Join me today for Episode 1062 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- No Business Model? But Bitcoin
- More Stablecoins Are On The Way
- Democrat Attitudes On Bitcoin Changing
- MtGox Coin Movements Shake Market
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://cointelegraph.com/news/firms-without-a-business-model-buy-bitcoin-angel-investor-jason-calacanis
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/03/26/fidelity-investments-prepares-to-unveil-its-own-stablecoin-ft
https://cointelegraph.com/news/custodia-bank-helps-execute-first-bank-issued-stablecoin-transaction-in-us
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https://bitcoinmagazine.com/politics/congressman-ro-khanna-says-democrats-are-changing-their-tune-on-bitcoin
https://decrypt.co/311532/mt-gox-billion-bitcoin-repayments
https://www.theblock.co/post/348178/north-carolina-lawmakers-propose-separate-bills-in-both-chambers-to-allow-crypto-in-pension-funds
https://atlas21.com/blackrock-ishares-bitcoin-etp-makes-its-debut-in-europe/
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[00:00:02]
Unknown:
It is 10:16AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the March 2025. This is episode ten sixty three, I believe. Nope. Ten sixty two of Bitcoin and GameStop. We're gonna have to do it. We have to talk about it. We just do. I know you don't want to, but we're going to. So let's just dive right in. Nick, writing this one for Bitcoin magazine, GameStop approves adding Bitcoin to treasury reserves and the price crashes. I gotta love these people. GameStop announced that its board of directors has unanimously approved an update to the company's investment policy allowing Bitcoin to be held as a treasury reserve asset.
The decision follows a series of engagements between GameStop chairman and CEO Ryan Cohen and prominent figures like Michael Saylor in the Bitcoin industry. On February, Cohen met with strategy chairman and well known Bitcoin advocate Michael Saylor, sparking speculation that GameStop may be adding BTC to its balance sheet. A couple of weeks after, Cohen responded to CoinDesk via a tweet saying, letter received. After receiving a letter from Strive Asset Management CEO, Matt Cole, which urged GameStop to adopt Bitcoin as a reserve asset. In its announcement, GameStop noted that its investment policy now permits investments in, quote, certain cryptocurrency assets including Bitcoin and US dollar denominated stablecoins.
The company also acknowledged associated risks, including the potential impact of these investments on its financial results. And from a statement directly pulled from the official statement from GameStop, we have this sentence, the company's investment policy permits investments in certain cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and US dollar denominated stablecoins. And if the company acquires Bitcoin or said stablecoins, the company will be exposed to certain risks associated with Bitcoin and stablecoins. Well, duh. I don't know. The policy update was disclosed alongside the company's financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year ending 02/01/2025 for the fourth quarter.
GameStop reported net sales of $1,280,000,000 which is a decrease from the $1,790,000,000 in the same period the prior year. Selling, general, and administrative expenses fell to 282,500,000.0 compared to the 359,200,000.0 in the fourth quarter of the previous year. The net income for the quarter was a hundred and $31,100,000, which was up from $63,100,000 a year earlier. Adjust as adjusted EBITDA or e b I d t d t d a. Good lord. E b I t d a for the quarter was 96,500,000.0 compared to 88,000,000 in the prior year's fourth quarter. Now GameStop also disclosed that had held 477 no, sorry, dollars 4,770,000,000.00 in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities at the end of the quarter.
The company completed its exit from Italy and finalized its wind down of store operations in Germany during this period. For the full fiscal year of 2024, GameStop reported net sales of $3,800,000,000 down from 5,200,000,000.0 SG and A expenses for the year were 1,130,000,000.00 compared to 1,320,000,000.00 in the prior year. Net income for the whole year reached a hundred and 31,300,000.0, significantly higher than the 6,700,000.0 reported in the full fiscal year of 2023. And the adjusted adjusted EBITDA, dada, for the full year was 36,100,000.0 compared to 64,700,000.0 the previous year.
The company has not yet disclosed how much Bitcoin it plans to purchase. Let me read that to you again because I don't think people are being really fully above board about this. As far as we know, GameStop holds zero Bitcoin. The company has not yet disclosed how much it plans to purchase or when it will begin acquiring Bitcoin, and CEO Ryan Cohen has not yet commented publicly on the addition of Bitcoin to GameStop's balance sheet at the time of publishing. There are people that are thinking, I I can see it in tweets and notes on Nostr, that thinking that that GameStop has Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And as far as we don't know, this is not true.
We don't know if they have Bitcoin on their balance sheet. We probably should know because they would have to report that, so my assumption is that they do not have any Bitcoin purchased as of yet. And like I said in a tweet the other day, opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one, so shit or get off the pot. And so do presumptions, so do predictions, so do announcements of announcements. They're all assholes. And until somebody pulls the trigger and actually does the thing, then this is all conjecture. Just because they said, hey, we've unanimously said that we're gonna do it, that doesn't mean that they're going to do it. It just means that they're allowed to do it. So, please, please, for the love of God, everybody stop jumping up and down about how GameStop has come to save the day.
GameStop is not in a position to save anybody's day. However, I will say this, this is starting to look like one hell of an impressive turnaround even if you don't think about Bitcoin as far as GameStop is concerned. The amount of cutting that they've done has enabled them to actually make more money this year even though they had less revenue this year. And that's really honestly, that's actually a good sign. Like, again, with even without the consideration of Bitcoin and being held on their balance sheet, $4,770,000,000 in cash and cash equivalents, and the fact that their earnings per share actually went up even though their revenues went down this year shows that whatever it is that they're doing behind the scenes so far is actually working.
But we've got to move on to Adrian Zeminski writing this one for Cointelegraph. Firms without business models buy Bitcoin, angel investor Jason Calacanis boasts. Oh, Jason. Prominent US based angel investor investor Jason Calacanis poked fun at GameStop's decision to invest in Bitcoin. In a March 26 Twitter post, Calacanis suggested that buying Bitcoin was a solution well suited for public companies that don't have a sustainable business model. Quote, if you're a public company that can't figure out a business model, buy Bitcoin. This might actually be great advice if strategy cofounder Michael Saylor is gonna buy $1,000,000,000,000 in Bitcoin. End quote.
Still, Thomas Fanta, principal at crypto investment firm, HeartCore, told Cointelegraph that there are tangible long term benefits to holding Bitcoin on a corporate balance sheet. Among those he listed were long term price appreciation and theoretically lower correlation to equity markets over time. Quote, I do disagree with this view though, that failing companies should be using Bitcoin as a last ditch strategy, Fanta said. Fanta also said that while quote one case is not enough to gauge a broader trend, there does appear to be such a trend quote we may actually be witnessing one of the first experiments with corporate treasury diversification into crypto outside of tech or crypto aligned companies such as Tesla or Coinbase end quote.
Sal Rajwan, managing partner at crypto early stage venture capital firm Masterkey, echoed the sentiment. According to him, companies are increasingly trying to secure themselves against long term monetary shifts. Bitcoin's role as a corporate reserve asset is no longer fringe, and this is a quote. It's becoming a legitimate play for companies that want to align themselves with a digitally native, inflation resistant financial future. While not every company will follow suit, GameStop's move joins a growing chorus, Rajuand said. Rajuand also noted that historically successful companies often falter when they resist change, citing Nokia as an example, and said adopting Bitcoin could be viewed as strategic adaptation.
Quote, when done transparently and with proper risk management, Bitcoin can bring long term resilience to corporate balance sheets, especially for brands with low time preference and strong alignment with digitally native values, end quote. This idea was also repeated by Georgi Verbitsky, founder of crypto investment app, Timeo, who said that GameStop, quote, could well become the example the market is waiting for. And he added, quote, adding Bitcoin to a corporate balance sheet isn't just speculative. It has real long term upside if executed properly.
So that's that's the end of that article. So Jason Calacanis poking fun at GameStop, but see, what I don't think Jason saw was the fact that they were slashing their costs in the background. They're pulling a doge, man. They're, like, they're looking for anything that they don't need, and they're throwing it overboard. And in a lot of times, yeah, you you'll go, well, that just means their ship is sinking. Yeah. But throwing all that shit overboard might just get them back into port where they can get themselves fixed up. GameStop has brand recognition, y'all. And even though nobody's buying their games online, that does not mean that you just ditch a brand.
Having brand recognition is important even if you have to change your entire business model, which I assume that at one point or another, GameStop is going to do. I I mean, even used games are going to go out of the window when it comes to video games, which is, in a very real way, that is, I think, the majority of what GameStop has actually been doing lately is they're making money on selling previously owned games. Well, that's gonna go by the wayside as well. Right? So they used to sell brand new games and used games. They used to, you know and they all have always sold a bunch of gamer swag.
