Join me today for Episode 972 of Bitcoin And . . . is LIVE!
Topics for today:
- Buy the MSTR
- Massive Bank Caught in Criminal Action
- Man Sues City to Excavate Landfill
- Google "Delists" BTC Chart
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://cointelegraph.com/news/uk-colombia-crypto-exchanges-linked-td-bank-fine
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/10/14/man-who-accidentally-sent-527m-in-bitcoins-to-dump-sues-local-council-to-retrieve-them-report/
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[00:00:00]
David Bennett:
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:12 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 14th day of October 2024. This is episode 972 of Bitcoin and somebody bought some micro strategy stock and wants to talk all about it. We've got another bank that's clearly gone outside the rules, off the rails, got caught with their pants down, and probably absolutely nobody is going to go to jail. Maybe they will though.
And a couple of crypto banks are caught up with this other legacy financial bank. We'll find out about that. Oh, oh, oh, this dude that has been trying to get his hard drive back, he had a wallet, a Bitcoin wallet with a whole bunch of Bitcoin on there. He I guess he was mining back in the early days. He he's back in the news. He keeps trying to get his wallet out of a landfill, and it looks like things are coming to blows. There's some vice presidential stuff going on. I want to talk, make you guys aware of Bitcoin plus plus and some other things. But let's just go ahead and start with buying MicroStrategy stock.
This one written by Pete Rizzo for Bitcoin Magazine. I bought a bunch of MSTR stock for no real reason. Oh, God. That's okay. Fine. Let's find out about that one. The price of MicroStrategy stock surging above $200. The MicroStrategy bulls were out in force last week, insufferably, posting about how Michael Saylor's tech firm, a once dead tech company from the dotcom era, will outperform everything again this cycle. Look, I'm not even I'm not going to even start parsing the hokum. You can follow BitPayne or Dan Hillary or one of the 100 of Bitcoin Twitter accounts which now comprise the MSTR bull Twitterverse.
There's videos and threads and of course a lot of people who are irresponsibly long. But the general gist is this. One, Michael Saylor has decided to buy over 200,000 BTC to keep and to keep buying Bitcoin until the fiat system collapses. He will continue leveraging cheap debt to do this, which he can borrow because this is how the fiat system works. Infinite money glitch. Number 2. This will make his company more valuable than other companies since it offers exposure to a valuable and scarce commodity, that being Bitcoin, but with added beta due to the company's existing profitable product suite.
Said another way, as the Bitcoin they accumulate gains in value, MicroStrategy stock will look undervalued compared to the underlying collateral. Number 3. Since BTC won't go to 0 and the Federal Reserve has to keep cutting rates by, you know, well, and that means boosting stocks, this is a perfect storm for MicroStrategy. And it will benefit from the liquidity injection and outperform Bitcoin even as Bitcoin enters its 4 year cycle. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. This is my best attempt to repeat this thesis. I wrote it in 2 minutes.
I refuse to even copy edit it. The gist is, companies that some people believe buying Bitcoin stock can outperform Bitcoin for some reason. And that this isn't speculation, but morally aligned Bitcoin maximalism or something. Maybe Dylan Leclerc can explain the math to you. He's tried with me multiple times and I've never understood anything more than the above. Amount of the bitcoin sorry. Excuse me. Amount of bitcoin the company owns per share equals good. No bitcoin divided by shares equals bad. So why did I buy MicroStrategy? Short story, I had money in my 401 ks that I can only invest in regulated investments.
Yes. That means I own Bitcoin ETFs as well. But that's not really the whole story. Really, I'm just tired of watching the MicroStrategy bulls be right about whatever it is that they are talking about. And I want some skin in the upside. Should I have done some diligence here? Should I have some sort of hypothesis? Shouldn't I just be holding? Maybe. But have you considered Michael Sailor? Bull bull bull? Alright, so clearly Pete Rizzo is kind of on the kind of on the attack a little bit. I think it's more tongue in cheek than anything else. But, I mean, we knew that this was going to start happening with MicroStrategy.
I told you about that they I told you, like, you know, weeks ago that MicroStrategy was going to dump out of all of its tech stuff. It was going to cease doing software development. Probably, they'll keep their, their support staff on, their customer support staff to help with customers that already own the MicroStrategy products because that's just bad juju if you leave your customers out, you know, hanging out in the wind to twist. But it's clear from last week and I believe it was last Friday's show episode 971 that it it that the news stories made it clear that I'm I'm probably right.
It looks that Michael Sailor is going to create a bank. He's gonna go pure finance. And he's got enough underlying asset in the form of Bitcoin that he can probably do that. And if he does it well, if he if if MicroStrategy becomes a very good, quote unquote, finance company, and they do risk management very very well, then they will probably make out like banksters. But time time will tell. Now, talking about banks, and my cats are fighting in the background so just do I'm just gonna have to deal with it here. They'll they'll shut up eventually when somebody wins and maybe they'll offer each other meow mix or something as a as a parting gift. Who knows? But TD Bank is going to pay $3,000,000,000 that's billion with a b in historic money laundering settlement with the U. S. Justice Department. This is out of the Associated Press.
What the hell is going on? So, TD Bank will pay approximately $3,000,000,000 in this settlement with US authorities who said Thursday that the financial institution's lax practices allowed significant money laundering over multiple years. The Canada based TD Bank pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering, the largest bank in US history to do so, attorney general Merrick Garland said. Quote, TD Bank created an environment that allowed financial crime to flourish. Oh my god. Whatever shall we do? By making its services convenient for criminals, it itself became 1, end quote.
High level executives were alerted to serious problems with the bank's anti money laundering program but failed failed failed failed failed to correct them as employees openly joked about how easy it seemed to be for criminals to launder money there. Garland said. The bank is the 10th largest in the United States, and its CEO said that the company takes full responsibility and has been cooperating with the investigation. It's been taking steps to fix its US Anti Money Laundering Program, including appointing new leadership and adding hundreds of new specialists, said TD Bank Group CEO, Bahrat Masrani.
I think I pronounced that right. Quote, we know what the issues are. We are fixing them. As we move forward, we're ensuring that this never happens again. And I'm 100% confident that we get to the other side and emerge even stronger, Masrani said. Well, the Justice Department said that the bank allowed at least 3 different money laundering networks, not clients, whole networks. 3 different money laundering networks to move a total of $670,000,000 through TD Bank accounts over the period of several years. The institution became the bank of choice for multiple criminals and money laundering organizations.
Quote, from fentanyl and narcotics trafficking to terrorist financing and human trafficking, TD Bank's chronic failures provided fertile ground for a host of illicit activity to penetrate our financial system, said deputy secretary of the Treasury. In one case, a man moved more than $470,000,000 in drug proceeds and other illicit funds through TD Bank branches, bribing employees with more than $57,000 in gift cards. That's right. Walmart gift cards. Visa gift cards. Home Depot gift cards. 57,000. Woah. Nelly. He chose TD Bank because it has the most permissive policies.
More than once depositing more than $1,000,000 in cash in a single day and then moving the funds out of the bank with checks or wire transfers. It continued despite employees expressing concerns about what he was doing. There were also piles of cash dumped on the bank's counters and ATM withdrawals that totaled 40 times to 50 times higher than the daily limits, said Philip Selinger, US attorney in New Jersey. In a separate scheme, 5 employees worked with criminal organizations to open and maintain accounts that were then used to launder $39,000,000 to Colombia, including drug proceeds.
There were also multiple red flags in that case, including that the same Venezuelan passports were used to open multiple accounts, but the bank did not identify the problem until one of the employees was arrested. In the 3rd scheme, a money laundering network had accounts for at least 5 shell companies that moved more than 100,000,000 dollars in illicit funds. But but but but the bank did not file the required suspicious activity report until law enforcement alerted it. The bank's long term pervasive and systemic deficiencies in its policies over a period of 9 years allowed such abuses to flourish, prosecutors said.
2 dozen people have been prosecuted for involvement in money laundering schemes, including 2 TD Bank employees, Garland said, and the investigation is still ongoing. The bank has also agreed to a major restructuring of the corporate compliance program in its US operations, as well as 3 years of monitoring and 5 years of probation. So it looks like there are actual people being prosecuted for involvement in this, and 2 of those people are actual TD Bank employees. What do you wanna guess? That they're at the level of bank teller or drive through teller or something like that. It's not gonna be the c CEO.
