Join me today for Episode 897 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- US Kicks China Out
- El Salvador's Volcano Bitcoin
- Wisconsin Officially Buys Bitcoin
- Three Cashu Wallets with USD ecash Released
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
Circle P:
https://primal.net/p/npub1ugnq57hn8va6xqr5zywy2eunem6c624583vkt0dmv40ep7tnnxkqrr898l (faster)
email: [email protected] (slower)
Product: Comfrey
One full root for 20$
Or root cutting for 1$ each
Buyer pays shipping
[[Episode 726]]: https://fountain.fm/episode/15491737864
Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/legal/president-biden-blocks-chinese-backed-bitcoin-mining-firm-from-owning-land-near-a-wyoming-nuclear-missile-base
https://cointelegraph.com/news/el-salvador-mines-bitcoin-volcanic-energy
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/legal/developing-financial-privacy-tools-was-today-criminalized-by-the-dutch-court-
https://gizmodo.com/bitcoin-price-pension-etf-wisconsin-sec-liquidity-btc-1851475707
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://www.cnbc.com/bonds/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
https://primal.net/e/note1vv5n7n4czg59w72z3h5m9fnf3y55ut2tnvr84tm30h8mam2tfv0sah73fl
https://primal.net/e/note178du87hqdtfyuflpfznq5m3lmgc3sae0ur29qda7v2fyjlzwh0nskfazq7
https://www.btctimes.com/news/el-salvador-launches-bitcoin-based-capital-raise-for-new-airport-hotel
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/ex-blackrock-bitcoin-etf-lead-appointed-new-vanguard-ceo
https://decrypt.co/230728/ethereum-security-status-sec-unlikely-spot-etf
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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. Uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:45 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 15th day of May 2024, and this is episode 897 of Bitcoin, and the circle p is open for business. The circle p is where I bring plebs like you, plebs just like you, who have goods and services to offer for Bitcoin. If you're not selling it for Bitcoin, you're not in the circle p.
Sheeshi21 m is certainly in the circle p. He is selling root cuttings of my favorite plant in the world, Confrey. If you don't understand what Confrey is or why I talk about it all the time, then please go back and listen to episode 726 of Bitcoin. And I've also got the, the link directly to that particular episode. It'll be in the show notes. 30 straight, maybe 40 minutes straight of why comfrey, what it is, where it came from, what it does. It's that I could tell you about it here, but we'd be talking for another 30 minutes, and that's not what the circle p is for. The circle p is to tell you that products like Comfrey, are for purchase in bitcoin. One full root, $20.
Root cuttings are a buck each and there's a difference between the 2. The full root basically includes the head of the root and not just an actual cutting. And that head, the very top part of the root, because the whole thing is included, it comes up much faster than a regular root cutting. Although, I've never had a failure on root cuttings coming up and building a full comfrey plant. It's perennial. It builds, the most biomass of any terrestrial plant. That's arguable, but I believe it is true. Good for compost, good for compost tea, good for mulching. You chop it, you drop it, you do all you mix medicine, you do all kinds of stuff with it, but you want it in your garden. And these are sterile so they don't propagate through seed and they don't send runners.
Right? You can propagate it if you want but it's not if you just put it in the ground and leave it there, it's not gonna drift, it's not gonna move, it's not gonna, you know, take over something. Like, everybody's all scared of mint and shit taking over. Big, oh my god. You planted mint. I cannot believe you planted mint. It's going to take over. Good. I like mint. I've never actually had it take over a damn thing. Good morning, Kid Warp. He just popped into the zap.stream live chat. I appreciate you being here. But one full route for $20, you can get a root cutting for a buck each. You pay the shipping. You get a hold of [email protected] if you wanna email them. It's a little slower. If you wanna get to them fast, use the link in the show notes. It'll take you right to his Noster account so you can DM him or just honestly, just send him a message on Noster. Don't don't worry about the DM shit. If you guys wanna do addresses and stuff after you decide tell him that you wanna buy it, then you figure that shit out. But when you buy it, you make sure you tell him that you heard it here on the circle p and he will cut me some satoshis. Alright. The news.
The news is next. Oh, is there no audio in the zap stream? Oh, I know why. I know why. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. I know. I switched mics. Let me see what's going on here. I think I know yeah. I know what's going on. I forgot to set my properties over here at OBS. So hold on and let me see if I can get that done. I may even have to restart this whole thing. Okay. It looks like we got that figured out. Thank you, my eternal thanks to Kidwarp and Slow Slow for watching my back over there in zap.stream. Otherwise, I would have streamed the whole damn thing without any audio whatsoever.
It's not that I have a huge I mean, I don't have a very big audience at all when I'm streaming. I I do it because it's just another method of getting stuff out there. But if you've noticed, I've changed microphones. You guys, because y'all have been very good to me, with your donations, bought me a Shure SM 57 or I mean a Shure SM 7 b, microphone, which is a much better microphone. It's got a much deeper bottom end. It's got a much richer sound for, you know, radio type stuff. So I put it on there but forgot to change over a lot of the, configuration in some of the, stuff that's going on that that runs this show. So much appreciation to Kidwarp and Slow Slow, and thank you, in pub 15, f o l n l x, for the 1,000 sat boost.
It's nice it's nice to have that. Okay. Now that I've I've gotten my mind apparently back together here, Let's do this one from Bitcoin Magazine. This is one of the biggest pieces of news today. President Biden has blocked Chinese backed Bitcoin mining firm from owning land near a Wyoming nuclear missile base. Probably not the best idea. Holy shit. Huddl bod with 10,000 sats, brother. Good to see you. Thank you. I hope things are doing very, very well in your world. Brother, we gotta go get a beer, man. We gotta go get a beer. We we need to set that shit up. Alright. So the United States president, Joe Biden, has issued an order prohibiting the acquisition of certain real property by Mine 1, Cloud Computing Investment 1, or act I think they say LLP, but it says investment ILP. I don't know. I've never seen that one before. Whatever. Citing national security concerns.
The order, based on findings outlined by the president, aims to safeguard critical assets near Francis e Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The president's order stems from evidence indicating that Mine 1 Partners Limited, a British Virgin Islands Company majority owned by Chinese nationals, and related entities plan to acquire real estate within 1 mile of Warren Air Force Force Base. This real estate, specifically described as Lot 1 Block 10 North Range Business Park Third Filing, and the nature of operations conducted by mine 1 poses potential national security risks due to its close proximity to a strategic missile base, Biden explained.
Mine 1 acquired the real estate back in June of 2022 and subsequently developed it for specialized cryptocurrency mining operations, which raised concerns about surveillance and espionage activities facilitated by foreign sourced equipment. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS became involved after a public tip, which they then identified significant risks to national security associated with the transaction. The president's order prohibits the transaction outright requiring Mine 1 and its affiliates to divest all legal and beneficial ownership interest in the real estate within 120 days.
Additionally, mine 1 must remove all equipment and improvements related to their operations on the property within 90 days subject to verification by CFIUS. Furthermore, Mine 1 and its affiliates are barred from any physical or logical access to the real estate equipment or improvements until divestment and removal are completed to Cepheus' satisfaction. In any attempt any attempt to evade or circumvent this order is strictly prohibited with the attorney general authorized to enforce compliance. In response to the order, Mine 1 and its affiliates are required to cooperate fully with Cepheus, providing regular updates on compliance efforts, blah, blah blah blah blah. So they kicked them out. The whole stack of Bitcoin miners that were within, I guess, one mile of Warren Air Force Base, which is a nuclear strategic nuclear site, just got basically thrown out of the country. Alright. Now so on its face that actually I don't really have a problem with it because of this.
It's a nuclear facility. I don't want I it they could be Germans for all I care. I don't want them hanging out within a mile of strategic nuclear missile silos. I don't know what they're I I don't know if they have any other plans. It it even though I'm not the biggest fan of the United States federal government or any federal governments, that's I totally understand this. I get it. I get it. Except that there's some language in the executive order itself that talks about the potential for this equipment being used for surveillance and some kind of espionage.
And the fact that that language is in the executive order and it specifically pertains to Bitcoin mining, it's possible it's possible that this is one of the ways that they might use to, quote, unquote, crush Bitcoin, which is not going to happen. We saw what happened when China banned Bitcoin. First of all, it didn't actually work all the way because there's still a lot of heavy ass mining going on in China. And second of all, they just moved to a different country. You know, a lot of them came over the United States. A lot of them went up into the, Stans countries, you know, north north and west of the Chinese border, the top northwest corner of that of that nation, they just they just took them across the border. I think it was Uzbekistan. I don't know. I can't I don't know my my eastern European and Chinese geography that well. But in either event, it could be something that we need to watch out for except for this. And and they're saying that this this because it was all made in China, because the ASIC chips were made in China, because the controller chips were made in China, that somehow or another espionage is possible.
Okay. Alright. So fine. So are most of the chips in our cars, in, what did I say? I put a note out on Noster yesterday, something about, like, front end registers at grocery stores. Yeah. That's all Chinese made. The pump controllers for gasoline pipelines and oil pipelines and natural gas pipelines. Guess what? They're all Chinese made. All the chips for all the controllers for all that shit. The heaters on natural gas pipelines, which they well, they're not in the pipeline, but over at, like, exchange stations. There's heaters and there's coolers, and all of that shit is controlled by chips that were made in China. I airplanes, cars, buses, trains, They'd have to you'd have to shut it all down. You'd have to shut it all down. Every surveillance camera. Do we know?
Because they were made in China. I guarantee it. Or at least the electronics were. Or do we know that they didn't backdoor that shit and are sending, like, a copy of the feed over into Beijing? We don't know. So I don't think this has as many teeth as people think it does. Because what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If somebody just gets all uppity and says, well, if you're, you know, if you're gonna do it for this, then you best do it for all of this shit. And then that did it could scare the living crap out of the United States population when it becomes evident just how much of our electronic infrastructure has actually been built by the Chinese. So I'm not worried about it. I honestly think it's for me, in this particular case, I'm okay with them telling them to skedaddle and get away from a strategic nuclear missile silo site. I'm just saying I I don't have that much of a problem with it. Alright.