Right? That's pretty much been their their oh, and consoles and, like, you know, console accessories. They're gonna have to do something else. Hell, what they might even do is have enough cash where they do something like buy, oh, what like what are those skater clothing shops in the mall? I could see that actually happening, like Journeys or there's another one. I can't there's, like, three of them. Like, Spencer Gifts used to be one. I think they're actually still around, but not as much as they used to be. There's there's actually a few. And those are just that's just if you wanna get into, like, clothing and the other side of of non tech retail. But still services essentially the same crowd that I guarantee you knows the name GameStop.
So I I think we're being a little hard on GameStop right now considering the fact that they are clearly in a transition. I honestly my I I my gut feeling is that they survive. And it's not gonna be just because of Bitcoin that they survive. It's gonna be because cost cutting, and they're gonna get into different they're gonna start selling some other stuff. But they're going to leverage that brand. They're gonna leverage GameStop, and it's probably gonna work. So be aware, man. Things happen. Fidelity invest Fidelity Fidelity Investments prepares to unveil its own stablecoin.
What have I been telling you? What have I well, Jamie is gonna back me up. Jamie Crowley out here from CoinDesk is gonna tell you all about how we're just gonna see a whole bunch of stable coins coming out of the pipes. Fidelity Investments is in advanced stages of developing its very own stable coin according to the Financial Times. The Boston based financial services giant plans for the token to serve as a form of digital cash according to the report which sites two people close to the matter. Oh, they're close to the matter, are they? Well, the token would form part of the company strategy to enter the tokenized government bonds market.
Let me read that to you again. We're talking about stable coins and every idiot under the sun wanting their own so that they could do what? Help The United States export its debt to the poorest countries on the planet. The token would form part of the company's strategy to enter the tokenized government bonds market. Stablecoins are a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a real world asset, such as a US dollar or a ounce of gold. They provide a convenient way for crypto traders to preserve their fiat value without having to cash out in the market. The news emerges just days after Fidelity filed paperwork to register a blockchain based version of its US dollar money market fund.
The company seeks to register an on chain shares class of its treasury digital fund, which holds cash and US treasury securities and is available only to Fidelity's hedge fund and institutional clients. A Fidelity stablecoin could fill the role of cash in this fund. The stablecoin would enter an already crowded market dominated by the likes of Tether and Circle. The report comes a day after World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance protocol backed by president Donald Trump, confirmed that it too has plans to offer a stable coin.
And as if I was completely 100% right in my prediction, Bryden Lindria comes in with the killing blow from Cointelegraph, Custodia and Vantage Bank, partner for the first bank issued stablecoin. Don't listen to me at your own risk, guys. The crypto friendly custodian bank has worked with Vantage Bank to complete what the two firms say is America's First ever bank issued stablecoin on a, of course, permissionless blockchain. Custodia said on March that it tokenizes US dollar demand deposits and facilitated the issuance, transfer, and redemption of the stablecoin called Avit, a v I t, on Ethereum via the ERC 20 token standard. You know, I'm pausing here to just say that it's fitting that the shittiest parts of the fiat economy are gravitating towards the shittiest blockchain ever conceived of in the world.
What better way to export debt and make people poor as shit than using Ethereum? Yep. Yep. Yep. Quote, a new dollar US dollar payment rail has now been activated inside The US banking system, Custodia added. Quote, we broke ground on the legal slash regulatory front, proving that US banks can collaborate to tokenize demand deposits on a permissionless blockchain in a regulatory compliant manner, said Custodia CEO Caitlin Long. Vantage Bank CEO and president Jeff Sinnott said that the event was a pivotal moment in reshaping the financial lane landscape, demonstrating how blockchain and stablecoins can revolutionize payments, end quote.
In a series of posts on Twitter, Caitlin Long explained that the Avid stablecoin was a real dollar, not a synthetic dollar as Federal Reserve board governor Christopher wall Waller called stablecoins in the February 12 speech. Real US dollars, Long explained, can only be issued by the Federal Reserve and a few legally authorized entities, including Custodia Bank. She added that Avid is a real dollar as it tokenizes a bank's demand deposits, funds that customers can withdraw on demand, such as money in a checking account. Custodia has historically championed Bitcoin, and Ethereum advocates were quick to note that the bank chose Ethereum for the stable coin. Quote, ETH fixed this.
Bitcoin couldn't, wrote Ethereum advocate, Ethan Van Ness. Ethereum educator, Anthony Susano, also posted to make clear the permissionless blockchain custodial referred to in its announcements. Quote, just in case it wasn't obvious, this is built on Ethereum. Yeah. I wouldn't be all proud of that, dude. This is these are not the fucking droids you're looking for pal. Anyway, Ethereum secures Ethereum does this, Ethereum does that, tokenizes 3,600,000,000.0 of treasury bills. It's all bullshit. Now then they get into talking about the Stellar network. It's all crap.
I'm really disappointed with, Caitlin Long that she's jumping into the stable coin game because it just shows a me too attitude, whereas Caitlin used to be, we're forging we're forging the path. And now they're following somebody else's path. And it's really kinda nauseating to watch. It it just it just is. I'm sorry to say that. Alright. You know what? Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities is brought to you by [email protected]. That's my friend, she she. He has comfrey. It's a plant. You're gonna wanna know all about this plant. It is a huge boon to your, well, your outdoor activities when it comes to gardening, composting, doing all kinds of neat stuff because it is a mineral miner. Its taproots go down deep deep deep, and it does it every year because it's a perennial. It lasts forever.
It pulls the minerals down deep, and it pulls it up into the leaves, and then you chop all the leaves off of this honking plant. Sometimes I've gotten a full pound, if not two pounds, of leaves from a single plant that I then either pitch as mulch directly into garden beds so that as the nitrogen rich leaves and mineral rich leaves break down, it fertilizes the soil around tomato plants, or I just throw it as a nitrogen stock into my compost pile. I can make all kinds of neat compost teas out of it. You want this plant. And you can get a full root cutting for $20. That means that after you plant this thing and today and now's the time to do it. It's springtime. This is the time to get your cut your your your comfrey cuttings, your roots.
This is the time to do it. Once you plant that thing, a full root will give you a full plant by the end of the season. If you choose to buy root cuttings, which are about as big as half of your thumb, each one of them will form a plant. It will just take longer, but you can get a root cutting for a single dollar. Or if you want, you can just buy a full root for $20 and cut it into 20 pieces, and you'll probably end up with somewhere between eighteen and nineteen plants. It's up to you. But you want this plant. I built an entire episode about the plant, Comfrey, Its history, what it could be used for, all the neat stuff that it does, and it's in episode seven twenty six of Bitcoin and seven twenty six of the Bitcoin and podcast. Make sure that you tell Shishi when you email him for your order at Shishi, that's s h I s h I twenty one, the letter m, at protonmail dot com that you heard about his product here on the circle p.
And he will cut me Satoshis as to what he thinks making a sale for his conferee was worth to him. Oil, West Texas Intermediate is up 1.16 to $69.80. Brent Norsey is up 1.15% to $73.86. Natural gas following suit this time, 1.07% to the upside, halting at $3.88 per thousand cubic feet, and gasoline up one and a quarter back up to $2.23 per gallon. Gold down point 12%, still holding above 3,000, however. Silver is crawling sideways. Platinum is up or down a third. Copper is up a half. Palladium is up three quarters of a point. Biggest winner in ag today, at least in the futures, is cotton, 0.81% to the upside. Biggest loser is coffee, 1.62% to the downside.
Live cattle is up a third. Lean hogs are up point 87%. And feeder cattle, also in the green, up a half point. Now along with Bitcoin having problems this morning is also the equity markets. So news came in, I suppose, and I think it has something to do with durable goods, and I'm not sure exactly what this means. But the Dow is down a half point. The S and P is down 1.18%. The Nasdaq is down 1.8%. That's quite a dip for the Nasdaq. S and P Mini is down three quarters of a point. And if I remember reading the durable goods report this morning, I wanna say that they projected that there would be minus 1% in this in the growth of sales of durable goods.
And apparently, it turned out that that number was point 9%. So there was a 9% increase in the amount of durable goods being bought. And I guess that's translating into people thinking that the economy is just fine. So, therefore, the chances that the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates in their next meeting, gets lower and lower and lower. And Bitcoin is following lower as well. An $86,760 token price gives us a $1,720,000,000,000 market cap. We can get 28.8 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,842,119.68 of. And average fees per block skyrocketed all the way up to 0.11 BTC taking in fees on a per block basis, and there are roughly 32 blocks carrying 23,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 6 Satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at four. And mining, on the mining front, we have, well, not minor capitulation.