It's probably not going to be the treasurer. It's probably not going to be anybody at the c suite level. None of those people are probably going to jail. It's probably going to be some lowly broke ass dude that just needed the Home Depot gift cards, you know, to make ends meet. I guess in his workshop or whatever whatever. It look, this goes on, though. Because Zolton Vardy from Cointelegraph suggest that the UK and Columbia crypto exchanges linked in TD Bank record fine is something that we should probably be looking at. Now TD Bank recent meltdown could could just it could have ties to 2 unnamed cryptocurrency firms in Colombia and then the other one in the United Kingdom.
On October 10th, TD Bank's US wing agreed to pay pay a whole bunch in penalties. Yes. We just read about that. The FinCEN report states the following. Customer group c conducted over 1,000,000,000 in transactions through TD Bank during the relevant period with over 90% of the incoming funds from a UK based cryptocurrency exchange and more than 60% of outgoing transactions sent as wires to a Colombian financial institution that also offers virtual asset related services. According to FinCEN, the above mentioned customer group conducted an average of over $100,000,000 worth of monthly wire transfers, most of which facilitated apparent third party cryptocurrency trading in quote high risk jurisdictions such as Colombia, China, and countries in the Middle East.
TD Bank has facilitated over $650,000,000 worth of bank transfers for customer group c received from an international cryptocurrency exchange. So according to FinCEN, this type of volume significantly deviated from the customer group's onboarding documentation and the report adds, quote, during this time, customer group c received more than $650,000,000 from an international cryptocurrency exchange platform where the purpose, ultimate originators, and source of funds were unknown to TD Bank. End quote. Despite the unknown origins of the funds, TD Bank continued processing transactions including the facilitation of of over $420,000,000 to a quote financial institution offering cryptocurrency services in the high risk jurisdiction of Columbia. End quote.
TD Bank previously dabbled in the cryptocurrency space for a short period. TD Cowan, a US independent investment bank, launched Cowan Digital in March 2022 sorry, March 2022 to provide institutional clients exposure to the crypto markets via 16 different crypto assets including bitcoin and shitcoin number 1. TD Cowan's crypto unit was shut down in June of 2023 without disclosing the reason behind the closure. The Cowan Bank was acquired by TD Bank Group for 1,300,000,000 in August of 2022 in a deal completed in March of 2023, 3 months before the crypto wing was shut down.
The closure came amid several crypto company collapses last year alongside US banking and regulatory crisis of 2023. Okay. So this is because it's got very seriously large hooks into the cryptocurrency thing, you can bet your ass that Elizabeth Warren and others are going to use this as a see we told you Bitcoin bad. But there's another thing here. It's this it's this continued funneling of money to Colombia. And it's not Colombia itself that I'm worried about. What what bugs me is that this is scathingly close to, well, it's Latin America.
And we know what's going on in Latin America. We know about El Salvador. We don't have to rehash that. Argentina, Malay's made it basically not well, he hasn't made it legal tender, but he said, you can use it. It's fine by me. So Argentina is definitely on deck. Brazil has been on deck with Bitcoin for quite a while. So all of a sudden, we've got this massive people are getting there are people that are gonna go to jail, and it's the $3,000,000,000 fine, which I guess they assume that that's more than the cost of doing business, whatever.
But it's it's a big thing, man. It's a big banking crisis, and people are going jail, and the numbers are really high, and the US justice department, and, oh, look at this customer group c. Latin America. Sure. They're gonna say Colombia at first, but I'm just saying watch out because this is one of the ways that I could see the Justice Department start to discredit Latin American countries and then we'll have the whole World Bank and IMF and Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren and all those guys just crying and screeching and moaning about Bitcoin. And meanwhile, Bitcoin probably doesn't care. But this dude does.
Because a man who accidentally sent $527,000,000 in Bitcoin to the dump sues their local council to retrieve them according to a report. CoinDesk Jamie Crowley writing it. A British man has filed a legal claim against a local council in Wales in an attempt to retrieve a hard drive containing 8,000 BTC that he accidentally threw out back in 2013. The story of James Howells, 39, is well known in Bitcoin lore. In 2013, he accidentally threw out the hard drive, his Bitcoin stash, and his that had his Bitcoin stash. And he had mined that since 2009.
Wow. Worth about $1,000,000 at the time, but now worth about 527,000,000. And over the last decade, House has made requests to the Newport Council, which is the proprietors of the landfill where the hard drive ended up, to retrieve it. But he claims he has been largely ignored. He is now suing the council for damages of £495,000,000 which equates to $646,000,000 US, representing the peak valuation that 8,000 BTC reached earlier this year. The case is due to be heard in December, but Hal said that his aim is to leverage the council into an an agreement to excavating the site in order to avoid a legal battle, according to the report.
Howells assembled a team to carry out a $13,000,000 excavation of the site, which includes the council's former head of landfill, who claims to know the particular area where the hard drive is now located. The excavation would take between 18 36 months to carry out with a further year of remediation work, which the council has rejected out of environmental concerns. Quote, I'm still allocating 10% of the value for the council even though they have been problematic throughout. That would be £41,000,000 based on today's rate, but in the future, it could be 100 of 1,000,000.
So he is just flat out now suing the city council and say, look, you either excavate this thing, which I will pay for, or we're gonna go to court. That's what that's this entire thing. And it just seems it seems dubious at best that the hard drive that's been in a landfill, an open pit, exposed to all the elements, all of the rain, all of the snow, any ice melt, plunging temperatures, rising temperatures, and bathed in methane gas. And I'm I'm here to tell you that methane isn't exactly a neutral chemistry. Right? It's not like it's not especially when it gets with water.
Look, that hard drive is done for. I don't think anybody's going to get anything off of that hard drive. I feel bad for the guy. I really do. But honestly, he's just it's one of those things. I mean, I know $527,000,000 and you're just gonna say let it go? Wow. Probably not. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities got West Texas Intermediate Oil down 2 and a half points, back down to $73.70 Brent Norsee down 2.28 percent to 77.24. Natural gas is following suit today, 4.67% of the downside. And gasoline is also down over 2 points to $2.10 a gallon.
Gold not doing well. Not having a good day pretty much for all of the metal futures. Gold is down almost half a point. It's back to $26.64.50. Silver is down over 1 point. Platinum, however, is the only one in the green. 0.79 percent to the upside. Copper is down 2. Palladium is down 3 and a half. Ag looks like it is fully mixed today. Biggest winner is coffee. 4 points to the upside. Biggest loser today is what's it gonna be? Wheat. 1.79 percent to the downside. Live cattle up a quarter, but lean hogs are down 2a half. Feeder cattle are up a quarter.
And all the legacy indices, your your equity markets, they're all in the green today. Dow is up almost a half a point. The S and P is up 3 quarters of a point. Nasdaq is up 3 quarters of a point. And the S and P Mini is up a half. What's Bitcoin doing? Oh my God. $65,650. That's back to a $1,300,000,000,000 market cap after a couple of giant green candles, honestly. We can only purchase 64.6 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,767,364.86 of. And average fees per block went through the roof over the weekend. We are now up to 0.19 almost a full 5th of a Bitcoin on average in fees on a per block basis. And there are a 107 blocks carrying 233,000 sorry unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 21 satoshis per vbyte.
Low priority is gonna get you in at 16. Hash rate has fallen below 600. We are now at 598.5 exahashes per second. Just cleared a block as I was looking at that. And it looks like the, difficulty adjustment is estimated for a 2% downturn coming up, when is it? When is that thing coming up? Oh, in 8 days. So the difficulty adjustment will change to the downside in 8 days unless something changes. Again, I'm going to say it. We saw real buying on Friday Saturday Sunday. Real organic buying. There was lots of transactions. The fees were high. Man, another block just rolled out.
Sweet. I mean, for 598xashes per second, you guys are kicking some butt. Anyway, we saw real actual purchasing going on. Now who's buying Bitcoin? I don't know, but they're doing this. I think that this is organic. I don't think that this is like some kind of wash shit. I think people are like, just give me get me into some Bitcoin. Please do it. And we're seeing the same thing now because we've got, well, you know, we've got what, like we had like 13 now. So 13 satoshis per v byte for highs and low priorities have gone back down to 9. So that just changed. It changes all the time. But I think this shows real organic growth. Now from Bank of Sailor, last Friday's episode of Bitcoin and, wartime with just knocking it out of the park with 33,333 satoshis says, thanks for everything you do with advertising pleb stuff, man.
I've known Rev Hoddle for a while and just went to his permaculture class and it was awesome. Highly recommended. Really great experience and the food was out of this world. Side note, we need some kind of noster nip for rating people, places, and events, like sellers, items, and marketplaces. I tend to agree, but who's going to write the nip? I don't know how to write the nip. But I do think that that's not a bad idea. Although, could it be gained? Could you be like some pleb minding your own business and all of a sudden get, you know, harshed beyond all manner of of of, you know, I don't know, being able to come back from just because, I don't know, maybe you said something to somebody and all, 1,000 people got together and just gave you a a a shitty rating.
