Join me today for Episode 1101 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
nostr handle: https://primal.net/p/npub172mu27r5yny0nnmvgjqwhx055dmsesrrx7j0p5d3pxagfx6xgxfsv75p3q
Twitter: https://x.com/beisnerds
https://www.theblock.co/post/355355/trump-crypto-czar-david-sacks-stablecoin-bill-trillions-of-dollars-demand-us-treasurys
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/05/22/texas-moves-closer-to-setting-up-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-as-bill-passes-house
https://decrypt.co/321523/uk-appeals-court-dismisses-bitcoin-sv-investors-13-3b-damages-bid-against-binance
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/how-zeus-is-redefining-bitcoin-with-cashu-ecash-integration
https://atlas21.com/the-majority-in-the-us-wants-to-convert-part-of-the-gold-reserves-into-bitcoin/
https://bitcoinnews.com/markets/blackstone-invests-in-blackrocks-ibit/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/cake-wallet-v4-28/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/sparrow-wallet-v2-2-1/
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Topics for today:
- BTC Beats Bezos
- GENIUS Bill to Drive Debt Creation in U.S.
- Texas One Stem Closer to SBR
- Zeus Wallet Explained
Circle P:
Maple Syrup and Soapsnostr handle: https://primal.net/p/npub172mu27r5yny0nnmvgjqwhx055dmsesrrx7j0p5d3pxagfx6xgxfsv75p3q
Twitter: https://x.com/beisnerds
Articles:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-tops-amazon-market-cap-on-bitcoin-pizza-dayhttps://www.theblock.co/post/355355/trump-crypto-czar-david-sacks-stablecoin-bill-trillions-of-dollars-demand-us-treasurys
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/05/22/texas-moves-closer-to-setting-up-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-as-bill-passes-house
https://decrypt.co/321523/uk-appeals-court-dismisses-bitcoin-sv-investors-13-3b-damages-bid-against-binance
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://www.bitcoinandshow.com/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/how-zeus-is-redefining-bitcoin-with-cashu-ecash-integration
https://atlas21.com/the-majority-in-the-us-wants-to-convert-part-of-the-gold-reserves-into-bitcoin/
https://bitcoinnews.com/markets/blackstone-invests-in-blackrocks-ibit/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/cake-wallet-v4-28/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/sparrow-wallet-v2-2-1/
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
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[00:00:02]
Unknown:
It is 08:57AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the May 2025. That's a lot of twos and a couple of fives. This is episode eleven oh one of Bitcoin and, God, the numbers just keep going up. We're going to talk about pizza day. We are. It's not going to be very long, but we're gonna talk about pizza day in association with these, well, these high numbers. And, you know, it it appears that, I might have been, correct again about my thoughts on stablecoin and its relationship with United States Treasury bonds, which we might as well call debt instrumentation. Texas has passed a Bitcoin bill.
Where the hell does it go next? I I really hope I have an answer for that question by the end of this show because, honestly, shit confuses me. It it just does. And then we're gonna go across the pond to The UK where Bitcoin SV has been dealt another blow. And if you don't know what Bitcoin SV is, it was the rug pull of Roger Ver. Yeah. We'll we'll probably talk about a little bit of the history there. Zeus wallet. There is a good write up here from Bitcoin magazine about Bitcoin and Cashew eCash integration and how Zeus is actually doing that and kinda what it means.
And I I honestly think that that's important. We're we're I'm not seeing as much about eCash as I was, and I think it's going to be important going into the future. ECash is an extremely important development, and it should not at all be dismissed. And I don't think it's being dismissed, but I'm also not seeing as much about ECash as I had been in the past. I I wanna be one of the people that keeps it up in in front of people's you know, if you put it into your imagination as to, oh my god. I can't believe what we're building here. There's a report that says that the majority of The United States wants to convert part of its gold reserves into Bitcoin.
Honestly, I'm just gonna call straight up bullshit on that one, but we gotta talk about that one. Blackstone has waded into the Bitcoin pool, and we're not talking about BlackRock. We're talking about Blackstone, which isn't which is also not something that we need to be sneezing at. And then we've got a couple of updates from our good buddies at nobsbitcoin.com, which seem to be have been on hiatus for a little while. It looks like they are back. I am so happy that no b s bitcoin is back into the fray. I really did miss them. They are one of the people that I look for when I'm putting together this show. But let's get on back over to Bitcoin and pizza day. Cointelegraph Adrian Zmunksy is writing this one. Bitcoin has topped Amazon's market cap on pizza day as price sets new high. Yeah. We we know we're looking at new all time highs.
Let's settle down, folks. You need to settle down there. I'm gonna just settle down. And I'm talking about the price. I'm talking about talking about a little bit of hubris. I I I see it both on on Nostra as well as over there on Deadbird's side. I'm I'm seeing people taking victory laps, and that's you know, honestly, let's just calm down, people. But, regardless, the market cap of the world's first cryptocurrency Bitcoin surpassed that of retail and tech behemoth Amazon on pizza day. Market cap or market data shows that Bitcoin had a market cap of $2,205,000,000,000 at the time of writing, which was $70,000,000,000 more than the $2,135,000,000,000 Amazon valuation.
Quote, by surpassing Amazon in terms of capitalization, Bitcoin has now attracted even more attention from the non crypto audience, said Alex Obakachikov, founder of Obakachikov for research. There's no way I Alex said that the latest rally will strengthen confidence in Bitcoin and lead to new injections into the crypto market. The surge came as Bitcoin set a new all time high and traded well above $110,000 which Alex said would attract new investors to large funds. Alex noted that institutional players continue to expand their role on the digital asset space. Quote, in May, BlackRock became the second largest Bitcoin holder after Satoshi Nakamoto surpassing Binance in this particular indicator.
Hassan Khan, which is easier to pronounce, the CEO of Bitcoin liquidity platform, Ordiz, told CoinTelegraph that, quote, this is a structural change. He explained that Bitcoin is no longer simply a hedge. It's in the process of becoming a benchmark currency. And a similar sentiment was echoed by Shruti Kohli, head of global business development at crypto exchange, Bitrue, which I've I've never heard of any of these people, who told Cointelegraph that, quote, this is a strong signal for the digital economy. And he added, quote, Bitcoin is proving itself as a legitimate macro asset class. Surpassing Amazon's market cap is not only drawing massive attention, but is also helping Bitcoin position itself alongside established market giants.
Stan Lowe, operations and research lead at hybrid crypto exchange, GRVT, disagrees. He told Cointelegraph that, quote, the fundamental principles of Bitcoin is its underlying mechanisms have all had that's okay. Bad grammar. Grammar cop. Grammar cop. The fundamental principles of Bitcoin and its underlying mechanisms have always been and are still the same despite the asset's recent surpassing of Amazon's market cap. He said that he does not think this has any implications on the crypto market. So there's a little voice of reason there because I I I'm I'm sorry, but I I tend to agree with them. I'm I'm not I think people are making are are overblowing this entire thing.
You're just putting too much pressure on on or you're too much you're putting too much sentiment into surpassing Amazon or Google or any of the other things that that it it has nothing to do with the market cap of Bitcoin versus a company like Amazon. It's two different things. Not only are these not apples this is not a comparison of apples and oranges. It certainly isn't a compare comparison of apples to apples. This is more like the compares comparing stake and dirt. Okay? It's very different situations. Bitcoin does not have customers, Bitcoin does not have investors.
Bitcoin has miners, node runners, and users of currency. Whether you're saving in it or spending it, it does not matter. It's not a company. I I I we're getting way over our skis on thinking that this is really important. So thank you, Stan Lowe, for breathing a sigh of relief into this ridiculous argument. Anyway, according to coin market cap data, the total cryptocurrency market cap stood at 3 and a half trillion dollars at the time of writing. While high, this is still nearly 6% lower than the all time high of 3,710,000,000,000.00 reported at the end of twenty twenty four. More coin market cap data shows that Bitcoin exchange traded funds saw nearly 604,000,000 of net inflows yesterday, May 21.
The current open interest on crypto derivatives of $756,000,000,000 for perpetual swaps and 3 and a quarter billion for futures. Looking into the future, Alex, who I cannot pronounce his last name, shared his view on Bitcoin's direction, quote, we are moving gradually towards 200,000 with gradual adjustments. I am sure that this year, we will see Bitcoin at somewhere between a hundred and 50 and $90,000. Okay. Maybe he meant a hundred and 50 and a hundred and 90,000, and maybe this is just a typo. Who knows? There is no editing anymore in any of these publications. But Khan said that large net inflows to ETFs and increasing open interest demonstrate that institutional confidence is growing.
Looking forward, he said, quote, short term profit taking and macro rate uncertainty are tempering momentum, but below the surface metrics point to continued high conviction. The foundation is more solid than any other cycle before it. Don't get too far over your skis there, pal. Okay. Today, May, is Bitcoin Pizza Day, a recurring commemoration of 05/22/2010 when programmer Laszlo Hynix first made the documented purchase of goods using Bitcoin paying 10,000 Bitcoin for two, count them, one, two Papa John's pizzas. Quote, what was once considered a highly speculative risk asset has evolved into a more serious asset class, said Uli Spankowski, chief digital officer at Boris Stuttgart Group.
Spankowski added that nowadays, Bitcoin boasts a market capitalization over 2,000,000,000,000 US dollars, ranking it as the fifth largest asset globally behind gold and the three largest publicly traded companies. Again, I think we're putting too much weight on comparing things like currencies, commodities, to companies with a revenue model. They're different things. The the only thing that is really common between them is that somehow or another, they have a calculable market cap, but that's the only thing that even remotely ties them together. Otherwise, they're they're just too different.
So I I really I'm not even really looking really looking at this whole we we've surpassed Amazon. I don't freaking care. I I I don't care. I actually don't even care if it pass surpasses gold, but that's $22,000,000,000,000. So, you know, give me a phone call when we get there. Other than that, Bitcoin pizza day is kind of a, is kind of an important day. However, I do still believe that this is incorrect. It is not the first purchase of goods with Bitcoin. I remember when I first got into this into this thing back in the day, and that was around the summer of twenty fifteen, we were talking about people buying alpaca socks as being the first Bitcoin transaction.
Yes. Alpaca socks. And it was a big deal back then. It was a great big deal, and it was right you know, it would and they it wasn't that it was made in 2015. I just remembered that this was a story that I started listening to because I didn't really I really wasn't listening to Bitcoin stuff until 2015, and they were talking about this actually being the first transaction even before Laszlo made the Bitcoin pizza transaction. So I I still cannot find, you know, and and I'm it's not like I'm I'm not flying to Washington DC and hanging out in the library of congress trying to figure this shit out. Right? It's not that important to me. But if somebody has definitive proof that the pizza buy came before the alpaca socks buy, please let me know and do that through a boostagram. Help support the show. Now onto Trump's crypto czar, David Sachs.
He's saying that this genius stablecoin bill could create trillions of dollars in demand for, you guessed it, United States treasuries. This is James Hunt for the block in an interview on CNBC's closing bell late Wednesday. White House crypto czar David Sacks said that he expects the Genius Act stablecoin bill to pass and potentially unlock trillions of dollars for the United States Treasury. Asked how soon stablecoins could start driving dollar demand, quote, I think it will be immediate, Sachs said. Quote, we already have over $200,000,000,000 worth of stablecoins, but it's just it's just unregulated.