Hash rate standing at 836.1 exahashes per second. The miners know something. They do. I swear to God. And from yesterday's Bitcoin and episode entitled Kentucky Fried Chicken no. I mean Kentucky Fried Bitcoin. I got baked potato that gave me 10,000 satoshis, brother. Now that's a boost. And baked potato says boost for the soap miner plug. Respect. Hashtag circular economy, hashtag value for value. Pies with four twenty says thank you, sir. No thank you. Psyduck with five seventy says Psyduck. Paul Cernine with 500 says, thanks again for your take on the current news. Keep up the good work. Thank you, sir. War Time with three thirty three says, streaking, in this sense, I would assume, is what the kids mean when they say it, which means you use an app every day, so you're on a streak for so long. Yeah. Yeah. I figured that one out. Kids use Snapchat and going on streaks. I don't remember what my kids told me the last time I asked, but it was something ridiculous like multiple hundreds of days in a row. Oh my God.
That sounds horrible, dude. Perma nerd with two thirty four says, none you business discussing streaking. Perhaps there is a number of sats that would make this happen. I'm not going streaking, perma nerd. I'm not gonna go on the college campus, drunk my like my ass off, and whip off my clothes and go streaking around a college campus. Never going to happen. Yodle with 300 says, I see you Psyduck. Good info about hist.nostril.land. Yes. If you get yourself into a situation where you've lost all your followers or your the people that you follow on nostril, go to hist.nostril.land.
It'll keep it basically takes a snapshot of your in pub every once in a while, and you can get most of the people that like, the most of the people that you followed, you can get them back. So it's it's much easier. And Justin 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. Congressman Ro Khanna says Democrats are changing their tune on Bitcoin. This is Frank Korver writing for Bitcoin Magazine. On March 2025, representative Ro Khanna gave a short but impactful talk at the Bitcoin Policy Institute's Bitcoin for America summit. Quote, Bitcoin is transformational for so many people around the world.
That is why the Democratic Party should be embracing it as something that can create financial empowerment for people, not just in The United States, but around the world, end quote. This is the type of message he's been spreading for years now, and he's urged his fellow Democrats to follow his lead. He's implored them to not be scared of Bitcoin, but to view it just as they view any other major technological advancement of our time, including the Internet itself. Quote, my goal is to make Bitcoin bipartisan, Rep Khanna told Bitcoin Magazine. Quote, I want to convince Democrats that Bitcoin is a next generation store value that millions of people around the world use, and that America showing strong leadership on it allows us to connect with these people, often some of the most disenfranchised, end quote.
For a party that often advocates for financial inclusion, it seems almost ironic that so many Democrats have looked past Bitcoin, an open source technology that anyone can use with nothing more than an Internet connection, and in some cases, even without one. That said, Rep Khanna made the point that while he remains one of the few more vocal Democrats when it comes to creating pro Bitcoin or to being pro Bitcoin, the number of Democratic politicians who have stated that they're in favor of the technology has increased substantially over the past few years.
Quote, we went from just 10 of us or so supporting Bitcoin and crypto to almost 70 or 80, representative Khan has said. It's happening slowly. While some have attributed to malice what and while some have attributed to malice most Democrats' historical stance on Bitcoin, representative Khanna claims the issue is more lack of understanding of the technology's purpose and use cases. Quote, some Democratic politicians are not aware. They're just not aware of how helpful Bitcoin can be with remittances or how it can be used by those who don't have access to US Dollars. Many people around the world use it for both reasons, said the congressman, alluding to the idea that many, including some Democrats, might not be aware of this fact.
According to research from Coinbase, in each of the swing states in the most recent US presidential election, there were about 10 times the number of crypto holders compared to the vote differential between Biden and Trump in 2020. Harris lost to Trump in each of these swing states, leaving some to speculate that the turnout of the Bitcoin and crypto voting block may have been one of the primary forces that swayed the election in Trump's favor. While representative Khanna doesn't know to what extent this voting block impacted the election results, he did agree that it was likely one of the major factors that affected the outcome of the election. Quote, I think it made a difference, said the congressman.
In such a close election, everything matters. And the fact that there were some Democrats who offended Bitcoin and crypto voters was not helpful, end quote. And representative Khanna is not alone in acknowledging this. In December of twenty twenty four, the New York Times deal book summit, Van Jones, political analyst, media person persona, and prominent voice within the Democratic party stated that it was to the Democratic party detriment that it shut out pro bitcoin and pro crypto voters. Representative Khanna sang Jones's praises and said that we should be hearing more voices like Jones within the Democratic Party speaking up in favor of Bitcoin in the near future.
Quote, he spent and he's speaking of Van Jones. He spent a lot of time in the Bay Area, so he gets technology. The party will be moving in a direction that's going to embrace Bitcoin and other technologies, he added. While it only seems logical that the Democratic Party would reverse its stance on Bitcoin if it's looking to pick pick up seats on the house and senate come the twenty twenty six midterm elections, it simultaneously seems difficult to imagine that Democrats coming out in support of Bitcoin given the highly partisan political climate in The US coupled with the fact that president Trump is an ardent Bitcoin supporter.
Rep Khanna argued that Democrats should not be thinking along party lines when it comes to Bitcoin, but rather assessing the technology based solely on what it is. Quote, politicians are capable of evaluating Bitcoin on its merits. Bitcoin is just a decentralized digital currency that enables peer to peer transactions without the need for an intermediary. People just need to study Bitcoin and learn that it's just a medium of exchange, representative Khanna said. Rep Khanna also took a moment to differentiate between Bitcoin and meme coins, highlighting the fact that the president's recently released Trump coin creates much confusion regarding the value proposition of crypto assets including Bitcoin. Quote, we should not have elected in officials like president Trump launching meme coins, said the congressman, at a time when many US citizens are struggling to make ends meet.
Should Bitcoin be a front and center issue for Democrats once widely regarded as the political party of the middle and working class? Well, Rep Khanna doesn't necessarily think so, but he also doesn't think that the party should continue to pooh pooh the technology. Quote, there are far bigger issues at hand right now, like the cuts in Medicaid, the firing of veterans, and the erratic policy of tariffs. But the Democrats were on the wrong side of issues of innovation in Bitcoin in both 2022 and 2024, and we now have an opportunity to get on the right side of it, the congressman explained.
So how can pro Bitcoin democrat voters help to get their party on the right side of history when it comes to Bitcoin? Khanna has some suggestions. Quote, they should point to those of us who are leading on Bitcoin and crypto. They can encourage members of government to study the issues so that they're not uninformed, and they should talk about the enormous adoption of Bitcoin. Okay. So that's that's Frank's piece on representative Khanna. Here's my issue. It seems to me that people like senator Elizabeth Warren hate us. Whether I'm a conservative, libertarian, Democrat, I I don't feel any love from her.
I don't feel any love from AOC. I I I feel that being a white male makes me some kind of persona non grata, and I'm fucking tired of it. And the people that are, like, you know, that will be saying, oh, but you're getting it wrong. You know what? You're delivering the fucking message wrong. It's not my fault. When I hear white men suck, I mean, I hear white men suck. When I hear that I'm the oppressor, I hear I'm the oppressor. I'm not going to dig through the runnels of my mind to find some kind of extravagant explanation how they don't really mean that I, as a white man, suck. If you really don't mean that I, as a white man, sucks, you need to say the fucking words. You need to figure out a way to explain it better.
Because it's all I hear is that I suck, and most of it's coming out of the Democrat party. I I'm to be surveilled. My money is to be taken away from me. If I make any money at all, it's at the expense of somebody who doesn't live in this country. That that that's what I hear, that it's all my fault. And I'm tired of anything being my fault when I'm having trouble being able to do the same shit that the people I'm supposedly oppressing are having. It's not like I'm separate from the problems that they're having. So please, if if you really want me to to to start thinking along the lines of what you guys are doing, then stop telling me I suck so much.
Mt. Gox moves $1,000,000,000 in Bitcoin, but payments aren't going out according to Glassnode. This is Simon Chandler from Decrypt. Mt. Gox has transferred over 11,000. Wow. 11,000 Bitcoin to two separate wallets. But Glassnode analysts told Decrypt that it's unlikely the shuffle is in preparation of beginning the repayments or for more of the bankruptcies exchange creditors. According to the analytics firm, Arkham Intelligence, Mt. Gox deposited 893 BTC into one of its hot wallets and another 10,608 into a new change wallet in the past twenty four hours.