Huddlebot? Okay. Yeah. It might be cutting off. Let me see here. Do do do. Let me see if I can get what do we what do I got on filters? Hold on. Let me see if there's an issue here. What I'm gonna do, I think here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to kill this filter. And that is probably going to introduce a lot of noise into the background until I get this shit fixed up because there's just no way to really test this stuff until you have somebody on the other side, you know, listening to it. So let me know if this fixes up the, cutting out, but also in the in over there in Zap. Stream, please let me know how much more the background noise has increased.
I'd appreciate that because I'm pretty sure that I just increased a whole shit ton of background noise. Okay. Let's get back to it. Let's go down south to El Salvador where they've mined 474 Bitcoin using geothermal volcanic energy. Prashant Jha Cointelegraph tells us more about this one. El Salvador has mined a total of 474 Bitcoin worth $29,000,000. Uh-huh. $25,000,000, for, using volcanic geothermal energy since 2021. Damn. $29,000,000 since 9 since 2021 is not bad, dude. Well, the Bitcoin was mined with power from the country's Takapa volcano using 300 minuteing processors. The country has allocated 1.5 megawatts to cryptocurrency mining out of the 100 and 2 megawatts produced by the state owned power plant according to Reuters.
In the face of increased scrutiny over BTC Mining Reliance and electricity and fossil fuels, El Salvador has emerged as a pioneer in renewable energy mining. In 2021, El Salvador made history by becoming the 1st country to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender alongside the United States dollar. And since then, the government has adopted several bitcoin focused policies, including establishing a geothermal plant to mine BTC. El Salvador now holds a total of 5,750 BTC worth around $354,000,000 Since 2021, global organizations such as the World Bank and others have heavily criticized the Central American nation for adopting Bitcoin.
Blah blah blah. And then they go on to a little bit more more history. But this is the first solid numbers that I've heard of mining in El Salvador using geothermal energy or, quote, unquote, Bitcoin or volcano Bitcoin. Right? It seems to me that El Salvador is becoming more serious about being transparent when it comes to their Bitcoin because it was just Monday that I told you I told you about the website that they had set up that is basically a it looks to me not a hack, but base basing this entire website off of mempool.space and turning it into where it's just watching their one wallet, and now we can see exactly what they've got in there. We can see the 1 Bitcoin per day allocations. We We see it all. And now we're finally starting to get numbers from their Bitcoin mining, so I am looking forward to the future where El Salvador becomes even more transparent.
Okay. Speaking of El Salvador, we are still gonna remain down south in El Salvador because BTC Times' Dennis Sat has this one called El Salvador Launches A Bitcoin Based Capital Raise for a new airport hotel. Oh, interesting. After a prolonged process, beginning with the approval of their digital securities laws, El Salvador is now launching a Bitcoin funded capital raise. This initiative potentially sets the stage for the much discussed Bitcoin bonds announced by president Bukele. The capital will fund the construction of the only resort hotel at the Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero e Galdamas International Airport in San Salvador. God, that's a hell of an name. Marking the country's first venture into liquid Bitcoin based capital markets.
The project, identified as the Hampton by Hilton, is targeting a funding goal of $6,250,000 The funds will be utilized to construct a 400 and I'm sorry. 4,484 square meter facility over 5 stories tall, featuring 80 rooms, commercial spaces, a swimming pool, and other amenities. The hotel's location within the airport's premises positions it to be the sole provider of hotel services in this area. The project site, leased from SEPA, the Salvadoran agency responsible for transportation infrastructure, the investment opportunity begins at a minimum entry of $1,000 US with a total of 6,250 tokens available, each offering a 10% annual yield paid semi annually.
Watch out for the yield stuff, guys. I'm I'm I like Bukele. I'm not sure about them, but every time I see yield, I definitely get the the hackles, especially double digit yields, always gets the hackles on the back of my neck to stand up. Alright? Well, I've just I've seen too much. I'm jaded because of it. But for investments exceeding $10,000, the project will provide complimentary stays at the resort Overseen by Invision's LaGuardia SA DCV and facilitated through Bitfinex Securities, the project is projected to create 1,000 jobs during its construction phase and an additional 5,000 jobs once it's operational. The construction of the facility is already started and is expected to be completed within the next 12 months.
For further information, interested parties can access details through Bitfinex Securities. Oh, god. This capital raise exemplifies El Salvador's ongoing efforts to integrate Bitcoin into its economic development strategies. I got something to say about this Bitfinex security shit. Without getting too far into the weeds on some of the shit that I some of the sausage that I saw being made with the whole Bitfinex securities thing by a couple of other companies that I am aware of, that I will not name. This honestly, this feels really greasy, sleazy, oily, and a little bit slimy.
The Bitfinex securities I'm not Bitfinex securities is part of Bitfinex, but it is a different arm than Bitfinex, the trading platform. Right? It's the same company, I get that, but it is a different arm. I every time I see the word Bitfinex securities, the hackles go way up on the back of my neck. It's the whole this whole thing kinda bugs me. Right? This whole, hey. We're gonna build a hotel at our international airport. You can buy in for as little as $1,000 and here's these tokens, which Bitfinex Securities has done for a couple of companies. I don't know, man. There's something about this that feels I don't wanna say that it feels wrong. It could be completely above board.
I'm sure that that I'm sure that hotel's gonna be great. It's just the way this is working just makes me just be aware, guys. You might wanna keep your eyes on on this kind of thing because a slippery slope can happen with this entire thing going on in El Salvador. The wrong people get in. The wrong people get their clutches in. The wrong people bury you know, sink and then bury to the bone very long fangs into El Salvador, and you've got yourself a problem. And then if it is a problem, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and Peter Schiff will all stand together in a great big party and go, see? I told you. I told you.
We've tried to warn you. I don't want that shit happening. I don't know, man. We'll have to definitely gonna have to watch and see this this Hampton by Hilton Hotel over there at the El San Salvador airport. Now back up into the United States, way, way up into cheese country, we've got Wisconsin becoming the 1st United States state to buy Bitcoin, and this is out of Gizmodo dotcom. It is written by Matt Novak. Wisconsin has officially become the very first state in the United States to buy bitcoin according to a new filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. And while $98,000,000 isn't considered a lot of money for a state pension fund.
It's still a notable move given how notoriously volatile cryptocurrency investing can be. The SEC filing available online was first reported by CoinDesk, which notes the state of Wisconsin Investment Board bought 9 94,562 shares of BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust worth about $98,000,000 and 63,000,000 dollars worth of grayscale spot Bitcoin ETF. I don't know. See, it says it says that they put in 98,000,000 total. I this I don't know. There's something wrong about these numbers. Gizmodo, I think, has got this wrong. I think it's a total of 98,000,000 plus 63,000,000 and not a total of 98,000,000.
But somebody else check my math on that. Bitcoin ETFs were only approved this past January. Yes. We're aware. Quote, normally, you don't get these big fish institutions in the 13 f's for a year or so when the ETF gains more liquidity. But as we've seen, these are no ordinary launches, Eric Balchunas, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg, said. Good sign. Expect more as institutions tend to move in herds. End quote. The most famous large institutional investment in Bitcoin started in El Salvador when they did all of their Bitcoin law stuff. We're not gonna worry about that. The the thing is is that we have a state pension fund.
Now it's not this is the thing about for any of you listening in other countries. There is pension funds that are private And, like, you know, some some, like, businesses will, you know, buy those pension funds for their, as a package deal for their employees, and the employees put in their money into the pension fund as part of their draw from their pay daily check. And but that's on a company by company basis depending on where the company is and where they're headquartered and blah blah blah. This isn't a company. This is the state pension fund.
So this is owned by the state government, not a private institution. It's different. Why? Because it's the police, all of them in Wisconsin. It is the fire department, all of them in Wisconsin. It's all of the EMTs that are state funded, not the private guys. But like the guys that get the ambulance, When you get your ass in a sling, you need some help, the ambulance comes. Yeah. That a lot of that shit's state funded. Teachers. All of your teachers. All of them in public school. That's their pen this they're going to have exposure to Bitcoin ETFs. All of these people. Right? The national like, or the state guard of Wisconsin.
They're state they're essentially state employees. Also, all of the state military. Right? All government employees of the state of Wisconsin, if you're working at the capitol building as a receptionist, you have now have exposure to Bitcoin ETFs because your pension fund is get if you're a state employee, your your pension fund is determined by the state. If you're a state employee, that's your package. You in at in Texas, I could have gone to a different one, but that's not true in every state. And I'm not sure about what's going on in Wisconsin, But for the great guts and feathers, even in Texas, most people were using if you were a state employee, most people were just into the state pension funds. And I'm sure the exact same thing is happening here in the state of Wisconsin.
So out of all 50 states, it was the cheese heads who figured it out first. I feel I feel that this is not fair. I I feel that Texas should have been at least on the on the docket to be the first to have, you know, figured this shit out. But no. No. No. No. Up in the great white north in the frozen tundra land of the Green Bay Packers, it's the cheese heads of freaking Wisconsin that are actually front running all 5th all the rest of the 49 states in the United States. And I I feel cheated. Let's see if the numbers do me any better. CNBC Futures and Commodities. Oil is actually up today after after scaring the living piss out of tech you know, Exxon and Chevron to $78.37.
Brent Norcia is up a quarter of a point on West Texas Intermediate back up to $78.37. Brent Norcia is up a quarter of a point to 8262. Natural gas is up almost three points to $2.41 a1000, and gasoline is up just over 1% to $2.48 a gallon. All of your shiny metal rocks are having a good day. Can you imagine why? The CPI numbers came in this morning, and they were a little soft. It looked like inflation is getting a little bit better. So now everybody is thinking that now that means that Jerome Powell is going to cut rates. Spoiler.
He's not gonna cut rates. It's just not gonna happen. But as far as shiny metal rocks are concerned, everything's golden because gold is up, 1 and a third points. Silver is up 3 and a third points. Platinum is up 2 and a half. Copper is up 0.85%. Palladium is up just over, 3.17%, to be exact. Ag, kinda mixed today. Biggest winner is gonna be, chocolate, up 6.27% to the upside. Biggest loser today is sugar point, no. Actually, 2 1.27 percent of the downside. The this let's see. Oh, what the hell? Oh, never mind. Something went something went wrong. Something went wrong. Live cattle is up a quarter of a point. Lean hogs are up scant. Feeder cattle are up even less of a scant. The Dow is up 0.68%.
