Join me today for Episode 975 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- FBI Nabs SEC X Hacker
- NosFabrica vs. $4.5 Trillion Industry
- AI Tanking or Taking Off?
- Elon's BTC Move Shakes BTC Free of Weak Hands
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
Circle P:
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Fully Built Lightning Piggy:
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- https://www.bitcoinstuffstore.com/nl_nl/product/lightningpiggy/
The King Ranch Donation Pages:
https://www.ruralamericainaction.com/fundraising/save-king-ranch-and-agriculture-in-washington
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Articles:
https://www.theblock.co/post/321766/fbi-arrests-alabama-man-behind-sec-social-media-hack-and-phony-spot-bitcoin-etf-post
https://nosfabrica.npub.pro/post/nosfabrica-8cwh6b/
https://www.theblock.co/post/321717/bitcoin-miner-mara-warns-ai-mirrors-2000s-internet-boom-firms-risk-overbuilding-infrastructure-bernstein
https://www.theblock.co/post/321727/jpmorgan-analysts-say-bitcoin-miners-face-narrowing-window-of-opportunity-to-secure-ai-data-center-deals
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
- https://geyser.fund/project/thebitcoinandpodcast
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/10/17/four-reasons-elon-musks-tesla-may-have-moved-760m-of-bitcoin/
https://cointelegraph.com/news/trump-world-liberty-financial-token-crash
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/electrum-v4-5-6/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/esp-miner-v2-3-0/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/stratum-v2-sri-v1-1-0/
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Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's 17th day of October 2024, and this is episode 975 of Bitcoin and breaking breaking news. The FBI has arrested an Alabama man behind the SEC social media hack and phony spot Bitcoin ETF post.
We forgot about this, didn't we? I get I forgot about it. I completely forgot about it, but the block didn't. Now we're gonna find out more from Sarah Wynne talking about all of this. An Alabama man was arrested on Thursday morning after prosecutors said he was behind the hack of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission's social media account that posted a fake announcement about the spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds being approved. Now, is it coming? Is it crystalizing in your head? Do you remember this? Do you remember it? Well, Eric Counsell Junior, 25 years old, was charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud according to a statement released by the US attorney's office in the District of Columbia.
The SEC's Twitter account was compromised back in January ahead of the spot Bitcoin ETFs being approved by the agency. Okay. If you don't remember, alright, here's what happened. It was either January 11th or January 12th when we really knew that the ETFs for Bitcoin were being approved. Lots of hype leading up to it. We knew it was gonna be somewhere in January. We didn't know exactly when. I think it was exactly 2 days before or the day before. It was either 2 or, you know, 2 or one day before. It was very, very close. The SEC's Twitter account started saying that, well, all of the, we've approved all of the ETFs, every single one of them. And at the time, there were like 13, and I think we're down to 12 or 11. It's it it bounces around those those two numbers.
But the SEC almost immediately corrected that on their Twitter account after they gained back control and said, no, we haven't approved anything. So there was a spike in the price of Bitcoin. They're saying, like, it's, like, a $1,000 price spike or something like that. And then it fell back down. And then either one day, the next very next day, which I think it was the very next day, we actually got the SEC saying yes, we have in fact approved the Bitcoin ETFs and it was not a hoax. So we conjecture that it was an accident. It was an accident. We didn't there were some people that were saying it could have been a hack, but we didn't really know. And then, of course, because 24 hours later the entire traunch of BTC ETFs got released we completely forgot that this thing even occurred.
It took about a week but we eventually forgot about it. But really there was no word that it was a hack. We just thought it was incompetence. We thought somebody pulled the trigger too quickly. They, like the intern or whoever they had running the SEC's Twitter account, didn't know what the hell they were doing. That was pretty much what we were conjecturing. Well, it turns out that it was, according to the SEC, indeed a hack. And they're gonna put this 25 year old dude probably behind bars for a year maybe. I don't know. He's gonna probably also pay a hefty fine.
My question is, were they looking for a scapegoat or did this dude really hack the SEC's account? I'm sure that we will find out more as time goes on, but we've got a lot better fish to fry. This time in the world of healthcare. You've probably seen if you're on Nostr, possibly X. I don't know. I don't spend a whole hell of a lot of time on or well, Twitter. Not x. Twitter. I don't spend a lot of time on Twitter anymore. I do spend the majority of my time on Noster if I'm going to hit any kind of thing that resembles, you know, communications, media, social media, that kind of thing.