This deposit follows two similar trans transfers on March when the exchanges administrator sent 332 BTC to the same hot wallet and 11,833 b t c to one of its cold wallets. While the larger sum was merely moved from one Mt. Gox wallet to another, the smaller amount was then sent onto the bits or onto bit stamp according to Tracker Spot on Chain. This raises the possibility that the 893 Bitcoin deposited today may end up at a trading platform as was also the case with a March 6 deposit of 166 Bitcoin, which ended up at BitGo. Yet, the two bigger transfers, Mt. Gox made this month of the 11,833 on the eleventh and the 12,000 BTC on March, have simply moved from one of the exchanges wallets to the other.
This makes it uncertain as to whether today's moves signal an imminent repayment of creditors, which experts remaining remain agnostic on as to what exactly the transfers mean in the near term. Quote, the recent Mt. Gox linked BTC movements appear to be part of the ongoing creditor repayment process, which has been unfolding for God knows several months, said Glassnode's analyst team speaking to Decrypt. Glassnode adds that while the latest transaction may indicate preparations for distribution, the firm has seen no conclusive on chain evidence that repayments are imminent.
The firm's analysis team also points out that Mt. Gox has pushed back the repayment deadline to October the thirty first of this year with the Japan based exchange exchanges trustees explaining at the time that many rehabilitation creditors still have not received their payments because they have not completed the necessary procedures for receiving repayments. Mt. Gox began the process of actually repaying creditors in July of last year with ARCEM data showing that the exchange's Bitcoin balance has declined from around a hundred and 40,000 Bitcoin in July to 35,000 today.
That's quite a chunk, man. That's a hundred and 5,000 Bitcoin. So a lot of this stuff has already gone out. At today's prices, that stash is worth $3,100,000,000. However, this doesn't mean that Mt. Gox has paid upwards of the hundred $1,100,000 BTC to creditors with Glassnode explaining that most of this has likely remained in the wallets of custodians such as Bitstamp and Kraken. It's important to highlight that on chain transfers to these entities don't necessarily confirm that creditors have been repaid as the exchanges may still be in custody of the funds. The repayment process is ongoing, and not all activity is directly traceable to final disbursements, end quote.
The market appears to be aware of this fact. Insofar, as the price of Bitcoin has barely moved today, posting a 0.5% drop in the past twenty four hours, at the time of writing, the Bitcoin price has dipped just below 88,000 according to CoinGecko data. And, of course, as I just told you a few minutes ago, we are actually looking at 86,540. So I think the news took a while to matriculate. I think this, along with the durable goods report, is putting pressure on the Bitcoin price. That's just a gut feeling. But sentiment could change for the worse. Oh, joy. As the October 31 repayment deadline approaches, it is not a foregone conclusion that all recipients of Mt. Gox's BTC will sell, will sell as soon as they possibly can.
What it it is not yeah. It's not a foregone conclusion that they will all sell. Right? Right? That's what they're trying to say, which I so badly fumbled. It's my fault. One Reddit poll from July found that 55.7% of Mt. Gox creditors do not plan to sell any of their BTC immediately upon receiving it from the exchange's trustees, though 18.8% plan to sell all of their Bitcoin, which is yeah. Okay. Have fun staying or whatever. But, yeah, that's so this is the other end of the story that I was wondering about with the price action that I saw Bitcoin this morning. I'm like, oh, wait a minute. This isn't no. Like, durable goods shouldn't that report shouldn't be having this effect on Bitcoin.
But alongside, you know, this this whole thing coupled with Mt. Gox, yeah, if there's a lot of movement in the Mt. Gox wallets, that always that always shakes some, you know, some of these idiots out of their tree, and it looks like quite a few have been shaken out of their tree this morning. Let's just hope that none of them live in North Carolina, where lawmakers propose separate bills in both chambers to allow crypto in pension funds. Timmy Shen writing for the block, lawmakers in North Carolina have proposed legislation in both chambers to create an investment authority with the power to invest up to 5% of various pension funds and cryptocurrencies.
Representative Brendan Jones filed the State Investment Modernization Act, house bill five zero six on Monday with the house while a separate but similar act dubbed senate bill seven zero nine was submitted on Tuesday to the senate. Both bills seek to establish an investment authority that would be located within, but independent from, the control of the state treasurer. The bills intend to authorize the investment body to manage investments for a wide range of funds, including several state retirement funds. Notably, the bills would allow the authority to allocate up to 5% of designated funds for investment in digital assets. Such digital assets include cryptocurrencies, stable coins, or non fungible tokens.
The bills also require that these crypto assets be maintained with a secure custody solution and that the authority must consider the risk and reward profile of the assets. The introduction of the two new bills follows the house bill 92 and senate bill three twenty seven, both of which seek to authorize the state treasurer to invest in Bitcoin itself. So apparently, there's four connected bills here. Bitcoin has become an investment project among lawmakers in The United States states, especially after pro crypto Trump took office in January. So there you go. North Carolina on deck.
See, and I there here's here's another thing that's been rattling around my head. Is I you know, you wonder about GameStop saying that they're gonna put Bitcoin on the sheet, and everybody said, oh, that's gonna that's gonna charge up all the meme, meme stock guys from what was it? What was that Reddit group? I can't remember the name of it. The silver hand, diamond hand guys, all you know, the dude with the red bandana. Remember that? Like, GameStop and, like, there was a movie company and, I can't remember. Hollywood video, maybe. Who knows? Who knows? But you remember that time. It was just like it was like 2021.
I wonder because that you know, we did not get a massive price spike on the on the GME news, the GameStop news. So what I wonder about is that every single time now that every single time that one of these either companies or institutions or, like, there's a, you know, a new, exchange traded fund was you know, that buys Bitcoin and then you buy shares against it. I wonder if what's going on here with the price action giving all this, quote, unquote, good news, and I do put that in quotes, stifles the very nature of what Bitcoin was supposed to be in the first place. IE was we were supposed to use it as money. But if we if everything if all these companies keep buying it and there's just less and less floating around to use, then maybe that's weighing on the psychology of the market saying, but it can't be the thing that I thought it was gonna be if all these people buy it.
Okay. That I I actually think that that's a a valid argument. But like most things in nature, and I'm always going back to the forest to inform me ways that I can think about things that don't confuse and frighten me. Things change. A tree grows like two trees grow together. And when they're when they're baby trees, they're grown. They're just as tall as each other and they're just fine. But one is a a pine tree and the other one is a, you know, a a tree that loses its leaves in the fall. Means the pine tree gets a lot more photosynthetic activity through the year than the deciduous tree does.
So the pine tree starts to overtake the growth pattern of the deciduous tree, and the deciduous tree ends up in the shade of a pine forest, thereby getting stifled. These are changes, but it doesn't make the part it doesn't make the deciduous tree any less important to the forest ecosystem. And I'm not actually directly comparing Bitcoin to the deciduous tree. That could actually be fiat. I'm just saying that what you thought a thing was when you took a snapshot of it in your mind certainly does not guarantee that that will be the thing that it's supposed to be ten years from now, twenty years from now.
If you're not if you don't have the ability to accept change, you define yourselves in the real in in real, real trouble. Like, we never expected. We really never expected. We theorized, but we never expected BlackRock to actually start buying Bitcoin for their spot Bitcoin ETF. And in the same vein, I didn't see the following coming. BlackRock, well, their iShares Bitcoin ETP, their exchange traded product, has made its debut in Europe. I've told you about this yesterday, I think. However, let's see if there's any news, like, has anybody bought any of this stuff? Well, by the way, this is new, written from Atlas twenty one dot com. According to Bloomberg, BlackRock has now officially launched its first Bitcoin product in Europe. The iShares Bitcoin ETP is now available on several European stock exchanges.
The new product is listed on three European trading platforms. The product is traded under the ticker iBit, on Zetta and Euronext in Paris, while on Euronext Amsterdam, the symbol is b's BTCN. To attract investors during the initial phase, BlackRock introduced a temporary management fee of 0.15% discounted from their standard quarter of a percent fee set to take effect after the end of the year. The BlackRock's, BlackRock ETP is not simply a wrapper, a financial structure that replicates another fund, of its US ETF, but an independent product specifically structured for the European market. And for the European launch, BlackRock formed strategic partnerships with Coinbase as the custodian of the underlying Bitcoins and Bank of New York Mellon as the administrator.
And the fund is issued through a special purpose Swiss vehicle, and we did hear about that yesterday. Manuel Speriandio, head of iShares products for Europe and The Middle East at BlackRock, stated that the combination of strong demand from the retail market and growing interest from professional investors is generating real momentum. Although Europe has had cryptocurrency ETPs for some time, the overall market remains smaller compared to US counterparts, which with around 13,600,000,000.0 in assets under management across the region. In comparison, BlackRock's US Bitcoin product, the iBit, quickly became one of the most successful ETF launches in market history, accumulating over 50,000,000,000 in AUM or assets under management. So we still don't know if the Europeans are are biting at this.