The S and P is up almost a point. The Nasdaq is up 1 and a third. S and P Mini is up a half a point. And let's get over into Clark Moody's dashboard. I got 65,000 and $80, which is a $1,280,000,000,000 market cap. You may purchase 27.4 ounces of gold with your 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,698,500 and 14.87 of and point 16 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. Speaking of blocks, what are blocks doing? Let's I don't know. Let's find out. Over here at mintpool.space, 221 blocks carrying a 165,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 12 satoshis per v byte, and that is the same price for low priority, satoshis per v byte.
Anything under 5 satoshis per v byte are being purged from memples around the world. Hash rate is flashing 587.8 exahashes per second at this particular time. From episode 896 of bitcoin and roaring kitty meows, Natgas Immersion throws me 19,550 satoshis saying thank you, sir. No. No. No. No. Thank you. Orange Mart with 5,000 says, sending sats, save 10% off at Blockstream with code orange mart. Reverend Hoddle boosted 2,121. Satoshi says, boosting to help others find the signal. Axelrod with a thousand says, solid show. Interested in your thoughts on Japan's issues. I don't understand how the United States federal interest rates are putting the squeeze on them. Do you think Satoshi's name is a reference to Japan being the highest debt to GNP ratio?
The last part, I'll answer first. No. I don't. I don't think it has anything to do with that. But as far as Japan's issues and the interest rates, here's what's going on. It's the bonds. The bonds. United States bonds. Japan is the largest holder of US Treasury bonds at this particular date. And why is that important? Well, if they bought a whole bunch of bonds at a certain face value, let's say, a $100 per bond and they've got 100 of that 1,000,000 of bonds, I mean, 100 of you know, 1,000,000,000 of dollars is what we're talking about. They're holding our debt on their balance sheets for their banks and their central bank.
And as interest rates rose, the face value of those bonds went down. Japan, basically speaking, without giving any proof or just gut feeling, all their banks are insolvent. They don't have the funds to back the people's money that have been that are being held in the bank because the face value of the bonds that they hold to back that shit have fallen precipitously. When you get in a situation like that and you need liquidity, one of the first things that you do is you sell the bonds. United States Treasury does not want that. Neither does the Federal Reserve or Janet Yellen or anybody at the SEC, at the president's office, the administration, you name it, they don't wanna see it. Jamie Dimon doesn't wanna see it. They want Japan to hold on to the bond. So what did they do? They opened up the money printer just for Japan, not for the United States citizen, but just for Japan. They said, here, I'll tell you what, we'll print 1,000,000,000. We'll have 100 of 1,000,000,000. We might print a $1,000,000,000,000 and we're just gonna give it to you. You give us yen on the forex, the foreign exchange.
Right? Currency exchange markets say we get a shitload again. They just give it to us. And that way, they don't have to sell the bonds. So they're printing trash, which is money. It's easy to do and its effects are seen way downstream. But if Japan were to announce that they were going to auction off and sell all their or at least a good portion of their United States treasury bonds to defend the yen's price against the dollar, that's going to send shock waves throughout the market because the because Japan is the largest, not a large, but the largest holder of US debt on the face of the planet right now.
China's been getting rid of our debt for a long time because they're smart. But Japan, we're basically telling them do not sell our bonds. We'll just print trash money because we basically destroyed the financial system, so might as well just don't sell the bonds because that precipitates a very it's very clear. It'd be very clear to the world's population what the hell just happened. But by printing money and bribing them to not sell the bonds, that the effects of that won't be seen for a while. That's why they're doing that. So I hope that answered your question. Vague with a 1,000 I got 3 flame emojis. Thank you, man. Bitcoin Boaz with 821 says hashtag all sats matter at all satsmatter.com.
God's death with 537 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And user 507-408-94 with 500 says I'm a be first. Watch for me. Changing the world from inside the belly of the beast. Well, I hope you're up there in the upper echelons of some high powered government just so that you can make changes from from there. Wartime boosted 333 with cheers, Pies with a 100 says thank you, sir, no thank you. And Stacy finishes us off with a 100 sat says, another great show with more value than I have. Sat stats. Actually, I think it says sats in this wallet. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And if you wanna make a donation to the show, it's the only way that I operate anymore. It's all about Satoshis. It's trying not to have to do advertising. I don't wanna do it. I will if I have to, but I would rather just be listener supported, and that's gonna take a lot. So if you're not using or your friend and you know a friend that's not using a podcasting 2.0 app, get them to use 1. Because if they're using a legacy app or you're using a legacy app, you're missing out on the fun.
I'm talking about chapters and transcribe transcriptions and, translate or tran actually, translations too and album art, and all kinds of stuff with the new podcasting 2 point o apps. Please consider using 1 and boost the show. You know, send me a boostogram. Give me satoshis per per minute as you stream this. You can do that. You can only do that on podcasting 2.0. Do that and make sure that this show is around for you forever. And that's the morning roundup. Part 2 of the news you can use. Bitcoin Magazine, developing financial privacy tools was today criminalized by the Dutch court. Yeah. Here we we're gonna do it. Aaron von Weerdam writing this one. In the Netherlands, open source developers are now liable for their software that is used.
Alex Pertsev, a 31 year old Russian national living in the Netherlands and one of the developers of the Ethereum based privacy tool, Tornado Cash, was today found guilty of money laundering by the Dutch court. He's been sentenced to 30 no. 64 months in prison. The fact that Pertsev never held cast custody of any cryptocurrency flowing through tornado cash or could even control how the smart contract operated was deemed irrelevant by the panel of judges as he did contribute to the development of the software, In line with Dutch public prosecutor, Martin Bora Large, the court ruled that Tornado Cash was essentially ran like a business operated by PepperSec, the company founded and operated by Pertsev and his 2 cofounders, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov.
But rather than just publishing code, the judges said that the trio benefited financially from the obfuscation of illicit funds through the tools that they built. Specifically, the judges ruled that Pertsev was personally responsible for the laundering of well over $1,000,000,000 US worth of stolen Ethereum or ETH, whatever you wanna call it, including by North Korean hackers known as the Lazarus Group. Even though Pertsev could not stop this from happening after their software was released, the fact that he helped release software that enabled this in the first place without including measures to prevent it was deemed reason enough to consider him guilty.
Quote, tornado cash functions in the way the defendant and its cofounders developed port tornado cache, wrote the judges. So the operation is completely their responsibility. Oh, man. The judgment could have far reaching consequences for open source software development in general, including Bitcoin software development, at least in the Netherlands. I'm actually going to add Noster to that list. Y'all be careful out there. Please, please, please be careful out there because God only knows what can drift through Noster considering that, what, we can do lightning payments. And somebody might say, well, the lightning payment didn't go through Noster.
Technically, it doesn't do that. Yeah. I don't think these people care about technicalities. Technically, this guy had nothing to do with his shit, except to write code. If your code can be something done that you had no idea, like, runes and ordinals and inscriptions. When Taproot was was put in and a couple of other things were put in, even though it sort of enabled that behavior, but we didn't know it was going to we just weren't looking at that. And yet we have here we are with inscriptions and ordinals. Now magnify that into other shit, like human trafficking and I don't know drug trafficking and all the stuff that everybody is all up in arms about. And if they can figure out a way to use your software to do something like that, and they do, then somehow or another, according to this Dutch court, you're liable, even though you had no intention of this thing being used the way it was being used.
That's some scary shit, ladies and gentlemen. Don't let that be you. Please. And this is this is the hard one. Is getting is and I've talked about it. Is this issue of don't use your name. You know, don't start your company. Don't have a company name. Don't use an LLC structure. Don't open a checking account for it or get a phone for it or an email for it. I don't think we live in that time right now. I think we're kind of in a, what I would call, a mini dark ages, where no none of the people that are building the things that all these people know need to be built.
I don't think we're at a time where we can know their names. We we shouldn't know what there shouldn't be companies associated with them. If there are, we should not know that they're associated with the companies, and somehow or another, the companies need to be completely offshore, but that's not going to matter. All of the development probably just needs to be done in the blind, and I have no idea what the hell this means for something like open sats. I mean, could I mean, well, you, We have found this person guilty because their code, which was clearly funded by OpenSats, which means you're now liable. I mean, really? Are they gonna take all the guys at OpenSats to jail too? Does that mean that Jack Dorsey goes to jail? Because he funded OpenSats, which then funded a developer, which then built a protocol, which was able to, I don't know, set up a set up a date with a child trafficker.
I don't know how I mean, what's the chain of custody? There's a whole there's a whole line of legal theory in the United States about chain of custody and chains of liability. And, honestly, they they they're pretty short, but I don't know if we're gonna change that too. The Dutch certainly did, but let's try to just keep calm because they sent in the sentenced this dude to 64 months. That's a long time. Now thank God it's not life without possibility of parole or 2 life sentences plus 40. But let's be real, they're basically absconding with a good amount a good chunk of his time here on this planet without anybody's permission but their own. This shit needs to stop.
But before it stops, everybody's gotta go dark, I guess. I mean, that was a note that I put out the other you know, yesterday, is like as if a a 1000000000 people's identity suddenly went dark. What happens if a 1,000,000,000 people's identities are just basically left to collect dust? We just use different identities. I think we live in a world now where the whole reason we have names and last names and Christian names and middle names was simply a way to be able to propagate property legally from one entity to another entity, and we used names to do it. And maybe that's why we're so fascinated with identity and names is because it's it's a fundamental part of transferring property from 1 hairy or hairless ape to another hairless ape.
What happens if what happens if you got a 1000000000 people that figure out a different way to legally transfer a property without that without those names. With a different I don't know. It's because it's like I'm talking about a legal structure and you know that the legal structure is not going to allow that shit. And even if they did, we're still working on we we haven't changed our boats. We haven't gotten off the sinking ship because this ship is sinking. We're still on the same ship, we're just calling it a different name and that's not going to work. That's not going to work.
