No. 648, my ass. 948. We're damn near to 50 away from the 1000th show of the Bitcoin and podcast. Wow, man. That's a that's a hell of a run, right? So what do we got? Dharav has made a statement. Dharav is the Telegram's founder, and we've got a little bit more than that going on with the, with Dharav. We got a couple of things to talk about with Jirov. I'm gonna talk a little bit about one of Ripple co founder because you need to know what side of the fence the people that do the whole Ripple thing. You need to know what side of this what side of the fence that they are truly truly sitting on. You don't want to have anything to do with these guys and you don't want to have anything to do with Ripple either.
Jobs numbers came in. You might have noticed that there's a bit of a red dildo going on. Well, we'll we'll talk a little bit about that. There's also a couple of things that I wanna talk about. Actually, there's at least one thing that I wanna talk about with the, feds, Waller. He had a Q and A and he made it a statement that I think is rather chilling when you read it more than once. And then we'll do a little bit of market stuff and then we're gonna talk a bit about the tornado cash court case that's going on because they're railroading these poor dudes from tornado cash.
And then I want to get into a little bit of Reply Guy. But first, Durov has announced that he is disabling personal geolocation from Telegram and I guess he can do that because he's, I guess, out on bail. Vince Quill, Cointelegraph, let's crank this son of a bitch up. Telegram founder Pavel Durov revealed that Telegram is cutting certain features from the platform, including media uploads to the platform's telegraph blog and disabling the people nearby feature in a September 6th announcement. Durov told his followers that media uploads to the blogging platform were misused by malicious actors, explaining that the vast majority of the Telegram community was not abusing these features. However, Durov made it clear that the 0.001% involved in illicit activities pose a disproportionate risk to the vast majority of law abiding users on Telegram.
The Telegram co founder also announced that the individual geolocation tracking would be ditched for a businesses nearby option. Durov likewise claimed that this personal geolocation feature was only used by a tiny minority of Telegram users. Okay, so I guess that means that you had to turn it on and that it was off by default. Let's hope that that is indeed the case. This year, we're committed to turning moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise, Durov concluded. Pausing for effect. Let's read that again.
This year, we are committed to turning moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise. I'm gonna tell you right now they got to him. They got to him. We all know how they got to him. But if there's any question in your mind that he is know that he is uncompromised, that should be swept under the rug right now. And I'm not saying anything bad about him. He's a human being. He has a life to live. He has 1,000,000,000 of dollars. He has a lot to lose. But make no mistake, they have successfully compromised Durov.
French prosecutors have alleged that the Telegram founder and the platform were complicit in the spread of, of course, child pornography by not enforcing stricter content moderation policies. On August 28, 2024, French authorities charged Durov with money laundering, criminal association, and providing cryptology services without a license. French authorities issued arrest warrants for Pavel Durov and his brother, Nikolai, in March of 2024. French law enforcement officials claimed that the Telegram founders refused to cooperate with an earlier investigation by failing to identify a specific Telegram user who was allegedly spreading child abuse materials.
According to French officials, the probe started after cybercrime investigators from the Paris prosecutor's office uncovered an illicit Telegram chat room attempting to lure underage girls into the room and exploit them. On September 5th, Durov broke his silence for the first time since his arrest and took to his Telegram channel to clarify the events since his arrest. And since that time, Telegram has signaled a shift in content moderation policies by changing the language surrounding the moderation of private chats in the Telegram frequently asked questions section and trimming certain features.
Okay, so first I'm not an advocate of illicit materials being exchanged on any platform. But I'm also not an advocate of threatening somebody with their life, their security, their future, their possessions, and everything about them to immediately affect a change that you want to see that I guarantee has nothing to do with child pornography. They don't give a shit. It's like everything else. Hey, do we want to wrap it in terrorism or do we want to wrap this little gift box with child pornography and child exploitation? It's a meme if you haven't seen it, right? The picture like it's a cartoon of uncle Sam with a box and he's coming up to, like, a gift wrapping place and the other dude's like, do you want this wrapped in child pornography or do you want it wrapped in, you know, terrorism?
Because that's the only two choices the United States government and the rest of the Western governments have. That that's it. It's a is a mind manipulation to get you to think that everybody is a criminal, except, of course, for the United States and Western governments, of which they are all criminals. They should all be put on trial. They should all be drugged out in the street and at least hard and feathered and run out on a rail. I've said it before. I'll say it again. But Dharov is fully compromised. And it was very quickly done, which makes me wonder what those discussions were.
And I doubt very seriously that we're gonna find out anything more when I read you Durov's statement. And this is from his direct telegram. It says, Thanks, everyone, for your support and love. Last month I got interviewed by police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told I may be personally responsible for other people's illegal use of Telegram because the French authorities didn't receive responses from Telegram. This was surprising for several reasons. 1. Telegram has an official representative in the European Union that accepts and replies to EU requests. Its email address has been publicly available for anyone in the EU who Googles Telegram EU address for law enforcement.
I gotta stop there. Because even though that that the way he said it is like, well, all you had to do was Google Telegram EU address for law enforcement there, mister officer. No. That's sort of not the way you do it. What you do is you build you build and write a memorandum on Telegram stationery, and you give the exact email address and the reason for that email address's existence and you send it to every authority under the sun. Alright? And I'm not saying that because I love the authorities. I just said that I don't. But this, honestly, this is a little bit of 6th grader logic.
Oh, well, all you had to do was email Telegram EU address for law enforcement. Oh, that I that's not gonna wash. Okay? So number 2, the French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France. 3. If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages, is a rather misguided approach.
Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools. And in there is the seed of the future. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools. This is why everybody in Bitcoin, everybody in Lightning, everybody in eCash, everybody in Nostr, everybody in Fedimint, all of this was we jumped the gun of creating companies. Maybe that's what Satoshi was talking about so long ago when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks started accepting donations in bitcoin.
You know, I think that the seed of what what was just said by Durov is there. That no longer are we allowed to build tools and have companies if we're going to be thrown in prison and have all our shit taken from us. Which is why it's so incredibly important that free and open source software and freedom technology be done in a way that is not done the way it is now. I mean, how to make money from a thing without having a company. How to get support financial honest to God pay the bills pay the rent pay the stuff buy the food get the gas. How can we do that without having a company?
I think this is a major question that needs to be examined and answered for us to thrive in the rest of this century. Because it is very clear to me that the governments, especially of the Western world, view everybody else in the world as well as their own citizens as criminal and as somebody that they would rather not see walking around. It's sad. I shouldn't be that much of a cynic, but I cannot help it. They are giving me nothing else to look at. Let's continue. Establishing the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You have to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements and local laws with EU laws. You have to take into account technological limitations.
As a platform, you want to process or you want your process to be consistent globally while also ensuring that they are not abused in countries with weak rule of law. We've been committed to engaging with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles. Our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes, but we've always been open to dialogue and sometimes we can't agree with a country's regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. And in those cases, we are ready to leave that country. We've done it many times.
When Russia demanded we hand over encryption keys to enable surveillance, we refused, and Telegram got banned in Russia. When Iran demanded we block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused and Telegram got banned in Iran. We are prepared to leave markets that aren't compatible with our principles, because we're not doing this for money. We're driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated. All of that does not mean Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities could be confused by where to send requests is something that we should improve. But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue.
We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports. We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster. However, we hear voices saying that it's not enough. Telegram's abrupt increase in user count to 950,000,000 caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That's why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We've already stated that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon. Yeah, and he did. I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram and the social networking industry as a whole safer and stronger.
Thanks again for your love and memes. Man, I mean, there's a lot honestly, this is kind of creeping me out. His tone is playful, yet there's 6th grade logic in this whole thing about all they had to do was email or Google how to get a hold of Telegram by EU authorities or whatever it was. Right? And this this sign off, thanks again for your love and memes, The fuck is this? We're we're we're literally talking about the lives of people being absolutely hammered and destroyed because they went to Telegram to figure out how they could communicate with each other in authoritarian regimes.
He talks about how he's, like, perfectly happy to say, fuck you, and pull out of Russia and pull out of Iran and just, you know, let the authoritarian regimes do what they may. Because we're not in it for the money, but yet we're what? Look, I don't want Durov to go to prison. I don't want him to lose any of his money. I really don't. But no one's taking a stand because no one can. Because we've been lured by money and riches and wealth. It's like for the for the United States, that shit started in earnest in the very early 19 eighties with Robin Leach's lifestyles of the rich and famous, where they showed you how much of a schmo you were every single week.
How you didn't have the mansion, how you didn't have the jet, how you didn't have all of the stuff that these beautiful people have. And it's not done us any good. Durov, I think, is just a victim of the same shit. He's got he's a billionaire. He doesn't want to lose it, and he will do whatever it takes to keep it. That's the carrot and the stick all in one. It's not the carrot then the stick, it's the carrot and the stick all at one. The carrot is the fucking stick. This is a carrot that if you get walked upside the head with, you're going to writhe on the ground like a baby and then go feed them.
It's the wealth that we were promised, the wealth that we were shown that we could get, but we don't have and until you do you're a schmo that keeps us under the thumb. That's the real prison. And I'm not saying sell everything and wear sackcloth and go out and hunt squirrels in the forest for the rest of your life. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that it is imperative for all of us to start really endeavoring on how to build a system that somehow or another creates wealth for the people that build it, but somehow is completely untraceable that nobody knows who built it.
This goes back to this thing that was said a long time ago by very wealthy people. I don't own anything, but I control everything. You don't really want to own anything because they can take it away from you. Why would you want to when you can simply control a thing? Now, there's a lot of I just unloaded a lot of baggage on you and I understand that. And do I have all the answers? Hell, no. I don't. But what I've seen after being in Bitcoin for long enough I started really looking at free and open source software as something that I'd never looked at before, something vitally important.