In fact, if we can wait just a second. Let me get back to where where was that ticker? Let me get that other ticker. Yeah. BTCN. Let's see what that ticker throws gives me on the interwebs. Let's see. Is there any okay. Let's see. Bitcoin network's price, BTC in, coin market cap. Let's see if there's anything going on here. BTC in digital model token. Oh, no. This is a different BTC in. So I'll have to do a little bit more research on my side. And if I find anything out, I will report back to you. But in the meantime, 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 10:16AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the March 2025. This is episode ten sixty three, I believe. Nope. Ten sixty two of Bitcoin and GameStop. We're gonna have to do it. We have to talk about it. We just do. I know you don't want to, but we're going to. So let's just dive right in. Nick, writing this one for Bitcoin magazine, GameStop approves adding Bitcoin to treasury reserves and the price crashes. I gotta love these people. GameStop announced that its board of directors has unanimously approved an update to the company's investment policy allowing Bitcoin to be held as a treasury reserve asset.
The decision follows a series of engagements between GameStop chairman and CEO Ryan Cohen and prominent figures like Michael Saylor in the Bitcoin industry. On February, Cohen met with strategy chairman and well known Bitcoin advocate Michael Saylor, sparking speculation that GameStop may be adding BTC to its balance sheet. A couple of weeks after, Cohen responded to CoinDesk via a tweet saying, letter received. After receiving a letter from Strive Asset Management CEO, Matt Cole, which urged GameStop to adopt Bitcoin as a reserve asset. In its announcement, GameStop noted that its investment policy now permits investments in, quote, certain cryptocurrency assets including Bitcoin and US dollar denominated stablecoins.
The company also acknowledged associated risks, including the potential impact of these investments on its financial results. And from a statement directly pulled from the official statement from GameStop, we have this sentence, the company's investment policy permits investments in certain cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and US dollar denominated stablecoins. And if the company acquires Bitcoin or said stablecoins, the company will be exposed to certain risks associated with Bitcoin and stablecoins. Well, duh. I don't know. The policy update was disclosed alongside the company's financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year ending 02/01/2025 for the fourth quarter.
GameStop reported net sales of $1,280,000,000 which is a decrease from the $1,790,000,000 in the same period the prior year. Selling, general, and administrative expenses fell to 282,500,000.0 compared to the 359,200,000.0 in the fourth quarter of the previous year. The net income for the quarter was a hundred and $31,100,000, which was up from $63,100,000 a year earlier. Adjust as adjusted EBITDA or e b I d t d t d a. Good lord. E b I t d a for the quarter was 96,500,000.0 compared to 88,000,000 in the prior year's fourth quarter. Now GameStop also disclosed that had held 477 no, sorry, dollars 4,770,000,000.00 in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities at the end of the quarter.
The company completed its exit from Italy and finalized its wind down of store operations in Germany during this period. For the full fiscal year of 2024, GameStop reported net sales of $3,800,000,000 down from 5,200,000,000.0 SG and A expenses for the year were 1,130,000,000.00 compared to 1,320,000,000.00 in the prior year. Net income for the whole year reached a hundred and 31,300,000.0, significantly higher than the 6,700,000.0 reported in the full fiscal year of 2023. And the adjusted adjusted EBITDA, dada, for the full year was 36,100,000.0 compared to 64,700,000.0 the previous year.
The company has not yet disclosed how much Bitcoin it plans to purchase. Let me read that to you again because I don't think people are being really fully above board about this. As far as we know, GameStop holds zero Bitcoin. The company has not yet disclosed how much it plans to purchase or when it will begin acquiring Bitcoin, and CEO Ryan Cohen has not yet commented publicly on the addition of Bitcoin to GameStop's balance sheet at the time of publishing. There are people that are thinking, I I can see it in tweets and notes on Nostr, that thinking that that GameStop has Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And as far as we don't know, this is not true.
We don't know if they have Bitcoin on their balance sheet. We probably should know because they would have to report that, so my assumption is that they do not have any Bitcoin purchased as of yet. And like I said in a tweet the other day, opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one, so shit or get off the pot. And so do presumptions, so do predictions, so do announcements of announcements. They're all assholes. And until somebody pulls the trigger and actually does the thing, then this is all conjecture. Just because they said, hey, we've unanimously said that we're gonna do it, that doesn't mean that they're going to do it. It just means that they're allowed to do it. So, please, please, for the love of God, everybody stop jumping up and down about how GameStop has come to save the day.
GameStop is not in a position to save anybody's day. However, I will say this, this is starting to look like one hell of an impressive turnaround even if you don't think about Bitcoin as far as GameStop is concerned. The amount of cutting that they've done has enabled them to actually make more money this year even though they had less revenue this year. And that's really honestly, that's actually a good sign. Like, again, with even without the consideration of Bitcoin and being held on their balance sheet, $4,770,000,000 in cash and cash equivalents, and the fact that their earnings per share actually went up even though their revenues went down this year shows that whatever it is that they're doing behind the scenes so far is actually working.
But we've got to move on to Adrian Zeminski writing this one for Cointelegraph. Firms without business models buy Bitcoin, angel investor Jason Calacanis boasts. Oh, Jason. Prominent US based angel investor investor Jason Calacanis poked fun at GameStop's decision to invest in Bitcoin. In a March 26 Twitter post, Calacanis suggested that buying Bitcoin was a solution well suited for public companies that don't have a sustainable business model. Quote, if you're a public company that can't figure out a business model, buy Bitcoin. This might actually be great advice if strategy cofounder Michael Saylor is gonna buy $1,000,000,000,000 in Bitcoin. End quote.
Still, Thomas Fanta, principal at crypto investment firm, HeartCore, told Cointelegraph that there are tangible long term benefits to holding Bitcoin on a corporate balance sheet. Among those he listed were long term price appreciation and theoretically lower correlation to equity markets over time. Quote, I do disagree with this view though, that failing companies should be using Bitcoin as a last ditch strategy, Fanta said. Fanta also said that while quote one case is not enough to gauge a broader trend, there does appear to be such a trend quote we may actually be witnessing one of the first experiments with corporate treasury diversification into crypto outside of tech or crypto aligned companies such as Tesla or Coinbase end quote.
Sal Rajwan, managing partner at crypto early stage venture capital firm Masterkey, echoed the sentiment. According to him, companies are increasingly trying to secure themselves against long term monetary shifts. Bitcoin's role as a corporate reserve asset is no longer fringe, and this is a quote. It's becoming a legitimate play for companies that want to align themselves with a digitally native, inflation resistant financial future. While not every company will follow suit, GameStop's move joins a growing chorus, Rajuand said. Rajuand also noted that historically successful companies often falter when they resist change, citing Nokia as an example, and said adopting Bitcoin could be viewed as strategic adaptation.
Quote, when done transparently and with proper risk management, Bitcoin can bring long term resilience to corporate balance sheets, especially for brands with low time preference and strong alignment with digitally native values, end quote. This idea was also repeated by Georgi Verbitsky, founder of crypto investment app, Timeo, who said that GameStop, quote, could well become the example the market is waiting for. And he added, quote, adding Bitcoin to a corporate balance sheet isn't just speculative. It has real long term upside if executed properly.
So that's that's the end of that article. So Jason Calacanis poking fun at GameStop, but see, what I don't think Jason saw was the fact that they were slashing their costs in the background. They're pulling a doge, man. They're, like, they're looking for anything that they don't need, and they're throwing it overboard. And in a lot of times, yeah, you you'll go, well, that just means their ship is sinking. Yeah. But throwing all that shit overboard might just get them back into port where they can get themselves fixed up. GameStop has brand recognition, y'all. And even though nobody's buying their games online, that does not mean that you just ditch a brand.
Having brand recognition is important even if you have to change your entire business model, which I assume that at one point or another, GameStop is going to do. I I mean, even used games are going to go out of the window when it comes to video games, which is, in a very real way, that is, I think, the majority of what GameStop has actually been doing lately is they're making money on selling previously owned games. Well, that's gonna go by the wayside as well. Right? So they used to sell brand new games and used games. They used to, you know and they all have always sold a bunch of gamer swag.
Right? That's pretty much been their their oh, and consoles and, like, you know, console accessories. They're gonna have to do something else. Hell, what they might even do is have enough cash where they do something like buy, oh, what like what are those skater clothing shops in the mall? I could see that actually happening, like Journeys or there's another one. I can't there's, like, three of them. Like, Spencer Gifts used to be one. I think they're actually still around, but not as much as they used to be. There's there's actually a few. And those are just that's just if you wanna get into, like, clothing and the other side of of non tech retail. But still services essentially the same crowd that I guarantee you knows the name GameStop.