I think that if we can provide the legal clarity and legal framework for this, we could create trillions, trillions of dollars of demand for our treasuries, particularly overnight, you know, very, very quickly. Even ahead of the bill, stablecoin issuer Tether has demonstrated considerable demand, recently nearing 120,000,000,000 in US Treasury securities, surpassing Germany as the nineteenth largest global holder according to the United States Department of Treasury Statistics. David Sacks' remarks echoes Bitwise chief investment officer, Matt Hugan, who said on Tuesday that the legislation could pave the way for a multiyear crypto bull run, projecting stablecoins would grow into a $2,500,000,000,000 market cap in no time.
The Genius Act would require stablecoins to be fully backed by US treasuries or dollar equivalents. They would it would impose AML rules, add oversight for foreign issuers, and mandate registration and auditing for large issuers with market caps exceeding $50,000,000,000, which is currently just Tether and Circle. Senators voted 66 to 32 on Monday to advance the bill. Yes. We know. However, not everyone is happy with the legislation, and then they get into the fact that, well, Elizabeth Warren is pretty pissed off. But Sachs did not directly respond to any of those concerns predominantly on the Democratic side of the aisle.
There's just not enough safeguards to keep president Trump and his family from benefiting from the legislation, instead emphasizing that the bill has bipartisan support. Quote, I think 15 Democrats voted for the bill to pass this key procedural threshold of cloture, which means that there will be no filibuster against the bill. Quote, we have every expectation that this is going to pass. I think the reason it's going to pass is because stablecoins offer a more efficient, cheaper, smoother payment system, new payment rails for The United States economy. It also extends the, here it comes, the dominance of the dollar online.
I think for all of these reasons, the stablecoin bill is going to pass, and it's going to pass with significant bipartisan support. Yeah. Because they have absolutely no fucking choice at this time. It's they they they sat around and they laughed at us for too long. And this is what you get. Instead of putting high quality strategic safeguards into place to protect their power base, they were too busy insider trading, like, you know, Nancy Pelosi with $710,000,000 worth of excuse me excuse me. You you know, on a on a senator's budget or or house of representatives budget. You know? No. Nothing to see here.
No. They were they were too busy glad handing themselves and trying to force well over, I don't know, I'd say 70% of the country to feel bad about, you know, themselves and and feel bad about what race they are and telling everybody that they were racist and and too busy talking about shit that didn't matter. And guess what happened? They missed their chance to safeguard their power base. They completely fucked this up. Talk about dropping the ball. Wow. We warned them. We we were right there saying you guys are laughing at us and you shouldn't be laughing at us. Well, it's too late now.
Continuing, Sachs, whose remit also covers artificial intelligence policy, closed the interview by emphasizing that the US administration would help support the infrastructure, power capacity, and innovation required to win the AI race. If we don't, this is a quote, it'll be very bad for our economy. It'll be very bad for our military. So I think we're going to do what's necessary to win this race. I'm telling you that this is this stablecoin stuff in The United States in direct interest in it is all about dollar dominance and the ability to print debt like it's going out of style. They they now have the one instrumentation that they've been waiting for.
It took it took a a completely different set of people to be able to figure this out, but now they've got it. And through regulatory moding, they're going to capture as much of stablecoin as they possibly can. They're I really also believe that they're going to have an under the table agreement with Tether that they will never get licensure in The United States to provide United States citizens with direct stablecoin. They're going their job is to export United States debt ad across the rest of the world. They'll let JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America take care of this the Joe Schmoes inside of America.
And between those two weaponizations of the US dollar, the power base is going to seek to retain their power, but it's not going to work the way they think it's going to work. How is it going to work in my view? I don't know yet. I don't. I'm gonna be brutally honest with you. I do not have an answer to that yet, but I'm I'm I'm thinking about it. Let's move on. Texas, the great state of Texas, the lone star state, my home, the state that I miss of all states in the world because I'm not there anymore, moves closer to setting up strategic Bitcoin reserve bill as the bill passes the house. Yep. Yes. It does. Jamie Crowley tell us more. CoinDesk. Texas is drawing closer to establishing a Bitcoin strategic reserve after senate bill after a senate bill to create one was approved by the lower house.
The state's house of representatives voted in favor of senate bill 121, which would establish a Texas strategic Bitcoin reserve for the purpose of investing in cryptocurrency and the investment authority of the comptroller of public accounts over the reserve and certain other state funds. That's actually, I guess, the title of the bill. It's rather long, but whatever. The bill, which passed in a 101 to 42 vote, that is a screaming majority, by the way, now awaits a concurrence vote from the senate following house amendments before passing to governor Greg Abbott's desk for a final signature.
Texas would become the second state to establish a strategic reserve for the digital asset after New Hampshire. That equivalent vote in Arizona got all the way to the governor but was, of course, vetoed by the insanity that is Katie Hobbs calling Bitcoin an untested investment. You know? But she's she's probably gonna get not be governor of Arizona after this, especially if the Bitcoin price holds into the next election for the governor of Arizona. Uh-uh. I mean, she just she just robbed Arizonans from their birthright, And she doesn't deserve she actually doesn't deserve to be governor. Because if she can't see this after all of the time that's passed, after all of the examples, after all of the fights that have been won handily, and she still can't see it into the future, you don't want that kind of person governing your state because there's no vision there.
However, she has enacted a similar bill which does permit the state to hold abandoned digital assets as unclaimed property, which is basically bullshit. It's this is that's even below lip service. It doesn't do anything, and anybody who thinks it does, I got bridges in Arizona to sell you. Vismaya v is writing the following one for decrypt. The UK appeals court has dismissed Bitcoin SV investors thirteen point three billion dollar damages bid against the exchange, Binance. And if you're not sure what's going on here, I guarantee it'll be clear after this.
The United Kingdom Court Of Appeals has dismissed the majority of a $13,300,000,000 class action lawsuit against crypto exchange Binance dealing a major blow to Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision or BSV investors who said the company's 2019 delisting of the token crushed its growth potential. The court rejected the investor's, quote, foregone growth effort or effect foregone growth effect theory, which suggested BSV would have reached price levels similar to Bitcoin had it not been removed from major trading platforms in a judgment handed down on Wednesday.
The claim sought 352 times the original value of BSV held by subclass b investors, but the court deemed it speculative and ruled that it could not proceed. Quote, I asked mister John Wardell KC how the representative could possibly claim hundreds of times more than the value of the assets that the defendants had allegedly damaged, wrote master of the roles, sir Jeffrey Voss, in the ruling, quote, he was unable to give any answer, end quote. Wardell, a senior barrister at Wilberforce Chambers, represented BSV Claims Limited, the entity which is bringing the collective action on behalf of over 240,000 morons, UK based morons.
They call them investors, but, no, if you invested in BSV, you are a moron. I am sorry for you. May your retardation be forever. Last week, his team asked the court to revive the dismissed claims, including a loss of chance theory. Trying to legislate what could have happened in the future. Jesus. The court found or, adjudicate. I'm sorry. Not legislate, but adjudicate what could happen in the future. The court found that the claim its own expert had relied on comparators like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash to estimate damages undermining the argument that BSV was a unique or irreplaceable asset.
It also dismissed the loss loss of chance claim, ruling that it was not even legally applicable. The judges explained the damages sought did not involve missed opportunities tied to third party decisions nor realistic probabilities. Instead, the claim turned on whether BSV would have developed into a top tier cryptocurrency, a question the court said could be resolved on the balance of probabilities and not through speculative or fallback theories. In doing so, the court affirmed the Competition Appeal Tribunal's July twenty twenty four decision, which applied the, quote, market mitigation rule, a legal principle requiring claimants to take reasonable steps to reduce their losses when a functioning market is available.
I guess that meant you should have sold all your shit. Decrypt has reached out to Binance for comment. The judgment narrows the lawsuit, which also targets Kraken, ShapeShift, and Bittylicious over their twenty nineteen delistings of the BSV token. The BSV token, the full name of which is Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, was created by Craig Wright, whose claim to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was dismissed by another UK court earlier this year. While the appeal court dismissed the largest part of the lawsuit against Binance, some smaller claims could still move forward, but they probably won't.
These include claims from investors who lost access to their BSV after it was removed from exchanges or who sold it at a loss soon after the delisting. The only thing that's gonna be viable here is, the people the investors who lost access to their BSV after it was removed from exchanges. That loss of access is probably going to that will probably fly through. But that has nothing at all to do with the rest of this. And the people who sold it at a loss after the delisting, sorry for you. You shouldn't have held it in the first fucking place. This BSV was a in case you did not know, BSV was a fork of Bitcoin Cash, which itself was a fork from actual Bitcoin, which occurred primarily well, actually, only because of the block size wars that ended at the end of twenty seventeen.
At the end of twenty seventeen, it was like from when I got into Bitcoin in 2015, the argument on bigger blocks was heating up. By the time you got to 2017 actually, I think it was the end of twenty sixteen and going into 2017 that that we finished this up. That's when Roger Ver broke off Bitcoin Cash. Within a couple of months of breaking off and doing Bitcoin Cash, she was approached by Craig Wright, and Craig Wright's best friend and sugar daddy, Calvin Ayre, and they teamed up. And then two months after that, Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright raped publicly raped Roger Ver over the Coles, told everybody that they thought he was stupid, and that Bitcoin Cash was stupid, and that they were going to fork Bitcoin Cash into BSV.
So that's where Bitcoin Satoshi Vision came from, and anybody who bought into it deserves exactly what they got, which is nothing. Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities. West Texas Intermediate Oil taking a hit 1.14% of the downside back to $60.87 a barrel. Brent, North Sea is down one and a quarter to $64.00 8. Natural gas is also down 3.21% to the downside. We got, $3.26 per thousand on that, and gasoline is down 1.4% to $2.12 a gallon. Gold is down two thirds of a point, bucking down to $32.94 and no dimes. Silver is down one and a third. Platinum is crawling sideways in the red. Copper is crawling sideways in the green, and palladium is down 2.14%.
Ag is pretty much kinda brutalized this morning. Biggest loser today is chocolate, 3.96% to the downside. Biggest winner is corn, point 65% to the upside. Why live cattle is up over a point, lean hogs down a quarter, and feeder cattle are up well over a point. The Dow is up a quarter of a point to 42,061. S and P is up a quarter of a point. Nasdaq is up two thirds, and the S and P Mini is crawling sideways slightly in the red. I got a damn. 1 thou sorry. $111,280 on a price of Bitcoin. That is a $2,210,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 33.7 ounces of shiny metal rocks now with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,868,119.6 of, and average fees per block are moderate.
Not bad at all. In fact, 0.05 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. There are ten, eleven, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 blocks carrying 12,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of four. Count them one, two, three, four. Satoshis per v byte. Low priority is gonna get you in at the same. Hash rate continues to rise slightly. 878.2 exahashes per second is what we're at right now. Reminder to go over to bitcoin and show.com and show that site some love. Click around. Give me some clicks if you would. You know, go check it out. Tell me what it is that I yeah. Tell me what it is I'm doing wrong. Because I'm not a web guy. I I'm not sure how to present information in a visual style when it comes to web pages. So if you have any tips or tricks that you might want to impart to a poor old soul like me, please do so. Otherwise, sign up for bitcoinandshow.com.