But you know what really happened to make me really move into that direction? A direction that many other people in this space had already seen, but I was it hadn't clicked just yet. I saw it as important. I saw it as critical. But the light bulb didn't go off until Noster. And that's when I realized that's when I realized that we can build our way out of this with these Freedom Tech tools, but it's not enough. We have to figure out a way to build what would be considered in modern times as in today brand new legal structures except that it's not not a legal structure. It's a logic structure. I think that that's what it should be. We should be building businesses and companies and have value exchange that is a has a logical structure, but it's not technically something to do with the legal lay of the land because it is clear that that is being used as a weapon against us.
If they don't like what we're doing they'll just build a new law and all of a sudden what we've been doing for 10 years is now illegal. Do you see what I'm saying? How do we build something that looks like a company that we can have a product that is sold that does not look like a company and has no product to sell? I know I'm probably confusing you. But I don't see any other way out except to build our way out Bitcoin e cash Lightning Network Fedimint's Gnoster I'm missing something. This is a this is a good start. Free and open source software, the extension of what that that I just mentioned, the Bitcoin and all that, free and open source software needs to extend amongst well beyond that. And it has been for decades and I wasn't seeing what it was doing.
Now I can see it plainly. Watching Durov basically roll over after 6 days or 7 or however whatever it was that he was arrested in Paris. He rolled over within 2 weeks, and Telegram is no longer going to be what Telegram was. That's all it took. And there's more. Because Ripple's co founder is among Kamala Harris's new corporate endorsers. CoinDesk, Jesse Hamilton, Chamomile Shamba is writing this one, and I'm not gonna read all of it. Ripple cofounder and executive chairman, Chris Larsen, is among the 88 corporate leaders who endorsed vice president Kamala Harris to be the next United States president in a letter on Friday, revealing potential differences among company leaders. While while Larson joined, other high profile CEOs come from the likes of review site Yelp, cloud storage company Box, social media platform Snapchat's snap, and more. According to the letter CNBC was first to report on, Ripple and CEO Brad Garlinghouse has targeted prominent Democrats in their campaign contributions.
The majority of the company's contributions have gone to pro crypto super political action committees or PACs, like the Fair Shake political action committee, which is focused on getting crypto friendly candidates elected from both major parties. Ripple Labs has been among the chief backers of Fairshake and its affiliates, giving about $48,000,000 to influence the 2024 elections. While the industry's combined efforts has tried to walk a tight rope between the 2 major political parties, Ripple's giving has leaned into the Republican side in one key situation, trying to defeat crypto critic senator Elizabeth Warren Garlinghouse, the company's CEO, has also reportedly given 50,000 to a super PAC aimed at building a Republican majority in the senate according to disclosures to the Federal Elections Commission.
So his political sympathies may be at odds with the letter Larson signed which favors a Democratic administration under Harris. The letter argued that Harris would continue to advance fair and predictable policies that support the rule of law, stability, and the sound business environment. Ripple has been in a protracted fight with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission over accusations that the company violated securities law in its, in its sale of the token XRP. We don't need to know anymore here. Chris Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse are not diametrically opposed at all.
They're not. They're playing both sides of the fence because they've they know how to do this. That's why they're not in jail. They know how to do this. They know how to buy them off. This is the kind of chicanery that is going has plagued, is plaguing, and will continue to plague this industry. And it's not just this industry. It plagues it plagues our freedom. It causes people like Durov to be plucked off of his private plane in Paris and then rolled over in a week to where his platform is not going to look anything like it used to look like. Anybody who was depending on Telegram, you can kiss that shit goodbye.
Now these assholes are putting themselves squarely up the butts of these politicians. And if you don't think it's not going to have an effect, then you're wrong. So this shit now gets worse and it becomes even more imperative that we build our way out of these people's view to become invisible, but visible only to ourselves. And now, Ayn Rand comes back to mind. Galt's Gulch The whole shield around Galt's Gulch that made it invisible. I don't see any other way out. She saw it in the fifties or forties or whatever the hell. Was it the thirties? It may have been the thirties when she wrote that shit. But it's somewhere around there, when she's writing Atlas Shrugged, she knew.
It was just going to be this shit storm forever and ever and ever. We have so many talented people in this space and it's attracting more every day. And they are it's chewing riches and fame and glory and whatever, you know, they're they're they don't seem to care because they know if they if if they do care about the the legacy world, that their children are gonna have to live in one that's even worse than today. And while you think it can't get any worse, believe me, it can. Because you know how many jobs we added? Because the jobs report dropped.
We added a 142,000 jobs in August. And that likely sets the stage for a 25 basis point rate cut by the Federal Reserve, CoinDesk. Steven Alpher is writing US job growth was slightly less than expectations in August, but probably not weak enough to prompt the Federal Reserve to begin its rate cutting cycle later this month with a 50 basis point move as people want. According to Friday's morning's nonfarm payroll report from the government, which we can't trust, by the way, the US added a 142,000 jobs in August versus The Economist forecast for a 160,000. And July's 89,000 jobs, which was revised from a previously reported 114,000.
Now, the unemployment rate edged down to 4.2 percent in line with expectations and from a 4.3% print in July. Down sizably in the days leading up to the report, the price of Bitcoin rose about a well, 1% to 56,500. In the minutes following the report, the price remains lower by 5% from week ago levels. And now we've seen an even sharper dip. We'll get to that. A check of traditional market shows US stock index futures trimming early large losses with the Nasdaq now lower by just 0.5%. And now all these numbers that I'm about to read, which I'm not going to read anymore, they're all out of date by about a couple of hours. So here's the main question. Will the Fed cut 25 or 50 basis points?
Always a key data point. The jobs numbers for August had taken on extra importance given that the Federal Reserve is set to begin cutting rates at its mid September meeting. That's this month. The conventional thinking believed the US central bank would enter this monetary easing cycle cautiously by lowering its benchmark Fed funds by a mere 25 basis points. The Fed, though, might be swayed by a weak August employment report to instead slash rates a full 50 basis points at that meeting. The headline numbers from this report doesn't appear to make the case for a 50 basis point move.
I'm pausing to let you know that's why the markets are in the red today. Everybody wanted 50. Everybody wanted 50, but the jobs report wasn't weak enough. We didn't have enough people in bread lines to make money. We didn't have enough people not going to be able to pay their fucking rent so that we could make some money. So everybody's fleeing to the dollar. This is why. The downward revisions to not just July but also June are somewhat troublesome, though. Taken together, the 3 month average job growth is just 116,000 and that is sure to come up in the Fed's discussions.
See, they're they're still hoping. They're they're they're they're hoping for it. It's hopium. It's hopium. They're smoking a big old bong of it. A check of the other report details show a somewhat stronger picture. However, average hourly earnings rose 0.4% in August. In July's well, sorry. I'm sorry. On a year over year basis, average hourly earnings were higher by 3.8 percent versus expectations of 3.7 in July's 3.6. Quote, it's a solid, if unspectacular report, that largely confirms the cooling trend in place, wrote economist Joe Bresalis, minutes following the release.
The details, he said, support a 25 basis point rate cut from the Fed. Alright. So that's why everything is freaking red. It's why it's all red But there's this little note that I caught early this morning when I woke up and I saw that we were going to dump The Federal Reserve's Waller, at a Q and A, said that the Fed probably waited too long to stop buying MBS as the housing market was on fire. What is MBS? Mortgage backed securities. You remember 2,008? Do you remember 2,008? Every institution was buying mortgage backed securities, like like fireman's pension funds, and teachers pension funds, and banks, and brokerage houses, and exchanges, and like massive massive institutions.
And bank you know, the banks themselves were so exposed to mortgage backed securities that the second that shit started to unravel, so did the banks. Now it's the government of the United States. And even the Federal Reserve's own I think he's the New York chair of the or the the chair of the New York Fed. Even he's like, yeah, we probably waited just a bit too long to stop buying this garbage because the housing market was on fire. They bought into the bullshit just like everybody did in, you know, prior 2,008. And now we've got these dismal job numbers, right? All the markets are in the red.
Bitcoin is completely correlated to all of it because everybody's running to dollars. Hence, why the dollar strengthened to something like 103 on the dollar strength chart. And somebody speculated earlier today that this might have to do still with the yen carry trade being torpedoed on August 5th. Right? And I remember we dumped all the way down to 49,000? Do you remember we actually went down to 49,000 on August 5th on the price of Bitcoin, and then we came right the hell back up to what, like, 60 I can't remember what it was. 60 something. It doesn't really matter because we're not there right now.
Because everybody is is getting out and they're getting into the dollar. Because everybody is terrified. It doesn't matter what market you're in. In fact, let's run the numbers. Oil, energy markets are all down. West Texas Intermediate is down over 2 points to 67 dollars 67¢ a barrel. Brent, North Sea is down exactly the same, about 2.14 percent to oh, no. It just flipped over. 2.23 percent to $71.07 a barrel. Natural gas is the only thing making a gain, but not much. Just 2 thirds of a point to $2.6 no. $2.26 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is down 1 and a half, so enjoy your dollar 89 a gallon gasoline even though you're not going to find that price, guaranteed.
Gold and silver, all the metal rocks are dying. Well, not dying, but they definitely got they got raked over the coals. Gold is down 3 quarters of a point to 2523. Silver is down 3 points. Platinum is down almost a point. Copper is down 1.6. Palladium is down over 3 points. Ag, is it any better today? No. The only thing is that's a winner today is cocoa. 0.06 percent to the upside. The biggest loser? Let's see if I can find it. 3.4% down for coffee. Yay. Cheap coffee. Live cattle is down almost a point. Lean hogs are down just over a point. Feeder cattle are down 1.41%. Now the legacy equity market, surely, surely somebody's buying the blood. Nope. They're still bleeding them out because the Dow is down a full point. S and p is down 1.69%.