So I I think we're being a little hard on GameStop right now considering the fact that they are clearly in a transition. I honestly my I I my gut feeling is that they survive. And it's not gonna be just because of Bitcoin that they survive. It's gonna be because cost cutting, and they're gonna get into different they're gonna start selling some other stuff. But they're going to leverage that brand. They're gonna leverage GameStop, and it's probably gonna work. So be aware, man. Things happen. Fidelity invest Fidelity Fidelity Investments prepares to unveil its own stablecoin.
What have I been telling you? What have I well, Jamie is gonna back me up. Jamie Crowley out here from CoinDesk is gonna tell you all about how we're just gonna see a whole bunch of stable coins coming out of the pipes. Fidelity Investments is in advanced stages of developing its very own stable coin according to the Financial Times. The Boston based financial services giant plans for the token to serve as a form of digital cash according to the report which sites two people close to the matter. Oh, they're close to the matter, are they? Well, the token would form part of the company strategy to enter the tokenized government bonds market.
Let me read that to you again. We're talking about stable coins and every idiot under the sun wanting their own so that they could do what? Help The United States export its debt to the poorest countries on the planet. The token would form part of the company's strategy to enter the tokenized government bonds market. Stablecoins are a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a real world asset, such as a US dollar or a ounce of gold. They provide a convenient way for crypto traders to preserve their fiat value without having to cash out in the market. The news emerges just days after Fidelity filed paperwork to register a blockchain based version of its US dollar money market fund.
The company seeks to register an on chain shares class of its treasury digital fund, which holds cash and US treasury securities and is available only to Fidelity's hedge fund and institutional clients. A Fidelity stablecoin could fill the role of cash in this fund. The stablecoin would enter an already crowded market dominated by the likes of Tether and Circle. The report comes a day after World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance protocol backed by president Donald Trump, confirmed that it too has plans to offer a stable coin.
And as if I was completely 100% right in my prediction, Bryden Lindria comes in with the killing blow from Cointelegraph, Custodia and Vantage Bank, partner for the first bank issued stablecoin. Don't listen to me at your own risk, guys. The crypto friendly custodian bank has worked with Vantage Bank to complete what the two firms say is America's First ever bank issued stablecoin on a, of course, permissionless blockchain. Custodia said on March that it tokenizes US dollar demand deposits and facilitated the issuance, transfer, and redemption of the stablecoin called Avit, a v I t, on Ethereum via the ERC 20 token standard. You know, I'm pausing here to just say that it's fitting that the shittiest parts of the fiat economy are gravitating towards the shittiest blockchain ever conceived of in the world.
What better way to export debt and make people poor as shit than using Ethereum? Yep. Yep. Yep. Quote, a new dollar US dollar payment rail has now been activated inside The US banking system, Custodia added. Quote, we broke ground on the legal slash regulatory front, proving that US banks can collaborate to tokenize demand deposits on a permissionless blockchain in a regulatory compliant manner, said Custodia CEO Caitlin Long. Vantage Bank CEO and president Jeff Sinnott said that the event was a pivotal moment in reshaping the financial lane landscape, demonstrating how blockchain and stablecoins can revolutionize payments, end quote.
In a series of posts on Twitter, Caitlin Long explained that the Avid stablecoin was a real dollar, not a synthetic dollar as Federal Reserve board governor Christopher wall Waller called stablecoins in the February 12 speech. Real US dollars, Long explained, can only be issued by the Federal Reserve and a few legally authorized entities, including Custodia Bank. She added that Avid is a real dollar as it tokenizes a bank's demand deposits, funds that customers can withdraw on demand, such as money in a checking account. Custodia has historically championed Bitcoin, and Ethereum advocates were quick to note that the bank chose Ethereum for the stable coin. Quote, ETH fixed this.
Bitcoin couldn't, wrote Ethereum advocate, Ethan Van Ness. Ethereum educator, Anthony Susano, also posted to make clear the permissionless blockchain custodial referred to in its announcements. Quote, just in case it wasn't obvious, this is built on Ethereum. Yeah. I wouldn't be all proud of that, dude. This is these are not the fucking droids you're looking for pal. Anyway, Ethereum secures Ethereum does this, Ethereum does that, tokenizes 3,600,000,000.0 of treasury bills. It's all bullshit. Now then they get into talking about the Stellar network. It's all crap.
I'm really disappointed with, Caitlin Long that she's jumping into the stable coin game because it just shows a me too attitude, whereas Caitlin used to be, we're forging we're forging the path. And now they're following somebody else's path. And it's really kinda nauseating to watch. It it just it just is. I'm sorry to say that. Alright. You know what? Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities is brought to you by [email protected]. That's my friend, she she. He has comfrey. It's a plant. You're gonna wanna know all about this plant. It is a huge boon to your, well, your outdoor activities when it comes to gardening, composting, doing all kinds of neat stuff because it is a mineral miner. Its taproots go down deep deep deep, and it does it every year because it's a perennial. It lasts forever.
It pulls the minerals down deep, and it pulls it up into the leaves, and then you chop all the leaves off of this honking plant. Sometimes I've gotten a full pound, if not two pounds, of leaves from a single plant that I then either pitch as mulch directly into garden beds so that as the nitrogen rich leaves and mineral rich leaves break down, it fertilizes the soil around tomato plants, or I just throw it as a nitrogen stock into my compost pile. I can make all kinds of neat compost teas out of it. You want this plant. And you can get a full root cutting for $20. That means that after you plant this thing and today and now's the time to do it. It's springtime. This is the time to get your cut your your your comfrey cuttings, your roots.
This is the time to do it. Once you plant that thing, a full root will give you a full plant by the end of the season. If you choose to buy root cuttings, which are about as big as half of your thumb, each one of them will form a plant. It will just take longer, but you can get a root cutting for a single dollar. Or if you want, you can just buy a full root for $20 and cut it into 20 pieces, and you'll probably end up with somewhere between eighteen and nineteen plants. It's up to you. But you want this plant. I built an entire episode about the plant, Comfrey, Its history, what it could be used for, all the neat stuff that it does, and it's in episode seven twenty six of Bitcoin and seven twenty six of the Bitcoin and podcast. Make sure that you tell Shishi when you email him for your order at Shishi, that's s h I s h I twenty one, the letter m, at protonmail dot com that you heard about his product here on the circle p.
And he will cut me Satoshis as to what he thinks making a sale for his conferee was worth to him. Oil, West Texas Intermediate is up 1.16 to $69.80. Brent Norsey is up 1.15% to $73.86. Natural gas following suit this time, 1.07% to the upside, halting at $3.88 per thousand cubic feet, and gasoline up one and a quarter back up to $2.23 per gallon. Gold down point 12%, still holding above 3,000, however. Silver is crawling sideways. Platinum is up or down a third. Copper is up a half. Palladium is up three quarters of a point. Biggest winner in ag today, at least in the futures, is cotton, 0.81% to the upside. Biggest loser is coffee, 1.62% to the downside.
Live cattle is up a third. Lean hogs are up point 87%. And feeder cattle, also in the green, up a half point. Now along with Bitcoin having problems this morning is also the equity markets. So news came in, I suppose, and I think it has something to do with durable goods, and I'm not sure exactly what this means. But the Dow is down a half point. The S and P is down 1.18%. The Nasdaq is down 1.8%. That's quite a dip for the Nasdaq. S and P Mini is down three quarters of a point. And if I remember reading the durable goods report this morning, I wanna say that they projected that there would be minus 1% in this in the growth of sales of durable goods.
And apparently, it turned out that that number was point 9%. So there was a 9% increase in the amount of durable goods being bought. And I guess that's translating into people thinking that the economy is just fine. So, therefore, the chances that the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates in their next meeting, gets lower and lower and lower. And Bitcoin is following lower as well. An $86,760 token price gives us a $1,720,000,000,000 market cap. We can get 28.8 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,842,119.68 of. And average fees per block skyrocketed all the way up to 0.11 BTC taking in fees on a per block basis, and there are roughly 32 blocks carrying 23,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 6 Satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at four. And mining, on the mining front, we have, well, not minor capitulation.
Hash rate standing at 836.1 exahashes per second. The miners know something. They do. I swear to God. And from yesterday's Bitcoin and episode entitled Kentucky Fried Chicken no. I mean Kentucky Fried Bitcoin. I got baked potato that gave me 10,000 satoshis, brother. Now that's a boost. And baked potato says boost for the soap miner plug. Respect. Hashtag circular economy, hashtag value for value. Pies with four twenty says thank you, sir. No thank you. Psyduck with five seventy says Psyduck. Paul Cernine with 500 says, thanks again for your take on the current news. Keep up the good work. Thank you, sir. War Time with three thirty three says, streaking, in this sense, I would assume, is what the kids mean when they say it, which means you use an app every day, so you're on a streak for so long. Yeah. Yeah. I figured that one out. Kids use Snapchat and going on streaks. I don't remember what my kids told me the last time I asked, but it was something ridiculous like multiple hundreds of days in a row. Oh my God.