It's gonna have to be a 1000000000 people basically just going dark with their identities, choosing a nim, and that's just the way they operate from now on until these silly sons of bitches either get strung up on a gallows or they just end up dying of old age. I don't know how this works. But one of the people that I worry about is Cali. You know, he's one of the heaviest developers of e cash which is I guarantee you is not making the United States government or any government around the world happy at all. They cannot keep up with these people.
But Cali put out this note on Nostr yesterday. Yeah, yesterday. He says, 3 Cashew wallets with USD e cash support launched in 1 week okay he says that's what he says What is that? Well, Bob has another note that he put up pretty much shortly after Cali put his up, and he says, introducing Boardwalk Cash. The first dollar based Cashew wallet built on top of Bitcoin and connected to Nostr. You can go see it at boardwalkcash.com. That's boardwalk cash, all one word, dot com we now have stable cash on Bitcoin completely interoperable with the Lightning Network Share your Lightning address or invoices to receive dollars.
Dollars. I'll say it again. Dollars. Paste a Lightning address or invoice to send dollars. Boardwalk Cash connects to any Nostra client via NWC or Nostra Wallet Connect. Zap dollars on Nostra apps like Primal or on Discord with our ZapBot and it's any any zapper like coreacle.social is gonna be another client that you can you probably use this with because it's just basically using Nostril Wallet Connect And if huddlebot, if he's if you're still out there, correct me if if you're using something different than Nostril Wallet Connect in either event. This is a very early stage project product and there are not many public mints. So, use at your own risk.
Yet, we're excited to show some of what cash and Nostra can offer for advancing Bitcoin payments. So, again, if you wanna go see it, go over to boardwalk cash.com. And what you'll find is that there's not, like you said, not a whole lot of USD e cash mints out there to actually connect with. Further, I'm not exactly sure how any of this works. And what I mean is, like, I mean, the sending a zap, I I kinda get that, but I'm just saying USD based e cash, what is that? Do we really know what that means? Some the people talk about how Tether and the USD based stable you know, Tether being a USD based stable coin.
But is it really a dollar? I mean, is it it's not printed by the United States Treasury or or the Federal Reserve. I it's not that I don't understand it. I I get the most part of it, but there's that last mile. Is it really a dollar? I I I'm not a fan of the dollar. I think it's one of the I I I don't think it's doing us any good, but that said, how how is it that I can walk into a Wells Fargo and say, well, I'll just put out I wanna deposit $100 USD. And they go, sure. How do you wanna do that? I pull out my phone and I say, I've got a Cashew US dollar based e cash mints right here. I can do it right here. Let's just let me just send it to my account.
Let's say you could do that. To pay Wells Fargo is gonna look at you and say, that's that's not US dollars. So you see there we we fall into these traps where we see it. We understand it. We know it in our gut about a certain thing being able to perform a certain function. But we when we're staying in our bubble and we're not transporting ourselves to the other side of that boundary layer and seeing what it looks like from that side, I don't think we're doing ourselves a real service. So somebody, please, tell me how I'm going to actually give somebody an e cash USD and have them look at it as indistinguishable from the United States dollar. That's what I want. A normie.
A normie being able to look at my USD in eCash and say, yes. I recognize that that as a dollar. Tell me socially how that works because money is a very social critter. How am I going to convince a maid to take payment in USD? We're thinking, oh, what's just it's US dollars. Is it? Is it really? Are we sure that social definition is going to be fucking painfully clear to any idiot that you show this to? Because if it is not, then we've got a problem. That's what I'm saying. This is a social mechanism as well as a legal instrument. And in many cases, it's the social mechanism part that trumps the legal mechanism as far as recognition of that thing as a dollar. And, yes, I will take that for my goods and services.
So I'm just saying, it's it's not that I'm trying to shit on it. I'm just trying to bring up facts. And the fact is, I don't think a normie is going to recognize an eCash USD as US dollars. Not right now. I I think we should just keep that in mind. Okay. Will Ethereum be declared a security? God, I hope so. And talk about lost opportunity cost since 2021. Do I even still have it up here? Hold on. Let me no. I don't want you. Oh, let me see if I if I can pull this thing up. Yep. Here we go. Check this shit out. I mean, honestly, do you wanna see that? This is a chart I just put up for the guys at in, the Zap dot stream. I put up a chart of Ethereum versus b BTC.
And Ethereum's value in BTC terms since what? I'm gonna put it back over here, and I'm going to say since May of 2021 since May of 2021, Ethereum has done nothing but consistently lose value all the way to today. And I've got a couple of marks. I've got an upper line, which is an upper boundary, which can was the upward resistance. And then I've got a floor line underneath a whole bunch of these candles, red and green, as they just kinda drift downward. So the the both lines are coming left to right, but going down in the downward direction.
And Ethereum, as of this morning, just punched through the bottom resistance in a way that nobody, if you're holding Ethereum, nobody wants to see this shit. I mean, it broke through that resistance floor like nobody's business, and it's kind of embarrassing. If you went all in Ethereum and just been holding it since 2021 or before, dude, I feel for you, brother. Just buy Bitcoin, hold the Bitcoin. Anyway, decrypt, Andrei Beganski has this one. The Securities and Exchange Commission may soon assert that indeed Ethereum is a security in its expected rejections of several spot Ethereum ETF applications.
A lawyer who specializes in digital assets, warned on Tuesday. The regulator is due to decide on Van X applications for such a product on May 23rd, followed by a final decision deadline for ARK Invest and 21 Shares applications the very next day. BlackRock Fidelity and Grayscale also have applications on the SEC's desk. In March, the SEC put forth potential grounds for the disapproval of Black Rock's application and Nasdaq's proposal to list Black Rock's product. One question the SEC posed in its notice is whether Nasdaq properly filed its proposal under the exchanges rules for so called commodity based trust shares.
Requiring that trusts hold a specified commodity, Scott Johnson, a general partner at Van Buren Capital, described the question's inclusion as telling. Quote, the obvious purpose is to potentially deny on the basis that these spot filings are improperly filed as commodity based trust shares and therefore do not qualify if they are holding a security, he wrote on Twitter. Rather than indirectly excluding the digital asset as a commodity, the SEC could explicitly assert that Ethereum is a regulated security in its expected ETF denials. But that's highly unlikely, Terrence Yang, a managing director at Swan Bitcoin, told Decrypt.
Quote, Gensler and his team, they're political animals, he said, arguing that the political backdrop surrounding crypto has grown too tense for a move that would likely spark backlash from crypto friendly politicians, including former president Donald Trump. Following the SEC's approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in January, hopes that spot Ethereum ETFs will get the same treatment have plummeted On the blockchain based prediction platform, Polymarket, traders penciled in a pessimistic 16% chance that ETFs are approved this month, as of this writing anyway. Even though SCC chair Gary Gensler has publicly affirmed that Bitcoin is a commodity, the Wall Street cop has been light lipped or tight lipped when it comes to Ethereum refusing to answer questions about the cryptocurrency's regulatory status as recently as March.
Last month, a lawsuit filed by the Ethereum Software Company Consensus alleged that the SEC had internally viewed Ethereum as a security for over a year. Among other requests, the firm asked a federal judge in Texas to declare Ethereum as a commodity. Prior to its approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in January, the SEC denied similar applications for a decade, citing concerns of fraud and market manipulation in Bitcoin spot markets. So called surveillance agreements monitoring the Bitcoin futures market for ETFs that were already approved would not be sufficient, the SEC said. Eventually, the federal appellate court found that logic that logic faulty, ordering the SEC to vacate its previous rejection of Grayscale's application to convert its flagship trust into an ETF given the SEC approval or approved Ethereum futures ETFs last October, Yang said a similar headache for the regulator could follow if it points to bear market manipulation again or just general market manipulation. I don't know why I said bear. Whatever.
Quote, they can do it, but they should expect to get sued. And I think they'll get attacked politically through the heavy lobbying that the well funded crypto industry has. Yeah. Consensus is is got a large pocketbook and they will figure out a way to screw up what really needs to happen. Because what really needs to happen is that, in this particular case, and I know, I got I got Bitcoin bags. I have not liked Ethereum since I got rid of mine. And the reason I got rid of it is that I figured it out. It's a scam. It was a guy that got pissed off that he wasn't being his ideas weren't being included or taken seriously in Bitcoin development when he was working on color coins. That was a long time ago.
Yes. He was working in Ethereum. He is the guy that started Bitcoin Magazine. Blah blah blah blah blah. You know how who else was working on color coins? Jimmy Song. Jimmy Song was kinda working in a way with Vitalik Buterin on color coins way back in the day. We're talking 2013, 2014. Nobody was really, really taking Vitalik Buter and his ideas very seriously. And he got mad. And that's what that's how you got Ethereum, is you got a pissed off child who knows just enough code to be able to be dangerous, and and you get an unregistered security. And the reason it's unregistered is because of the preline and because of consensus and because of Joe Lubin as a partner in this entire thing as that, there's, like, 3 partners. There's, like, Joe Lubin, Vitalik Buterin, and one other guy and I can't remember his name and I don't give a shit.
This thing is a security. It breeds other securities, which is a first of its kind in in the United States or actually in world markets. When it comes to securities, I don't know of any security that has bred other securities. It's like it has babies. All the shit coins that come out, they're all they're all coming out of the mother asshole that is Ethereum. This thing is a security. And if you're holding a bag of it, I'd get rid of it as fast as humanly possible. I don't think this shit's going to work the way they think it's going to work. Anyway, that's going to do it for the morning Roundup. Dad says jokes, what do you call a Frenchman who's been attacked by a cat?
Claude. Get it? Okay. So happy Wednesday, everybody. I hope everybody is doing very, you know, very good today. We're we got some good green candles on the hourlies going up. Feels better than the last couple of days. Wisconsin's buying in. We got Wells Fargo buying in, although paltry. And then JPMorgan buying in, a little bit more. I don't know. We'll I hate saying it all the time, but we're gonna have to actually see how this rolls out. But of all those news of people, you know, like, all of a sudden, all these 13 what happened is a bunch of filings to the SEC were due this week and and, like, late last week. And that's where we got the news.