Nasdaq is down 2a half. The S and P mini, down 1 a quarter. What's Bitcoin doing? $53,840 per coin. We have now gone down to a $1,060,000,000,000 market cap and we can only get 21.5 ounces of shiny metal rocks with that one Bitcoin of which there are 19,750,342.99 of and yet these still remain low. 0.06 BTC on average on a per block basis. How many blocks but a 131? Carrying 262,678 transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 4 satoshis per vbyte. Low priorities are 4 satoshis per vbyte. Doesn't make any sense, does it? I saw a spike earlier today went all the way up to 8 satoshis per vbyte.
So what's what's selling? Did anybody see? I I mean, I've been scanning the news, like, for the last well, I've been bringing you news since I've been home from Colorado and I look at these markets every single day for you. You know what I haven't seen? I'm not just the markets but the news. I haven't seen very many or any at all in fact news articles about people putting their Bitcoin back on exchanges. Like, I haven't seen headlines like like bitcoin hodlers rush to put bitcoin back on exchanges. $100,000,000 inflows per day to coinbase in bitcoin. I haven't seen anything like that.
Yet, it's it doesn't seem to be, you know, retail, the the people like us that actually use the Bitcoin network, this seems to be all book value. It's like exchanges or or or trades on exchanges of Bitcoin that was already there, but I had seen nothing but Bitcoin coming off exchanges pre August 5th. And I haven't seen very many stories at all. Actually, like I said, none at all about great gobs of Bitcoin going rushing to exchanges. So what the hell is going on? I don't know. If you can tell me, if you know, if you've got the intelligence on that, please let me know what that intelligence is because I'm confused. But, you know, it's okay. It's not like we haven't been here before. We've been in here or I've been here since 2015. I've seen this many many times.
It's just it's but now that institutions are involved, it's a little has a little bit of a different flavor. But maybe you can just get Uncle Jim'd. That was episode 947 of Bitcoin and Dovrovko with 2,290 sat says apologies. I am not more timely with my boosts. Fountain probably counts the 1st day the most heavily. I'll work on that. That's okay, Dabravco. I appreciate it though. The federalis like to f with Texas. Department of Transportation even made a rule tied to money, go figure, that electronic road signs can't be funny after TxDOT kept becoming viral for their funny quips promoting safe traveling habits. How effing petty can you be?
Pretty petty. I'm so I'm I'm actually disappointed with TxDOT, but it doesn't surprise me. Dark with 2121 says, awesome episode. Thanks, man. God's death with 537 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. The bird the bird. I don't know if that's actually it. The bird the and then a whole bunch of underline hashes. 500 says, BlackRock is going to do what you said, but only after they buy up more BTC on the cheap. Gin, sue the government so they so then they win on both sides. Maybe it's meant then. Then sue the government so then they win on both sides. Good show, by the way. Oh, thanks dude. I hope this one is as good too. Anyway, where else? Oh, Hugh Janice with 200 says, shout out to my missus Eun.
Love the show. Oh, thanks, man. I appreciate that. S w bratcher says nothing well, he actually says, Mastercard to allow spins from your own wallets in the EU. And I don't know if that was something that I wrote or not, but Dabravco comes back with another 100. The Mastercard is a good notch in the belt of adoption. With f and f, let me know how that goes. Not sure what that means, Dabravco. It's probably because my brain cells aren't working all that well. Also, does the new fountain take, more phone data? The possibility has kept me from updating.
I don't know. I've had fountain on my phone for so long that I can't remember if I what it takes. I'm I'm not sure, man. Oscar Mayer is your guy. On Noster, just type, you know, at symbol Oscar and see if Oscar Mayer populates. He's the guy behind fountain, that might be a good question to ask him. Stacy with a 100 says great show. Xplbzx, says I appreciate the 947 shows, wait, I I hold on. I appreciate that 947 shows later. There are still 0 dads or 0 ads on this show. Alright. Well, yeah. I'm I'm trying to do that, probably because I don't want meetings. I don't know.
That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. Only 3. Count them. 3. 1, 2, 3 examples of, quote, illicit tornado cash use cited by the United States Treasury in the sanctions case. A 5th Circuit panel questioned the United States Treasury's classification of Tornado Cash as a corporation, calling its reasoning slippery during oral arguments on Tuesday. Tornado Cash users appealed a Texas federal court's decision upholding the treasury sanctions. The treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash after discovering, quote, North Korean hackers used it at least 3 times, you know, out of 1,000,000 of transactions to launder 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.
Users argue Tornado Cash is an open source privacy tool and not a sanctionable entity. That's right. Build yourself to invisibility, ladies and gentlemen. The Treasury Department argues it can sanction Tornado Cash for saying the crypto project acts like a corporation rather than ownerless code. Bradley Henslewood of the United States Department of Justice noted that users own torn, t o r n, a token similar to corporate stock. That's not a very good sentence. US circuit Judge Court Engelhardt noted that out of 1,000,000 of transactions, the agency found only 3 instances of money laundering using Tornado Cash asking why the existing designations for North Korea were insufficient to achieve the agency's purpose, reports Law 360, quote, you're a solution in search of an entity in a way, she added.
United States Circuit Judge Edith Jones also expressed skepticism of the Treasury's categorization, noting that North Korea could still use the protocol regardless if the sanctions were in place or not. In fact, just earlier this week, there were reports that a hacker entity, which stole over $230,000,000 in user assets from an Indian crypto exchange, Wazirix, started to move funds through Tornado Cash in attempt to obfuscate obfuscate the trail of funds. Quote, but the 3 transactions that we're talking about are instances where, oh my god, North Korea stole 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars of cryptocurrency. DOJ's Hensalwood said, adding that it's important because by sanctioning entities that aid North Korea, their ability to help the rogue state is lessened. Do you can you smell the bullshit?
Can you smell it? US circuit judge Don Willett also asked if it mattered that the people who made tornado cash made a profit. Plaintiff's representative Cannon k Shamgan, I can't pronounce the name, said anyone making money from tornado cash was doing so through a service besides the protocol itself. I'm not sure if I agree with that. Property includes rights like possession and use and enjoyment. None of those rights are implicated here. This application exists on the internet. It's not even controlled in any meaningful way through the Tornado Cash website, he added.
Separately from this appeal, the United States government is criminally prosecuting the cofounders of Tornado Cash, Roman Seminov and Roman Storm. Seminov is fighting the charges while Storm remains at large. Another cofounder of Tornado Cash, Alexei Pertsev, has already been sentenced into a 64 months or in the for sentenced to 64 months in the Netherlands and is currently in the process of appealing that decision. In another related case, the United States government also went after the founders of Bitcoin privacy tool, samurai wallet. The next hearing in the samurai developers case is expected to take place on September 17th. All of the Department of Justice's arguments are bullshit.
Re remember what I what I was telling you about was either yesterday or the day before, the FBI dropped their warning that North Korea, oh my God, it's always North Korea, is trying to abscond and hack funds out of the Bitcoin exchange traded funds like Fidelity and Ark and BlackRock. And now here's North Korea, it's North Korea. I'm surprised that they haven't just done nothing but Russians. I mean, that would I mean, that that that would seem to to wash with the theme that the United States has had for, I don't know, since the elections before actually, the 2016 elections.
Russia Russia Russia. It's a it's a Russian disinformation operation. It's Russia this and Russia that. And now we're just gonna use North Korea. Why? I I I don't know. I I wish I did, but I just this is nothing but bullshit. Every argument here is all bullshit. And if the Texas court if the 5th actually, it's not it's the court's in Texas, but it's the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. They really need to eviscerate the DOJ on this one. And just I don't know if they can vacate this thing or not, but they basically need to tell the DOJ to go sit and spin. Go pound sand, brother. But it doesn't matter which way this rolls out.
It doesn't like, if we were to breathe breathe a huge sigh of relief and think that we're all going to be safe because the 5th Circuit's Court of Appeal tells the DOJ to go pound sand, it won't matter. The only way to get out of this mess is to build our way out of it. I wish I could program. I really wish I do. I wish I could be one of the developers for Noster. I really wish I do. I'd apply for an open sats grant or or Human Rights Foundation grant. I would just do that. Because I cannot leave my children in this place.
We have to build ourselves the invisibility cloak that we need. We need to build the companies that cannot be seen. We need to build the routes that are blinded. It's not just building Nostr and e cash and Bitcoin and Lightning Network. No. It's way more than that. It's entire logic structures that we have to build. What does a company? What does an invisible company look like? How do you sell products? How do you pay employees? You can't you can't do it through any of what we have already. There can be no payroll tax. And it's not because well, I'm tax is theft. Let's get that clear. But it's not because I want to evade the tax. And it's not because I don't want there to be a tax. This is different. There needs to be no trail at all.
Everybody working for company x or, well, let's say company y because x is a destroyed letter because of e Elon Musk, like the retirement accounts. What is what do those look like in a in a blinded company, Which doesn't exist, by the way. I mean, the the structure I'm talking about doesn't exist. Nobody's ever had to think of it before. Now we better start thinking about how to do this shit. How how how do we take on completely new identities that do not have a social security number? And they're they're what does health care look like? What what the hell does insurance look like? How do you insure your house?
How do you do any of this? And you know what? What we should probably do? We should probably look at how the drug lords of Colombia did their shit. But it won't matter because a lot of them got caught. And I'm not saying I wanna be a Colombian drug lord. I don't wanna destroy people's lives. I'm not in this to figure out a way to cheat people out of their money or destroy their lives. I am in this to destroy governments of the west at this point. That's a horrible thing to say. I know. You're anti American. What under what circumstances do you think the United States government is in this for you?
What have they done in the last 25 years that is good for you? Do you think they're working for you? Do you think they want to keep you safe? Have they? Have they demonstrated any competency whatsoever that they can do that? And even beyond the competency, have they demonstrated any any actual plan that doesn't do something other than take more of your money, more of your time, and more of your good feelings. You know how hard it is for people to be in a good mood nowadays? It's not because this is all an accident. This is because a very small group of people have basically decided about think about 25 years ago, we've had enough of you people.