We gotta think about these kinds of things. Especially if we start getting like the algorithms into Nostr that we want. And those algorithms that we want, all that means is any algorithm, but we can choose to use it. We can choose not to use 1 at all. We can choose to change them up. We don't have to select 1 and just be stuck with it for the rest of our lives. As long as we can change it or or have a choice to not choose the algorithm at all, I'm fine with that. But those algorithms at one point or another, they're common.
And if we do something where a nip can rate somebody, is it possible that that could be used in a way that we do not foresee? That's sort of like that whole adversarial thinking. So wartime, thank you brother for the idea as well as the sats. Bruised Bitcoin with 5,000 sats, dude. Says thanks for the info. Well, thank you for the sats. Joey DD with 3333 always delivering. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you, sir. Bitcoin Sandy with a 1,000 gives me a flame emoji. I got God's death with 537 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Pie's to pleb. 4:20. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And user 115-568-42 with 500 says make it rain, sats.
That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. I have discovered that YouTube has podcasts. Yes. I have. And real podcasts too, like our RSS feed podcast. So here's here's what I mean. I was listening to something the other day and it said, hey, you know, you should probably get your RSS feed up on on YouTube. And I'm like, what? What? You can do what? Sure enough, after following, you know, a couple of instructions, which wasn't so bad, it turns out that I can just port in my entire library, which is being hosted by podhome.fm.
That is my new podcast host. Once I left SoundCloud for good, I was like, screw you guys. I'm going somewhere that's got got podcasting 2.0 enabled features. And Pod Home was I don't know, man. It was high it came highly recommended. But anyway, so they give me their r my RSS feed. They generate a new RSS feed for me. And I take that RSS feed and I take it over into YouTube. And it's like, hey, well, do you wanna import your entire library or do you wanna just import after, you know, your shows after some date? And I'm, like, well, sure. Take them all in.
And the following happened. The first day, it pulled in a 100 of my episodes and then stopped and said, okay. You got 498 episodes waiting in the queue. We'll resume that shit tomorrow. I'm, like, sure. I I go, that makes sense. I got a pretty big library. It's it's I mean, I've been doing these things for, you know, for a long long time. Okay. So the next or the next day, another 100 episodes comes in. I'm like, sweet. And it's like, oh, you got 398 left in the queue. We'll resume that shit tomorrow. I'm like, fine. Let let rock it rock on, brother. And then this morning I woke up to a strike on my account on YouTube.
So, apparently, in one of my last, you know, one of the many shows that I've done, during the pandemic, I said something about it. And YouTube doesn't like it. Not, I mean, it's just it just it kind of rankles me that I'm pulling in a whole bunch of old stuff from YouTube, and yet there's no way to mark it as, let me review this before you review this, so that I can make sure that I haven't said anything that goes against your community guidelines. I know I know what you're saying already. I hear you in the background. It's just that it's a YouTube has the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. It's either the 2nd or the 3rd largest search engine behind Google. I'm trying to market the show. I'm doing my good my good podcaster marketing bit by trying to get it in the hands of more people. And after day number 2, I get a strike on my account. So this does not bode well.
And I don't know if I'm going to survive. I've got for the rest of the day, because I don't think they'll start resuming until, like, 8 o'clock this evening, pulling in more, even more episodes, which I'm sure go and get directly against community guidelines. So what I may have to do is I may have to pull the whole podcast down and then re up it starting from, like, some certain date instead of all the stuff back in pandemic days. Just saying. So if if for whatever reason you're able to find my YouTube podcast because it's it's just this show. It's like whatever you're hearing me say right now that thing is gonna end up over at YouTube in the podcast channel on my YouTube account.
And it's going to be it's going to be the same thing. So I'm going to have to learn how to navigate this because there's going to be some things that I say that I'm just going to go fine. I'm just not going to put it on YouTube because they can just go pound sand for all I give a shit. In either event, I'm just saying, if for whatever reason, I'm I'm I end up still on YouTube podcasts after this week and you want to listen at your desktop or whatever, I'm on I'm on YouTube podcast. So there you go. Now, on back with the news. Bitcoin and shitcoin number 1 price charts have disappeared from Google search results. Interesting. And I did confirm this.
Decrypt Adrian Zmutsky is writing, Google search has stopped displaying price charts for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in its search results. Users can still access these charts through Google Finance. So over the weekend, Twitter users noted that searching for Bitcoin's price no longer yields a chart in the search results. In contrast, stock price searches still produce charts. Google did not respond to a request for comment. Google's decision has prompted discussions about the reasons behind this change. Now this is the important thing. Listen up.
Interestingly, as of press time, searching for Doge still shows Dogecoin's price chart. The feature showing the balances of shitcoin number 1 name service ENS addresses is also fully functional. Previously, Google provided charts showing current rates of leading cryptocurrencies allowing allowing users to check prices without navigating to yet another platform. And this feature enabled users to see in real time or near real time price charts for Bitcoin in search results. Separately, Google Trends data shows that the search volume for bitcoin on Google hit a 1 year low during the week of October 13th 19th this year. And by the end of the week, global interest in the term had dropped to a mere 27% of this year's peak search volume reported between March 3rd March 9th.
Bitcoin search interest is highest in El Salvador, the world's first country to adopt it as legal tender, but failed to see widespread adoption. It is followed by Nigeria, a country where inflation skyrocketed and crypto is seen as a capital flight mechanism that led to a crackdown by local authorities and dire consequences for local exchanges. Shitcoin number 1 shows a similar trend with October 13 through 19 data showing a yearly low of only 19% of the search volume reported at the high seen between March 3rd March 9th. Search interest is quite different from Bitcoin's led by Saint Helena followed by Switzerland and Slovenia.
Don't really care about that last thing. Yes, I did confirm it. If you search for Doge on Google, the first thing up is the price chart of Doge. If you search for Bitcoin on Google, there's no price chart at all. Now, I didn't change I didn't look at any any of the other shit coins cause I don't need to. But it is really interesting that they're allowing the price the price chart of Doge to come through. I don't think that this is a good idea. It should either be all or nothing. And this to me seems to be I think it could be considered market manipulation by Google, but nobody is ever going to get in trouble for that. Right? Right. Vice president Kamala Harris vows to support a crypto regulatory framework in a plan to support black men.
You heard it. That's what the block has. Sarah Wynne has written it. I if it's as cringe as I think it's gonna be, hold on to your seat. US vice president Kamala Harris said she plans to support a cryptocurrency regulatory framework that gives protections to black men who invest and own crypto as part of a newly released proposal to help build wealth for black men. Less than a month out before the presidential election, Harris released a proposal called the, quote, Opportunity Agenda for Black Men, end quote, on Monday. Over 20% of black Americans own or have in the past owned cryptocurrency according to the Harris team's plan. Quote, vice president Harris appreciates the way in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services.
The campaign team said in the plan, quote, she will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that black men and others who participate in this market are protected. Well, who the hell are others? I thought this was a plan just for black men. Who are the others? Do they even know what that whatever? As part of the plan, the Democratic presidential candidate also said she would provide 1,000,000 loans that are fully forgivable up to $20,000 to black entrepreneurs looking to start a business, launch a health initiative focused on black men, and legalize recreational marijuana.
This isn't Harris' first comment on crypto. Last month, Harris said her administration would encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets while protecting consumers and investors according to her 80 page economic plan. Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made his own pledge to end an unlawful and un American crackdown on the US crypto industry and has backed a crypto project called World Liberty Financial. Such a bad move. I mean, he really shouldn't have done World Liberty Financial right before the election. I just why?
Whatever. National Policy Network WOC blockchain founder, Clive Mezadore, said she has been fighting for inclusion in crypto and criticized Harris' approach. Quote, it is perplexing that the Harris Walls policy team opted not to meet with diverse leaders in crypto, but instead is rolling out a policy that narrowly frames crypto around black men only and proposes a regulatory framework limiting black men to consumers instead of producers, Mesador said in a statement to the block. Mezadore, along with Black Women Blockchain Council founder, Olyinka Odenarian, I think, professor at Penn State Dickinson Law, Tanya Evans and others sent a letter to Harris' campaign asking for a meeting this month to discuss policy recommendations to push forward innovation and inclusion. That meeting has not yet taken place.