These filings are called 13 f's. That's like your 10 40 e z or 10 40 form, you know, form 86 or whatever. It's a form. It's a 13 f. And as people start reading them and they start realizing, holy shit, the state of Wisconsin is holding Bitcoin, and here's the way that they're holding it because it's all lined out in those 13 f filings, and more do. And it'll take time to figure out who's in and who's out, but there's gonna be more 13 f's on the horizon. Not just than this tranche, but I I get the feeling that they're quarterly, but they may be annually. I'm not exactly sure on the 13 f. But if we're done with this year and their annual, next year, there's gonna be another round.
I think there will be at least one more United States state that gets in on their pension this year, their retirement fund, their pension fund. That's at least one more state, and god, I hope it's Texas. Let's cross our fingers, and I'll 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. Uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:45 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 15th day of May 2024, and this is episode 897 of Bitcoin, and the circle p is open for business. The circle p is where I bring plebs like you, plebs just like you, who have goods and services to offer for Bitcoin. If you're not selling it for Bitcoin, you're not in the circle p.
Sheeshi21 m is certainly in the circle p. He is selling root cuttings of my favorite plant in the world, Confrey. If you don't understand what Confrey is or why I talk about it all the time, then please go back and listen to episode 726 of Bitcoin. And I've also got the, the link directly to that particular episode. It'll be in the show notes. 30 straight, maybe 40 minutes straight of why comfrey, what it is, where it came from, what it does. It's that I could tell you about it here, but we'd be talking for another 30 minutes, and that's not what the circle p is for. The circle p is to tell you that products like Comfrey, are for purchase in bitcoin. One full root, $20.
Root cuttings are a buck each and there's a difference between the 2. The full root basically includes the head of the root and not just an actual cutting. And that head, the very top part of the root, because the whole thing is included, it comes up much faster than a regular root cutting. Although, I've never had a failure on root cuttings coming up and building a full comfrey plant. It's perennial. It builds, the most biomass of any terrestrial plant. That's arguable, but I believe it is true. Good for compost, good for compost tea, good for mulching. You chop it, you drop it, you do all you mix medicine, you do all kinds of stuff with it, but you want it in your garden. And these are sterile so they don't propagate through seed and they don't send runners.
Right? You can propagate it if you want but it's not if you just put it in the ground and leave it there, it's not gonna drift, it's not gonna move, it's not gonna, you know, take over something. Like, everybody's all scared of mint and shit taking over. Big, oh my god. You planted mint. I cannot believe you planted mint. It's going to take over. Good. I like mint. I've never actually had it take over a damn thing. Good morning, Kid Warp. He just popped into the zap.stream live chat. I appreciate you being here. But one full route for $20, you can get a root cutting for a buck each. You pay the shipping. You get a hold of [email protected] if you wanna email them. It's a little slower. If you wanna get to them fast, use the link in the show notes. It'll take you right to his Noster account so you can DM him or just honestly, just send him a message on Noster. Don't don't worry about the DM shit. If you guys wanna do addresses and stuff after you decide tell him that you wanna buy it, then you figure that shit out. But when you buy it, you make sure you tell him that you heard it here on the circle p and he will cut me some satoshis. Alright. The news.
The news is next. Oh, is there no audio in the zap stream? Oh, I know why. I know why. Okay. Hold on. Hold on. I know. I switched mics. Let me see what's going on here. I think I know yeah. I know what's going on. I forgot to set my properties over here at OBS. So hold on and let me see if I can get that done. I may even have to restart this whole thing. Okay. It looks like we got that figured out. Thank you, my eternal thanks to Kidwarp and Slow Slow for watching my back over there in zap.stream. Otherwise, I would have streamed the whole damn thing without any audio whatsoever.
It's not that I have a huge I mean, I don't have a very big audience at all when I'm streaming. I I do it because it's just another method of getting stuff out there. But if you've noticed, I've changed microphones. You guys, because y'all have been very good to me, with your donations, bought me a Shure SM 57 or I mean a Shure SM 7 b, microphone, which is a much better microphone. It's got a much deeper bottom end. It's got a much richer sound for, you know, radio type stuff. So I put it on there but forgot to change over a lot of the, configuration in some of the, stuff that's going on that that runs this show. So much appreciation to Kidwarp and Slow Slow, and thank you, in pub 15, f o l n l x, for the 1,000 sat boost.
It's nice it's nice to have that. Okay. Now that I've I've gotten my mind apparently back together here, Let's do this one from Bitcoin Magazine. This is one of the biggest pieces of news today. President Biden has blocked Chinese backed Bitcoin mining firm from owning land near a Wyoming nuclear missile base. Probably not the best idea. Holy shit. Huddl bod with 10,000 sats, brother. Good to see you. Thank you. I hope things are doing very, very well in your world. Brother, we gotta go get a beer, man. We gotta go get a beer. We we need to set that shit up. Alright. So the United States president, Joe Biden, has issued an order prohibiting the acquisition of certain real property by Mine 1, Cloud Computing Investment 1, or act I think they say LLP, but it says investment ILP. I don't know. I've never seen that one before. Whatever. Citing national security concerns.
The order, based on findings outlined by the president, aims to safeguard critical assets near Francis e Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The president's order stems from evidence indicating that Mine 1 Partners Limited, a British Virgin Islands Company majority owned by Chinese nationals, and related entities plan to acquire real estate within 1 mile of Warren Air Force Force Base. This real estate, specifically described as Lot 1 Block 10 North Range Business Park Third Filing, and the nature of operations conducted by mine 1 poses potential national security risks due to its close proximity to a strategic missile base, Biden explained.
Mine 1 acquired the real estate back in June of 2022 and subsequently developed it for specialized cryptocurrency mining operations, which raised concerns about surveillance and espionage activities facilitated by foreign sourced equipment. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS became involved after a public tip, which they then identified significant risks to national security associated with the transaction. The president's order prohibits the transaction outright requiring Mine 1 and its affiliates to divest all legal and beneficial ownership interest in the real estate within 120 days.
Additionally, mine 1 must remove all equipment and improvements related to their operations on the property within 90 days subject to verification by CFIUS. Furthermore, Mine 1 and its affiliates are barred from any physical or logical access to the real estate equipment or improvements until divestment and removal are completed to Cepheus' satisfaction. In any attempt any attempt to evade or circumvent this order is strictly prohibited with the attorney general authorized to enforce compliance. In response to the order, Mine 1 and its affiliates are required to cooperate fully with Cepheus, providing regular updates on compliance efforts, blah, blah blah blah blah. So they kicked them out. The whole stack of Bitcoin miners that were within, I guess, one mile of Warren Air Force Base, which is a nuclear strategic nuclear site, just got basically thrown out of the country. Alright. Now so on its face that actually I don't really have a problem with it because of this.
It's a nuclear facility. I don't want I it they could be Germans for all I care. I don't want them hanging out within a mile of strategic nuclear missile silos. I don't know what they're I I don't know if they have any other plans. It it even though I'm not the biggest fan of the United States federal government or any federal governments, that's I totally understand this. I get it. I get it. Except that there's some language in the executive order itself that talks about the potential for this equipment being used for surveillance and some kind of espionage.
And the fact that that language is in the executive order and it specifically pertains to Bitcoin mining, it's possible it's possible that this is one of the ways that they might use to, quote, unquote, crush Bitcoin, which is not going to happen. We saw what happened when China banned Bitcoin. First of all, it didn't actually work all the way because there's still a lot of heavy ass mining going on in China. And second of all, they just moved to a different country. You know, a lot of them came over the United States. A lot of them went up into the, Stans countries, you know, north north and west of the Chinese border, the top northwest corner of that of that nation, they just they just took them across the border. I think it was Uzbekistan. I don't know. I can't I don't know my my eastern European and Chinese geography that well. But in either event, it could be something that we need to watch out for except for this. And and they're saying that this this because it was all made in China, because the ASIC chips were made in China, because the controller chips were made in China, that somehow or another espionage is possible.
Okay. Alright. So fine. So are most of the chips in our cars, in, what did I say? I put a note out on Noster yesterday, something about, like, front end registers at grocery stores. Yeah. That's all Chinese made. The pump controllers for gasoline pipelines and oil pipelines and natural gas pipelines. Guess what? They're all Chinese made. All the chips for all the controllers for all that shit. The heaters on natural gas pipelines, which they well, they're not in the pipeline, but over at, like, exchange stations. There's heaters and there's coolers, and all of that shit is controlled by chips that were made in China. I airplanes, cars, buses, trains, They'd have to you'd have to shut it all down. You'd have to shut it all down. Every surveillance camera. Do we know?
Because they were made in China. I guarantee it. Or at least the electronics were. Or do we know that they didn't backdoor that shit and are sending, like, a copy of the feed over into Beijing? We don't know. So I don't think this has as many teeth as people think it does. Because what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If somebody just gets all uppity and says, well, if you're, you know, if you're gonna do it for this, then you best do it for all of this shit. And then that did it could scare the living crap out of the United States population when it becomes evident just how much of our electronic infrastructure has actually been built by the Chinese. So I'm not worried about it. I honestly think it's for me, in this particular case, I'm okay with them telling them to skedaddle and get away from a strategic nuclear missile silo site. I'm just saying I I don't have that much of a problem with it. Alright.
Huddlebot? Okay. Yeah. It might be cutting off. Let me see here. Do do do. Let me see if I can get what do we what do I got on filters? Hold on. Let me see if there's an issue here. What I'm gonna do, I think here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to kill this filter. And that is probably going to introduce a lot of noise into the background until I get this shit fixed up because there's just no way to really test this stuff until you have somebody on the other side, you know, listening to it. So let me know if this fixes up the, cutting out, but also in the in over there in Zap. Stream, please let me know how much more the background noise has increased.