We don't care about you anymore. We'll we'll say that we do, but we don't. Because all of their actions lead me to believe that. It's more more than a gut feeling. So I come back to the question, What structures aside from free and open source software, which I believe is the underpinning of the new technology for where we're going. How do we build on top of that non technological logic structures that are basically like businesses but cannot be seen by any government in the world because all of them are corrupt. Every single one of them. I have no respect for a single government whether they're west, east, south, whatever.
Don't give a shit. I automatically assume that they're all corrupt, they are all evil, and they either don't care about you or they actually hate you. This is where I've come to. And it's not because I'm in a bad mood because I got a red dildo. I've seen those before. Okay? I've seen them many, many times. That's not it. But this Dharav thing, he rolled over inside of 2 weeks, and Telegram is now destroyed. Well, actually, it will be. You just haven't seen it yet. You haven't seen it yet. But it will be. We're left with the very things that most of the people that so many people in Bitcoin that so many other people listen to refuse.
Even Parker Lewis, one of my favorite people in the space, looks at seems to have an attitude of Noster that is just thumbing his nose at it or or turning his nose up at it, and I don't get it. I don't how easy is it to make people roll over? Is it their influence? Is it their 1,000,000,000 of dollars in their yacht? Is Michael Saylor possibly going to be absconded with in that same way that Durov just woke up and said, hey, by the way, we're gonna strip out all this shit and we're gonna we are gonna moderate the living crap out of you guys from now on because you can't be trusted. Is that what it is?
Well, we can soften the mood as we go into this weekend because God only knows what happens this weekend. I almost have a gut feeling that this entire week because I told you I told you guys on Tuesday that it was gonna be a week of bad news to hold fast. You know? Don't freak out. If you got hey. If you gotta pay a bill, I don't mind that with, you know, with your Bitcoin. But for those people that are just gonna like, you know what? I'm done. I'm out. And you're gonna see it. You're gonna see that shit in droves. It always happens. Right? The the weak the people that said that they were strong hands get really weak, and they sell everything. Yeah. Don't do that. If you need to make rent, sell a little bit. Keep most of it. Right? If you gotta do that, that I mean, I there's no problem with that. I'm not gonna look down at you. And even if I did, you can just look up at me and say, fuck you. I don't care about you. But in either event, I told you that this was going to happen. Right?
So this week, if I was somebody sitting on a boatload of Bitcoin and I really wanted to make more Bitcoin, I would continuously sell, especially after every single one of these reports, which as we've seen has happened, which is exactly what I told you was going to happen. And then over the weekend when the markets can't aren't open, the people that sold their positions in the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF can't do anything when they see a green candle over the weekend. Do I do I know that that's going to happen? No. It could go the other way. It could still go south. We could see 52. We could see 50. People are calling for 49.
Some asshole out there is calling for 40. I don't know what it's gonna do. Right? But if I was the guy that could actually do that kind of shit, had enough Bitcoin that if I throw it on an exchange and I start market selling and start buying, you know, buying it back at the bottom and then market sell some more and then buy it back at that local bottom and then rinse and repeat for the entire week to the point that by the time you get into Friday, everybody that was going to sell their institutional positions is basically out and then buy it all back.
So wouldn't surprise me. I'm not gonna swear by it, but it would not surprise me. Okay, so let's get into the weekend with a little bit of fun. Reply guy on Nostr. Dude is pissing people off left and right. If you're not on Nostr, why? Bring your talent, bring your thoughts, bring your energy to Nostr. Not to Telegram, which is gonna be eviscerated, not to Twitter, which has already been eviscerated, not to any of the other legacy media stuff Bring it to Nostra because Nostra is more than media It really is If you haven't tried it, it doesn't cost you nothing And you will if you stay around long enough and you experiment long enough and you ask me questions, you can ask me questions, I'm none your business on on Nostr, right? Just just look me up, ask me a question.
I'll answer or if I don't know, I'll send you somewhere there is. But there's but one of the things that I love about Nostr is that every once in a while you get these weird things that start occurring. Right? And meant like, people like maybe like Parker Lewis might say, see that's why Nostra will fail. Uh-uh. No. No. So reply guy. What is reply guy? Reply guy is a bot that is replying to almost every note that there is. And it says it says something like, good morning from reply guy. But what's interesting is that it actually gives the relay that it's coming from, right? So it's like WSS.
And for those of you who don't know what nostril is, relays is the way that we're propagating and storing notes around the nostril network. Right? So I write a note I say, hi, good morning, and then it goes to like a relay that I'm or several relays that I'm subscribed to and they all start with wsscolonforward/forward/likenoster.snort.social. Right? It's like a server. It's just an open server. It's out there. It takes in notes if you're subscribed to it. If it's got, you know, read and write capabilities, it'll save your note and then it will like if so like it like if somebody else is subscribed to that same, same, relay, they'll be able to read that note. The relays start talking to each other and, it takes a while, but, you know, the the notes start getting propagated around.
But these this bot has a particular server or a particular relay that it's writing from and or writing to and reading from. And it's causing some problems. Because all like like somebody said earlier this morning, the noster is almost unusable now. Okay. Yeah. Because I write a note and I get a reply guy and it's just this all it says is g m and then, like, exclamation point, couple of emojis, and the relay. Except this. Here's the here's the biggest problem. It's not just one reply guy. It's thousands of them or at least 100 at this point.
And they all have the same emblem, right? Or the the same PFP, your profile picture. It's the same ones like reply guy and it's like blue and yellow. Right? But they all have different in pubs. And now I'm starting to see multiple different relays that these in pubs these reply guy in pubs are coming from. And they're replying, like, I will now I can write a note, and I'll get 15 different in pub reply guys all saying good morning emoji emoji emoji and then whatever relay that they're writing from. And this has caused consternation that started happening yesterday. So, like, that way, you know, when you write a note and 15 to 25 different reply guys, you know, reply to it, you think your note got, like, oh my god. Look at this. I got 25 replies, but only one of them is from a human.
You can see how that might piss some people off. You can see why somebody like, I don't know, Parker Lewis might say, see, that's why Nostra is going to be unusable. Now before I tell you what I think is happening I want to take you back back the way Sherman set the way back machine for, like, 4 months ago. I was getting followed by a new like several new account it just started happening one day. And for about 2 months, I would write I would write something like a note and then, like, I'd go away and I'd come back to my notifications and I'd see that, you know, a whole bunch of people, like, you know, hearted my or, thumbed up my note. But what I was really noticing was the fact that I was getting, like, 55 followers a day.
Sometimes I would get as many as a 100 followers a day. Most of the time, however, it was, like, between 5 and 10. But the PFP, remember I told you that the reply guy PFP is like this little robot looking thing is blue and yellow or whatever it is. This one was a whole bunch of concentric concentric circles of different colors, but, like, actually of 2 different colors. It was like red and yellow or orange and yellow or something like that. But they they had it to where, like, there was like 5 circles and they would all be broken like, like a little gap in the circle and they'd all be rotated in a different position.
And each one of those was a different in pub, but it was relentless. I think I gained like 400 followers if not if not a couple actually, I probably gained more like 3,000 followers off this thing. They're all fake, right? They're all like it's a bot and it's just this it's not a bot these are all bots, but these bots are being constructed autonomously by some kind of compute automated computer program or something like that script, right? It's just like a script kitty. And it's annoying when you get all these followers and you think oh, well, I get like some like thing people are listening to what I say and then it's just garbage. Right? Well, that went on for about 2 full months and then it just stopped.
And I've never seen him again ever. And now we have this reply guy. He's not following anybody, but he's liking all the posts and, like, well, they're like like they because there's hundreds of them now. They like all the posts and then they say good morning and then they reply reply to the post saying good morning emoji emoji emoji and then whatever it's relay is. So this has prompted several people, to, hold on. I'm looking at something here. So actually wait wait wait wait wait. Yeah, I'm not gonna do that one. So I'm about here.
Here's my thought of what this is. Now keep in mind both these stories. A bunch of fake in pubs interacting with real human accounts, making life kind of miserable. Reply guy is actually more miserable than the follow guy the the the guy that happened about, like, you know, 4 months ago. So I wrote a note on Nostr earlier this morning that said hear me out. Reply guy is a developer antagonizing Nostr so they can see how to fix it. Hashtag adversarial thinking is back? That's what I thought that was my gut feeling with the follow bots.
Now with the reply guy bots, I'm thinking the same thing. I'm thinking that there is a Nostra developer out there that is savaging the Nostra network and that developer is indeed savaging the network. This is a lot of, like, wasted data. It's all crap. It doesn't mean anything. It's all bullshit. And it's dust. It's noise. We don't need it. And yet I believe that the developer that is doing this is doing this because the developer loves Nostr and is trying to figure out ways to break Nostr so that other developers, including the developer himself or herself, can fix it against state actors or institutional actors or people like Elon Musk's how do we screw with these guys so that we can have Twitter and we can be the town square forever and ever and Nostra will just die.
That's what I believe is happening. I think they're actually doing it out of love for the network. So please, instead of intake antagonizing the reply guy thing, think about what I was saying when we have to build ourselves out of these situations. It starts right here with reply guy. How do we guard against that shit happening? And keep the platform open. And make it to where if somebody like, oh, I'm not even gonna give a name. So some major developer, Nostr, is picked off a plane in, you know, London and said, hey, you're gonna you're gonna fix Nostr the way we want and have that developer say, I don't know what to do. I I can't help you on that. Because they can't.
And meanwhile, we're down here in the trenches thinking about how how do we stop Reply Guy without stopping me posting a picture of my cat? These are the ways that we build our way out and everybody can do this. You can think about, you know, given what you know about how things work, what would you do? And maybe, just maybe, give that idea to a developer. So when stuff like reply guy happens don't fret don't freak out use it as a way to help build ourselves an invisibility cloak against those people that are truly brutal to us You do that over the weekend and I will see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 10:17 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 6th day of September 2024, and this is episode I just had it. I think it's 648.