That sounds horrible, dude. Perma nerd with two thirty four says, none you business discussing streaking. Perhaps there is a number of sats that would make this happen. I'm not going streaking, perma nerd. I'm not gonna go on the college campus, drunk my like my ass off, and whip off my clothes and go streaking around a college campus. Never going to happen. Yodle with 300 says, I see you Psyduck. Good info about hist.nostril.land. Yes. If you get yourself into a situation where you've lost all your followers or your the people that you follow on nostril, go to hist.nostril.land.
It'll keep it basically takes a snapshot of your in pub every once in a while, and you can get most of the people that like, the most of the people that you followed, you can get them back. So it's it's much easier. And Justin 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. Congressman Ro Khanna says Democrats are changing their tune on Bitcoin. This is Frank Korver writing for Bitcoin Magazine. On March 2025, representative Ro Khanna gave a short but impactful talk at the Bitcoin Policy Institute's Bitcoin for America summit. Quote, Bitcoin is transformational for so many people around the world.
That is why the Democratic Party should be embracing it as something that can create financial empowerment for people, not just in The United States, but around the world, end quote. This is the type of message he's been spreading for years now, and he's urged his fellow Democrats to follow his lead. He's implored them to not be scared of Bitcoin, but to view it just as they view any other major technological advancement of our time, including the Internet itself. Quote, my goal is to make Bitcoin bipartisan, Rep Khanna told Bitcoin Magazine. Quote, I want to convince Democrats that Bitcoin is a next generation store value that millions of people around the world use, and that America showing strong leadership on it allows us to connect with these people, often some of the most disenfranchised, end quote.
For a party that often advocates for financial inclusion, it seems almost ironic that so many Democrats have looked past Bitcoin, an open source technology that anyone can use with nothing more than an Internet connection, and in some cases, even without one. That said, Rep Khanna made the point that while he remains one of the few more vocal Democrats when it comes to creating pro Bitcoin or to being pro Bitcoin, the number of Democratic politicians who have stated that they're in favor of the technology has increased substantially over the past few years.
Quote, we went from just 10 of us or so supporting Bitcoin and crypto to almost 70 or 80, representative Khan has said. It's happening slowly. While some have attributed to malice what and while some have attributed to malice most Democrats' historical stance on Bitcoin, representative Khanna claims the issue is more lack of understanding of the technology's purpose and use cases. Quote, some Democratic politicians are not aware. They're just not aware of how helpful Bitcoin can be with remittances or how it can be used by those who don't have access to US Dollars. Many people around the world use it for both reasons, said the congressman, alluding to the idea that many, including some Democrats, might not be aware of this fact.
According to research from Coinbase, in each of the swing states in the most recent US presidential election, there were about 10 times the number of crypto holders compared to the vote differential between Biden and Trump in 2020. Harris lost to Trump in each of these swing states, leaving some to speculate that the turnout of the Bitcoin and crypto voting block may have been one of the primary forces that swayed the election in Trump's favor. While representative Khanna doesn't know to what extent this voting block impacted the election results, he did agree that it was likely one of the major factors that affected the outcome of the election. Quote, I think it made a difference, said the congressman.
In such a close election, everything matters. And the fact that there were some Democrats who offended Bitcoin and crypto voters was not helpful, end quote. And representative Khanna is not alone in acknowledging this. In December of twenty twenty four, the New York Times deal book summit, Van Jones, political analyst, media person persona, and prominent voice within the Democratic party stated that it was to the Democratic party detriment that it shut out pro bitcoin and pro crypto voters. Representative Khanna sang Jones's praises and said that we should be hearing more voices like Jones within the Democratic Party speaking up in favor of Bitcoin in the near future.
Quote, he spent and he's speaking of Van Jones. He spent a lot of time in the Bay Area, so he gets technology. The party will be moving in a direction that's going to embrace Bitcoin and other technologies, he added. While it only seems logical that the Democratic Party would reverse its stance on Bitcoin if it's looking to pick pick up seats on the house and senate come the twenty twenty six midterm elections, it simultaneously seems difficult to imagine that Democrats coming out in support of Bitcoin given the highly partisan political climate in The US coupled with the fact that president Trump is an ardent Bitcoin supporter.
Rep Khanna argued that Democrats should not be thinking along party lines when it comes to Bitcoin, but rather assessing the technology based solely on what it is. Quote, politicians are capable of evaluating Bitcoin on its merits. Bitcoin is just a decentralized digital currency that enables peer to peer transactions without the need for an intermediary. People just need to study Bitcoin and learn that it's just a medium of exchange, representative Khanna said. Rep Khanna also took a moment to differentiate between Bitcoin and meme coins, highlighting the fact that the president's recently released Trump coin creates much confusion regarding the value proposition of crypto assets including Bitcoin. Quote, we should not have elected in officials like president Trump launching meme coins, said the congressman, at a time when many US citizens are struggling to make ends meet.
Should Bitcoin be a front and center issue for Democrats once widely regarded as the political party of the middle and working class? Well, Rep Khanna doesn't necessarily think so, but he also doesn't think that the party should continue to pooh pooh the technology. Quote, there are far bigger issues at hand right now, like the cuts in Medicaid, the firing of veterans, and the erratic policy of tariffs. But the Democrats were on the wrong side of issues of innovation in Bitcoin in both 2022 and 2024, and we now have an opportunity to get on the right side of it, the congressman explained.
So how can pro Bitcoin democrat voters help to get their party on the right side of history when it comes to Bitcoin? Khanna has some suggestions. Quote, they should point to those of us who are leading on Bitcoin and crypto. They can encourage members of government to study the issues so that they're not uninformed, and they should talk about the enormous adoption of Bitcoin. Okay. So that's that's Frank's piece on representative Khanna. Here's my issue. It seems to me that people like senator Elizabeth Warren hate us. Whether I'm a conservative, libertarian, Democrat, I I don't feel any love from her.
I don't feel any love from AOC. I I I feel that being a white male makes me some kind of persona non grata, and I'm fucking tired of it. And the people that are, like, you know, that will be saying, oh, but you're getting it wrong. You know what? You're delivering the fucking message wrong. It's not my fault. When I hear white men suck, I mean, I hear white men suck. When I hear that I'm the oppressor, I hear I'm the oppressor. I'm not going to dig through the runnels of my mind to find some kind of extravagant explanation how they don't really mean that I, as a white man, suck. If you really don't mean that I, as a white man, sucks, you need to say the fucking words. You need to figure out a way to explain it better.
Because it's all I hear is that I suck, and most of it's coming out of the Democrat party. I I'm to be surveilled. My money is to be taken away from me. If I make any money at all, it's at the expense of somebody who doesn't live in this country. That that that's what I hear, that it's all my fault. And I'm tired of anything being my fault when I'm having trouble being able to do the same shit that the people I'm supposedly oppressing are having. It's not like I'm separate from the problems that they're having. So please, if if you really want me to to to start thinking along the lines of what you guys are doing, then stop telling me I suck so much.
Mt. Gox moves $1,000,000,000 in Bitcoin, but payments aren't going out according to Glassnode. This is Simon Chandler from Decrypt. Mt. Gox has transferred over 11,000. Wow. 11,000 Bitcoin to two separate wallets. But Glassnode analysts told Decrypt that it's unlikely the shuffle is in preparation of beginning the repayments or for more of the bankruptcies exchange creditors. According to the analytics firm, Arkham Intelligence, Mt. Gox deposited 893 BTC into one of its hot wallets and another 10,608 into a new change wallet in the past twenty four hours.
This deposit follows two similar trans transfers on March when the exchanges administrator sent 332 BTC to the same hot wallet and 11,833 b t c to one of its cold wallets. While the larger sum was merely moved from one Mt. Gox wallet to another, the smaller amount was then sent onto the bits or onto bit stamp according to Tracker Spot on Chain. This raises the possibility that the 893 Bitcoin deposited today may end up at a trading platform as was also the case with a March 6 deposit of 166 Bitcoin, which ended up at BitGo. Yet, the two bigger transfers, Mt. Gox made this month of the 11,833 on the eleventh and the 12,000 BTC on March, have simply moved from one of the exchanges wallets to the other.