That's bitcoinandshow,all1word,.com. The only emails that you will receive from me is when I release something on that website. I'm not going to hound you with contests. I'm not gonna say, hey. You know, if you if you follow me on Twitter, I'll give you whatever. No. No. No. This is just for you to say, oh, hey. Look. I got an email for bitcoin and show dot com. Clearly, he's dropped either another episode or maybe he wrote something. Hopefully, it'll be interesting, and hopefully, you will read it from I'm the mayor, which was yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and I got proof of pleb. A thousand sat says, how many Bitcoiners actually roll their own entropy when setting up new hardware wallets?
Discuss. Probably not many. Probably less than you think. And you would think that that would not be the case, would you? Because they're sophisticated enough to get a hardware wallet that has entropy, and yet chances are really good that we're not doing it. But you know what I haven't heard? And don't, god forbid, everything that I'm about to say, do not say, oh, well, Dave said it was okay not to do it, so, you know, I'm not gonna worry about it. No. No. No. No. By all means, roll your own entropy. If you don't like okay. You don't know what that means. If you if you get something like a cold card, you know, you can get dice.
Cold card has the situation where you can say I'm rolling my own entropy to make sure that, you know, the wallet address that this that as I spin up a new wallet with a cold card is going to have enough entropy that it's not gonna be easily guessed by another computer. So you roll dice and you roll it you can roll it like a hunt you know, a couple of pairs of dice or roll a single dice a hundred times, and you're guaranteed that you're gonna get, like, random numbers because it's not a random number generator, which, in my opinion, doesn't really exist.
There's always gonna be some kind of cyclical nature of a random number generator because of the way that the random number generator is built. It's usually with software. It's just chaos doesn't really work that way. The only true chaos is to physically roll something with six sides on it or or you could do with a, you know, Dungeons and Dragons dice, I suppose, if you if you wanna do it that way, because, like, you know, you get, like, a, you know, an eight sided die or something like that. I I don't know. I'm not I'm I'm pretty sure that you can put in more than the number six on the cold card. It just makes it it just kinda scrambles the entropy up a little bit so that you can do, so that you can be more assured that your your wallet address isn't going to be guessed. Right?
But you know what I haven't heard is I haven't heard a single news story. I haven't heard a single anecdote on Nostr or on Twitter or on Facebook or on LinkedIn or anything that said, I rolled all this entropy and somebody still was able to guess my Bitcoin wallet and drained it. I have yet to hear that. Alright? So I honestly I'm not all that concerned about it. It's just I like I said, don't do what I say. Don't do what I do. Just if you if you feel comfortable rolling entropy, do so. If you don't, I'm not technically certain.
I'm not technically certain if it's gonna, like, really impact you, but don't don't listen to me. You should probably roll your own entropy. Progressively worse with a thousand says love, peace, and chicken grease. Psyduck with seven zero three says Psyduck. Paul Sirnine with 500 says thanks again for an interesting episode. By the way, pocket protectors are an undervalued sartorial accessory. Keep up the good work. Greatly appreciated. Turkey with 500 says nothing. Yoda with four four four says good day, fellow boosters. Love you guys. God's death 237. Thank you, sir. Pies with a hundred says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. That's the weather report.
Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Just a little note here. Bitcoin Liquid Network has surpassed $3,200,000,000 in total value locked. So I guess Liquid Network is finally getting some love, I I guess. I I don't know. I I don't use it, but, hey. You know, more power to Adam back and the people over there at Blockstream. Okay. How Zeus how Zeus is redefining Bitcoin with Casu eCash integration, John Gault writing for Bitcoin Magazine. The United States based Bitcoin and lightning mobile wallet, Zeus, recently announced an alpha release integration of Casu.
The move marks the first integration of eCash into a popular Bitcoin wallet breaking new ground for potential user adoption of Bitcoin. Cashew is a hot new implementation of Chaumian eCash, a form of digital cash invented by David Chaum in the nineties. It has incredible privacy and scalability properties with the trade offs of being fundamentally centralized, requiring a significant amount of trust in the issuer. So keep that shit in mind. It is centralized. There's no two ways about it. It is definitely a centralized way of doing things.
But in a counterintuitive move for Zeus known as the known as the go to tool for advanced Lightning users seeking to connect to their home nodes, the integration of Cashew knowledges a sorry. The integration of Cashew acknowledges a last mile challenge Lightning wallets face when delivering Bitcoin to the masses. Quote, we basically started off as the cypherpunk wallet. Right? You got to set up your own lightning node and connect to it with Zeus. The last two years, we put the node in the phone with one click, and you can run it all in a standalone app without a remote node, Evan Kaludes, founder and CEO of Zeus, told Bitcoin magazine. Quote, Cashew addresses or rather, Cashew addresses uneconomical self custody for smaller Bitcoin amounts.
On chain, the dust limit is 546 satoshis, and layer two systems like Lightning have costs for channel setup or unilateral exits that aren't widely discussed, Evan explained, highlighting a major point of friction in noncustodial Lightning wallets, the need for liquidity and channel management. While these esoteric aspects of the Lightning Network have mostly, mostly been abstracted away since its invention in 02/2016, these fundamental trade offs continue to manifest even in the most sophisticated and user friendly wallets. In the case of both Phoenix and Zeus Wallet, two of the most popular noncustodial options in the market, Users must pay up to 10,000 sats upfront to gain any spending capacity.
These fees are necessary to cover the on chain fees spent to open a channel for the user against the wallet's liquidity service provider unlocking a non custodial experience. The required upfront fee is difficult to explain and represents a painful a painful onboarding experience for brand new users who are used to fiat apps just giving them the money to join instead. Well, the result is the proliferation of custodial lightning wallets like Wallet of Satoshi, which gained massive adoption early on by leveraging the global nearly instant settlement power of Bitcoin combined with the excellent user experience centralized wallets can create.
Major developments have been made over seven years after the Lightning Network's inception, however, and Zeus wallet is pushing the boundaries. Excuse me. Woah. With e cash, we make it so easy for anyone to set up a wallet and start participating in our ecosystem, which I really think is going to become more and more prevalent, Evan explained. Today, at roughly a hundred thousand dollars per Bitcoin, 1 thousand Satoshis are equivalent to $1. Transactions of these sizes are known as microtransactions. A popular example are Nostra social media tips known as Zaps. But finding the right tool for this use case is not simple.
Self custodied wallet like Phoenix charges transaction fees in the hundreds of Satoshis even with open channels and on chain fees often cost the same and are slower to settle. As a result, there's an entire category of spending that is not only served by cheaper alternatives such as custodial lightning wallets like Walletist Satoshi or Blink, but result in significant privacy trade offs often requiring phone numbers from users and in some cases, more advanced KYC and IP tracking. Cashew hopes to serve this market with lower privacy costs, the same ease of use, speed, and competitive fees.
Digging deeper into the Casu integration, Evan explained that, quote, for users, this means being able to pick and switch between custodians in a single app. For developers, it means being able to defer custodial responsibilities to third parties and not have to wire up new integrations when your current custodian halts operations. Zaps are Satoshi denominated rewards delivered as likes or micro tips for content in the Nostra social media ecosystem. A zap can be as small as 1 satoshi, the smallest amount of Bitcoin that could be technically transferred equivalent today to about 1 tenth of a penny.
Quote, but I think if we look at Nostrand, you're seeing how many people are zapping and how big a part of that ecosystem it is, it's like people are willing to do it, Evan explained. Cashew, while custodial, lets users accumulate small amounts, say, via nostrils apps, without needing 6,000 satoshis to open a lightning channel. Zeus prompts users to upgrade to self custody as their balance grows, he concluded, explaining that the wallet will effectively annoy users into self custody, one of several design choices made to mitigate the risks introduced by Casu itself.
The trade offs introduced by Cashew challenge the common understanding of custody as an either or in Bitcoin. Historically, you were either a centralized custodial exchange or you were a non custodial Bitcoin wallet. In the first one, you entrust the coins to a third party. In the latter one, you take personal responsibility for those coins and their corresponding private keys. Kashu changes this paradigm by introducing Bitcoin denominated e cash notes or NUTS, which are bearer instruments that should be backed by a full Bitcoin reserve and lightning interoperability for instant withdrawal.
Similar to fiat cash, you must take control and responsibility over these notes. But there's also counterparty risk. In the case of Cashew, there are certain things the issuing mint can theoretically do to exploit their users, akin to how a bank can run on a fractional reserve. The big difference between Casu or custodial Bitcoin exchanges and fiat currency is that Casu is open source, is designed around user privacy, and scales very well. It makes the cost of running a mint lower than either alternative, a feature that makes mint competition easier, in theory countering the centralizing network effects of specific mints.
Finally, the user experience of storing Cashew tokens has been attached to known forms of Bitcoin self custody such as the download of 12 word seeds via various mechanisms through implementations still vary from wallet to wallet and the whole ecosystem is in its early stages. To further mitigate the custodial risks of Chamian style eCash and Bitcoin, the Cashew community has developed various methods for automatically managing that custody risk. Users can split risk by using multiple mints, switching between them in the user interface. Soon, Zeus will guide users to select five or six reputable mints automatically balancing funds to minimize exposure, Evan explained, referring to a particular approach called automated automated bank runs.
The idea is that as some cashew mints may hold more of your funds, Zeus deranks them and rotates value out of them to minimize risk. Quote, I think the idea is going to be what we guide users to pick four, five, or six reputable mints, and from there, users will be able to have the wallet automatically switch between those mints and determine which mint should be receiving the balance depending on the balance of all the mints presently. So you'll be like, okay. Many Bits has way too much money. Let's switch the default to one of the mints that doesn't have a lot of money.
So that way, you can sort of mitigate or rather distribute the rug risk there, Evan explained. Quote, our Discover Mint feature pulls reviews from bitcoinminced.com, showing voucher counts and user feedback like Mint reliability or longevity. He explained, describing the reputation layer stacked on top of the various other risk management mechanisms, pausing to say, reputation layer is very important here. And it's very important for a great many things, but especially in this, you want. This is essentially oh, god. What is it what is it called?
Not proof of stake. What am I thinking of? When when you're looking for friends on Nostr, what the hell hold on. Now now I gotta find it. Web of trust. That's what I was talking about. We're we're essentially you're trusting people who trust other people. Right? Which sounds that's a terrible way to explain it right right there, but it's essentially saying, look, man. If I if I'm a not I'm a Nostrand. I follow certain people. I have more interactions with with certain people than other people. That's just the way that's just the way it works. That's just the way that's how being social actually works. Right? There's a score of that, like people that I clearly trust more because I interact with them more. And if other people are also connected to those same people, then the way that they interact with those people affects those people's web of trust score.
The same is true for these mints. You do not want to be using a mint that has been or has been accused of or proven to have rugged some of its users by stealing their money. And if they come back online, the rest of the ecosystem goes, no, dude. Remember that time when you stole everybody's cash? Yeah. We don't trust you. So that's sort of how that works. But there is no known way to use Charmian style eCash in an entirely noncustodial way, so get that shit right out of your head. So as long as the custody risk can be minimized, the scaling and privacy upside becomes rather remarkable.