Is it? Yeah. No. 648, my ass. 948. We're damn near to 50 away from the 1000th show of the Bitcoin and podcast. Wow, man. That's a that's a hell of a run, right? So what do we got? Dharav has made a statement. Dharav is the Telegram's founder, and we've got a little bit more than that going on with the, with Dharav. We got a couple of things to talk about with Jirov. I'm gonna talk a little bit about one of Ripple co founder because you need to know what side of the fence the people that do the whole Ripple thing. You need to know what side of this what side of the fence that they are truly truly sitting on. You don't want to have anything to do with these guys and you don't want to have anything to do with Ripple either.
Jobs numbers came in. You might have noticed that there's a bit of a red dildo going on. Well, we'll we'll talk a little bit about that. There's also a couple of things that I wanna talk about. Actually, there's at least one thing that I wanna talk about with the, feds, Waller. He had a Q and A and he made it a statement that I think is rather chilling when you read it more than once. And then we'll do a little bit of market stuff and then we're gonna talk a bit about the tornado cash court case that's going on because they're railroading these poor dudes from tornado cash.
And then I want to get into a little bit of Reply Guy. But first, Durov has announced that he is disabling personal geolocation from Telegram and I guess he can do that because he's, I guess, out on bail. Vince Quill, Cointelegraph, let's crank this son of a bitch up. Telegram founder Pavel Durov revealed that Telegram is cutting certain features from the platform, including media uploads to the platform's telegraph blog and disabling the people nearby feature in a September 6th announcement. Durov told his followers that media uploads to the blogging platform were misused by malicious actors, explaining that the vast majority of the Telegram community was not abusing these features. However, Durov made it clear that the 0.001% involved in illicit activities pose a disproportionate risk to the vast majority of law abiding users on Telegram.
The Telegram co founder also announced that the individual geolocation tracking would be ditched for a businesses nearby option. Durov likewise claimed that this personal geolocation feature was only used by a tiny minority of Telegram users. Okay, so I guess that means that you had to turn it on and that it was off by default. Let's hope that that is indeed the case. This year, we're committed to turning moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise, Durov concluded. Pausing for effect. Let's read that again.
This year, we are committed to turning moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise. I'm gonna tell you right now they got to him. They got to him. We all know how they got to him. But if there's any question in your mind that he is know that he is uncompromised, that should be swept under the rug right now. And I'm not saying anything bad about him. He's a human being. He has a life to live. He has 1,000,000,000 of dollars. He has a lot to lose. But make no mistake, they have successfully compromised Durov.
French prosecutors have alleged that the Telegram founder and the platform were complicit in the spread of, of course, child pornography by not enforcing stricter content moderation policies. On August 28, 2024, French authorities charged Durov with money laundering, criminal association, and providing cryptology services without a license. French authorities issued arrest warrants for Pavel Durov and his brother, Nikolai, in March of 2024. French law enforcement officials claimed that the Telegram founders refused to cooperate with an earlier investigation by failing to identify a specific Telegram user who was allegedly spreading child abuse materials.
According to French officials, the probe started after cybercrime investigators from the Paris prosecutor's office uncovered an illicit Telegram chat room attempting to lure underage girls into the room and exploit them. On September 5th, Durov broke his silence for the first time since his arrest and took to his Telegram channel to clarify the events since his arrest. And since that time, Telegram has signaled a shift in content moderation policies by changing the language surrounding the moderation of private chats in the Telegram frequently asked questions section and trimming certain features.
Okay, so first I'm not an advocate of illicit materials being exchanged on any platform. But I'm also not an advocate of threatening somebody with their life, their security, their future, their possessions, and everything about them to immediately affect a change that you want to see that I guarantee has nothing to do with child pornography. They don't give a shit. It's like everything else. Hey, do we want to wrap it in terrorism or do we want to wrap this little gift box with child pornography and child exploitation? It's a meme if you haven't seen it, right? The picture like it's a cartoon of uncle Sam with a box and he's coming up to, like, a gift wrapping place and the other dude's like, do you want this wrapped in child pornography or do you want it wrapped in, you know, terrorism?
Because that's the only two choices the United States government and the rest of the Western governments have. That that's it. It's a is a mind manipulation to get you to think that everybody is a criminal, except, of course, for the United States and Western governments, of which they are all criminals. They should all be put on trial. They should all be drugged out in the street and at least hard and feathered and run out on a rail. I've said it before. I'll say it again. But Dharov is fully compromised. And it was very quickly done, which makes me wonder what those discussions were.
And I doubt very seriously that we're gonna find out anything more when I read you Durov's statement. And this is from his direct telegram. It says, Thanks, everyone, for your support and love. Last month I got interviewed by police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told I may be personally responsible for other people's illegal use of Telegram because the French authorities didn't receive responses from Telegram. This was surprising for several reasons. 1. Telegram has an official representative in the European Union that accepts and replies to EU requests. Its email address has been publicly available for anyone in the EU who Googles Telegram EU address for law enforcement.
I gotta stop there. Because even though that that the way he said it is like, well, all you had to do was Google Telegram EU address for law enforcement there, mister officer. No. That's sort of not the way you do it. What you do is you build you build and write a memorandum on Telegram stationery, and you give the exact email address and the reason for that email address's existence and you send it to every authority under the sun. Alright? And I'm not saying that because I love the authorities. I just said that I don't. But this, honestly, this is a little bit of 6th grader logic.
Oh, well, all you had to do was email Telegram EU address for law enforcement. Oh, that I that's not gonna wash. Okay? So number 2, the French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France. 3. If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages, is a rather misguided approach.
Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools. And in there is the seed of the future. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools. This is why everybody in Bitcoin, everybody in Lightning, everybody in eCash, everybody in Nostr, everybody in Fedimint, all of this was we jumped the gun of creating companies. Maybe that's what Satoshi was talking about so long ago when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks started accepting donations in bitcoin.
You know, I think that the seed of what what was just said by Durov is there. That no longer are we allowed to build tools and have companies if we're going to be thrown in prison and have all our shit taken from us. Which is why it's so incredibly important that free and open source software and freedom technology be done in a way that is not done the way it is now. I mean, how to make money from a thing without having a company. How to get support financial honest to God pay the bills pay the rent pay the stuff buy the food get the gas. How can we do that without having a company?
I think this is a major question that needs to be examined and answered for us to thrive in the rest of this century. Because it is very clear to me that the governments, especially of the Western world, view everybody else in the world as well as their own citizens as criminal and as somebody that they would rather not see walking around. It's sad. I shouldn't be that much of a cynic, but I cannot help it. They are giving me nothing else to look at. Let's continue. Establishing the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You have to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements and local laws with EU laws. You have to take into account technological limitations.
As a platform, you want to process or you want your process to be consistent globally while also ensuring that they are not abused in countries with weak rule of law. We've been committed to engaging with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles. Our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes, but we've always been open to dialogue and sometimes we can't agree with a country's regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. And in those cases, we are ready to leave that country. We've done it many times.
When Russia demanded we hand over encryption keys to enable surveillance, we refused, and Telegram got banned in Russia. When Iran demanded we block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused and Telegram got banned in Iran. We are prepared to leave markets that aren't compatible with our principles, because we're not doing this for money. We're driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated. All of that does not mean Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities could be confused by where to send requests is something that we should improve. But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue.
We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports. We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster. However, we hear voices saying that it's not enough. Telegram's abrupt increase in user count to 950,000,000 caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That's why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We've already stated that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon. Yeah, and he did. I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram and the social networking industry as a whole safer and stronger.
Thanks again for your love and memes. Man, I mean, there's a lot honestly, this is kind of creeping me out. His tone is playful, yet there's 6th grade logic in this whole thing about all they had to do was email or Google how to get a hold of Telegram by EU authorities or whatever it was. Right? And this this sign off, thanks again for your love and memes, The fuck is this? We're we're we're literally talking about the lives of people being absolutely hammered and destroyed because they went to Telegram to figure out how they could communicate with each other in authoritarian regimes.
He talks about how he's, like, perfectly happy to say, fuck you, and pull out of Russia and pull out of Iran and just, you know, let the authoritarian regimes do what they may. Because we're not in it for the money, but yet we're what? Look, I don't want Durov to go to prison. I don't want him to lose any of his money. I really don't. But no one's taking a stand because no one can. Because we've been lured by money and riches and wealth. It's like for the for the United States, that shit started in earnest in the very early 19 eighties with Robin Leach's lifestyles of the rich and famous, where they showed you how much of a schmo you were every single week.
How you didn't have the mansion, how you didn't have the jet, how you didn't have all of the stuff that these beautiful people have. And it's not done us any good. Durov, I think, is just a victim of the same shit. He's got he's a billionaire. He doesn't want to lose it, and he will do whatever it takes to keep it. That's the carrot and the stick all in one. It's not the carrot then the stick, it's the carrot and the stick all at one. The carrot is the fucking stick. This is a carrot that if you get walked upside the head with, you're going to writhe on the ground like a baby and then go feed them.
It's the wealth that we were promised, the wealth that we were shown that we could get, but we don't have and until you do you're a schmo that keeps us under the thumb. That's the real prison. And I'm not saying sell everything and wear sackcloth and go out and hunt squirrels in the forest for the rest of your life. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that it is imperative for all of us to start really endeavoring on how to build a system that somehow or another creates wealth for the people that build it, but somehow is completely untraceable that nobody knows who built it.
This goes back to this thing that was said a long time ago by very wealthy people. I don't own anything, but I control everything. You don't really want to own anything because they can take it away from you. Why would you want to when you can simply control a thing? Now, there's a lot of I just unloaded a lot of baggage on you and I understand that. And do I have all the answers? Hell, no. I don't. But what I've seen after being in Bitcoin for long enough I started really looking at free and open source software as something that I'd never looked at before, something vitally important.