You've probably seen on nostr nosfabrica again that is pronounced nosfabrica somebody some people might actually say nosfabrica but we're gonna call it nosfabrica here And this is Avi Burra and Vitor Pamplona, I believe is his last name. And then there's John Gordon. These three guys have kind of gotten together and they've they're building this thing called NOS Fabrica. And it's all about the use of Nostr and Bitcoin in the realm of healthcare, specifically around medical records. If you don't know what the hell is going on, they actually have a pretty good write up. And I'm going to read it for you here. And this is from nosfabrica. Npub.
Pro. We're excited to launch our new company, Nosfabrica. Our mission is to empower sovereign healthcare by building tools for peer to peer healthcare interactions giving individuals and providers the keys to their own health data we are building a healthcare application factory shipping health clients built on Nostr and Bitcoin and bootstrapping a decentralized ecosystem of health tools we want to onboard thousands of people to nostr and bitcoin and enable people to live healthy lives by utilizing nostr for identity resolution and bitcoin for payments were paving the way for interoperable healthcare applications to exchange health information and individuals to track and own data that matters to them, connecting to healthcare providers on their health journey.
The problem. The fiat health care system has led to dangerous centralizations of health care records in the United States and globally, where companies ultimately own health data, not the individuals. Current protocols of oOS and APIs have led to bloated and expensive walled gardens like Epic and Cerner. And a honeypot for healthcare hackers, most notably the recent change healthcare hack owned by United Healthcare which affected Avi Burrows work. In 2023, more than 115,000,000 health records were compromised across 6 55 data breaches.
High cost and poor outcomes are the current product of fiat healthcare. Of the $4,500,000,000,000 annual US healthcare spend, 25% of that is administrative cost. And half of that is waste. 6 in 10 Americans have a chronic health condition. Yet 6 to 10 percent of every health care transaction goes to a medical billing middleman. A decentralized healthcare application ecosystem would give the healthy sovereign individual the opportunity to take back ownership of their own healthcare data and their health too. So here's the solution. NOS Fabrica means our factory in Latin.
With, of course, the nod to Noster. We aim to build a new parallel health system on top of open source protocols Nostr and Bitcoin this decentralized health care system will be driven by peer to peer interactions between patients and providers we will move health care onto a Bitcoin and Nostr standard giving independent healthcare providers the tools to integrate Bitcoin deeper into their practice while maintaining practice sovereignty by establishing an open source protocol for the private exchange of health data on nostr NostFabrica will set a foundation for a decentralized healthcare system and enable Bitcoin Native Electronic Medical Records or EMR software clients to be built on top of Nostr We will cut out middlemen in healthcare and build the tools that put the individual at the center of the solution.
The benefits to patients include owning their own medical data care discovery at competitive prices the portability of their health care data, and ultimately improve health outcomes. Doctors will also have the ability to reach a much broader population, reduce their administrative costs, and own their key demographic data such as licenses, credentials, and board certifications. Ultimately, we envision a more robust ecosystem of independent providers combating the trend of m and a, mergers and acquisition, and centralization that we see under the current fiat healthcare regime.
There are several impacts for the broader free and open source community as it gives tools for individuals with different healthcare use cases to bring solutions to sorely needed applications such as medical consent, data sharing, clinical trials, and public health. NOSR enables the NOS fabric of future in 3 primary ways: identity and access, data standardization and persistence and availability. So under identity and access, the user identity exists at the protocol layer via your n pub insec, instead of the application layer. Users can sign into any application connected to the protocol.
Users can sign and certify events with their key pair verifiably demonstrating ownership. Data standardization. We can develop specific nostr event kinds created for medical data. Viator has already started by building the NIP 82 for medical data. Existing international data standards and formats such as FHIRHL7 can be wrapped within Nostra events. This structure provides seamless data portability and interoperability across applications. And finally and third, persistence and availability. HIPAA compliant encrypted healthcare data is stored on relays. Only the owner of the data and those authorized by the owner can decrypt or view the data. In other words, selective disclosure, which is a cornerstone of privacy.
Boosting the Nostr network effect and flywheel will continue. As there are already 40,000 weekly active users by building healthcare applications on Nostr we can onboard more people to the ecosystem who may not be interested in social media. That's a big one right there. I gotta highlight that and hopefully come back to it. So here's the call to action. Of course, Nostr and Bitcoin are global protocols and networks that anyone can opt into. While the United States gets a lot of the focus due to its very expensive and extremely complex health care system, there may be challenges globally including health care access, affordability, and timely care that we can address with open source tools and permissionless sound money.