One of the opportunities that eCash unlocks is the aforementioned microtransactions, the most popular example of which are Nostra's apps, often in single dollar ranges of value transferred, though it applies to small lightning transactions as well. This use case triggers an important technical question that predates Bitcoin. Do microtransactions actually make economic sense? There's a long standing argument about the user experience friction inherent in microtransactions, and the term dates back to 1999 when Nick Szabo, one of the intellectual fathers of Bitcoin, wrote a thesis on micropayments and mental transaction costs, explaining that if a payment is too small, it becomes hard to calculate and the mental cost of calculating it becomes higher than the value at stake.
In his paper, Szabo recommended that developers focused on minimizing these cognitive costs, the thinking, from a design perspective as the user interface posed a much more serious challenge to the theorized use case of microtransactions than anything else. Szabo's thesis has stood as a key explanation for the failure of microtransactions to gain adoption. However, Bitcoiners have been thinking about the problem for a long time, and some believe they might have solved it. Zeus' integration of Casu could mark an important moment in bringing Bitcoin to the mainstream via zapping.
Echoing the proliferation of emojis and Facebook's iconic like button, entrepreneurs like Evan and Kahlie, the founder of eCash, believes zaps could make Bitcoin easy to use. Zaps represent a specific opportunity, a new way for the public to acquire the experience Bitcoin that doesn't come from exchanges or brokerages as a legacy wrapped investment product. Rather than a $100,000 asset, zaps are Internet tipping technology. It means sending a few Satoshis to a friend for posting a funny meme on a Nostra app or producing high quality content knowing you could be rewarded directly with Bitcoin from those who find it valuable.
Evan believes that with the right interface, it is possible, and Nick Szabo's warning about microtransactions may have been addressed, quote, if it's as mindless as one click, like pressing the heart button, you press the zap button, then it doesn't require you to fire up your wallet and choose the destination. If it's just one press away, then I think a lot of that mental burden Zabo talks about gets pushed aside because you don't have time to think about it. Nostra's Zap feature shows people are willing to send small amounts like a thousand Satoshis for a good post if the UX is seamless with a sing single click. Delivering a Walletus Satoshi style user experience via a fully open source and trust minimized software stack is no easy feat. In fact, it's arguably the harder path.
When Walletist Satoshi first launched, it made waves in the Bitcoin world. No 12 word seed download? No account creation page? Just receive and send sats with instant settlement and barely any transaction fees? The experience was so amazing. It is still one of the most popular Bitcoin wallets. But this was only possible at the time due to a very centralized, entirely custodial, and closed source approach taken by the creators of Wallet of Satoshi. They define the standard and set the bar of user experience, but now open source is catching up. Zeus Wallet has been walking this fine line between working in public and running a profit motivated startup and so far, so good.
Quote, the wallet is fully open source, verifiable on GitHub with 50 external contributors. Open source builds trust, attracts users to our paid services, and prevents black box risks, Evan Kaludis explained about why open source matters when it comes to Bitcoin software. And while the downsides of open source are self evident to many developers, others may copy your code and even outcompete you. And the code has to be good enough that hackers can't easily break it. But the upsides have now started to snowball. Quote, we have a few employees right now that are hacking on the Zeus code every day, but we got 50 plus external code contributors that have worked on the project.
Being open source also allows you to iterate on the wallet and the feature set that attracts more users as well. And meanwhile, we're able to plug in our paid services like the default options. From a business model perspective, they are following the industry path of becoming liquidity providers for the Lightning Network. Revenues come from our LSP, Lightning Service Provider, where users lease channels for two weeks to a year, renewable indefinitely. Our white glove service supports clients like PubKey with node management, Evan explained.
However, Zeus' greatest challenge came during the spring of twenty twenty four with the arrest and prosecution of the samurai wallet developers, a shot across the bow that intimidated many Bitcoin entrepreneurs out of The United States entirely, including Zeus' top competitors, Phoenix Wallet and Wallet of Satoshi. And many companies have already hedged their bets by incorporating offshore. Zeus, founded and built in The United States, was not one of them. They said that they would be going down with the ship. Quote, it was a scary time with Wall of the Satoshi and Phoenix pulling out. It caused panic. I was about to have my first kid and feared the consequences, but folding out of fear felt worse.
We wanted to push back and give users confidence that Zeus would not abandon them, Evan recalled. And the courage that it took to stay in The United States under such hostility paid off. With the top competitors out of The United States, Bitcoiners looking for noncustodial software and good user interfaces had very few options. Quote, it was insane. At the time, the LSP was just getting started, but at that time, probably 250 to 300% growth in the first six months. So we saw a ton of activity on the LSP. So looking back at it, I wouldn't change a thing. That was peanuts. We are going to have to make some much more difficult decisions down the road potentially, and we need to be prepared for when those days happen. So I think in a lot of ways, this was just like a trial run, and we passed.
But that's the end of the article. And I know it was a long one, but we've gotta give the guys Zeus, you know, some applause here. The fact that they did not bail out on their customer base because I remember, I loved Wallace Satoshi, and I talk about it like it was, like, eight years ago. It wasn't. It was, like, two years ago. It was it was it was like it like well, actually, no. It was exactly one year ago. I was sitting on my couch in the very same place that I'm living now, and I was zapping people with my wallet of Satoshi. That's what I was using, and it was fun, and it was easy.
Now I use Albi Go, and it is as just as seamless as Walidus Satoshi. And Albi Go is non custodial. That's how they're getting away with it. Right? That that's how they're doing it. But the fact that Zeus hung in there and the fact that Evan Kalutis was having a kid at the time and did not immediately bail, like he said, he didn't fold out of fear. Man, if we all had those guts, could you imagine what this country would actually look like if everybody acted that way, if everybody was like, fine. Fuck it. Come get me. If everybody and I don't wanna say I don't wanna say it the wrong way because martyrdom is is is different than what I'm getting at.
You have potential martyrdom and you have kinetic martyrdom. Let's let's look at it that way. Potential martyrdom is not being a martyr. You have to actually have to be killed, you know, or imprisoned for life. And even then, some people would say, well, you're not dead, so you're not technically a martyr. Fuck it. Let let's just go with martyr. Imprisoned for life or killed because of what you believed in, martyr. Let's just say that. But if you have if you're a potential martyr, if you have the guts like Evan Kaludis had, right, if you have if you were willing to go down with the ship, and if thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people had that attitude, Could you imagine what The United States would actually look like? It would look very very different than what we have now.
Right now everybody folds like they like I don't know Somebody can cough on you and you will fold like you got hit with a fucking category five hurricane. Somebody says, oh, you said the wrong thing, and you go, I'm sorry. You know, we need to stop doing that shit. Let him come. Be brave enough to say, I will potentially have to be a martyr, I guess. I don't know. I mean, everybody that signed their name to the, constitute or to the, bill not bill of rights, not constitution. Declaration of independence, the beginning of the civil war, the United States, but, you know, between United States and Britain. Every single signature on that page was potentially was a potential martyr because if they had lost, they would have been found and they would have been hung in public until dead, and their corpse probably would have been left there for four or five days, if not months, because that's what the British did with pirates. They would hang them and and they would never take them down. So their bodies could never be buried, so they would always be symbols of don't fuck with the British government.
Do not screw with the British Navy. That's what would have happened to Ben Franklin and all the other guys that signed their name to the Declaration of Independence. So the Declaration of Independence was potentially both freedom or destruction. It turned out from a kinetic standpoint when everything was engaged and the dust had settled that we found freedom and not destruction. But if it had gone the other way, all those people would have been dead. Just saying. Let's move on. There is a report that the majority of The United States citizenry wants to convert part of the gold reserve into Bitcoin.
This is Atlas 21. This is from a recent survey conducted by the Nakamoto project that revealed that a majority of Americans support converting a portion of the gold reserves into Bitcoin. The survey carried out online by Qualtrics between February 2025 involved 3,345 participants with demographic characteristics representative of United States Census standards, and most respondents expressed a desire to convert between one to 30% of United States gold reserves directly into Bitcoin. Troy Cross, cofounder of the Nakamoto project, stated, when given a slider and asked to advise the United States government on the right proportion of Bitcoin and gold, subjects were very reluctant to put that slider on zero Bitcoin and a % gold. Instead, they settled to around 10% of gold being sold to Bitcoin, end quote.
A significant finding from the research is the correlation between age and openness to Bitcoin. Younger respondents showed a greater inclination toward the cryptocurrency compared to older generations. Well, that's not really significant. We can't That's that's a no brainer, dude, but whatever. Beau Hines, a White House adviser, is promoting an initiative for the treasury department to acquire Bitcoin by selling off a portion, not all, but only a portion of United States Gold Holdings. Under the proposed plan, the government could acquire up to 1,000,000 BTC over the next five years.
I don't know if I agree with that. Although, I gotta say, the sample size, impressive. 3,300 people. And you'll say, dude, there's, like, millions couple of hundred million people in The United States. Dude, look. I I know I I get what we we talk about statistics all the time as being there's lies, there's damn lies, and then there's statistics. That's not always true. It is definitely true if you fudge the numbers the way that you want to fudge the numbers. I'm just saying that in a lot of cases, 3,300 people as a sample is a big enough sample to be representative of what's probably going to happen, Unless you completely fudge it, you know, in which case and I can't vouch for the way that this was done, and I'm not going to. But I'm just saying, all things being equal, 3,300 people is actually enough to kind of figure out what the hell 210,000,000 other people are gonna do. I know that sounds weird, but if it was, like, five people, I'd be going total bullshit.
If it was 10, total bullshit. At at about a hundred, I'm still going total bullshit. At about 300 to 500, I start getting tipped into the well. This might very well be indicative. And once you get over 1,500 to 2,000, I'm kinda like, yeah, that's probably enough. And the reason I say that is because I've been in science I was in science for a long time. I it just it just works that way. Anyway, let's let's move on. I at first, I was, like, not believing that let me just final words. When I first started the show, I just kinda didn't believe what was going on with this particular survey. However, I will say this, if all things are equal and they didn't fudge the numbers and they didn't present this to the the sort of people that were going to like Bitcoin in the first place, if everything was equal, then this is kinda significant.
Maybe this following story is significant as well because Blackstone, world's largest alternative asset manager, has invested in Bitcoin, but not really. They bought the Bitcoin ETF. Blackstone, the world's largest alternative asset manager, has entered the Bitcoin space with a piddly ass $1,080,000 investment in BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF. This is a big deal for both Wall Street and the Bitcoin world. No. It's not. It's $1,000,000 is like what this is what I was saying the other day with the farmer. Right? All I need him to do is sacrifice a quarter acre of a thousand acres to just manage shit differently so that you can see it.
And if it goes the way that I think it's gonna go, then they'll look at that and go, I wanna do this for the, like, another hundred acres. And then they do that, and then they start getting actual production numbers, and it starts being mind blowing for the new for the almost regenerative farmer. And the next thing you know, like, Gabe Brown, within five years, they've got almost 95% of their entire ranch of 10,000 acres under a regenerative ag program, and it all started with just a couple of acres. That's what this is.
So from that standpoint, it could be significant, but $1,000,000 of buying an ETF, not really significant for me. Now let's get into the fact that Cake Wallet has released version 4.28. They have PayJoin version two support, quote, and I cannot speak highly enough of how amazing it has been were been to work with Bitgould and John from PayJoin DevKit team. They're doing incredible work. None of this would be possible without them and their tireless efforts. So Cake Wallet now has PayJoin version two inside of it. If you are a Cake Wallet user, you might want to go look at that. Another wallet, Sparrow Wallet version two point two point one has been released.