I'd appreciate that because I'm pretty sure that I just increased a whole shit ton of background noise. Okay. Let's get back to it. Let's go down south to El Salvador where they've mined 474 Bitcoin using geothermal volcanic energy. Prashant Jha Cointelegraph tells us more about this one. El Salvador has mined a total of 474 Bitcoin worth $29,000,000. Uh-huh. $25,000,000, for, using volcanic geothermal energy since 2021. Damn. $29,000,000 since 9 since 2021 is not bad, dude. Well, the Bitcoin was mined with power from the country's Takapa volcano using 300 minuteing processors. The country has allocated 1.5 megawatts to cryptocurrency mining out of the 100 and 2 megawatts produced by the state owned power plant according to Reuters.
In the face of increased scrutiny over BTC Mining Reliance and electricity and fossil fuels, El Salvador has emerged as a pioneer in renewable energy mining. In 2021, El Salvador made history by becoming the 1st country to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender alongside the United States dollar. And since then, the government has adopted several bitcoin focused policies, including establishing a geothermal plant to mine BTC. El Salvador now holds a total of 5,750 BTC worth around $354,000,000 Since 2021, global organizations such as the World Bank and others have heavily criticized the Central American nation for adopting Bitcoin.
Blah blah blah. And then they go on to a little bit more more history. But this is the first solid numbers that I've heard of mining in El Salvador using geothermal energy or, quote, unquote, Bitcoin or volcano Bitcoin. Right? It seems to me that El Salvador is becoming more serious about being transparent when it comes to their Bitcoin because it was just Monday that I told you I told you about the website that they had set up that is basically a it looks to me not a hack, but base basing this entire website off of mempool.space and turning it into where it's just watching their one wallet, and now we can see exactly what they've got in there. We can see the 1 Bitcoin per day allocations. We We see it all. And now we're finally starting to get numbers from their Bitcoin mining, so I am looking forward to the future where El Salvador becomes even more transparent.
Okay. Speaking of El Salvador, we are still gonna remain down south in El Salvador because BTC Times' Dennis Sat has this one called El Salvador Launches A Bitcoin Based Capital Raise for a new airport hotel. Oh, interesting. After a prolonged process, beginning with the approval of their digital securities laws, El Salvador is now launching a Bitcoin funded capital raise. This initiative potentially sets the stage for the much discussed Bitcoin bonds announced by president Bukele. The capital will fund the construction of the only resort hotel at the Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero e Galdamas International Airport in San Salvador. God, that's a hell of an name. Marking the country's first venture into liquid Bitcoin based capital markets.
The project, identified as the Hampton by Hilton, is targeting a funding goal of $6,250,000 The funds will be utilized to construct a 400 and I'm sorry. 4,484 square meter facility over 5 stories tall, featuring 80 rooms, commercial spaces, a swimming pool, and other amenities. The hotel's location within the airport's premises positions it to be the sole provider of hotel services in this area. The project site, leased from SEPA, the Salvadoran agency responsible for transportation infrastructure, the investment opportunity begins at a minimum entry of $1,000 US with a total of 6,250 tokens available, each offering a 10% annual yield paid semi annually.
Watch out for the yield stuff, guys. I'm I'm I like Bukele. I'm not sure about them, but every time I see yield, I definitely get the the hackles, especially double digit yields, always gets the hackles on the back of my neck to stand up. Alright? Well, I've just I've seen too much. I'm jaded because of it. But for investments exceeding $10,000, the project will provide complimentary stays at the resort Overseen by Invision's LaGuardia SA DCV and facilitated through Bitfinex Securities, the project is projected to create 1,000 jobs during its construction phase and an additional 5,000 jobs once it's operational. The construction of the facility is already started and is expected to be completed within the next 12 months.
For further information, interested parties can access details through Bitfinex Securities. Oh, god. This capital raise exemplifies El Salvador's ongoing efforts to integrate Bitcoin into its economic development strategies. I got something to say about this Bitfinex security shit. Without getting too far into the weeds on some of the shit that I some of the sausage that I saw being made with the whole Bitfinex securities thing by a couple of other companies that I am aware of, that I will not name. This honestly, this feels really greasy, sleazy, oily, and a little bit slimy.
The Bitfinex securities I'm not Bitfinex securities is part of Bitfinex, but it is a different arm than Bitfinex, the trading platform. Right? It's the same company, I get that, but it is a different arm. I every time I see the word Bitfinex securities, the hackles go way up on the back of my neck. It's the whole this whole thing kinda bugs me. Right? This whole, hey. We're gonna build a hotel at our international airport. You can buy in for as little as $1,000 and here's these tokens, which Bitfinex Securities has done for a couple of companies. I don't know, man. There's something about this that feels I don't wanna say that it feels wrong. It could be completely above board.
I'm sure that that I'm sure that hotel's gonna be great. It's just the way this is working just makes me just be aware, guys. You might wanna keep your eyes on on this kind of thing because a slippery slope can happen with this entire thing going on in El Salvador. The wrong people get in. The wrong people get their clutches in. The wrong people bury you know, sink and then bury to the bone very long fangs into El Salvador, and you've got yourself a problem. And then if it is a problem, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and Peter Schiff will all stand together in a great big party and go, see? I told you. I told you.
We've tried to warn you. I don't want that shit happening. I don't know, man. We'll have to definitely gonna have to watch and see this this Hampton by Hilton Hotel over there at the El San Salvador airport. Now back up into the United States, way, way up into cheese country, we've got Wisconsin becoming the 1st United States state to buy Bitcoin, and this is out of Gizmodo dotcom. It is written by Matt Novak. Wisconsin has officially become the very first state in the United States to buy bitcoin according to a new filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. And while $98,000,000 isn't considered a lot of money for a state pension fund.
It's still a notable move given how notoriously volatile cryptocurrency investing can be. The SEC filing available online was first reported by CoinDesk, which notes the state of Wisconsin Investment Board bought 9 94,562 shares of BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust worth about $98,000,000 and 63,000,000 dollars worth of grayscale spot Bitcoin ETF. I don't know. See, it says it says that they put in 98,000,000 total. I this I don't know. There's something wrong about these numbers. Gizmodo, I think, has got this wrong. I think it's a total of 98,000,000 plus 63,000,000 and not a total of 98,000,000.
But somebody else check my math on that. Bitcoin ETFs were only approved this past January. Yes. We're aware. Quote, normally, you don't get these big fish institutions in the 13 f's for a year or so when the ETF gains more liquidity. But as we've seen, these are no ordinary launches, Eric Balchunas, an ETF analyst at Bloomberg, said. Good sign. Expect more as institutions tend to move in herds. End quote. The most famous large institutional investment in Bitcoin started in El Salvador when they did all of their Bitcoin law stuff. We're not gonna worry about that. The the thing is is that we have a state pension fund.
Now it's not this is the thing about for any of you listening in other countries. There is pension funds that are private And, like, you know, some some, like, businesses will, you know, buy those pension funds for their, as a package deal for their employees, and the employees put in their money into the pension fund as part of their draw from their pay daily check. And but that's on a company by company basis depending on where the company is and where they're headquartered and blah blah blah. This isn't a company. This is the state pension fund.
So this is owned by the state government, not a private institution. It's different. Why? Because it's the police, all of them in Wisconsin. It is the fire department, all of them in Wisconsin. It's all of the EMTs that are state funded, not the private guys. But like the guys that get the ambulance, When you get your ass in a sling, you need some help, the ambulance comes. Yeah. That a lot of that shit's state funded. Teachers. All of your teachers. All of them in public school. That's their pen this they're going to have exposure to Bitcoin ETFs. All of these people. Right? The national like, or the state guard of Wisconsin.
They're state they're essentially state employees. Also, all of the state military. Right? All government employees of the state of Wisconsin, if you're working at the capitol building as a receptionist, you have now have exposure to Bitcoin ETFs because your pension fund is get if you're a state employee, your your pension fund is determined by the state. If you're a state employee, that's your package. You in at in Texas, I could have gone to a different one, but that's not true in every state. And I'm not sure about what's going on in Wisconsin, But for the great guts and feathers, even in Texas, most people were using if you were a state employee, most people were just into the state pension funds. And I'm sure the exact same thing is happening here in the state of Wisconsin.
So out of all 50 states, it was the cheese heads who figured it out first. I feel I feel that this is not fair. I I feel that Texas should have been at least on the on the docket to be the first to have, you know, figured this shit out. But no. No. No. No. Up in the great white north in the frozen tundra land of the Green Bay Packers, it's the cheese heads of freaking Wisconsin that are actually front running all 5th all the rest of the 49 states in the United States. And I I feel cheated. Let's see if the numbers do me any better. CNBC Futures and Commodities. Oil is actually up today after after scaring the living piss out of tech you know, Exxon and Chevron to $78.37.
Brent Norcia is up a quarter of a point on West Texas Intermediate back up to $78.37. Brent Norcia is up a quarter of a point to 8262. Natural gas is up almost three points to $2.41 a1000, and gasoline is up just over 1% to $2.48 a gallon. All of your shiny metal rocks are having a good day. Can you imagine why? The CPI numbers came in this morning, and they were a little soft. It looked like inflation is getting a little bit better. So now everybody is thinking that now that means that Jerome Powell is going to cut rates. Spoiler.
He's not gonna cut rates. It's just not gonna happen. But as far as shiny metal rocks are concerned, everything's golden because gold is up, 1 and a third points. Silver is up 3 and a third points. Platinum is up 2 and a half. Copper is up 0.85%. Palladium is up just over, 3.17%, to be exact. Ag, kinda mixed today. Biggest winner is gonna be, chocolate, up 6.27% to the upside. Biggest loser today is sugar point, no. Actually, 2 1.27 percent of the downside. The this let's see. Oh, what the hell? Oh, never mind. Something went something went wrong. Something went wrong. Live cattle is up a quarter of a point. Lean hogs are up scant. Feeder cattle are up even less of a scant. The Dow is up 0.68%.
The S and P is up almost a point. The Nasdaq is up 1 and a third. S and P Mini is up a half a point. And let's get over into Clark Moody's dashboard. I got 65,000 and $80, which is a $1,280,000,000,000 market cap. You may purchase 27.4 ounces of gold with your 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,698,500 and 14.87 of and point 16 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. Speaking of blocks, what are blocks doing? Let's I don't know. Let's find out. Over here at mintpool.space, 221 blocks carrying a 165,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 12 satoshis per v byte, and that is the same price for low priority, satoshis per v byte.