Members of the Harris Walls team did not immediately respond for a request to comment. Oh, for God's sakes. So I don't I'm I literally do not understand this. Is there somehow is it in some way, is it the case that black men are not allowed to buy crypto? I mean, is Coinbase turning black men away to buy Bitcoin? I think not. Is is Kraken turning away black men who wish to purchase Bitcoin? I think not. So what I I don't get this. I don't get this. Except for this. It's pandering. It's pandering to the crypto crowd and pandering to the African American nation that is part of the part of America.
That part of the nation, it's they're trying to kill 2 birds with 1 stone. And it doesn't make any fucking sense at all. Especially when it says the and others. What I don't understand. She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that black men and others who participate in this market are protected. I can only assume that when she says others that that means me. And that means Mexican Americans, and that means Chinese Americans, and Vietnamese Americans, and any other Southeast Asian American that you can possibly name. I'll bet it means Eastern European expatriates who have moved to the United States. We are the others. So where does the black men thing come in? See, this is the kind of pandering that tells me that she has no respect at all for the voting base.
Every time I see pandering, it just means, you know what? You're not even trying. This entire policy set makes no sense because it's just people. You either are going to protect the citizenry of the United States in their ownership of and participation in cryptocurrencies and digital assets, or you are not. And by colorizing it, it just makes her look like a racist. I'm sorry to say it, but you're literally saying this one group of people, by virtue of the color of their skin, and then anything else that you say after that doesn't matter because it's racist by definition.
So I guess we're having, I guess our vice president is a racist. I I just it's so stupid and I wish it would all just end. Well, thankfully, we've got the Bitcoin plus plus e cash edition. All of their talks and workshops have been put up. We'll get into it. Bitcoin plus plus is a developer focused conference series for audiences who are excited to get deeper into the cutting edge of Bitcoin technology. Bitcoin plus plus took place in Berlin between the dates of October 11th ending yesterday, October 13th. So, what this is, this is out of nobsbitcoin.com.
It is a list with links directly to every single one of the talks and every single one of the workshops. There's a lot here. Like for the for the talks and the keynote speeches, you have the 10 minute video of the conference kickoff. There's the 2nd renaissance of eCash by Cali. There's Fedimint, Federated eCash Mints 101. There's NIP 60 and NIP 61. There's Fedimint Footprints. There's Building Ecash Support. There's Cashew on Shopster, Awesome Payments. There's blind signatures and anonymous credentials. And that's just the talks and keynotes. If you actually want to watch the workshops, Alex Lewin put off put on a 30 minute one called how to build a Fedimint wallet in 20 minutes without using Rust.
There's another one, Fedimint consensus. Another one, how to add Nostra Wallet Connect to e cash by Supertestnet. That thing's almost an hour long. Casu devkit deep dive by the Simple Kid. There's Fedimit Lightning Gateway by Justin Moyler. There's basics of Casu Wallet development. I'm and submarine swaps. Thank god that Thomas Voigteland is going to talk about that for 20 minutes. But all of these links are in this particular web page. And this particular web page is going to be in the show notes. So you can click on that link in my show notes and go directly to this page where it is a whole bunch of links to the Bitcoin plus plus conference, which just ended yesterday in Berlin. So I would highly recommend checking that out. Now, last up for today, Fedimint web SDK.
Building e cache into the web. Fedament Web SDK offers tools for developing robust, privacy focused, and web assembly powered Fedament clients for the browser. Quote, announcing the Fedimint web SDK, a toolkit for building Fedimint and lightning wallets in the browser. There we go. The SDK includes a robust and WASM powered client, 0 setup lightning support, and dead simple API for web developers. Special shout out goes to Alex Lewin for spearheading development on the web SDK. Check it out. Let us know what you think. So here's the key features. The web assembly powered client packages a robust, fault tolerant Fedimint client built in Rust via web assembly.
It also lazy loads within a web worker for performance. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but if you do, let me know. ECash payments includes support for joining federations, sending and receiving eCash, and managing balances. And then there's lightning payments. It ships with 0 setup lightning network payments. Yay. State management. It can handle the complex state management and storage challenges of browser wallets. Privacy is included because there is it offers a privacy friendly wallet by default and it's framework agnostic, designed as a core library compatible with vanilla JavaScript laying the groundwork for future framework specific packages.
Check out this video from BTC plus plus e cash edition on how to build a Fedimint wallet in 20 minutes using this very same SDK here. And that same video I just talked about in the the very last thing that I was saying. The the Bitcoin plus plus conference talks and workshops. All of those videos are there. They will be in the show notes. You can go see all of them. And that's it for me, ladies and gentlemen. Have a wonderful Monday. Oh, oh, I forgot to mention, I did write a note on Nostra about it, but Mondays of every week is, at I've got to get my happy ass up at 5:40 in the morning so that I can be ready to roll for the Monday morning Toastmasters meeting that I have here in my neck of the woods. And lo and behold, a guy that I swear to God is like one of the most hardcore liberal guys.
I mean, I'm serious. Given what, you know, the speeches that he's given, the way he talks about certain issues, I'm like going, yeah, that's definitely a hardcore liberal guy. But he blew my mind today because he brought in a box from the Mises Institute. He pulls it open and says that another guy, and I don't I don't remember because it was, I mean, honestly, I had to get to this thing at 6:30 in the morning. I barely have, like, one brain cell functioning. According to him, another guy that used to be, like, in our our, our Toastmasters group had gotten this set of books from the Mises Institute and asked this guy to give them out. So everybody at my Toastmasters meeting got a copy of Murray Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money?
Just gave it out. I mean, they're free from the Mises Institute, but still, you know, and it's a very thin book, you'll probably read it in a day if you're really serious about it. But Murray Rothbard is one of the Austrian economists And Austrian economics is is essentially the the economy or, well, the economics, framework that Bitcoin is built upon. It's not built around debt. It's built around capital. Right? And that's a very simplistic way of looking at the difference between Keynesian economics and Austrian economics assured. But this is the end of the show. I'm not gonna launch into that. I just wanted to say that in a in the place where I'm at, which is hardcore what we call a hardcore blueberry.
What is a blueberry? A blueberry is a city that is definitively democrat, blue, liberal, you name it. But they exist in the midst of a sea of conservatism because they it's basically a whole bunch of rural areas, a bunch of farmers, a bunch of ranchers, and they don't buy into that crap. And yet, in the middle of this blueberry, this dude drops a box on the table of Murray Rothbard one of Murray Rothbard's books. So, at the very end of the meeting, I had to take a second and explain to everybody there that this book and that Murray Rothbard is an Austrian economics author, and therefore this is an Austrian economics based book. And that what they've been taught, what we've all been taught in the United States, in most of the West, is Keynesian economics.
They've no. There's not a college that we can find that actually teaches Austrian economics, not not as a general major portion of the course load get when you get an economics degree at any university in the west. It's always Keynesian economics. Austrian economists have basically been left out in the wind to twist by all these dudes and have been done so for decades decades decades. And the question becomes and this is a question that I posed to the group right before I left it kind of makes you wonder what they're hiding.
Why is Austrian economics not talked about? Why are we not taught Austrian economics versions of economy and economics in high school? Why do we not get exposed to it at the basic level of core competency classes that you take in colleges and universities? If you take an economics class in university, it's going to be Keansey in economics. It's going to be debt is good, printing money is good, blah blah blah everything's going to be fine, trust the government. And here we have Murray Rothbard who basically calls out the government in the title of the book, what has government done to our money? I actually posit that government didn't do shit to our money.
Government allowed our money to be corrupted by very elite, very wealthy, very well connected non governmental individuals. Case in point, the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. A, it ain't federal, b, it is indeed private, and, c, it was concocted by almost nobody in the government of the United States. They were all businessmen. They were all titans. They were all the the masters of the universe, the oil barons and steel barons and baron barons and baron barons barons. I'm just saying. There was there's nothing about the Federal Reserve that was private, and it never has been. Government, the United States government, didn't really do the damage.
I know I'm gonna get roasted for this. It was what they allowed to happen that did the damage. And I think that that's a distinction that we should probably start making. And it's not apologizing for the government. Screw them. They can all go pay on sand. But as long as we know the truth of the matter, I think that that's important. I think it's important to realize that the United States government had almost no hand in creating the Federal Reserve. It did give us the Federal Reserve insofar that it allowed it to occur and did throw did so through legislation at the highest level of government, the legislative branch, and executed by the president of the United States at the executive branch and has been defended by the judicial branch, every single time we wanna say, you got this is illegal. And the supreme court and the rest of the justice system says, no. It's fine.