It provides recent blocks view, an improved camera, tour, and p two a updates. So recent blocks view, it added to the send tab and inspired by mempools visualization of the blocks, it displays the last two blocks and the estimated next block to help choose fee rates for users. The camera system has been overhauled and it features a new library for higher resolution detection and mouse scroll zoom support when available. Vector based images have been added. All app images are now vectorized and theme aware, enhancing contrast especially in dark mode. Tor and p two a updates. There's an upgraded internal Tor and improved support for p two anchor, that's p two a, p two anchor outputs.
Linux package rename because for Linux users Sparrow has been renamed to Sparrow Wallet or Sparrow Server in some cases the original Sparrow package may need manual removal So if you are a Sparrow wallet user, you might want to go check out version two point two point one with recent blocks of view and some other improvements. That's the show, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you enjoyed getting all the news that you could use about Bitcoin and more today. If so, make sure that you donate to the show. It's the only way I can keep this boat afloat, and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.
Have a great day.
It is 08:57AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the May 2025. That's a lot of twos and a couple of fives. This is episode eleven oh one of Bitcoin and, God, the numbers just keep going up. We're going to talk about pizza day. We are. It's not going to be very long, but we're gonna talk about pizza day in association with these, well, these high numbers. And, you know, it it appears that, I might have been, correct again about my thoughts on stablecoin and its relationship with United States Treasury bonds, which we might as well call debt instrumentation. Texas has passed a Bitcoin bill.
Where the hell does it go next? I I really hope I have an answer for that question by the end of this show because, honestly, shit confuses me. It it just does. And then we're gonna go across the pond to The UK where Bitcoin SV has been dealt another blow. And if you don't know what Bitcoin SV is, it was the rug pull of Roger Ver. Yeah. We'll we'll probably talk about a little bit of the history there. Zeus wallet. There is a good write up here from Bitcoin magazine about Bitcoin and Cashew eCash integration and how Zeus is actually doing that and kinda what it means.
And I I honestly think that that's important. We're we're I'm not seeing as much about eCash as I was, and I think it's going to be important going into the future. ECash is an extremely important development, and it should not at all be dismissed. And I don't think it's being dismissed, but I'm also not seeing as much about ECash as I had been in the past. I I wanna be one of the people that keeps it up in in front of people's you know, if you put it into your imagination as to, oh my god. I can't believe what we're building here. There's a report that says that the majority of The United States wants to convert part of its gold reserves into Bitcoin.
Honestly, I'm just gonna call straight up bullshit on that one, but we gotta talk about that one. Blackstone has waded into the Bitcoin pool, and we're not talking about BlackRock. We're talking about Blackstone, which isn't which is also not something that we need to be sneezing at. And then we've got a couple of updates from our good buddies at nobsbitcoin.com, which seem to be have been on hiatus for a little while. It looks like they are back. I am so happy that no b s bitcoin is back into the fray. I really did miss them. They are one of the people that I look for when I'm putting together this show. But let's get on back over to Bitcoin and pizza day. Cointelegraph Adrian Zmunksy is writing this one. Bitcoin has topped Amazon's market cap on pizza day as price sets new high. Yeah. We we know we're looking at new all time highs.
Let's settle down, folks. You need to settle down there. I'm gonna just settle down. And I'm talking about the price. I'm talking about talking about a little bit of hubris. I I I see it both on on Nostra as well as over there on Deadbird's side. I'm I'm seeing people taking victory laps, and that's you know, honestly, let's just calm down, people. But, regardless, the market cap of the world's first cryptocurrency Bitcoin surpassed that of retail and tech behemoth Amazon on pizza day. Market cap or market data shows that Bitcoin had a market cap of $2,205,000,000,000 at the time of writing, which was $70,000,000,000 more than the $2,135,000,000,000 Amazon valuation.
Quote, by surpassing Amazon in terms of capitalization, Bitcoin has now attracted even more attention from the non crypto audience, said Alex Obakachikov, founder of Obakachikov for research. There's no way I Alex said that the latest rally will strengthen confidence in Bitcoin and lead to new injections into the crypto market. The surge came as Bitcoin set a new all time high and traded well above $110,000 which Alex said would attract new investors to large funds. Alex noted that institutional players continue to expand their role on the digital asset space. Quote, in May, BlackRock became the second largest Bitcoin holder after Satoshi Nakamoto surpassing Binance in this particular indicator.
Hassan Khan, which is easier to pronounce, the CEO of Bitcoin liquidity platform, Ordiz, told CoinTelegraph that, quote, this is a structural change. He explained that Bitcoin is no longer simply a hedge. It's in the process of becoming a benchmark currency. And a similar sentiment was echoed by Shruti Kohli, head of global business development at crypto exchange, Bitrue, which I've I've never heard of any of these people, who told Cointelegraph that, quote, this is a strong signal for the digital economy. And he added, quote, Bitcoin is proving itself as a legitimate macro asset class. Surpassing Amazon's market cap is not only drawing massive attention, but is also helping Bitcoin position itself alongside established market giants.
Stan Lowe, operations and research lead at hybrid crypto exchange, GRVT, disagrees. He told Cointelegraph that, quote, the fundamental principles of Bitcoin is its underlying mechanisms have all had that's okay. Bad grammar. Grammar cop. Grammar cop. The fundamental principles of Bitcoin and its underlying mechanisms have always been and are still the same despite the asset's recent surpassing of Amazon's market cap. He said that he does not think this has any implications on the crypto market. So there's a little voice of reason there because I I I'm I'm sorry, but I I tend to agree with them. I'm I'm not I think people are making are are overblowing this entire thing.
You're just putting too much pressure on on or you're too much you're putting too much sentiment into surpassing Amazon or Google or any of the other things that that it it has nothing to do with the market cap of Bitcoin versus a company like Amazon. It's two different things. Not only are these not apples this is not a comparison of apples and oranges. It certainly isn't a compare comparison of apples to apples. This is more like the compares comparing stake and dirt. Okay? It's very different situations. Bitcoin does not have customers, Bitcoin does not have investors.
Bitcoin has miners, node runners, and users of currency. Whether you're saving in it or spending it, it does not matter. It's not a company. I I I we're getting way over our skis on thinking that this is really important. So thank you, Stan Lowe, for breathing a sigh of relief into this ridiculous argument. Anyway, according to coin market cap data, the total cryptocurrency market cap stood at 3 and a half trillion dollars at the time of writing. While high, this is still nearly 6% lower than the all time high of 3,710,000,000,000.00 reported at the end of twenty twenty four. More coin market cap data shows that Bitcoin exchange traded funds saw nearly 604,000,000 of net inflows yesterday, May 21.
The current open interest on crypto derivatives of $756,000,000,000 for perpetual swaps and 3 and a quarter billion for futures. Looking into the future, Alex, who I cannot pronounce his last name, shared his view on Bitcoin's direction, quote, we are moving gradually towards 200,000 with gradual adjustments. I am sure that this year, we will see Bitcoin at somewhere between a hundred and 50 and $90,000. Okay. Maybe he meant a hundred and 50 and a hundred and 90,000, and maybe this is just a typo. Who knows? There is no editing anymore in any of these publications. But Khan said that large net inflows to ETFs and increasing open interest demonstrate that institutional confidence is growing.
Looking forward, he said, quote, short term profit taking and macro rate uncertainty are tempering momentum, but below the surface metrics point to continued high conviction. The foundation is more solid than any other cycle before it. Don't get too far over your skis there, pal. Okay. Today, May, is Bitcoin Pizza Day, a recurring commemoration of 05/22/2010 when programmer Laszlo Hynix first made the documented purchase of goods using Bitcoin paying 10,000 Bitcoin for two, count them, one, two Papa John's pizzas. Quote, what was once considered a highly speculative risk asset has evolved into a more serious asset class, said Uli Spankowski, chief digital officer at Boris Stuttgart Group.
Spankowski added that nowadays, Bitcoin boasts a market capitalization over 2,000,000,000,000 US dollars, ranking it as the fifth largest asset globally behind gold and the three largest publicly traded companies. Again, I think we're putting too much weight on comparing things like currencies, commodities, to companies with a revenue model. They're different things. The the only thing that is really common between them is that somehow or another, they have a calculable market cap, but that's the only thing that even remotely ties them together. Otherwise, they're they're just too different.
So I I really I'm not even really looking really looking at this whole we we've surpassed Amazon. I don't freaking care. I I I don't care. I actually don't even care if it pass surpasses gold, but that's $22,000,000,000,000. So, you know, give me a phone call when we get there. Other than that, Bitcoin pizza day is kind of a, is kind of an important day. However, I do still believe that this is incorrect. It is not the first purchase of goods with Bitcoin. I remember when I first got into this into this thing back in the day, and that was around the summer of twenty fifteen, we were talking about people buying alpaca socks as being the first Bitcoin transaction.
Yes. Alpaca socks. And it was a big deal back then. It was a great big deal, and it was right you know, it would and they it wasn't that it was made in 2015. I just remembered that this was a story that I started listening to because I didn't really I really wasn't listening to Bitcoin stuff until 2015, and they were talking about this actually being the first transaction even before Laszlo made the Bitcoin pizza transaction. So I I still cannot find, you know, and and I'm it's not like I'm I'm not flying to Washington DC and hanging out in the library of congress trying to figure this shit out. Right? It's not that important to me. But if somebody has definitive proof that the pizza buy came before the alpaca socks buy, please let me know and do that through a boostagram. Help support the show. Now onto Trump's crypto czar, David Sachs.
He's saying that this genius stablecoin bill could create trillions of dollars in demand for, you guessed it, United States treasuries. This is James Hunt for the block in an interview on CNBC's closing bell late Wednesday. White House crypto czar David Sacks said that he expects the Genius Act stablecoin bill to pass and potentially unlock trillions of dollars for the United States Treasury. Asked how soon stablecoins could start driving dollar demand, quote, I think it will be immediate, Sachs said. Quote, we already have over $200,000,000,000 worth of stablecoins, but it's just it's just unregulated.
I think that if we can provide the legal clarity and legal framework for this, we could create trillions, trillions of dollars of demand for our treasuries, particularly overnight, you know, very, very quickly. Even ahead of the bill, stablecoin issuer Tether has demonstrated considerable demand, recently nearing 120,000,000,000 in US Treasury securities, surpassing Germany as the nineteenth largest global holder according to the United States Department of Treasury Statistics. David Sacks' remarks echoes Bitwise chief investment officer, Matt Hugan, who said on Tuesday that the legislation could pave the way for a multiyear crypto bull run, projecting stablecoins would grow into a $2,500,000,000,000 market cap in no time.
The Genius Act would require stablecoins to be fully backed by US treasuries or dollar equivalents. They would it would impose AML rules, add oversight for foreign issuers, and mandate registration and auditing for large issuers with market caps exceeding $50,000,000,000, which is currently just Tether and Circle. Senators voted 66 to 32 on Monday to advance the bill. Yes. We know. However, not everyone is happy with the legislation, and then they get into the fact that, well, Elizabeth Warren is pretty pissed off. But Sachs did not directly respond to any of those concerns predominantly on the Democratic side of the aisle.