But you know what really happened to make me really move into that direction? A direction that many other people in this space had already seen, but I was it hadn't clicked just yet. I saw it as important. I saw it as critical. But the light bulb didn't go off until Noster. And that's when I realized that's when I realized that we can build our way out of this with these Freedom Tech tools, but it's not enough. We have to figure out a way to build what would be considered in modern times as in today brand new legal structures except that it's not not a legal structure. It's a logic structure. I think that that's what it should be. We should be building businesses and companies and have value exchange that is a has a logical structure, but it's not technically something to do with the legal lay of the land because it is clear that that is being used as a weapon against us.
If they don't like what we're doing they'll just build a new law and all of a sudden what we've been doing for 10 years is now illegal. Do you see what I'm saying? How do we build something that looks like a company that we can have a product that is sold that does not look like a company and has no product to sell? I know I'm probably confusing you. But I don't see any other way out except to build our way out Bitcoin e cash Lightning Network Fedimint's Gnoster I'm missing something. This is a this is a good start. Free and open source software, the extension of what that that I just mentioned, the Bitcoin and all that, free and open source software needs to extend amongst well beyond that. And it has been for decades and I wasn't seeing what it was doing.
Now I can see it plainly. Watching Durov basically roll over after 6 days or 7 or however whatever it was that he was arrested in Paris. He rolled over within 2 weeks, and Telegram is no longer going to be what Telegram was. That's all it took. And there's more. Because Ripple's co founder is among Kamala Harris's new corporate endorsers. CoinDesk, Jesse Hamilton, Chamomile Shamba is writing this one, and I'm not gonna read all of it. Ripple cofounder and executive chairman, Chris Larsen, is among the 88 corporate leaders who endorsed vice president Kamala Harris to be the next United States president in a letter on Friday, revealing potential differences among company leaders. While while Larson joined, other high profile CEOs come from the likes of review site Yelp, cloud storage company Box, social media platform Snapchat's snap, and more. According to the letter CNBC was first to report on, Ripple and CEO Brad Garlinghouse has targeted prominent Democrats in their campaign contributions.
The majority of the company's contributions have gone to pro crypto super political action committees or PACs, like the Fair Shake political action committee, which is focused on getting crypto friendly candidates elected from both major parties. Ripple Labs has been among the chief backers of Fairshake and its affiliates, giving about $48,000,000 to influence the 2024 elections. While the industry's combined efforts has tried to walk a tight rope between the 2 major political parties, Ripple's giving has leaned into the Republican side in one key situation, trying to defeat crypto critic senator Elizabeth Warren Garlinghouse, the company's CEO, has also reportedly given 50,000 to a super PAC aimed at building a Republican majority in the senate according to disclosures to the Federal Elections Commission.
So his political sympathies may be at odds with the letter Larson signed which favors a Democratic administration under Harris. The letter argued that Harris would continue to advance fair and predictable policies that support the rule of law, stability, and the sound business environment. Ripple has been in a protracted fight with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission over accusations that the company violated securities law in its, in its sale of the token XRP. We don't need to know anymore here. Chris Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse are not diametrically opposed at all.
They're not. They're playing both sides of the fence because they've they know how to do this. That's why they're not in jail. They know how to do this. They know how to buy them off. This is the kind of chicanery that is going has plagued, is plaguing, and will continue to plague this industry. And it's not just this industry. It plagues it plagues our freedom. It causes people like Durov to be plucked off of his private plane in Paris and then rolled over in a week to where his platform is not going to look anything like it used to look like. Anybody who was depending on Telegram, you can kiss that shit goodbye.
Now these assholes are putting themselves squarely up the butts of these politicians. And if you don't think it's not going to have an effect, then you're wrong. So this shit now gets worse and it becomes even more imperative that we build our way out of these people's view to become invisible, but visible only to ourselves. And now, Ayn Rand comes back to mind. Galt's Gulch The whole shield around Galt's Gulch that made it invisible. I don't see any other way out. She saw it in the fifties or forties or whatever the hell. Was it the thirties? It may have been the thirties when she wrote that shit. But it's somewhere around there, when she's writing Atlas Shrugged, she knew.
It was just going to be this shit storm forever and ever and ever. We have so many talented people in this space and it's attracting more every day. And they are it's chewing riches and fame and glory and whatever, you know, they're they're they don't seem to care because they know if they if if they do care about the the legacy world, that their children are gonna have to live in one that's even worse than today. And while you think it can't get any worse, believe me, it can. Because you know how many jobs we added? Because the jobs report dropped.
We added a 142,000 jobs in August. And that likely sets the stage for a 25 basis point rate cut by the Federal Reserve, CoinDesk. Steven Alpher is writing US job growth was slightly less than expectations in August, but probably not weak enough to prompt the Federal Reserve to begin its rate cutting cycle later this month with a 50 basis point move as people want. According to Friday's morning's nonfarm payroll report from the government, which we can't trust, by the way, the US added a 142,000 jobs in August versus The Economist forecast for a 160,000. And July's 89,000 jobs, which was revised from a previously reported 114,000.
Now, the unemployment rate edged down to 4.2 percent in line with expectations and from a 4.3% print in July. Down sizably in the days leading up to the report, the price of Bitcoin rose about a well, 1% to 56,500. In the minutes following the report, the price remains lower by 5% from week ago levels. And now we've seen an even sharper dip. We'll get to that. A check of traditional market shows US stock index futures trimming early large losses with the Nasdaq now lower by just 0.5%. And now all these numbers that I'm about to read, which I'm not going to read anymore, they're all out of date by about a couple of hours. So here's the main question. Will the Fed cut 25 or 50 basis points?
Always a key data point. The jobs numbers for August had taken on extra importance given that the Federal Reserve is set to begin cutting rates at its mid September meeting. That's this month. The conventional thinking believed the US central bank would enter this monetary easing cycle cautiously by lowering its benchmark Fed funds by a mere 25 basis points. The Fed, though, might be swayed by a weak August employment report to instead slash rates a full 50 basis points at that meeting. The headline numbers from this report doesn't appear to make the case for a 50 basis point move.
I'm pausing to let you know that's why the markets are in the red today. Everybody wanted 50. Everybody wanted 50, but the jobs report wasn't weak enough. We didn't have enough people in bread lines to make money. We didn't have enough people not going to be able to pay their fucking rent so that we could make some money. So everybody's fleeing to the dollar. This is why. The downward revisions to not just July but also June are somewhat troublesome, though. Taken together, the 3 month average job growth is just 116,000 and that is sure to come up in the Fed's discussions.
See, they're they're still hoping. They're they're they're they're hoping for it. It's hopium. It's hopium. They're smoking a big old bong of it. A check of the other report details show a somewhat stronger picture. However, average hourly earnings rose 0.4% in August. In July's well, sorry. I'm sorry. On a year over year basis, average hourly earnings were higher by 3.8 percent versus expectations of 3.7 in July's 3.6. Quote, it's a solid, if unspectacular report, that largely confirms the cooling trend in place, wrote economist Joe Bresalis, minutes following the release.
The details, he said, support a 25 basis point rate cut from the Fed. Alright. So that's why everything is freaking red. It's why it's all red But there's this little note that I caught early this morning when I woke up and I saw that we were going to dump The Federal Reserve's Waller, at a Q and A, said that the Fed probably waited too long to stop buying MBS as the housing market was on fire. What is MBS? Mortgage backed securities. You remember 2,008? Do you remember 2,008? Every institution was buying mortgage backed securities, like like fireman's pension funds, and teachers pension funds, and banks, and brokerage houses, and exchanges, and like massive massive institutions.
And bank you know, the banks themselves were so exposed to mortgage backed securities that the second that shit started to unravel, so did the banks. Now it's the government of the United States. And even the Federal Reserve's own I think he's the New York chair of the or the the chair of the New York Fed. Even he's like, yeah, we probably waited just a bit too long to stop buying this garbage because the housing market was on fire. They bought into the bullshit just like everybody did in, you know, prior 2,008. And now we've got these dismal job numbers, right? All the markets are in the red.
Bitcoin is completely correlated to all of it because everybody's running to dollars. Hence, why the dollar strengthened to something like 103 on the dollar strength chart. And somebody speculated earlier today that this might have to do still with the yen carry trade being torpedoed on August 5th. Right? And I remember we dumped all the way down to 49,000? Do you remember we actually went down to 49,000 on August 5th on the price of Bitcoin, and then we came right the hell back up to what, like, 60 I can't remember what it was. 60 something. It doesn't really matter because we're not there right now.
Because everybody is is getting out and they're getting into the dollar. Because everybody is terrified. It doesn't matter what market you're in. In fact, let's run the numbers. Oil, energy markets are all down. West Texas Intermediate is down over 2 points to 67 dollars 67¢ a barrel. Brent, North Sea is down exactly the same, about 2.14 percent to oh, no. It just flipped over. 2.23 percent to $71.07 a barrel. Natural gas is the only thing making a gain, but not much. Just 2 thirds of a point to $2.6 no. $2.26 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is down 1 and a half, so enjoy your dollar 89 a gallon gasoline even though you're not going to find that price, guaranteed.
Gold and silver, all the metal rocks are dying. Well, not dying, but they definitely got they got raked over the coals. Gold is down 3 quarters of a point to 2523. Silver is down 3 points. Platinum is down almost a point. Copper is down 1.6. Palladium is down over 3 points. Ag, is it any better today? No. The only thing is that's a winner today is cocoa. 0.06 percent to the upside. The biggest loser? Let's see if I can find it. 3.4% down for coffee. Yay. Cheap coffee. Live cattle is down almost a point. Lean hogs are down just over a point. Feeder cattle are down 1.41%. Now the legacy equity market, surely, surely somebody's buying the blood. Nope. They're still bleeding them out because the Dow is down a full point. S and p is down 1.69%.
Nasdaq is down 2a half. The S and P mini, down 1 a quarter. What's Bitcoin doing? $53,840 per coin. We have now gone down to a $1,060,000,000,000 market cap and we can only get 21.5 ounces of shiny metal rocks with that one Bitcoin of which there are 19,750,342.99 of and yet these still remain low. 0.06 BTC on average on a per block basis. How many blocks but a 131? Carrying 262,678 transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 4 satoshis per vbyte. Low priorities are 4 satoshis per vbyte. Doesn't make any sense, does it? I saw a spike earlier today went all the way up to 8 satoshis per vbyte.