It's totally fine. We got the Federal Reserve Act. You'll be fine. No, no, no. So I just feel that it's important to make the distinction. Is it going to help you today? No, that distinction is not going to help you today, and it's not going to help me either. It's just that it makes me kind of think if we should be a little bit more careful about who we're directing our ire to. Because it's been my belief for years that governments don't actually control shit. That they're just as much of a puppet as we find ourselves being today. With all that said, I will see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:12 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 14th day of October 2024. This is episode 972 of Bitcoin and somebody bought some micro strategy stock and wants to talk all about it. We've got another bank that's clearly gone outside the rules, off the rails, got caught with their pants down, and probably absolutely nobody is going to go to jail. Maybe they will though.
And a couple of crypto banks are caught up with this other legacy financial bank. We'll find out about that. Oh, oh, oh, this dude that has been trying to get his hard drive back, he had a wallet, a Bitcoin wallet with a whole bunch of Bitcoin on there. He I guess he was mining back in the early days. He he's back in the news. He keeps trying to get his wallet out of a landfill, and it looks like things are coming to blows. There's some vice presidential stuff going on. I want to talk, make you guys aware of Bitcoin plus plus and some other things. But let's just go ahead and start with buying MicroStrategy stock.
This one written by Pete Rizzo for Bitcoin Magazine. I bought a bunch of MSTR stock for no real reason. Oh, God. That's okay. Fine. Let's find out about that one. The price of MicroStrategy stock surging above $200. The MicroStrategy bulls were out in force last week, insufferably, posting about how Michael Saylor's tech firm, a once dead tech company from the dotcom era, will outperform everything again this cycle. Look, I'm not even I'm not going to even start parsing the hokum. You can follow BitPayne or Dan Hillary or one of the 100 of Bitcoin Twitter accounts which now comprise the MSTR bull Twitterverse.
There's videos and threads and of course a lot of people who are irresponsibly long. But the general gist is this. One, Michael Saylor has decided to buy over 200,000 BTC to keep and to keep buying Bitcoin until the fiat system collapses. He will continue leveraging cheap debt to do this, which he can borrow because this is how the fiat system works. Infinite money glitch. Number 2. This will make his company more valuable than other companies since it offers exposure to a valuable and scarce commodity, that being Bitcoin, but with added beta due to the company's existing profitable product suite.
Said another way, as the Bitcoin they accumulate gains in value, MicroStrategy stock will look undervalued compared to the underlying collateral. Number 3. Since BTC won't go to 0 and the Federal Reserve has to keep cutting rates by, you know, well, and that means boosting stocks, this is a perfect storm for MicroStrategy. And it will benefit from the liquidity injection and outperform Bitcoin even as Bitcoin enters its 4 year cycle. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. This is my best attempt to repeat this thesis. I wrote it in 2 minutes.
I refuse to even copy edit it. The gist is, companies that some people believe buying Bitcoin stock can outperform Bitcoin for some reason. And that this isn't speculation, but morally aligned Bitcoin maximalism or something. Maybe Dylan Leclerc can explain the math to you. He's tried with me multiple times and I've never understood anything more than the above. Amount of the bitcoin sorry. Excuse me. Amount of bitcoin the company owns per share equals good. No bitcoin divided by shares equals bad. So why did I buy MicroStrategy? Short story, I had money in my 401 ks that I can only invest in regulated investments.
Yes. That means I own Bitcoin ETFs as well. But that's not really the whole story. Really, I'm just tired of watching the MicroStrategy bulls be right about whatever it is that they are talking about. And I want some skin in the upside. Should I have done some diligence here? Should I have some sort of hypothesis? Shouldn't I just be holding? Maybe. But have you considered Michael Sailor? Bull bull bull? Alright, so clearly Pete Rizzo is kind of on the kind of on the attack a little bit. I think it's more tongue in cheek than anything else. But, I mean, we knew that this was going to start happening with MicroStrategy.
I told you about that they I told you, like, you know, weeks ago that MicroStrategy was going to dump out of all of its tech stuff. It was going to cease doing software development. Probably, they'll keep their, their support staff on, their customer support staff to help with customers that already own the MicroStrategy products because that's just bad juju if you leave your customers out, you know, hanging out in the wind to twist. But it's clear from last week and I believe it was last Friday's show episode 971 that it it that the news stories made it clear that I'm I'm probably right.
It looks that Michael Sailor is going to create a bank. He's gonna go pure finance. And he's got enough underlying asset in the form of Bitcoin that he can probably do that. And if he does it well, if he if if MicroStrategy becomes a very good, quote unquote, finance company, and they do risk management very very well, then they will probably make out like banksters. But time time will tell. Now, talking about banks, and my cats are fighting in the background so just do I'm just gonna have to deal with it here. They'll they'll shut up eventually when somebody wins and maybe they'll offer each other meow mix or something as a as a parting gift. Who knows? But TD Bank is going to pay $3,000,000,000 that's billion with a b in historic money laundering settlement with the U. S. Justice Department. This is out of the Associated Press.
What the hell is going on? So, TD Bank will pay approximately $3,000,000,000 in this settlement with US authorities who said Thursday that the financial institution's lax practices allowed significant money laundering over multiple years. The Canada based TD Bank pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering, the largest bank in US history to do so, attorney general Merrick Garland said. Quote, TD Bank created an environment that allowed financial crime to flourish. Oh my god. Whatever shall we do? By making its services convenient for criminals, it itself became 1, end quote.
High level executives were alerted to serious problems with the bank's anti money laundering program but failed failed failed failed failed to correct them as employees openly joked about how easy it seemed to be for criminals to launder money there. Garland said. The bank is the 10th largest in the United States, and its CEO said that the company takes full responsibility and has been cooperating with the investigation. It's been taking steps to fix its US Anti Money Laundering Program, including appointing new leadership and adding hundreds of new specialists, said TD Bank Group CEO, Bahrat Masrani.
I think I pronounced that right. Quote, we know what the issues are. We are fixing them. As we move forward, we're ensuring that this never happens again. And I'm 100% confident that we get to the other side and emerge even stronger, Masrani said. Well, the Justice Department said that the bank allowed at least 3 different money laundering networks, not clients, whole networks. 3 different money laundering networks to move a total of $670,000,000 through TD Bank accounts over the period of several years. The institution became the bank of choice for multiple criminals and money laundering organizations.
Quote, from fentanyl and narcotics trafficking to terrorist financing and human trafficking, TD Bank's chronic failures provided fertile ground for a host of illicit activity to penetrate our financial system, said deputy secretary of the Treasury. In one case, a man moved more than $470,000,000 in drug proceeds and other illicit funds through TD Bank branches, bribing employees with more than $57,000 in gift cards. That's right. Walmart gift cards. Visa gift cards. Home Depot gift cards. 57,000. Woah. Nelly. He chose TD Bank because it has the most permissive policies.
More than once depositing more than $1,000,000 in cash in a single day and then moving the funds out of the bank with checks or wire transfers. It continued despite employees expressing concerns about what he was doing. There were also piles of cash dumped on the bank's counters and ATM withdrawals that totaled 40 times to 50 times higher than the daily limits, said Philip Selinger, US attorney in New Jersey. In a separate scheme, 5 employees worked with criminal organizations to open and maintain accounts that were then used to launder $39,000,000 to Colombia, including drug proceeds.
There were also multiple red flags in that case, including that the same Venezuelan passports were used to open multiple accounts, but the bank did not identify the problem until one of the employees was arrested. In the 3rd scheme, a money laundering network had accounts for at least 5 shell companies that moved more than 100,000,000 dollars in illicit funds. But but but but the bank did not file the required suspicious activity report until law enforcement alerted it. The bank's long term pervasive and systemic deficiencies in its policies over a period of 9 years allowed such abuses to flourish, prosecutors said.
2 dozen people have been prosecuted for involvement in money laundering schemes, including 2 TD Bank employees, Garland said, and the investigation is still ongoing. The bank has also agreed to a major restructuring of the corporate compliance program in its US operations, as well as 3 years of monitoring and 5 years of probation. So it looks like there are actual people being prosecuted for involvement in this, and 2 of those people are actual TD Bank employees. What do you wanna guess? That they're at the level of bank teller or drive through teller or something like that. It's not gonna be the c CEO.
It's probably not going to be the treasurer. It's probably not going to be anybody at the c suite level. None of those people are probably going to jail. It's probably going to be some lowly broke ass dude that just needed the Home Depot gift cards, you know, to make ends meet. I guess in his workshop or whatever whatever. It look, this goes on, though. Because Zolton Vardy from Cointelegraph suggest that the UK and Columbia crypto exchanges linked in TD Bank record fine is something that we should probably be looking at. Now TD Bank recent meltdown could could just it could have ties to 2 unnamed cryptocurrency firms in Colombia and then the other one in the United Kingdom.