There's just not enough safeguards to keep president Trump and his family from benefiting from the legislation, instead emphasizing that the bill has bipartisan support. Quote, I think 15 Democrats voted for the bill to pass this key procedural threshold of cloture, which means that there will be no filibuster against the bill. Quote, we have every expectation that this is going to pass. I think the reason it's going to pass is because stablecoins offer a more efficient, cheaper, smoother payment system, new payment rails for The United States economy. It also extends the, here it comes, the dominance of the dollar online.
I think for all of these reasons, the stablecoin bill is going to pass, and it's going to pass with significant bipartisan support. Yeah. Because they have absolutely no fucking choice at this time. It's they they they sat around and they laughed at us for too long. And this is what you get. Instead of putting high quality strategic safeguards into place to protect their power base, they were too busy insider trading, like, you know, Nancy Pelosi with $710,000,000 worth of excuse me excuse me. You you know, on a on a senator's budget or or house of representatives budget. You know? No. Nothing to see here.
No. They were they were too busy glad handing themselves and trying to force well over, I don't know, I'd say 70% of the country to feel bad about, you know, themselves and and feel bad about what race they are and telling everybody that they were racist and and too busy talking about shit that didn't matter. And guess what happened? They missed their chance to safeguard their power base. They completely fucked this up. Talk about dropping the ball. Wow. We warned them. We we were right there saying you guys are laughing at us and you shouldn't be laughing at us. Well, it's too late now.
Continuing, Sachs, whose remit also covers artificial intelligence policy, closed the interview by emphasizing that the US administration would help support the infrastructure, power capacity, and innovation required to win the AI race. If we don't, this is a quote, it'll be very bad for our economy. It'll be very bad for our military. So I think we're going to do what's necessary to win this race. I'm telling you that this is this stablecoin stuff in The United States in direct interest in it is all about dollar dominance and the ability to print debt like it's going out of style. They they now have the one instrumentation that they've been waiting for.
It took it took a a completely different set of people to be able to figure this out, but now they've got it. And through regulatory moding, they're going to capture as much of stablecoin as they possibly can. They're I really also believe that they're going to have an under the table agreement with Tether that they will never get licensure in The United States to provide United States citizens with direct stablecoin. They're going their job is to export United States debt ad across the rest of the world. They'll let JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America take care of this the Joe Schmoes inside of America.
And between those two weaponizations of the US dollar, the power base is going to seek to retain their power, but it's not going to work the way they think it's going to work. How is it going to work in my view? I don't know yet. I don't. I'm gonna be brutally honest with you. I do not have an answer to that yet, but I'm I'm I'm thinking about it. Let's move on. Texas, the great state of Texas, the lone star state, my home, the state that I miss of all states in the world because I'm not there anymore, moves closer to setting up strategic Bitcoin reserve bill as the bill passes the house. Yep. Yes. It does. Jamie Crowley tell us more. CoinDesk. Texas is drawing closer to establishing a Bitcoin strategic reserve after senate bill after a senate bill to create one was approved by the lower house.
The state's house of representatives voted in favor of senate bill 121, which would establish a Texas strategic Bitcoin reserve for the purpose of investing in cryptocurrency and the investment authority of the comptroller of public accounts over the reserve and certain other state funds. That's actually, I guess, the title of the bill. It's rather long, but whatever. The bill, which passed in a 101 to 42 vote, that is a screaming majority, by the way, now awaits a concurrence vote from the senate following house amendments before passing to governor Greg Abbott's desk for a final signature.
Texas would become the second state to establish a strategic reserve for the digital asset after New Hampshire. That equivalent vote in Arizona got all the way to the governor but was, of course, vetoed by the insanity that is Katie Hobbs calling Bitcoin an untested investment. You know? But she's she's probably gonna get not be governor of Arizona after this, especially if the Bitcoin price holds into the next election for the governor of Arizona. Uh-uh. I mean, she just she just robbed Arizonans from their birthright, And she doesn't deserve she actually doesn't deserve to be governor. Because if she can't see this after all of the time that's passed, after all of the examples, after all of the fights that have been won handily, and she still can't see it into the future, you don't want that kind of person governing your state because there's no vision there.
However, she has enacted a similar bill which does permit the state to hold abandoned digital assets as unclaimed property, which is basically bullshit. It's this is that's even below lip service. It doesn't do anything, and anybody who thinks it does, I got bridges in Arizona to sell you. Vismaya v is writing the following one for decrypt. The UK appeals court has dismissed Bitcoin SV investors thirteen point three billion dollar damages bid against the exchange, Binance. And if you're not sure what's going on here, I guarantee it'll be clear after this.
The United Kingdom Court Of Appeals has dismissed the majority of a $13,300,000,000 class action lawsuit against crypto exchange Binance dealing a major blow to Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision or BSV investors who said the company's 2019 delisting of the token crushed its growth potential. The court rejected the investor's, quote, foregone growth effort or effect foregone growth effect theory, which suggested BSV would have reached price levels similar to Bitcoin had it not been removed from major trading platforms in a judgment handed down on Wednesday.
The claim sought 352 times the original value of BSV held by subclass b investors, but the court deemed it speculative and ruled that it could not proceed. Quote, I asked mister John Wardell KC how the representative could possibly claim hundreds of times more than the value of the assets that the defendants had allegedly damaged, wrote master of the roles, sir Jeffrey Voss, in the ruling, quote, he was unable to give any answer, end quote. Wardell, a senior barrister at Wilberforce Chambers, represented BSV Claims Limited, the entity which is bringing the collective action on behalf of over 240,000 morons, UK based morons.
They call them investors, but, no, if you invested in BSV, you are a moron. I am sorry for you. May your retardation be forever. Last week, his team asked the court to revive the dismissed claims, including a loss of chance theory. Trying to legislate what could have happened in the future. Jesus. The court found or, adjudicate. I'm sorry. Not legislate, but adjudicate what could happen in the future. The court found that the claim its own expert had relied on comparators like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash to estimate damages undermining the argument that BSV was a unique or irreplaceable asset.
It also dismissed the loss loss of chance claim, ruling that it was not even legally applicable. The judges explained the damages sought did not involve missed opportunities tied to third party decisions nor realistic probabilities. Instead, the claim turned on whether BSV would have developed into a top tier cryptocurrency, a question the court said could be resolved on the balance of probabilities and not through speculative or fallback theories. In doing so, the court affirmed the Competition Appeal Tribunal's July twenty twenty four decision, which applied the, quote, market mitigation rule, a legal principle requiring claimants to take reasonable steps to reduce their losses when a functioning market is available.
I guess that meant you should have sold all your shit. Decrypt has reached out to Binance for comment. The judgment narrows the lawsuit, which also targets Kraken, ShapeShift, and Bittylicious over their twenty nineteen delistings of the BSV token. The BSV token, the full name of which is Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, was created by Craig Wright, whose claim to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was dismissed by another UK court earlier this year. While the appeal court dismissed the largest part of the lawsuit against Binance, some smaller claims could still move forward, but they probably won't.
These include claims from investors who lost access to their BSV after it was removed from exchanges or who sold it at a loss soon after the delisting. The only thing that's gonna be viable here is, the people the investors who lost access to their BSV after it was removed from exchanges. That loss of access is probably going to that will probably fly through. But that has nothing at all to do with the rest of this. And the people who sold it at a loss after the delisting, sorry for you. You shouldn't have held it in the first fucking place. This BSV was a in case you did not know, BSV was a fork of Bitcoin Cash, which itself was a fork from actual Bitcoin, which occurred primarily well, actually, only because of the block size wars that ended at the end of twenty seventeen.
At the end of twenty seventeen, it was like from when I got into Bitcoin in 2015, the argument on bigger blocks was heating up. By the time you got to 2017 actually, I think it was the end of twenty sixteen and going into 2017 that that we finished this up. That's when Roger Ver broke off Bitcoin Cash. Within a couple of months of breaking off and doing Bitcoin Cash, she was approached by Craig Wright, and Craig Wright's best friend and sugar daddy, Calvin Ayre, and they teamed up. And then two months after that, Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright raped publicly raped Roger Ver over the Coles, told everybody that they thought he was stupid, and that Bitcoin Cash was stupid, and that they were going to fork Bitcoin Cash into BSV.
So that's where Bitcoin Satoshi Vision came from, and anybody who bought into it deserves exactly what they got, which is nothing. Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities. West Texas Intermediate Oil taking a hit 1.14% of the downside back to $60.87 a barrel. Brent, North Sea is down one and a quarter to $64.00 8. Natural gas is also down 3.21% to the downside. We got, $3.26 per thousand on that, and gasoline is down 1.4% to $2.12 a gallon. Gold is down two thirds of a point, bucking down to $32.94 and no dimes. Silver is down one and a third. Platinum is crawling sideways in the red. Copper is crawling sideways in the green, and palladium is down 2.14%.
Ag is pretty much kinda brutalized this morning. Biggest loser today is chocolate, 3.96% to the downside. Biggest winner is corn, point 65% to the upside. Why live cattle is up over a point, lean hogs down a quarter, and feeder cattle are up well over a point. The Dow is up a quarter of a point to 42,061. S and P is up a quarter of a point. Nasdaq is up two thirds, and the S and P Mini is crawling sideways slightly in the red. I got a damn. 1 thou sorry. $111,280 on a price of Bitcoin. That is a $2,210,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 33.7 ounces of shiny metal rocks now with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,868,119.6 of, and average fees per block are moderate.
Not bad at all. In fact, 0.05 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. There are ten, eleven, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 blocks carrying 12,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of four. Count them one, two, three, four. Satoshis per v byte. Low priority is gonna get you in at the same. Hash rate continues to rise slightly. 878.2 exahashes per second is what we're at right now. Reminder to go over to bitcoin and show.com and show that site some love. Click around. Give me some clicks if you would. You know, go check it out. Tell me what it is that I yeah. Tell me what it is I'm doing wrong. Because I'm not a web guy. I I'm not sure how to present information in a visual style when it comes to web pages. So if you have any tips or tricks that you might want to impart to a poor old soul like me, please do so. Otherwise, sign up for bitcoinandshow.com.
That's bitcoinandshow,all1word,.com. The only emails that you will receive from me is when I release something on that website. I'm not going to hound you with contests. I'm not gonna say, hey. You know, if you if you follow me on Twitter, I'll give you whatever. No. No. No. This is just for you to say, oh, hey. Look. I got an email for bitcoin and show dot com. Clearly, he's dropped either another episode or maybe he wrote something. Hopefully, it'll be interesting, and hopefully, you will read it from I'm the mayor, which was yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and I got proof of pleb. A thousand sat says, how many Bitcoiners actually roll their own entropy when setting up new hardware wallets?
Discuss. Probably not many. Probably less than you think. And you would think that that would not be the case, would you? Because they're sophisticated enough to get a hardware wallet that has entropy, and yet chances are really good that we're not doing it. But you know what I haven't heard? And don't, god forbid, everything that I'm about to say, do not say, oh, well, Dave said it was okay not to do it, so, you know, I'm not gonna worry about it. No. No. No. No. By all means, roll your own entropy. If you don't like okay. You don't know what that means. If you if you get something like a cold card, you know, you can get dice.