So what's what's selling? Did anybody see? I I mean, I've been scanning the news, like, for the last well, I've been bringing you news since I've been home from Colorado and I look at these markets every single day for you. You know what I haven't seen? I'm not just the markets but the news. I haven't seen very many or any at all in fact news articles about people putting their Bitcoin back on exchanges. Like, I haven't seen headlines like like bitcoin hodlers rush to put bitcoin back on exchanges. $100,000,000 inflows per day to coinbase in bitcoin. I haven't seen anything like that.
Yet, it's it doesn't seem to be, you know, retail, the the people like us that actually use the Bitcoin network, this seems to be all book value. It's like exchanges or or or trades on exchanges of Bitcoin that was already there, but I had seen nothing but Bitcoin coming off exchanges pre August 5th. And I haven't seen very many stories at all. Actually, like I said, none at all about great gobs of Bitcoin going rushing to exchanges. So what the hell is going on? I don't know. If you can tell me, if you know, if you've got the intelligence on that, please let me know what that intelligence is because I'm confused. But, you know, it's okay. It's not like we haven't been here before. We've been in here or I've been here since 2015. I've seen this many many times.
It's just it's but now that institutions are involved, it's a little has a little bit of a different flavor. But maybe you can just get Uncle Jim'd. That was episode 947 of Bitcoin and Dovrovko with 2,290 sat says apologies. I am not more timely with my boosts. Fountain probably counts the 1st day the most heavily. I'll work on that. That's okay, Dabravco. I appreciate it though. The federalis like to f with Texas. Department of Transportation even made a rule tied to money, go figure, that electronic road signs can't be funny after TxDOT kept becoming viral for their funny quips promoting safe traveling habits. How effing petty can you be?
Pretty petty. I'm so I'm I'm actually disappointed with TxDOT, but it doesn't surprise me. Dark with 2121 says, awesome episode. Thanks, man. God's death with 537 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. The bird the bird. I don't know if that's actually it. The bird the and then a whole bunch of underline hashes. 500 says, BlackRock is going to do what you said, but only after they buy up more BTC on the cheap. Gin, sue the government so they so then they win on both sides. Maybe it's meant then. Then sue the government so then they win on both sides. Good show, by the way. Oh, thanks dude. I hope this one is as good too. Anyway, where else? Oh, Hugh Janice with 200 says, shout out to my missus Eun.
Love the show. Oh, thanks, man. I appreciate that. S w bratcher says nothing well, he actually says, Mastercard to allow spins from your own wallets in the EU. And I don't know if that was something that I wrote or not, but Dabravco comes back with another 100. The Mastercard is a good notch in the belt of adoption. With f and f, let me know how that goes. Not sure what that means, Dabravco. It's probably because my brain cells aren't working all that well. Also, does the new fountain take, more phone data? The possibility has kept me from updating.
I don't know. I've had fountain on my phone for so long that I can't remember if I what it takes. I'm I'm not sure, man. Oscar Mayer is your guy. On Noster, just type, you know, at symbol Oscar and see if Oscar Mayer populates. He's the guy behind fountain, that might be a good question to ask him. Stacy with a 100 says great show. Xplbzx, says I appreciate the 947 shows, wait, I I hold on. I appreciate that 947 shows later. There are still 0 dads or 0 ads on this show. Alright. Well, yeah. I'm I'm trying to do that, probably because I don't want meetings. I don't know.
That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. Only 3. Count them. 3. 1, 2, 3 examples of, quote, illicit tornado cash use cited by the United States Treasury in the sanctions case. A 5th Circuit panel questioned the United States Treasury's classification of Tornado Cash as a corporation, calling its reasoning slippery during oral arguments on Tuesday. Tornado Cash users appealed a Texas federal court's decision upholding the treasury sanctions. The treasury sanctioned Tornado Cash after discovering, quote, North Korean hackers used it at least 3 times, you know, out of 1,000,000 of transactions to launder 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.
Users argue Tornado Cash is an open source privacy tool and not a sanctionable entity. That's right. Build yourself to invisibility, ladies and gentlemen. The Treasury Department argues it can sanction Tornado Cash for saying the crypto project acts like a corporation rather than ownerless code. Bradley Henslewood of the United States Department of Justice noted that users own torn, t o r n, a token similar to corporate stock. That's not a very good sentence. US circuit Judge Court Engelhardt noted that out of 1,000,000 of transactions, the agency found only 3 instances of money laundering using Tornado Cash asking why the existing designations for North Korea were insufficient to achieve the agency's purpose, reports Law 360, quote, you're a solution in search of an entity in a way, she added.
United States Circuit Judge Edith Jones also expressed skepticism of the Treasury's categorization, noting that North Korea could still use the protocol regardless if the sanctions were in place or not. In fact, just earlier this week, there were reports that a hacker entity, which stole over $230,000,000 in user assets from an Indian crypto exchange, Wazirix, started to move funds through Tornado Cash in attempt to obfuscate obfuscate the trail of funds. Quote, but the 3 transactions that we're talking about are instances where, oh my god, North Korea stole 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars of cryptocurrency. DOJ's Hensalwood said, adding that it's important because by sanctioning entities that aid North Korea, their ability to help the rogue state is lessened. Do you can you smell the bullshit?
Can you smell it? US circuit judge Don Willett also asked if it mattered that the people who made tornado cash made a profit. Plaintiff's representative Cannon k Shamgan, I can't pronounce the name, said anyone making money from tornado cash was doing so through a service besides the protocol itself. I'm not sure if I agree with that. Property includes rights like possession and use and enjoyment. None of those rights are implicated here. This application exists on the internet. It's not even controlled in any meaningful way through the Tornado Cash website, he added.
Separately from this appeal, the United States government is criminally prosecuting the cofounders of Tornado Cash, Roman Seminov and Roman Storm. Seminov is fighting the charges while Storm remains at large. Another cofounder of Tornado Cash, Alexei Pertsev, has already been sentenced into a 64 months or in the for sentenced to 64 months in the Netherlands and is currently in the process of appealing that decision. In another related case, the United States government also went after the founders of Bitcoin privacy tool, samurai wallet. The next hearing in the samurai developers case is expected to take place on September 17th. All of the Department of Justice's arguments are bullshit.
Re remember what I what I was telling you about was either yesterday or the day before, the FBI dropped their warning that North Korea, oh my God, it's always North Korea, is trying to abscond and hack funds out of the Bitcoin exchange traded funds like Fidelity and Ark and BlackRock. And now here's North Korea, it's North Korea. I'm surprised that they haven't just done nothing but Russians. I mean, that would I mean, that that that would seem to to wash with the theme that the United States has had for, I don't know, since the elections before actually, the 2016 elections.
Russia Russia Russia. It's a it's a Russian disinformation operation. It's Russia this and Russia that. And now we're just gonna use North Korea. Why? I I I don't know. I I wish I did, but I just this is nothing but bullshit. Every argument here is all bullshit. And if the Texas court if the 5th actually, it's not it's the court's in Texas, but it's the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. They really need to eviscerate the DOJ on this one. And just I don't know if they can vacate this thing or not, but they basically need to tell the DOJ to go sit and spin. Go pound sand, brother. But it doesn't matter which way this rolls out.
It doesn't like, if we were to breathe breathe a huge sigh of relief and think that we're all going to be safe because the 5th Circuit's Court of Appeal tells the DOJ to go pound sand, it won't matter. The only way to get out of this mess is to build our way out of it. I wish I could program. I really wish I do. I wish I could be one of the developers for Noster. I really wish I do. I'd apply for an open sats grant or or Human Rights Foundation grant. I would just do that. Because I cannot leave my children in this place.
We have to build ourselves the invisibility cloak that we need. We need to build the companies that cannot be seen. We need to build the routes that are blinded. It's not just building Nostr and e cash and Bitcoin and Lightning Network. No. It's way more than that. It's entire logic structures that we have to build. What does a company? What does an invisible company look like? How do you sell products? How do you pay employees? You can't you can't do it through any of what we have already. There can be no payroll tax. And it's not because well, I'm tax is theft. Let's get that clear. But it's not because I want to evade the tax. And it's not because I don't want there to be a tax. This is different. There needs to be no trail at all.
Everybody working for company x or, well, let's say company y because x is a destroyed letter because of e Elon Musk, like the retirement accounts. What is what do those look like in a in a blinded company, Which doesn't exist, by the way. I mean, the the structure I'm talking about doesn't exist. Nobody's ever had to think of it before. Now we better start thinking about how to do this shit. How how how do we take on completely new identities that do not have a social security number? And they're they're what does health care look like? What what the hell does insurance look like? How do you insure your house?
How do you do any of this? And you know what? What we should probably do? We should probably look at how the drug lords of Colombia did their shit. But it won't matter because a lot of them got caught. And I'm not saying I wanna be a Colombian drug lord. I don't wanna destroy people's lives. I'm not in this to figure out a way to cheat people out of their money or destroy their lives. I am in this to destroy governments of the west at this point. That's a horrible thing to say. I know. You're anti American. What under what circumstances do you think the United States government is in this for you?
What have they done in the last 25 years that is good for you? Do you think they're working for you? Do you think they want to keep you safe? Have they? Have they demonstrated any competency whatsoever that they can do that? And even beyond the competency, have they demonstrated any any actual plan that doesn't do something other than take more of your money, more of your time, and more of your good feelings. You know how hard it is for people to be in a good mood nowadays? It's not because this is all an accident. This is because a very small group of people have basically decided about think about 25 years ago, we've had enough of you people.
We don't care about you anymore. We'll we'll say that we do, but we don't. Because all of their actions lead me to believe that. It's more more than a gut feeling. So I come back to the question, What structures aside from free and open source software, which I believe is the underpinning of the new technology for where we're going. How do we build on top of that non technological logic structures that are basically like businesses but cannot be seen by any government in the world because all of them are corrupt. Every single one of them. I have no respect for a single government whether they're west, east, south, whatever.