On October 10th, TD Bank's US wing agreed to pay pay a whole bunch in penalties. Yes. We just read about that. The FinCEN report states the following. Customer group c conducted over 1,000,000,000 in transactions through TD Bank during the relevant period with over 90% of the incoming funds from a UK based cryptocurrency exchange and more than 60% of outgoing transactions sent as wires to a Colombian financial institution that also offers virtual asset related services. According to FinCEN, the above mentioned customer group conducted an average of over $100,000,000 worth of monthly wire transfers, most of which facilitated apparent third party cryptocurrency trading in quote high risk jurisdictions such as Colombia, China, and countries in the Middle East.
TD Bank has facilitated over $650,000,000 worth of bank transfers for customer group c received from an international cryptocurrency exchange. So according to FinCEN, this type of volume significantly deviated from the customer group's onboarding documentation and the report adds, quote, during this time, customer group c received more than $650,000,000 from an international cryptocurrency exchange platform where the purpose, ultimate originators, and source of funds were unknown to TD Bank. End quote. Despite the unknown origins of the funds, TD Bank continued processing transactions including the facilitation of of over $420,000,000 to a quote financial institution offering cryptocurrency services in the high risk jurisdiction of Columbia. End quote.
TD Bank previously dabbled in the cryptocurrency space for a short period. TD Cowan, a US independent investment bank, launched Cowan Digital in March 2022 sorry, March 2022 to provide institutional clients exposure to the crypto markets via 16 different crypto assets including bitcoin and shitcoin number 1. TD Cowan's crypto unit was shut down in June of 2023 without disclosing the reason behind the closure. The Cowan Bank was acquired by TD Bank Group for 1,300,000,000 in August of 2022 in a deal completed in March of 2023, 3 months before the crypto wing was shut down.
The closure came amid several crypto company collapses last year alongside US banking and regulatory crisis of 2023. Okay. So this is because it's got very seriously large hooks into the cryptocurrency thing, you can bet your ass that Elizabeth Warren and others are going to use this as a see we told you Bitcoin bad. But there's another thing here. It's this it's this continued funneling of money to Colombia. And it's not Colombia itself that I'm worried about. What what bugs me is that this is scathingly close to, well, it's Latin America.
And we know what's going on in Latin America. We know about El Salvador. We don't have to rehash that. Argentina, Malay's made it basically not well, he hasn't made it legal tender, but he said, you can use it. It's fine by me. So Argentina is definitely on deck. Brazil has been on deck with Bitcoin for quite a while. So all of a sudden, we've got this massive people are getting there are people that are gonna go to jail, and it's the $3,000,000,000 fine, which I guess they assume that that's more than the cost of doing business, whatever.
But it's it's a big thing, man. It's a big banking crisis, and people are going jail, and the numbers are really high, and the US justice department, and, oh, look at this customer group c. Latin America. Sure. They're gonna say Colombia at first, but I'm just saying watch out because this is one of the ways that I could see the Justice Department start to discredit Latin American countries and then we'll have the whole World Bank and IMF and Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren and all those guys just crying and screeching and moaning about Bitcoin. And meanwhile, Bitcoin probably doesn't care. But this dude does.
Because a man who accidentally sent $527,000,000 in Bitcoin to the dump sues their local council to retrieve them according to a report. CoinDesk Jamie Crowley writing it. A British man has filed a legal claim against a local council in Wales in an attempt to retrieve a hard drive containing 8,000 BTC that he accidentally threw out back in 2013. The story of James Howells, 39, is well known in Bitcoin lore. In 2013, he accidentally threw out the hard drive, his Bitcoin stash, and his that had his Bitcoin stash. And he had mined that since 2009.
Wow. Worth about $1,000,000 at the time, but now worth about 527,000,000. And over the last decade, House has made requests to the Newport Council, which is the proprietors of the landfill where the hard drive ended up, to retrieve it. But he claims he has been largely ignored. He is now suing the council for damages of £495,000,000 which equates to $646,000,000 US, representing the peak valuation that 8,000 BTC reached earlier this year. The case is due to be heard in December, but Hal said that his aim is to leverage the council into an an agreement to excavating the site in order to avoid a legal battle, according to the report.
Howells assembled a team to carry out a $13,000,000 excavation of the site, which includes the council's former head of landfill, who claims to know the particular area where the hard drive is now located. The excavation would take between 18 36 months to carry out with a further year of remediation work, which the council has rejected out of environmental concerns. Quote, I'm still allocating 10% of the value for the council even though they have been problematic throughout. That would be £41,000,000 based on today's rate, but in the future, it could be 100 of 1,000,000.
So he is just flat out now suing the city council and say, look, you either excavate this thing, which I will pay for, or we're gonna go to court. That's what that's this entire thing. And it just seems it seems dubious at best that the hard drive that's been in a landfill, an open pit, exposed to all the elements, all of the rain, all of the snow, any ice melt, plunging temperatures, rising temperatures, and bathed in methane gas. And I'm I'm here to tell you that methane isn't exactly a neutral chemistry. Right? It's not like it's not especially when it gets with water.
Look, that hard drive is done for. I don't think anybody's going to get anything off of that hard drive. I feel bad for the guy. I really do. But honestly, he's just it's one of those things. I mean, I know $527,000,000 and you're just gonna say let it go? Wow. Probably not. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities got West Texas Intermediate Oil down 2 and a half points, back down to $73.70 Brent Norsee down 2.28 percent to 77.24. Natural gas is following suit today, 4.67% of the downside. And gasoline is also down over 2 points to $2.10 a gallon.
Gold not doing well. Not having a good day pretty much for all of the metal futures. Gold is down almost half a point. It's back to $26.64.50. Silver is down over 1 point. Platinum, however, is the only one in the green. 0.79 percent to the upside. Copper is down 2. Palladium is down 3 and a half. Ag looks like it is fully mixed today. Biggest winner is coffee. 4 points to the upside. Biggest loser today is what's it gonna be? Wheat. 1.79 percent to the downside. Live cattle up a quarter, but lean hogs are down 2a half. Feeder cattle are up a quarter.
And all the legacy indices, your your equity markets, they're all in the green today. Dow is up almost a half a point. The S and P is up 3 quarters of a point. Nasdaq is up 3 quarters of a point. And the S and P Mini is up a half. What's Bitcoin doing? Oh my God. $65,650. That's back to a $1,300,000,000,000 market cap after a couple of giant green candles, honestly. We can only purchase 64.6 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,767,364.86 of. And average fees per block went through the roof over the weekend. We are now up to 0.19 almost a full 5th of a Bitcoin on average in fees on a per block basis. And there are a 107 blocks carrying 233,000 sorry unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 21 satoshis per vbyte.
Low priority is gonna get you in at 16. Hash rate has fallen below 600. We are now at 598.5 exahashes per second. Just cleared a block as I was looking at that. And it looks like the, difficulty adjustment is estimated for a 2% downturn coming up, when is it? When is that thing coming up? Oh, in 8 days. So the difficulty adjustment will change to the downside in 8 days unless something changes. Again, I'm going to say it. We saw real buying on Friday Saturday Sunday. Real organic buying. There was lots of transactions. The fees were high. Man, another block just rolled out.
Sweet. I mean, for 598xashes per second, you guys are kicking some butt. Anyway, we saw real actual purchasing going on. Now who's buying Bitcoin? I don't know, but they're doing this. I think that this is organic. I don't think that this is like some kind of wash shit. I think people are like, just give me get me into some Bitcoin. Please do it. And we're seeing the same thing now because we've got, well, you know, we've got what, like we had like 13 now. So 13 satoshis per v byte for highs and low priorities have gone back down to 9. So that just changed. It changes all the time. But I think this shows real organic growth. Now from Bank of Sailor, last Friday's episode of Bitcoin and, wartime with just knocking it out of the park with 33,333 satoshis says, thanks for everything you do with advertising pleb stuff, man.
I've known Rev Hoddle for a while and just went to his permaculture class and it was awesome. Highly recommended. Really great experience and the food was out of this world. Side note, we need some kind of noster nip for rating people, places, and events, like sellers, items, and marketplaces. I tend to agree, but who's going to write the nip? I don't know how to write the nip. But I do think that that's not a bad idea. Although, could it be gained? Could you be like some pleb minding your own business and all of a sudden get, you know, harshed beyond all manner of of of, you know, I don't know, being able to come back from just because, I don't know, maybe you said something to somebody and all, 1,000 people got together and just gave you a a a shitty rating.