Cold card has the situation where you can say I'm rolling my own entropy to make sure that, you know, the wallet address that this that as I spin up a new wallet with a cold card is going to have enough entropy that it's not gonna be easily guessed by another computer. So you roll dice and you roll it you can roll it like a hunt you know, a couple of pairs of dice or roll a single dice a hundred times, and you're guaranteed that you're gonna get, like, random numbers because it's not a random number generator, which, in my opinion, doesn't really exist.
There's always gonna be some kind of cyclical nature of a random number generator because of the way that the random number generator is built. It's usually with software. It's just chaos doesn't really work that way. The only true chaos is to physically roll something with six sides on it or or you could do with a, you know, Dungeons and Dragons dice, I suppose, if you if you wanna do it that way, because, like, you know, you get, like, a, you know, an eight sided die or something like that. I I don't know. I'm not I'm I'm pretty sure that you can put in more than the number six on the cold card. It just makes it it just kinda scrambles the entropy up a little bit so that you can do, so that you can be more assured that your your wallet address isn't going to be guessed. Right?
But you know what I haven't heard is I haven't heard a single news story. I haven't heard a single anecdote on Nostr or on Twitter or on Facebook or on LinkedIn or anything that said, I rolled all this entropy and somebody still was able to guess my Bitcoin wallet and drained it. I have yet to hear that. Alright? So I honestly I'm not all that concerned about it. It's just I like I said, don't do what I say. Don't do what I do. Just if you if you feel comfortable rolling entropy, do so. If you don't, I'm not technically certain.
I'm not technically certain if it's gonna, like, really impact you, but don't don't listen to me. You should probably roll your own entropy. Progressively worse with a thousand says love, peace, and chicken grease. Psyduck with seven zero three says Psyduck. Paul Sirnine with 500 says thanks again for an interesting episode. By the way, pocket protectors are an undervalued sartorial accessory. Keep up the good work. Greatly appreciated. Turkey with 500 says nothing. Yoda with four four four says good day, fellow boosters. Love you guys. God's death 237. Thank you, sir. Pies with a hundred says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. That's the weather report.
Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Just a little note here. Bitcoin Liquid Network has surpassed $3,200,000,000 in total value locked. So I guess Liquid Network is finally getting some love, I I guess. I I don't know. I I don't use it, but, hey. You know, more power to Adam back and the people over there at Blockstream. Okay. How Zeus how Zeus is redefining Bitcoin with Casu eCash integration, John Gault writing for Bitcoin Magazine. The United States based Bitcoin and lightning mobile wallet, Zeus, recently announced an alpha release integration of Casu.
The move marks the first integration of eCash into a popular Bitcoin wallet breaking new ground for potential user adoption of Bitcoin. Cashew is a hot new implementation of Chaumian eCash, a form of digital cash invented by David Chaum in the nineties. It has incredible privacy and scalability properties with the trade offs of being fundamentally centralized, requiring a significant amount of trust in the issuer. So keep that shit in mind. It is centralized. There's no two ways about it. It is definitely a centralized way of doing things.
But in a counterintuitive move for Zeus known as the known as the go to tool for advanced Lightning users seeking to connect to their home nodes, the integration of Cashew knowledges a sorry. The integration of Cashew acknowledges a last mile challenge Lightning wallets face when delivering Bitcoin to the masses. Quote, we basically started off as the cypherpunk wallet. Right? You got to set up your own lightning node and connect to it with Zeus. The last two years, we put the node in the phone with one click, and you can run it all in a standalone app without a remote node, Evan Kaludes, founder and CEO of Zeus, told Bitcoin magazine. Quote, Cashew addresses or rather, Cashew addresses uneconomical self custody for smaller Bitcoin amounts.
On chain, the dust limit is 546 satoshis, and layer two systems like Lightning have costs for channel setup or unilateral exits that aren't widely discussed, Evan explained, highlighting a major point of friction in noncustodial Lightning wallets, the need for liquidity and channel management. While these esoteric aspects of the Lightning Network have mostly, mostly been abstracted away since its invention in 02/2016, these fundamental trade offs continue to manifest even in the most sophisticated and user friendly wallets. In the case of both Phoenix and Zeus Wallet, two of the most popular noncustodial options in the market, Users must pay up to 10,000 sats upfront to gain any spending capacity.
These fees are necessary to cover the on chain fees spent to open a channel for the user against the wallet's liquidity service provider unlocking a non custodial experience. The required upfront fee is difficult to explain and represents a painful a painful onboarding experience for brand new users who are used to fiat apps just giving them the money to join instead. Well, the result is the proliferation of custodial lightning wallets like Wallet of Satoshi, which gained massive adoption early on by leveraging the global nearly instant settlement power of Bitcoin combined with the excellent user experience centralized wallets can create.
Major developments have been made over seven years after the Lightning Network's inception, however, and Zeus wallet is pushing the boundaries. Excuse me. Woah. With e cash, we make it so easy for anyone to set up a wallet and start participating in our ecosystem, which I really think is going to become more and more prevalent, Evan explained. Today, at roughly a hundred thousand dollars per Bitcoin, 1 thousand Satoshis are equivalent to $1. Transactions of these sizes are known as microtransactions. A popular example are Nostra social media tips known as Zaps. But finding the right tool for this use case is not simple.
Self custodied wallet like Phoenix charges transaction fees in the hundreds of Satoshis even with open channels and on chain fees often cost the same and are slower to settle. As a result, there's an entire category of spending that is not only served by cheaper alternatives such as custodial lightning wallets like Walletist Satoshi or Blink, but result in significant privacy trade offs often requiring phone numbers from users and in some cases, more advanced KYC and IP tracking. Cashew hopes to serve this market with lower privacy costs, the same ease of use, speed, and competitive fees.
Digging deeper into the Casu integration, Evan explained that, quote, for users, this means being able to pick and switch between custodians in a single app. For developers, it means being able to defer custodial responsibilities to third parties and not have to wire up new integrations when your current custodian halts operations. Zaps are Satoshi denominated rewards delivered as likes or micro tips for content in the Nostra social media ecosystem. A zap can be as small as 1 satoshi, the smallest amount of Bitcoin that could be technically transferred equivalent today to about 1 tenth of a penny.
Quote, but I think if we look at Nostrand, you're seeing how many people are zapping and how big a part of that ecosystem it is, it's like people are willing to do it, Evan explained. Cashew, while custodial, lets users accumulate small amounts, say, via nostrils apps, without needing 6,000 satoshis to open a lightning channel. Zeus prompts users to upgrade to self custody as their balance grows, he concluded, explaining that the wallet will effectively annoy users into self custody, one of several design choices made to mitigate the risks introduced by Casu itself.
The trade offs introduced by Cashew challenge the common understanding of custody as an either or in Bitcoin. Historically, you were either a centralized custodial exchange or you were a non custodial Bitcoin wallet. In the first one, you entrust the coins to a third party. In the latter one, you take personal responsibility for those coins and their corresponding private keys. Kashu changes this paradigm by introducing Bitcoin denominated e cash notes or NUTS, which are bearer instruments that should be backed by a full Bitcoin reserve and lightning interoperability for instant withdrawal.
Similar to fiat cash, you must take control and responsibility over these notes. But there's also counterparty risk. In the case of Cashew, there are certain things the issuing mint can theoretically do to exploit their users, akin to how a bank can run on a fractional reserve. The big difference between Casu or custodial Bitcoin exchanges and fiat currency is that Casu is open source, is designed around user privacy, and scales very well. It makes the cost of running a mint lower than either alternative, a feature that makes mint competition easier, in theory countering the centralizing network effects of specific mints.
Finally, the user experience of storing Cashew tokens has been attached to known forms of Bitcoin self custody such as the download of 12 word seeds via various mechanisms through implementations still vary from wallet to wallet and the whole ecosystem is in its early stages. To further mitigate the custodial risks of Chamian style eCash and Bitcoin, the Cashew community has developed various methods for automatically managing that custody risk. Users can split risk by using multiple mints, switching between them in the user interface. Soon, Zeus will guide users to select five or six reputable mints automatically balancing funds to minimize exposure, Evan explained, referring to a particular approach called automated automated bank runs.
The idea is that as some cashew mints may hold more of your funds, Zeus deranks them and rotates value out of them to minimize risk. Quote, I think the idea is going to be what we guide users to pick four, five, or six reputable mints, and from there, users will be able to have the wallet automatically switch between those mints and determine which mint should be receiving the balance depending on the balance of all the mints presently. So you'll be like, okay. Many Bits has way too much money. Let's switch the default to one of the mints that doesn't have a lot of money.
So that way, you can sort of mitigate or rather distribute the rug risk there, Evan explained. Quote, our Discover Mint feature pulls reviews from bitcoinminced.com, showing voucher counts and user feedback like Mint reliability or longevity. He explained, describing the reputation layer stacked on top of the various other risk management mechanisms, pausing to say, reputation layer is very important here. And it's very important for a great many things, but especially in this, you want. This is essentially oh, god. What is it what is it called?
Not proof of stake. What am I thinking of? When when you're looking for friends on Nostr, what the hell hold on. Now now I gotta find it. Web of trust. That's what I was talking about. We're we're essentially you're trusting people who trust other people. Right? Which sounds that's a terrible way to explain it right right there, but it's essentially saying, look, man. If I if I'm a not I'm a Nostrand. I follow certain people. I have more interactions with with certain people than other people. That's just the way that's just the way it works. That's just the way that's how being social actually works. Right? There's a score of that, like people that I clearly trust more because I interact with them more. And if other people are also connected to those same people, then the way that they interact with those people affects those people's web of trust score.
The same is true for these mints. You do not want to be using a mint that has been or has been accused of or proven to have rugged some of its users by stealing their money. And if they come back online, the rest of the ecosystem goes, no, dude. Remember that time when you stole everybody's cash? Yeah. We don't trust you. So that's sort of how that works. But there is no known way to use Charmian style eCash in an entirely noncustodial way, so get that shit right out of your head. So as long as the custody risk can be minimized, the scaling and privacy upside becomes rather remarkable.
One of the opportunities that eCash unlocks is the aforementioned microtransactions, the most popular example of which are Nostra's apps, often in single dollar ranges of value transferred, though it applies to small lightning transactions as well. This use case triggers an important technical question that predates Bitcoin. Do microtransactions actually make economic sense? There's a long standing argument about the user experience friction inherent in microtransactions, and the term dates back to 1999 when Nick Szabo, one of the intellectual fathers of Bitcoin, wrote a thesis on micropayments and mental transaction costs, explaining that if a payment is too small, it becomes hard to calculate and the mental cost of calculating it becomes higher than the value at stake.
In his paper, Szabo recommended that developers focused on minimizing these cognitive costs, the thinking, from a design perspective as the user interface posed a much more serious challenge to the theorized use case of microtransactions than anything else. Szabo's thesis has stood as a key explanation for the failure of microtransactions to gain adoption. However, Bitcoiners have been thinking about the problem for a long time, and some believe they might have solved it. Zeus' integration of Casu could mark an important moment in bringing Bitcoin to the mainstream via zapping.
Echoing the proliferation of emojis and Facebook's iconic like button, entrepreneurs like Evan and Kahlie, the founder of eCash, believes zaps could make Bitcoin easy to use. Zaps represent a specific opportunity, a new way for the public to acquire the experience Bitcoin that doesn't come from exchanges or brokerages as a legacy wrapped investment product. Rather than a $100,000 asset, zaps are Internet tipping technology. It means sending a few Satoshis to a friend for posting a funny meme on a Nostra app or producing high quality content knowing you could be rewarded directly with Bitcoin from those who find it valuable.