Don't give a shit. I automatically assume that they're all corrupt, they are all evil, and they either don't care about you or they actually hate you. This is where I've come to. And it's not because I'm in a bad mood because I got a red dildo. I've seen those before. Okay? I've seen them many, many times. That's not it. But this Dharav thing, he rolled over inside of 2 weeks, and Telegram is now destroyed. Well, actually, it will be. You just haven't seen it yet. You haven't seen it yet. But it will be. We're left with the very things that most of the people that so many people in Bitcoin that so many other people listen to refuse.
Even Parker Lewis, one of my favorite people in the space, looks at seems to have an attitude of Noster that is just thumbing his nose at it or or turning his nose up at it, and I don't get it. I don't how easy is it to make people roll over? Is it their influence? Is it their 1,000,000,000 of dollars in their yacht? Is Michael Saylor possibly going to be absconded with in that same way that Durov just woke up and said, hey, by the way, we're gonna strip out all this shit and we're gonna we are gonna moderate the living crap out of you guys from now on because you can't be trusted. Is that what it is?
Well, we can soften the mood as we go into this weekend because God only knows what happens this weekend. I almost have a gut feeling that this entire week because I told you I told you guys on Tuesday that it was gonna be a week of bad news to hold fast. You know? Don't freak out. If you got hey. If you gotta pay a bill, I don't mind that with, you know, with your Bitcoin. But for those people that are just gonna like, you know what? I'm done. I'm out. And you're gonna see it. You're gonna see that shit in droves. It always happens. Right? The the weak the people that said that they were strong hands get really weak, and they sell everything. Yeah. Don't do that. If you need to make rent, sell a little bit. Keep most of it. Right? If you gotta do that, that I mean, I there's no problem with that. I'm not gonna look down at you. And even if I did, you can just look up at me and say, fuck you. I don't care about you. But in either event, I told you that this was going to happen. Right?
So this week, if I was somebody sitting on a boatload of Bitcoin and I really wanted to make more Bitcoin, I would continuously sell, especially after every single one of these reports, which as we've seen has happened, which is exactly what I told you was going to happen. And then over the weekend when the markets can't aren't open, the people that sold their positions in the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF can't do anything when they see a green candle over the weekend. Do I do I know that that's going to happen? No. It could go the other way. It could still go south. We could see 52. We could see 50. People are calling for 49.
Some asshole out there is calling for 40. I don't know what it's gonna do. Right? But if I was the guy that could actually do that kind of shit, had enough Bitcoin that if I throw it on an exchange and I start market selling and start buying, you know, buying it back at the bottom and then market sell some more and then buy it back at that local bottom and then rinse and repeat for the entire week to the point that by the time you get into Friday, everybody that was going to sell their institutional positions is basically out and then buy it all back.
So wouldn't surprise me. I'm not gonna swear by it, but it would not surprise me. Okay, so let's get into the weekend with a little bit of fun. Reply guy on Nostr. Dude is pissing people off left and right. If you're not on Nostr, why? Bring your talent, bring your thoughts, bring your energy to Nostr. Not to Telegram, which is gonna be eviscerated, not to Twitter, which has already been eviscerated, not to any of the other legacy media stuff Bring it to Nostra because Nostra is more than media It really is If you haven't tried it, it doesn't cost you nothing And you will if you stay around long enough and you experiment long enough and you ask me questions, you can ask me questions, I'm none your business on on Nostr, right? Just just look me up, ask me a question.
I'll answer or if I don't know, I'll send you somewhere there is. But there's but one of the things that I love about Nostr is that every once in a while you get these weird things that start occurring. Right? And meant like, people like maybe like Parker Lewis might say, see that's why Nostra will fail. Uh-uh. No. No. So reply guy. What is reply guy? Reply guy is a bot that is replying to almost every note that there is. And it says it says something like, good morning from reply guy. But what's interesting is that it actually gives the relay that it's coming from, right? So it's like WSS.
And for those of you who don't know what nostril is, relays is the way that we're propagating and storing notes around the nostril network. Right? So I write a note I say, hi, good morning, and then it goes to like a relay that I'm or several relays that I'm subscribed to and they all start with wsscolonforward/forward/likenoster.snort.social. Right? It's like a server. It's just an open server. It's out there. It takes in notes if you're subscribed to it. If it's got, you know, read and write capabilities, it'll save your note and then it will like if so like it like if somebody else is subscribed to that same, same, relay, they'll be able to read that note. The relays start talking to each other and, it takes a while, but, you know, the the notes start getting propagated around.
But these this bot has a particular server or a particular relay that it's writing from and or writing to and reading from. And it's causing some problems. Because all like like somebody said earlier this morning, the noster is almost unusable now. Okay. Yeah. Because I write a note and I get a reply guy and it's just this all it says is g m and then, like, exclamation point, couple of emojis, and the relay. Except this. Here's the here's the biggest problem. It's not just one reply guy. It's thousands of them or at least 100 at this point.
And they all have the same emblem, right? Or the the same PFP, your profile picture. It's the same ones like reply guy and it's like blue and yellow. Right? But they all have different in pubs. And now I'm starting to see multiple different relays that these in pubs these reply guy in pubs are coming from. And they're replying, like, I will now I can write a note, and I'll get 15 different in pub reply guys all saying good morning emoji emoji emoji and then whatever relay that they're writing from. And this has caused consternation that started happening yesterday. So, like, that way, you know, when you write a note and 15 to 25 different reply guys, you know, reply to it, you think your note got, like, oh my god. Look at this. I got 25 replies, but only one of them is from a human.
You can see how that might piss some people off. You can see why somebody like, I don't know, Parker Lewis might say, see, that's why Nostra is going to be unusable. Now before I tell you what I think is happening I want to take you back back the way Sherman set the way back machine for, like, 4 months ago. I was getting followed by a new like several new account it just started happening one day. And for about 2 months, I would write I would write something like a note and then, like, I'd go away and I'd come back to my notifications and I'd see that, you know, a whole bunch of people, like, you know, hearted my or, thumbed up my note. But what I was really noticing was the fact that I was getting, like, 55 followers a day.
Sometimes I would get as many as a 100 followers a day. Most of the time, however, it was, like, between 5 and 10. But the PFP, remember I told you that the reply guy PFP is like this little robot looking thing is blue and yellow or whatever it is. This one was a whole bunch of concentric concentric circles of different colors, but, like, actually of 2 different colors. It was like red and yellow or orange and yellow or something like that. But they they had it to where, like, there was like 5 circles and they would all be broken like, like a little gap in the circle and they'd all be rotated in a different position.
And each one of those was a different in pub, but it was relentless. I think I gained like 400 followers if not if not a couple actually, I probably gained more like 3,000 followers off this thing. They're all fake, right? They're all like it's a bot and it's just this it's not a bot these are all bots, but these bots are being constructed autonomously by some kind of compute automated computer program or something like that script, right? It's just like a script kitty. And it's annoying when you get all these followers and you think oh, well, I get like some like thing people are listening to what I say and then it's just garbage. Right? Well, that went on for about 2 full months and then it just stopped.
And I've never seen him again ever. And now we have this reply guy. He's not following anybody, but he's liking all the posts and, like, well, they're like like they because there's hundreds of them now. They like all the posts and then they say good morning and then they reply reply to the post saying good morning emoji emoji emoji and then whatever it's relay is. So this has prompted several people, to, hold on. I'm looking at something here. So actually wait wait wait wait wait. Yeah, I'm not gonna do that one. So I'm about here.
Here's my thought of what this is. Now keep in mind both these stories. A bunch of fake in pubs interacting with real human accounts, making life kind of miserable. Reply guy is actually more miserable than the follow guy the the the guy that happened about, like, you know, 4 months ago. So I wrote a note on Nostr earlier this morning that said hear me out. Reply guy is a developer antagonizing Nostr so they can see how to fix it. Hashtag adversarial thinking is back? That's what I thought that was my gut feeling with the follow bots.
Now with the reply guy bots, I'm thinking the same thing. I'm thinking that there is a Nostra developer out there that is savaging the Nostra network and that developer is indeed savaging the network. This is a lot of, like, wasted data. It's all crap. It doesn't mean anything. It's all bullshit. And it's dust. It's noise. We don't need it. And yet I believe that the developer that is doing this is doing this because the developer loves Nostr and is trying to figure out ways to break Nostr so that other developers, including the developer himself or herself, can fix it against state actors or institutional actors or people like Elon Musk's how do we screw with these guys so that we can have Twitter and we can be the town square forever and ever and Nostra will just die.
That's what I believe is happening. I think they're actually doing it out of love for the network. So please, instead of intake antagonizing the reply guy thing, think about what I was saying when we have to build ourselves out of these situations. It starts right here with reply guy. How do we guard against that shit happening? And keep the platform open. And make it to where if somebody like, oh, I'm not even gonna give a name. So some major developer, Nostr, is picked off a plane in, you know, London and said, hey, you're gonna you're gonna fix Nostr the way we want and have that developer say, I don't know what to do. I I can't help you on that. Because they can't.
And meanwhile, we're down here in the trenches thinking about how how do we stop Reply Guy without stopping me posting a picture of my cat? These are the ways that we build our way out and everybody can do this. You can think about, you know, given what you know about how things work, what would you do? And maybe, just maybe, give that idea to a developer. So when stuff like reply guy happens don't fret don't freak out use it as a way to help build ourselves an invisibility cloak against those people that are truly brutal to us You do that over the weekend 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.
Challenges of Building New Tools and Companies
Bitcoin and Free Open Source Software
Federal Reserve's Mortgage-Backed Securities and Market Reactions
Market Analysis and Bitcoin Price Movements
Listener Boosts and Feedback
Building Invisible Companies and Logic Structures
Nostr and the Reply Guy Phenomenon
Closing Thoughts and Weekend Outlook