We gotta think about these kinds of things. Especially if we start getting like the algorithms into Nostr that we want. And those algorithms that we want, all that means is any algorithm, but we can choose to use it. We can choose not to use 1 at all. We can choose to change them up. We don't have to select 1 and just be stuck with it for the rest of our lives. As long as we can change it or or have a choice to not choose the algorithm at all, I'm fine with that. But those algorithms at one point or another, they're common.
And if we do something where a nip can rate somebody, is it possible that that could be used in a way that we do not foresee? That's sort of like that whole adversarial thinking. So wartime, thank you brother for the idea as well as the sats. Bruised Bitcoin with 5,000 sats, dude. Says thanks for the info. Well, thank you for the sats. Joey DD with 3333 always delivering. Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you, sir. Bitcoin Sandy with a 1,000 gives me a flame emoji. I got God's death with 537 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Pie's to pleb. 4:20. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And user 115-568-42 with 500 says make it rain, sats.
That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. I have discovered that YouTube has podcasts. Yes. I have. And real podcasts too, like our RSS feed podcast. So here's here's what I mean. I was listening to something the other day and it said, hey, you know, you should probably get your RSS feed up on on YouTube. And I'm like, what? What? You can do what? Sure enough, after following, you know, a couple of instructions, which wasn't so bad, it turns out that I can just port in my entire library, which is being hosted by podhome.fm.
That is my new podcast host. Once I left SoundCloud for good, I was like, screw you guys. I'm going somewhere that's got got podcasting 2.0 enabled features. And Pod Home was I don't know, man. It was high it came highly recommended. But anyway, so they give me their r my RSS feed. They generate a new RSS feed for me. And I take that RSS feed and I take it over into YouTube. And it's like, hey, well, do you wanna import your entire library or do you wanna just import after, you know, your shows after some date? And I'm, like, well, sure. Take them all in.
And the following happened. The first day, it pulled in a 100 of my episodes and then stopped and said, okay. You got 498 episodes waiting in the queue. We'll resume that shit tomorrow. I'm, like, sure. I I go, that makes sense. I got a pretty big library. It's it's I mean, I've been doing these things for, you know, for a long long time. Okay. So the next or the next day, another 100 episodes comes in. I'm like, sweet. And it's like, oh, you got 398 left in the queue. We'll resume that shit tomorrow. I'm like, fine. Let let rock it rock on, brother. And then this morning I woke up to a strike on my account on YouTube.
So, apparently, in one of my last, you know, one of the many shows that I've done, during the pandemic, I said something about it. And YouTube doesn't like it. Not, I mean, it's just it just it kind of rankles me that I'm pulling in a whole bunch of old stuff from YouTube, and yet there's no way to mark it as, let me review this before you review this, so that I can make sure that I haven't said anything that goes against your community guidelines. I know I know what you're saying already. I hear you in the background. It's just that it's a YouTube has the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. It's either the 2nd or the 3rd largest search engine behind Google. I'm trying to market the show. I'm doing my good my good podcaster marketing bit by trying to get it in the hands of more people. And after day number 2, I get a strike on my account. So this does not bode well.
And I don't know if I'm going to survive. I've got for the rest of the day, because I don't think they'll start resuming until, like, 8 o'clock this evening, pulling in more, even more episodes, which I'm sure go and get directly against community guidelines. So what I may have to do is I may have to pull the whole podcast down and then re up it starting from, like, some certain date instead of all the stuff back in pandemic days. Just saying. So if if for whatever reason you're able to find my YouTube podcast because it's it's just this show. It's like whatever you're hearing me say right now that thing is gonna end up over at YouTube in the podcast channel on my YouTube account.
And it's going to be it's going to be the same thing. So I'm going to have to learn how to navigate this because there's going to be some things that I say that I'm just going to go fine. I'm just not going to put it on YouTube because they can just go pound sand for all I give a shit. In either event, I'm just saying, if for whatever reason, I'm I'm I end up still on YouTube podcasts after this week and you want to listen at your desktop or whatever, I'm on I'm on YouTube podcast. So there you go. Now, on back with the news. Bitcoin and shitcoin number 1 price charts have disappeared from Google search results. Interesting. And I did confirm this.
Decrypt Adrian Zmutsky is writing, Google search has stopped displaying price charts for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in its search results. Users can still access these charts through Google Finance. So over the weekend, Twitter users noted that searching for Bitcoin's price no longer yields a chart in the search results. In contrast, stock price searches still produce charts. Google did not respond to a request for comment. Google's decision has prompted discussions about the reasons behind this change. Now this is the important thing. Listen up.
Interestingly, as of press time, searching for Doge still shows Dogecoin's price chart. The feature showing the balances of shitcoin number 1 name service ENS addresses is also fully functional. Previously, Google provided charts showing current rates of leading cryptocurrencies allowing allowing users to check prices without navigating to yet another platform. And this feature enabled users to see in real time or near real time price charts for Bitcoin in search results. Separately, Google Trends data shows that the search volume for bitcoin on Google hit a 1 year low during the week of October 13th 19th this year. And by the end of the week, global interest in the term had dropped to a mere 27% of this year's peak search volume reported between March 3rd March 9th.
Bitcoin search interest is highest in El Salvador, the world's first country to adopt it as legal tender, but failed to see widespread adoption. It is followed by Nigeria, a country where inflation skyrocketed and crypto is seen as a capital flight mechanism that led to a crackdown by local authorities and dire consequences for local exchanges. Shitcoin number 1 shows a similar trend with October 13 through 19 data showing a yearly low of only 19% of the search volume reported at the high seen between March 3rd March 9th. Search interest is quite different from Bitcoin's led by Saint Helena followed by Switzerland and Slovenia.
Don't really care about that last thing. Yes, I did confirm it. If you search for Doge on Google, the first thing up is the price chart of Doge. If you search for Bitcoin on Google, there's no price chart at all. Now, I didn't change I didn't look at any any of the other shit coins cause I don't need to. But it is really interesting that they're allowing the price the price chart of Doge to come through. I don't think that this is a good idea. It should either be all or nothing. And this to me seems to be I think it could be considered market manipulation by Google, but nobody is ever going to get in trouble for that. Right? Right. Vice president Kamala Harris vows to support a crypto regulatory framework in a plan to support black men.
You heard it. That's what the block has. Sarah Wynne has written it. I if it's as cringe as I think it's gonna be, hold on to your seat. US vice president Kamala Harris said she plans to support a cryptocurrency regulatory framework that gives protections to black men who invest and own crypto as part of a newly released proposal to help build wealth for black men. Less than a month out before the presidential election, Harris released a proposal called the, quote, Opportunity Agenda for Black Men, end quote, on Monday. Over 20% of black Americans own or have in the past owned cryptocurrency according to the Harris team's plan. Quote, vice president Harris appreciates the way in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services.
The campaign team said in the plan, quote, she will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that black men and others who participate in this market are protected. Well, who the hell are others? I thought this was a plan just for black men. Who are the others? Do they even know what that whatever? As part of the plan, the Democratic presidential candidate also said she would provide 1,000,000 loans that are fully forgivable up to $20,000 to black entrepreneurs looking to start a business, launch a health initiative focused on black men, and legalize recreational marijuana.
This isn't Harris' first comment on crypto. Last month, Harris said her administration would encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets while protecting consumers and investors according to her 80 page economic plan. Meanwhile, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has made his own pledge to end an unlawful and un American crackdown on the US crypto industry and has backed a crypto project called World Liberty Financial. Such a bad move. I mean, he really shouldn't have done World Liberty Financial right before the election. I just why?
Whatever. National Policy Network WOC blockchain founder, Clive Mezadore, said she has been fighting for inclusion in crypto and criticized Harris' approach. Quote, it is perplexing that the Harris Walls policy team opted not to meet with diverse leaders in crypto, but instead is rolling out a policy that narrowly frames crypto around black men only and proposes a regulatory framework limiting black men to consumers instead of producers, Mesador said in a statement to the block. Mezadore, along with Black Women Blockchain Council founder, Olyinka Odenarian, I think, professor at Penn State Dickinson Law, Tanya Evans and others sent a letter to Harris' campaign asking for a meeting this month to discuss policy recommendations to push forward innovation and inclusion. That meeting has not yet taken place.
Members of the Harris Walls team did not immediately respond for a request to comment. Oh, for God's sakes. So I don't I'm I literally do not understand this. Is there somehow is it in some way, is it the case that black men are not allowed to buy crypto? I mean, is Coinbase turning black men away to buy Bitcoin? I think not. Is is Kraken turning away black men who wish to purchase Bitcoin? I think not. So what I I don't get this. I don't get this. Except for this. It's pandering. It's pandering to the crypto crowd and pandering to the African American nation that is part of the part of America.