Anything under 5 satoshis per v byte are being purged from memples around the world. Hash rate is flashing 587.8 exahashes per second at this particular time. From episode 896 of bitcoin and roaring kitty meows, Natgas Immersion throws me 19,550 satoshis saying thank you, sir. No. No. No. No. Thank you. Orange Mart with 5,000 says, sending sats, save 10% off at Blockstream with code orange mart. Reverend Hoddle boosted 2,121. Satoshi says, boosting to help others find the signal. Axelrod with a thousand says, solid show. Interested in your thoughts on Japan's issues. I don't understand how the United States federal interest rates are putting the squeeze on them. Do you think Satoshi's name is a reference to Japan being the highest debt to GNP ratio?
The last part, I'll answer first. No. I don't. I don't think it has anything to do with that. But as far as Japan's issues and the interest rates, here's what's going on. It's the bonds. The bonds. United States bonds. Japan is the largest holder of US Treasury bonds at this particular date. And why is that important? Well, if they bought a whole bunch of bonds at a certain face value, let's say, a $100 per bond and they've got 100 of that 1,000,000 of bonds, I mean, 100 of you know, 1,000,000,000 of dollars is what we're talking about. They're holding our debt on their balance sheets for their banks and their central bank.
And as interest rates rose, the face value of those bonds went down. Japan, basically speaking, without giving any proof or just gut feeling, all their banks are insolvent. They don't have the funds to back the people's money that have been that are being held in the bank because the face value of the bonds that they hold to back that shit have fallen precipitously. When you get in a situation like that and you need liquidity, one of the first things that you do is you sell the bonds. United States Treasury does not want that. Neither does the Federal Reserve or Janet Yellen or anybody at the SEC, at the president's office, the administration, you name it, they don't wanna see it. Jamie Dimon doesn't wanna see it. They want Japan to hold on to the bond. So what did they do? They opened up the money printer just for Japan, not for the United States citizen, but just for Japan. They said, here, I'll tell you what, we'll print 1,000,000,000. We'll have 100 of 1,000,000,000. We might print a $1,000,000,000,000 and we're just gonna give it to you. You give us yen on the forex, the foreign exchange.
Right? Currency exchange markets say we get a shitload again. They just give it to us. And that way, they don't have to sell the bonds. So they're printing trash, which is money. It's easy to do and its effects are seen way downstream. But if Japan were to announce that they were going to auction off and sell all their or at least a good portion of their United States treasury bonds to defend the yen's price against the dollar, that's going to send shock waves throughout the market because the because Japan is the largest, not a large, but the largest holder of US debt on the face of the planet right now.
China's been getting rid of our debt for a long time because they're smart. But Japan, we're basically telling them do not sell our bonds. We'll just print trash money because we basically destroyed the financial system, so might as well just don't sell the bonds because that precipitates a very it's very clear. It'd be very clear to the world's population what the hell just happened. But by printing money and bribing them to not sell the bonds, that the effects of that won't be seen for a while. That's why they're doing that. So I hope that answered your question. Vague with a 1,000 I got 3 flame emojis. Thank you, man. Bitcoin Boaz with 821 says hashtag all sats matter at all satsmatter.com.
God's death with 537 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And user 507-408-94 with 500 says I'm a be first. Watch for me. Changing the world from inside the belly of the beast. Well, I hope you're up there in the upper echelons of some high powered government just so that you can make changes from from there. Wartime boosted 333 with cheers, Pies with a 100 says thank you, sir, no thank you. And Stacy finishes us off with a 100 sat says, another great show with more value than I have. Sat stats. Actually, I think it says sats in this wallet. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And if you wanna make a donation to the show, it's the only way that I operate anymore. It's all about Satoshis. It's trying not to have to do advertising. I don't wanna do it. I will if I have to, but I would rather just be listener supported, and that's gonna take a lot. So if you're not using or your friend and you know a friend that's not using a podcasting 2.0 app, get them to use 1. Because if they're using a legacy app or you're using a legacy app, you're missing out on the fun.
I'm talking about chapters and transcribe transcriptions and, translate or tran actually, translations too and album art, and all kinds of stuff with the new podcasting 2 point o apps. Please consider using 1 and boost the show. You know, send me a boostogram. Give me satoshis per per minute as you stream this. You can do that. You can only do that on podcasting 2.0. Do that and make sure that this show is around for you forever. And that's the morning roundup. Part 2 of the news you can use. Bitcoin Magazine, developing financial privacy tools was today criminalized by the Dutch court. Yeah. Here we we're gonna do it. Aaron von Weerdam writing this one. In the Netherlands, open source developers are now liable for their software that is used.
Alex Pertsev, a 31 year old Russian national living in the Netherlands and one of the developers of the Ethereum based privacy tool, Tornado Cash, was today found guilty of money laundering by the Dutch court. He's been sentenced to 30 no. 64 months in prison. The fact that Pertsev never held cast custody of any cryptocurrency flowing through tornado cash or could even control how the smart contract operated was deemed irrelevant by the panel of judges as he did contribute to the development of the software, In line with Dutch public prosecutor, Martin Bora Large, the court ruled that Tornado Cash was essentially ran like a business operated by PepperSec, the company founded and operated by Pertsev and his 2 cofounders, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov.
But rather than just publishing code, the judges said that the trio benefited financially from the obfuscation of illicit funds through the tools that they built. Specifically, the judges ruled that Pertsev was personally responsible for the laundering of well over $1,000,000,000 US worth of stolen Ethereum or ETH, whatever you wanna call it, including by North Korean hackers known as the Lazarus Group. Even though Pertsev could not stop this from happening after their software was released, the fact that he helped release software that enabled this in the first place without including measures to prevent it was deemed reason enough to consider him guilty.
Quote, tornado cash functions in the way the defendant and its cofounders developed port tornado cache, wrote the judges. So the operation is completely their responsibility. Oh, man. The judgment could have far reaching consequences for open source software development in general, including Bitcoin software development, at least in the Netherlands. I'm actually going to add Noster to that list. Y'all be careful out there. Please, please, please be careful out there because God only knows what can drift through Noster considering that, what, we can do lightning payments. And somebody might say, well, the lightning payment didn't go through Noster.
Technically, it doesn't do that. Yeah. I don't think these people care about technicalities. Technically, this guy had nothing to do with his shit, except to write code. If your code can be something done that you had no idea, like, runes and ordinals and inscriptions. When Taproot was was put in and a couple of other things were put in, even though it sort of enabled that behavior, but we didn't know it was going to we just weren't looking at that. And yet we have here we are with inscriptions and ordinals. Now magnify that into other shit, like human trafficking and I don't know drug trafficking and all the stuff that everybody is all up in arms about. And if they can figure out a way to use your software to do something like that, and they do, then somehow or another, according to this Dutch court, you're liable, even though you had no intention of this thing being used the way it was being used.
That's some scary shit, ladies and gentlemen. Don't let that be you. Please. And this is this is the hard one. Is getting is and I've talked about it. Is this issue of don't use your name. You know, don't start your company. Don't have a company name. Don't use an LLC structure. Don't open a checking account for it or get a phone for it or an email for it. I don't think we live in that time right now. I think we're kind of in a, what I would call, a mini dark ages, where no none of the people that are building the things that all these people know need to be built.
I don't think we're at a time where we can know their names. We we shouldn't know what there shouldn't be companies associated with them. If there are, we should not know that they're associated with the companies, and somehow or another, the companies need to be completely offshore, but that's not going to matter. All of the development probably just needs to be done in the blind, and I have no idea what the hell this means for something like open sats. I mean, could I mean, well, you, We have found this person guilty because their code, which was clearly funded by OpenSats, which means you're now liable. I mean, really? Are they gonna take all the guys at OpenSats to jail too? Does that mean that Jack Dorsey goes to jail? Because he funded OpenSats, which then funded a developer, which then built a protocol, which was able to, I don't know, set up a set up a date with a child trafficker.
I don't know how I mean, what's the chain of custody? There's a whole there's a whole line of legal theory in the United States about chain of custody and chains of liability. And, honestly, they they they're pretty short, but I don't know if we're gonna change that too. The Dutch certainly did, but let's try to just keep calm because they sent in the sentenced this dude to 64 months. That's a long time. Now thank God it's not life without possibility of parole or 2 life sentences plus 40. But let's be real, they're basically absconding with a good amount a good chunk of his time here on this planet without anybody's permission but their own. This shit needs to stop.
But before it stops, everybody's gotta go dark, I guess. I mean, that was a note that I put out the other you know, yesterday, is like as if a a 1000000000 people's identity suddenly went dark. What happens if a 1,000,000,000 people's identities are just basically left to collect dust? We just use different identities. I think we live in a world now where the whole reason we have names and last names and Christian names and middle names was simply a way to be able to propagate property legally from one entity to another entity, and we used names to do it. And maybe that's why we're so fascinated with identity and names is because it's it's a fundamental part of transferring property from 1 hairy or hairless ape to another hairless ape.
What happens if what happens if you got a 1000000000 people that figure out a different way to legally transfer a property without that without those names. With a different I don't know. It's because it's like I'm talking about a legal structure and you know that the legal structure is not going to allow that shit. And even if they did, we're still working on we we haven't changed our boats. We haven't gotten off the sinking ship because this ship is sinking. We're still on the same ship, we're just calling it a different name and that's not going to work. That's not going to work.
It's gonna have to be a 1000000000 people basically just going dark with their identities, choosing a nim, and that's just the way they operate from now on until these silly sons of bitches either get strung up on a gallows or they just end up dying of old age. I don't know how this works. But one of the people that I worry about is Cali. You know, he's one of the heaviest developers of e cash which is I guarantee you is not making the United States government or any government around the world happy at all. They cannot keep up with these people.
But Cali put out this note on Nostr yesterday. Yeah, yesterday. He says, 3 Cashew wallets with USD e cash support launched in 1 week okay he says that's what he says What is that? Well, Bob has another note that he put up pretty much shortly after Cali put his up, and he says, introducing Boardwalk Cash. The first dollar based Cashew wallet built on top of Bitcoin and connected to Nostr. You can go see it at boardwalkcash.com. That's boardwalk cash, all one word, dot com we now have stable cash on Bitcoin completely interoperable with the Lightning Network Share your Lightning address or invoices to receive dollars.