This makes it uncertain as to whether today's moves signal an imminent repayment of creditors, which experts remaining remain agnostic on as to what exactly the transfers mean in the near term. Quote, the recent Mt. Gox linked BTC movements appear to be part of the ongoing creditor repayment process, which has been unfolding for God knows several months, said Glassnode's analyst team speaking to Decrypt. Glassnode adds that while the latest transaction may indicate preparations for distribution, the firm has seen no conclusive on chain evidence that repayments are imminent.
The firm's analysis team also points out that Mt. Gox has pushed back the repayment deadline to October the thirty first of this year with the Japan based exchange exchanges trustees explaining at the time that many rehabilitation creditors still have not received their payments because they have not completed the necessary procedures for receiving repayments. Mt. Gox began the process of actually repaying creditors in July of last year with ARCEM data showing that the exchange's Bitcoin balance has declined from around a hundred and 40,000 Bitcoin in July to 35,000 today.
That's quite a chunk, man. That's a hundred and 5,000 Bitcoin. So a lot of this stuff has already gone out. At today's prices, that stash is worth $3,100,000,000. However, this doesn't mean that Mt. Gox has paid upwards of the hundred $1,100,000 BTC to creditors with Glassnode explaining that most of this has likely remained in the wallets of custodians such as Bitstamp and Kraken. It's important to highlight that on chain transfers to these entities don't necessarily confirm that creditors have been repaid as the exchanges may still be in custody of the funds. The repayment process is ongoing, and not all activity is directly traceable to final disbursements, end quote.
The market appears to be aware of this fact. Insofar, as the price of Bitcoin has barely moved today, posting a 0.5% drop in the past twenty four hours, at the time of writing, the Bitcoin price has dipped just below 88,000 according to CoinGecko data. And, of course, as I just told you a few minutes ago, we are actually looking at 86,540. So I think the news took a while to matriculate. I think this, along with the durable goods report, is putting pressure on the Bitcoin price. That's just a gut feeling. But sentiment could change for the worse. Oh, joy. As the October 31 repayment deadline approaches, it is not a foregone conclusion that all recipients of Mt. Gox's BTC will sell, will sell as soon as they possibly can.
What it it is not yeah. It's not a foregone conclusion that they will all sell. Right? Right? That's what they're trying to say, which I so badly fumbled. It's my fault. One Reddit poll from July found that 55.7% of Mt. Gox creditors do not plan to sell any of their BTC immediately upon receiving it from the exchange's trustees, though 18.8% plan to sell all of their Bitcoin, which is yeah. Okay. Have fun staying or whatever. But, yeah, that's so this is the other end of the story that I was wondering about with the price action that I saw Bitcoin this morning. I'm like, oh, wait a minute. This isn't no. Like, durable goods shouldn't that report shouldn't be having this effect on Bitcoin.
But alongside, you know, this this whole thing coupled with Mt. Gox, yeah, if there's a lot of movement in the Mt. Gox wallets, that always that always shakes some, you know, some of these idiots out of their tree, and it looks like quite a few have been shaken out of their tree this morning. Let's just hope that none of them live in North Carolina, where lawmakers propose separate bills in both chambers to allow crypto in pension funds. Timmy Shen writing for the block, lawmakers in North Carolina have proposed legislation in both chambers to create an investment authority with the power to invest up to 5% of various pension funds and cryptocurrencies.
Representative Brendan Jones filed the State Investment Modernization Act, house bill five zero six on Monday with the house while a separate but similar act dubbed senate bill seven zero nine was submitted on Tuesday to the senate. Both bills seek to establish an investment authority that would be located within, but independent from, the control of the state treasurer. The bills intend to authorize the investment body to manage investments for a wide range of funds, including several state retirement funds. Notably, the bills would allow the authority to allocate up to 5% of designated funds for investment in digital assets. Such digital assets include cryptocurrencies, stable coins, or non fungible tokens.
The bills also require that these crypto assets be maintained with a secure custody solution and that the authority must consider the risk and reward profile of the assets. The introduction of the two new bills follows the house bill 92 and senate bill three twenty seven, both of which seek to authorize the state treasurer to invest in Bitcoin itself. So apparently, there's four connected bills here. Bitcoin has become an investment project among lawmakers in The United States states, especially after pro crypto Trump took office in January. So there you go. North Carolina on deck.
See, and I there here's here's another thing that's been rattling around my head. Is I you know, you wonder about GameStop saying that they're gonna put Bitcoin on the sheet, and everybody said, oh, that's gonna that's gonna charge up all the meme, meme stock guys from what was it? What was that Reddit group? I can't remember the name of it. The silver hand, diamond hand guys, all you know, the dude with the red bandana. Remember that? Like, GameStop and, like, there was a movie company and, I can't remember. Hollywood video, maybe. Who knows? Who knows? But you remember that time. It was just like it was like 2021.
I wonder because that you know, we did not get a massive price spike on the on the GME news, the GameStop news. So what I wonder about is that every single time now that every single time that one of these either companies or institutions or, like, there's a, you know, a new, exchange traded fund was you know, that buys Bitcoin and then you buy shares against it. I wonder if what's going on here with the price action giving all this, quote, unquote, good news, and I do put that in quotes, stifles the very nature of what Bitcoin was supposed to be in the first place. IE was we were supposed to use it as money. But if we if everything if all these companies keep buying it and there's just less and less floating around to use, then maybe that's weighing on the psychology of the market saying, but it can't be the thing that I thought it was gonna be if all these people buy it.
Okay. That I I actually think that that's a a valid argument. But like most things in nature, and I'm always going back to the forest to inform me ways that I can think about things that don't confuse and frighten me. Things change. A tree grows like two trees grow together. And when they're when they're baby trees, they're grown. They're just as tall as each other and they're just fine. But one is a a pine tree and the other one is a, you know, a a tree that loses its leaves in the fall. Means the pine tree gets a lot more photosynthetic activity through the year than the deciduous tree does.
So the pine tree starts to overtake the growth pattern of the deciduous tree, and the deciduous tree ends up in the shade of a pine forest, thereby getting stifled. These are changes, but it doesn't make the part it doesn't make the deciduous tree any less important to the forest ecosystem. And I'm not actually directly comparing Bitcoin to the deciduous tree. That could actually be fiat. I'm just saying that what you thought a thing was when you took a snapshot of it in your mind certainly does not guarantee that that will be the thing that it's supposed to be ten years from now, twenty years from now.
If you're not if you don't have the ability to accept change, you define yourselves in the real in in real, real trouble. Like, we never expected. We really never expected. We theorized, but we never expected BlackRock to actually start buying Bitcoin for their spot Bitcoin ETF. And in the same vein, I didn't see the following coming. BlackRock, well, their iShares Bitcoin ETP, their exchange traded product, has made its debut in Europe. I've told you about this yesterday, I think. However, let's see if there's any news, like, has anybody bought any of this stuff? Well, by the way, this is new, written from Atlas twenty one dot com. According to Bloomberg, BlackRock has now officially launched its first Bitcoin product in Europe. The iShares Bitcoin ETP is now available on several European stock exchanges.
The new product is listed on three European trading platforms. The product is traded under the ticker iBit, on Zetta and Euronext in Paris, while on Euronext Amsterdam, the symbol is b's BTCN. To attract investors during the initial phase, BlackRock introduced a temporary management fee of 0.15% discounted from their standard quarter of a percent fee set to take effect after the end of the year. The BlackRock's, BlackRock ETP is not simply a wrapper, a financial structure that replicates another fund, of its US ETF, but an independent product specifically structured for the European market. And for the European launch, BlackRock formed strategic partnerships with Coinbase as the custodian of the underlying Bitcoins and Bank of New York Mellon as the administrator.
And the fund is issued through a special purpose Swiss vehicle, and we did hear about that yesterday. Manuel Speriandio, head of iShares products for Europe and The Middle East at BlackRock, stated that the combination of strong demand from the retail market and growing interest from professional investors is generating real momentum. Although Europe has had cryptocurrency ETPs for some time, the overall market remains smaller compared to US counterparts, which with around 13,600,000,000.0 in assets under management across the region. In comparison, BlackRock's US Bitcoin product, the iBit, quickly became one of the most successful ETF launches in market history, accumulating over 50,000,000,000 in AUM or assets under management. So we still don't know if the Europeans are are biting at this.
In fact, if we can wait just a second. Let me get back to where where was that ticker? Let me get that other ticker. Yeah. BTCN. Let's see what that ticker throws gives me on the interwebs. Let's see. Is there any okay. Let's see. Bitcoin network's price, BTC in, coin market cap. Let's see if there's anything going on here. BTC in digital model token. Oh, no. This is a different BTC in. So I'll have to do a little bit more research on my side. And if I find anything out, I will report back to you. But in the meantime, 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 Episode Overview