That part of the nation, it's they're trying to kill 2 birds with 1 stone. And it doesn't make any fucking sense at all. Especially when it says the and others. What I don't understand. She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that black men and others who participate in this market are protected. I can only assume that when she says others that that means me. And that means Mexican Americans, and that means Chinese Americans, and Vietnamese Americans, and any other Southeast Asian American that you can possibly name. I'll bet it means Eastern European expatriates who have moved to the United States. We are the others. So where does the black men thing come in? See, this is the kind of pandering that tells me that she has no respect at all for the voting base.
Every time I see pandering, it just means, you know what? You're not even trying. This entire policy set makes no sense because it's just people. You either are going to protect the citizenry of the United States in their ownership of and participation in cryptocurrencies and digital assets, or you are not. And by colorizing it, it just makes her look like a racist. I'm sorry to say it, but you're literally saying this one group of people, by virtue of the color of their skin, and then anything else that you say after that doesn't matter because it's racist by definition.
So I guess we're having, I guess our vice president is a racist. I I just it's so stupid and I wish it would all just end. Well, thankfully, we've got the Bitcoin plus plus e cash edition. All of their talks and workshops have been put up. We'll get into it. Bitcoin plus plus is a developer focused conference series for audiences who are excited to get deeper into the cutting edge of Bitcoin technology. Bitcoin plus plus took place in Berlin between the dates of October 11th ending yesterday, October 13th. So, what this is, this is out of nobsbitcoin.com.
It is a list with links directly to every single one of the talks and every single one of the workshops. There's a lot here. Like for the for the talks and the keynote speeches, you have the 10 minute video of the conference kickoff. There's the 2nd renaissance of eCash by Cali. There's Fedimint, Federated eCash Mints 101. There's NIP 60 and NIP 61. There's Fedimint Footprints. There's Building Ecash Support. There's Cashew on Shopster, Awesome Payments. There's blind signatures and anonymous credentials. And that's just the talks and keynotes. If you actually want to watch the workshops, Alex Lewin put off put on a 30 minute one called how to build a Fedimint wallet in 20 minutes without using Rust.
There's another one, Fedimint consensus. Another one, how to add Nostra Wallet Connect to e cash by Supertestnet. That thing's almost an hour long. Casu devkit deep dive by the Simple Kid. There's Fedimit Lightning Gateway by Justin Moyler. There's basics of Casu Wallet development. I'm and submarine swaps. Thank god that Thomas Voigteland is going to talk about that for 20 minutes. But all of these links are in this particular web page. And this particular web page is going to be in the show notes. So you can click on that link in my show notes and go directly to this page where it is a whole bunch of links to the Bitcoin plus plus conference, which just ended yesterday in Berlin. So I would highly recommend checking that out. Now, last up for today, Fedimint web SDK.
Building e cache into the web. Fedament Web SDK offers tools for developing robust, privacy focused, and web assembly powered Fedament clients for the browser. Quote, announcing the Fedimint web SDK, a toolkit for building Fedimint and lightning wallets in the browser. There we go. The SDK includes a robust and WASM powered client, 0 setup lightning support, and dead simple API for web developers. Special shout out goes to Alex Lewin for spearheading development on the web SDK. Check it out. Let us know what you think. So here's the key features. The web assembly powered client packages a robust, fault tolerant Fedimint client built in Rust via web assembly.
It also lazy loads within a web worker for performance. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but if you do, let me know. ECash payments includes support for joining federations, sending and receiving eCash, and managing balances. And then there's lightning payments. It ships with 0 setup lightning network payments. Yay. State management. It can handle the complex state management and storage challenges of browser wallets. Privacy is included because there is it offers a privacy friendly wallet by default and it's framework agnostic, designed as a core library compatible with vanilla JavaScript laying the groundwork for future framework specific packages.
Check out this video from BTC plus plus e cash edition on how to build a Fedimint wallet in 20 minutes using this very same SDK here. And that same video I just talked about in the the very last thing that I was saying. The the Bitcoin plus plus conference talks and workshops. All of those videos are there. They will be in the show notes. You can go see all of them. And that's it for me, ladies and gentlemen. Have a wonderful Monday. Oh, oh, I forgot to mention, I did write a note on Nostra about it, but Mondays of every week is, at I've got to get my happy ass up at 5:40 in the morning so that I can be ready to roll for the Monday morning Toastmasters meeting that I have here in my neck of the woods. And lo and behold, a guy that I swear to God is like one of the most hardcore liberal guys.
I mean, I'm serious. Given what, you know, the speeches that he's given, the way he talks about certain issues, I'm like going, yeah, that's definitely a hardcore liberal guy. But he blew my mind today because he brought in a box from the Mises Institute. He pulls it open and says that another guy, and I don't I don't remember because it was, I mean, honestly, I had to get to this thing at 6:30 in the morning. I barely have, like, one brain cell functioning. According to him, another guy that used to be, like, in our our, our Toastmasters group had gotten this set of books from the Mises Institute and asked this guy to give them out. So everybody at my Toastmasters meeting got a copy of Murray Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money?
Just gave it out. I mean, they're free from the Mises Institute, but still, you know, and it's a very thin book, you'll probably read it in a day if you're really serious about it. But Murray Rothbard is one of the Austrian economists And Austrian economics is is essentially the the economy or, well, the economics, framework that Bitcoin is built upon. It's not built around debt. It's built around capital. Right? And that's a very simplistic way of looking at the difference between Keynesian economics and Austrian economics assured. But this is the end of the show. I'm not gonna launch into that. I just wanted to say that in a in the place where I'm at, which is hardcore what we call a hardcore blueberry.
What is a blueberry? A blueberry is a city that is definitively democrat, blue, liberal, you name it. But they exist in the midst of a sea of conservatism because they it's basically a whole bunch of rural areas, a bunch of farmers, a bunch of ranchers, and they don't buy into that crap. And yet, in the middle of this blueberry, this dude drops a box on the table of Murray Rothbard one of Murray Rothbard's books. So, at the very end of the meeting, I had to take a second and explain to everybody there that this book and that Murray Rothbard is an Austrian economics author, and therefore this is an Austrian economics based book. And that what they've been taught, what we've all been taught in the United States, in most of the West, is Keynesian economics.
They've no. There's not a college that we can find that actually teaches Austrian economics, not not as a general major portion of the course load get when you get an economics degree at any university in the west. It's always Keynesian economics. Austrian economists have basically been left out in the wind to twist by all these dudes and have been done so for decades decades decades. And the question becomes and this is a question that I posed to the group right before I left it kind of makes you wonder what they're hiding.
Why is Austrian economics not talked about? Why are we not taught Austrian economics versions of economy and economics in high school? Why do we not get exposed to it at the basic level of core competency classes that you take in colleges and universities? If you take an economics class in university, it's going to be Keansey in economics. It's going to be debt is good, printing money is good, blah blah blah everything's going to be fine, trust the government. And here we have Murray Rothbard who basically calls out the government in the title of the book, what has government done to our money? I actually posit that government didn't do shit to our money.
Government allowed our money to be corrupted by very elite, very wealthy, very well connected non governmental individuals. Case in point, the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. A, it ain't federal, b, it is indeed private, and, c, it was concocted by almost nobody in the government of the United States. They were all businessmen. They were all titans. They were all the the masters of the universe, the oil barons and steel barons and baron barons and baron barons barons. I'm just saying. There was there's nothing about the Federal Reserve that was private, and it never has been. Government, the United States government, didn't really do the damage.
I know I'm gonna get roasted for this. It was what they allowed to happen that did the damage. And I think that that's a distinction that we should probably start making. And it's not apologizing for the government. Screw them. They can all go pay on sand. But as long as we know the truth of the matter, I think that that's important. I think it's important to realize that the United States government had almost no hand in creating the Federal Reserve. It did give us the Federal Reserve insofar that it allowed it to occur and did throw did so through legislation at the highest level of government, the legislative branch, and executed by the president of the United States at the executive branch and has been defended by the judicial branch, every single time we wanna say, you got this is illegal. And the supreme court and the rest of the justice system says, no. It's fine.
It's totally fine. We got the Federal Reserve Act. You'll be fine. No, no, no. So I just feel that it's important to make the distinction. Is it going to help you today? No, that distinction is not going to help you today, and it's not going to help me either. It's just that it makes me kind of think if we should be a little bit more careful about who we're directing our ire to. Because it's been my belief for years that governments don't actually control shit. That they're just as much of a puppet as we find ourselves being today. With all that said, I will see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Market Updates and Bitcoin's Performance
YouTube and Podcasting Challenges
Austrian Economics and Murray Rothbard