Evan believes that with the right interface, it is possible, and Nick Szabo's warning about microtransactions may have been addressed, quote, if it's as mindless as one click, like pressing the heart button, you press the zap button, then it doesn't require you to fire up your wallet and choose the destination. If it's just one press away, then I think a lot of that mental burden Zabo talks about gets pushed aside because you don't have time to think about it. Nostra's Zap feature shows people are willing to send small amounts like a thousand Satoshis for a good post if the UX is seamless with a sing single click. Delivering a Walletus Satoshi style user experience via a fully open source and trust minimized software stack is no easy feat. In fact, it's arguably the harder path.
When Walletist Satoshi first launched, it made waves in the Bitcoin world. No 12 word seed download? No account creation page? Just receive and send sats with instant settlement and barely any transaction fees? The experience was so amazing. It is still one of the most popular Bitcoin wallets. But this was only possible at the time due to a very centralized, entirely custodial, and closed source approach taken by the creators of Wallet of Satoshi. They define the standard and set the bar of user experience, but now open source is catching up. Zeus Wallet has been walking this fine line between working in public and running a profit motivated startup and so far, so good.
Quote, the wallet is fully open source, verifiable on GitHub with 50 external contributors. Open source builds trust, attracts users to our paid services, and prevents black box risks, Evan Kaludis explained about why open source matters when it comes to Bitcoin software. And while the downsides of open source are self evident to many developers, others may copy your code and even outcompete you. And the code has to be good enough that hackers can't easily break it. But the upsides have now started to snowball. Quote, we have a few employees right now that are hacking on the Zeus code every day, but we got 50 plus external code contributors that have worked on the project.
Being open source also allows you to iterate on the wallet and the feature set that attracts more users as well. And meanwhile, we're able to plug in our paid services like the default options. From a business model perspective, they are following the industry path of becoming liquidity providers for the Lightning Network. Revenues come from our LSP, Lightning Service Provider, where users lease channels for two weeks to a year, renewable indefinitely. Our white glove service supports clients like PubKey with node management, Evan explained.
However, Zeus' greatest challenge came during the spring of twenty twenty four with the arrest and prosecution of the samurai wallet developers, a shot across the bow that intimidated many Bitcoin entrepreneurs out of The United States entirely, including Zeus' top competitors, Phoenix Wallet and Wallet of Satoshi. And many companies have already hedged their bets by incorporating offshore. Zeus, founded and built in The United States, was not one of them. They said that they would be going down with the ship. Quote, it was a scary time with Wall of the Satoshi and Phoenix pulling out. It caused panic. I was about to have my first kid and feared the consequences, but folding out of fear felt worse.
We wanted to push back and give users confidence that Zeus would not abandon them, Evan recalled. And the courage that it took to stay in The United States under such hostility paid off. With the top competitors out of The United States, Bitcoiners looking for noncustodial software and good user interfaces had very few options. Quote, it was insane. At the time, the LSP was just getting started, but at that time, probably 250 to 300% growth in the first six months. So we saw a ton of activity on the LSP. So looking back at it, I wouldn't change a thing. That was peanuts. We are going to have to make some much more difficult decisions down the road potentially, and we need to be prepared for when those days happen. So I think in a lot of ways, this was just like a trial run, and we passed.
But that's the end of the article. And I know it was a long one, but we've gotta give the guys Zeus, you know, some applause here. The fact that they did not bail out on their customer base because I remember, I loved Wallace Satoshi, and I talk about it like it was, like, eight years ago. It wasn't. It was, like, two years ago. It was it was it was like it like well, actually, no. It was exactly one year ago. I was sitting on my couch in the very same place that I'm living now, and I was zapping people with my wallet of Satoshi. That's what I was using, and it was fun, and it was easy.
Now I use Albi Go, and it is as just as seamless as Walidus Satoshi. And Albi Go is non custodial. That's how they're getting away with it. Right? That that's how they're doing it. But the fact that Zeus hung in there and the fact that Evan Kalutis was having a kid at the time and did not immediately bail, like he said, he didn't fold out of fear. Man, if we all had those guts, could you imagine what this country would actually look like if everybody acted that way, if everybody was like, fine. Fuck it. Come get me. If everybody and I don't wanna say I don't wanna say it the wrong way because martyrdom is is is different than what I'm getting at.
You have potential martyrdom and you have kinetic martyrdom. Let's let's look at it that way. Potential martyrdom is not being a martyr. You have to actually have to be killed, you know, or imprisoned for life. And even then, some people would say, well, you're not dead, so you're not technically a martyr. Fuck it. Let let's just go with martyr. Imprisoned for life or killed because of what you believed in, martyr. Let's just say that. But if you have if you're a potential martyr, if you have the guts like Evan Kaludis had, right, if you have if you were willing to go down with the ship, and if thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people had that attitude, Could you imagine what The United States would actually look like? It would look very very different than what we have now.
Right now everybody folds like they like I don't know Somebody can cough on you and you will fold like you got hit with a fucking category five hurricane. Somebody says, oh, you said the wrong thing, and you go, I'm sorry. You know, we need to stop doing that shit. Let him come. Be brave enough to say, I will potentially have to be a martyr, I guess. I don't know. I mean, everybody that signed their name to the, constitute or to the, bill not bill of rights, not constitution. Declaration of independence, the beginning of the civil war, the United States, but, you know, between United States and Britain. Every single signature on that page was potentially was a potential martyr because if they had lost, they would have been found and they would have been hung in public until dead, and their corpse probably would have been left there for four or five days, if not months, because that's what the British did with pirates. They would hang them and and they would never take them down. So their bodies could never be buried, so they would always be symbols of don't fuck with the British government.
Do not screw with the British Navy. That's what would have happened to Ben Franklin and all the other guys that signed their name to the Declaration of Independence. So the Declaration of Independence was potentially both freedom or destruction. It turned out from a kinetic standpoint when everything was engaged and the dust had settled that we found freedom and not destruction. But if it had gone the other way, all those people would have been dead. Just saying. Let's move on. There is a report that the majority of The United States citizenry wants to convert part of the gold reserve into Bitcoin.
This is Atlas 21. This is from a recent survey conducted by the Nakamoto project that revealed that a majority of Americans support converting a portion of the gold reserves into Bitcoin. The survey carried out online by Qualtrics between February 2025 involved 3,345 participants with demographic characteristics representative of United States Census standards, and most respondents expressed a desire to convert between one to 30% of United States gold reserves directly into Bitcoin. Troy Cross, cofounder of the Nakamoto project, stated, when given a slider and asked to advise the United States government on the right proportion of Bitcoin and gold, subjects were very reluctant to put that slider on zero Bitcoin and a % gold. Instead, they settled to around 10% of gold being sold to Bitcoin, end quote.
A significant finding from the research is the correlation between age and openness to Bitcoin. Younger respondents showed a greater inclination toward the cryptocurrency compared to older generations. Well, that's not really significant. We can't That's that's a no brainer, dude, but whatever. Beau Hines, a White House adviser, is promoting an initiative for the treasury department to acquire Bitcoin by selling off a portion, not all, but only a portion of United States Gold Holdings. Under the proposed plan, the government could acquire up to 1,000,000 BTC over the next five years.
I don't know if I agree with that. Although, I gotta say, the sample size, impressive. 3,300 people. And you'll say, dude, there's, like, millions couple of hundred million people in The United States. Dude, look. I I know I I get what we we talk about statistics all the time as being there's lies, there's damn lies, and then there's statistics. That's not always true. It is definitely true if you fudge the numbers the way that you want to fudge the numbers. I'm just saying that in a lot of cases, 3,300 people as a sample is a big enough sample to be representative of what's probably going to happen, Unless you completely fudge it, you know, in which case and I can't vouch for the way that this was done, and I'm not going to. But I'm just saying, all things being equal, 3,300 people is actually enough to kind of figure out what the hell 210,000,000 other people are gonna do. I know that sounds weird, but if it was, like, five people, I'd be going total bullshit.
If it was 10, total bullshit. At at about a hundred, I'm still going total bullshit. At about 300 to 500, I start getting tipped into the well. This might very well be indicative. And once you get over 1,500 to 2,000, I'm kinda like, yeah, that's probably enough. And the reason I say that is because I've been in science I was in science for a long time. I it just it just works that way. Anyway, let's let's move on. I at first, I was, like, not believing that let me just final words. When I first started the show, I just kinda didn't believe what was going on with this particular survey. However, I will say this, if all things are equal and they didn't fudge the numbers and they didn't present this to the the sort of people that were going to like Bitcoin in the first place, if everything was equal, then this is kinda significant.
Maybe this following story is significant as well because Blackstone, world's largest alternative asset manager, has invested in Bitcoin, but not really. They bought the Bitcoin ETF. Blackstone, the world's largest alternative asset manager, has entered the Bitcoin space with a piddly ass $1,080,000 investment in BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF. This is a big deal for both Wall Street and the Bitcoin world. No. It's not. It's $1,000,000 is like what this is what I was saying the other day with the farmer. Right? All I need him to do is sacrifice a quarter acre of a thousand acres to just manage shit differently so that you can see it.
And if it goes the way that I think it's gonna go, then they'll look at that and go, I wanna do this for the, like, another hundred acres. And then they do that, and then they start getting actual production numbers, and it starts being mind blowing for the new for the almost regenerative farmer. And the next thing you know, like, Gabe Brown, within five years, they've got almost 95% of their entire ranch of 10,000 acres under a regenerative ag program, and it all started with just a couple of acres. That's what this is.
So from that standpoint, it could be significant, but $1,000,000 of buying an ETF, not really significant for me. Now let's get into the fact that Cake Wallet has released version 4.28. They have PayJoin version two support, quote, and I cannot speak highly enough of how amazing it has been were been to work with Bitgould and John from PayJoin DevKit team. They're doing incredible work. None of this would be possible without them and their tireless efforts. So Cake Wallet now has PayJoin version two inside of it. If you are a Cake Wallet user, you might want to go look at that. Another wallet, Sparrow Wallet version two point two point one has been released.
It provides recent blocks view, an improved camera, tour, and p two a updates. So recent blocks view, it added to the send tab and inspired by mempools visualization of the blocks, it displays the last two blocks and the estimated next block to help choose fee rates for users. The camera system has been overhauled and it features a new library for higher resolution detection and mouse scroll zoom support when available. Vector based images have been added. All app images are now vectorized and theme aware, enhancing contrast especially in dark mode. Tor and p two a updates. There's an upgraded internal Tor and improved support for p two anchor, that's p two a, p two anchor outputs.
Linux package rename because for Linux users Sparrow has been renamed to Sparrow Wallet or Sparrow Server in some cases the original Sparrow package may need manual removal So if you are a Sparrow wallet user, you might want to go check out version two point two point one with recent blocks of view and some other improvements. That's the show, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you enjoyed getting all the news that you could use about Bitcoin and more today. If so, make sure that you donate to the show. It's the only way I can keep this boat afloat, and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.
Have a great day.
Introduction and Overview
Bitcoin and Pizza Day
Institutional Interest in Bitcoin