Dollars. I'll say it again. Dollars. Paste a Lightning address or invoice to send dollars. Boardwalk Cash connects to any Nostra client via NWC or Nostra Wallet Connect. Zap dollars on Nostra apps like Primal or on Discord with our ZapBot and it's any any zapper like coreacle.social is gonna be another client that you can you probably use this with because it's just basically using Nostril Wallet Connect And if huddlebot, if he's if you're still out there, correct me if if you're using something different than Nostril Wallet Connect in either event. This is a very early stage project product and there are not many public mints. So, use at your own risk.
Yet, we're excited to show some of what cash and Nostra can offer for advancing Bitcoin payments. So, again, if you wanna go see it, go over to boardwalk cash.com. And what you'll find is that there's not, like you said, not a whole lot of USD e cash mints out there to actually connect with. Further, I'm not exactly sure how any of this works. And what I mean is, like, I mean, the sending a zap, I I kinda get that, but I'm just saying USD based e cash, what is that? Do we really know what that means? Some the people talk about how Tether and the USD based stable you know, Tether being a USD based stable coin.
But is it really a dollar? I mean, is it it's not printed by the United States Treasury or or the Federal Reserve. I it's not that I don't understand it. I I get the most part of it, but there's that last mile. Is it really a dollar? I I I'm not a fan of the dollar. I think it's one of the I I I don't think it's doing us any good, but that said, how how is it that I can walk into a Wells Fargo and say, well, I'll just put out I wanna deposit $100 USD. And they go, sure. How do you wanna do that? I pull out my phone and I say, I've got a Cashew US dollar based e cash mints right here. I can do it right here. Let's just let me just send it to my account.
Let's say you could do that. To pay Wells Fargo is gonna look at you and say, that's that's not US dollars. So you see there we we fall into these traps where we see it. We understand it. We know it in our gut about a certain thing being able to perform a certain function. But we when we're staying in our bubble and we're not transporting ourselves to the other side of that boundary layer and seeing what it looks like from that side, I don't think we're doing ourselves a real service. So somebody, please, tell me how I'm going to actually give somebody an e cash USD and have them look at it as indistinguishable from the United States dollar. That's what I want. A normie.
A normie being able to look at my USD in eCash and say, yes. I recognize that that as a dollar. Tell me socially how that works because money is a very social critter. How am I going to convince a maid to take payment in USD? We're thinking, oh, what's just it's US dollars. Is it? Is it really? Are we sure that social definition is going to be fucking painfully clear to any idiot that you show this to? Because if it is not, then we've got a problem. That's what I'm saying. This is a social mechanism as well as a legal instrument. And in many cases, it's the social mechanism part that trumps the legal mechanism as far as recognition of that thing as a dollar. And, yes, I will take that for my goods and services.
So I'm just saying, it's it's not that I'm trying to shit on it. I'm just trying to bring up facts. And the fact is, I don't think a normie is going to recognize an eCash USD as US dollars. Not right now. I I think we should just keep that in mind. Okay. Will Ethereum be declared a security? God, I hope so. And talk about lost opportunity cost since 2021. Do I even still have it up here? Hold on. Let me no. I don't want you. Oh, let me see if I if I can pull this thing up. Yep. Here we go. Check this shit out. I mean, honestly, do you wanna see that? This is a chart I just put up for the guys at in, the Zap dot stream. I put up a chart of Ethereum versus b BTC.
And Ethereum's value in BTC terms since what? I'm gonna put it back over here, and I'm going to say since May of 2021 since May of 2021, Ethereum has done nothing but consistently lose value all the way to today. And I've got a couple of marks. I've got an upper line, which is an upper boundary, which can was the upward resistance. And then I've got a floor line underneath a whole bunch of these candles, red and green, as they just kinda drift downward. So the the both lines are coming left to right, but going down in the downward direction.
And Ethereum, as of this morning, just punched through the bottom resistance in a way that nobody, if you're holding Ethereum, nobody wants to see this shit. I mean, it broke through that resistance floor like nobody's business, and it's kind of embarrassing. If you went all in Ethereum and just been holding it since 2021 or before, dude, I feel for you, brother. Just buy Bitcoin, hold the Bitcoin. Anyway, decrypt, Andrei Beganski has this one. The Securities and Exchange Commission may soon assert that indeed Ethereum is a security in its expected rejections of several spot Ethereum ETF applications.
A lawyer who specializes in digital assets, warned on Tuesday. The regulator is due to decide on Van X applications for such a product on May 23rd, followed by a final decision deadline for ARK Invest and 21 Shares applications the very next day. BlackRock Fidelity and Grayscale also have applications on the SEC's desk. In March, the SEC put forth potential grounds for the disapproval of Black Rock's application and Nasdaq's proposal to list Black Rock's product. One question the SEC posed in its notice is whether Nasdaq properly filed its proposal under the exchanges rules for so called commodity based trust shares.
Requiring that trusts hold a specified commodity, Scott Johnson, a general partner at Van Buren Capital, described the question's inclusion as telling. Quote, the obvious purpose is to potentially deny on the basis that these spot filings are improperly filed as commodity based trust shares and therefore do not qualify if they are holding a security, he wrote on Twitter. Rather than indirectly excluding the digital asset as a commodity, the SEC could explicitly assert that Ethereum is a regulated security in its expected ETF denials. But that's highly unlikely, Terrence Yang, a managing director at Swan Bitcoin, told Decrypt.
Quote, Gensler and his team, they're political animals, he said, arguing that the political backdrop surrounding crypto has grown too tense for a move that would likely spark backlash from crypto friendly politicians, including former president Donald Trump. Following the SEC's approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in January, hopes that spot Ethereum ETFs will get the same treatment have plummeted On the blockchain based prediction platform, Polymarket, traders penciled in a pessimistic 16% chance that ETFs are approved this month, as of this writing anyway. Even though SCC chair Gary Gensler has publicly affirmed that Bitcoin is a commodity, the Wall Street cop has been light lipped or tight lipped when it comes to Ethereum refusing to answer questions about the cryptocurrency's regulatory status as recently as March.
Last month, a lawsuit filed by the Ethereum Software Company Consensus alleged that the SEC had internally viewed Ethereum as a security for over a year. Among other requests, the firm asked a federal judge in Texas to declare Ethereum as a commodity. Prior to its approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in January, the SEC denied similar applications for a decade, citing concerns of fraud and market manipulation in Bitcoin spot markets. So called surveillance agreements monitoring the Bitcoin futures market for ETFs that were already approved would not be sufficient, the SEC said. Eventually, the federal appellate court found that logic that logic faulty, ordering the SEC to vacate its previous rejection of Grayscale's application to convert its flagship trust into an ETF given the SEC approval or approved Ethereum futures ETFs last October, Yang said a similar headache for the regulator could follow if it points to bear market manipulation again or just general market manipulation. I don't know why I said bear. Whatever.
Quote, they can do it, but they should expect to get sued. And I think they'll get attacked politically through the heavy lobbying that the well funded crypto industry has. Yeah. Consensus is is got a large pocketbook and they will figure out a way to screw up what really needs to happen. Because what really needs to happen is that, in this particular case, and I know, I got I got Bitcoin bags. I have not liked Ethereum since I got rid of mine. And the reason I got rid of it is that I figured it out. It's a scam. It was a guy that got pissed off that he wasn't being his ideas weren't being included or taken seriously in Bitcoin development when he was working on color coins. That was a long time ago.
Yes. He was working in Ethereum. He is the guy that started Bitcoin Magazine. Blah blah blah blah blah. You know how who else was working on color coins? Jimmy Song. Jimmy Song was kinda working in a way with Vitalik Buterin on color coins way back in the day. We're talking 2013, 2014. Nobody was really, really taking Vitalik Buter and his ideas very seriously. And he got mad. And that's what that's how you got Ethereum, is you got a pissed off child who knows just enough code to be able to be dangerous, and and you get an unregistered security. And the reason it's unregistered is because of the preline and because of consensus and because of Joe Lubin as a partner in this entire thing as that, there's, like, 3 partners. There's, like, Joe Lubin, Vitalik Buterin, and one other guy and I can't remember his name and I don't give a shit.
This thing is a security. It breeds other securities, which is a first of its kind in in the United States or actually in world markets. When it comes to securities, I don't know of any security that has bred other securities. It's like it has babies. All the shit coins that come out, they're all they're all coming out of the mother asshole that is Ethereum. This thing is a security. And if you're holding a bag of it, I'd get rid of it as fast as humanly possible. I don't think this shit's going to work the way they think it's going to work. Anyway, that's going to do it for the morning Roundup. Dad says jokes, what do you call a Frenchman who's been attacked by a cat?
Claude. Get it? Okay. So happy Wednesday, everybody. I hope everybody is doing very, you know, very good today. We're we got some good green candles on the hourlies going up. Feels better than the last couple of days. Wisconsin's buying in. We got Wells Fargo buying in, although paltry. And then JPMorgan buying in, a little bit more. I don't know. We'll I hate saying it all the time, but we're gonna have to actually see how this rolls out. But of all those news of people, you know, like, all of a sudden, all these 13 what happened is a bunch of filings to the SEC were due this week and and, like, late last week. And that's where we got the news.
These filings are called 13 f's. That's like your 10 40 e z or 10 40 form, you know, form 86 or whatever. It's a form. It's a 13 f. And as people start reading them and they start realizing, holy shit, the state of Wisconsin is holding Bitcoin, and here's the way that they're holding it because it's all lined out in those 13 f filings, and more do. And it'll take time to figure out who's in and who's out, but there's gonna be more 13 f's on the horizon. Not just than this tranche, but I I get the feeling that they're quarterly, but they may be annually. I'm not exactly sure on the 13 f. But if we're done with this year and their annual, next year, there's gonna be another round.
I think there will be at least one more United States state that gets in on their pension this year, their retirement fund, their pension fund. That's at least one more state, and god, I hope it's Texas. Let's cross our fingers, and I'll 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.