We'd love to hear from you if you're interested in our mission. Now Avi Birrah is part of the team, and he is an experienced health care veteran working as a senior director of product management at Optum, o p t u m. He is also the host of Pleb Chain Radio, a leading Bitcoin and Nostra podcast With a master's degree in electrical engineering and financial engineering, Avi brings a wealth of healthcare software product experience to NAS Fabrica. John Gordon, another member of the team, has worked across the healthcare industry including in provider strategy, prayers or sorry, payers, not prayers, payers and suppliers.
John has been helping healthcare providers integrate a Bitcoin strategy with his consulting business, Satoshi Health Advisors. He also has a double master's in health economics and policy. Vitor Pamplona is the creator of Amethyst, the top Android client for Nostra. Vitor previously led a company spun out of the MIT lab utilizing VR for eye exams at EyeNetra. He has a PhD in computer science from MIT. I had no idea that Vitor Pamplona had a PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That's right down the road from Harvard and is essentially MIT, if you didn't know, was sort of the Harvard for science.
It doesn't really matter. These three guys together are putting are putting together NOS Fabrica. Now what I have highlighted here is that is this by building healthcare applications on Nostr we can onboard more people to the ecosystem who may not be interested in social media. I've been screaming about this forever. Ever since I finally figured out what Nostr really was it almost immediately became clear to me that this can be used for almost everything. All we all we did the only reason that Nostra looks the way it looks right now to us is because the very first solution that came up was being able to get the hell away from Twitter and Facebook and TikTok and all the rest of this crap where if you said one wrong thing you were just booted off the platform.
We've been you know the argument. I understand that you get it but it's important to reiterate what's going on here these are all walled gardens Noster was the way to get out of this but I've been saying forever that that is not the end game for Noster In fact, we are just scratching the surface of what Nostr can actually do and the NIP 82 medical records event types prove that. I've been reading through them these make sense like the the NIP 82 it's it's available on GitHub if you go if you, if you go to the show notes or if you're able to get chapters in in your podcast application the, the URL to what I just read you is going to be here and that includes the github repository for the nip82 medical data event types and it has there's 2 types inside this nip 82 it's like I think it's like 32,225, and 32,226 as event types and it has nothing to do with social media that's not what noster is noster is a communications protocol how a client decides to wrap the capabilities of that protocol is what gives it its flavor and mostly what we've gotten is replacements for almost every social media type under the sun I don't think that that's a bad thing I that was a logical place to start it was the lowest hanging fruit that there is.
This fruit that these guys from NOS Fabrica are reaching for just a bit higher. You're talking about a $4,500,000,000,000 industry. They're not going to take kindly to this. Administration staffs are not are they are not going to just go, oh sure, we'll just do this. What they're taking on is a behemoth. It's going to be a very difficult road for them to hoe. I mean, I wish them all the best. And I think that they're going to be able to make some really good headway. It's going to be up to, like, the rest of us to start pestering our own doctors and saying, you know, can I just get my data at any time? Can can I make sure that you can't give my data without my permission?
You know, and how would you prove that that you didn't give somebody else my data without my permission? Because in this case, I could see this being a multisig situation. Your doc holds the key and you hold a key to your medical records. And unless those 2 keys are turned at the same time like a nuclear weapon, nobody's seeing that shit. Nobody. But the way that that would work, it would be a little difficult for the doctor to be able to update your medical files when you are not present there are problems with what I just said and I recognize that but I'm looking at this from like sort of a gestalt holistic you know way make it to where I don't know if the doctor sends your medical record somewhere it record for that send to be decrypted on the other end is going to require your your insect and and for you to sign for you to sign that message Right? For the doc to update the medical records, he could do that off maybe maybe a situation where he does it offline and then you get an email that says, hey, I've made, these particular upgrades or I've I've, you know, put this new new film of this CAT scan of your, you know, your head or whatever. I need it to go in your files. If you sign this message, that will happen automatically.
There are ways around the these problems. But what I think is the most important part here is that if we treat this like a Bitcoin transaction and say you don't move my medical records without my say so, however you can access them, but you're not writing anything into them without my permission so or you're certainly not sending them to another like outbound you're not sending them outbound to another hospital unless I say so Or you could say, Hey, look, I'll, you know, I'll sign like I'll sign over this particular insect and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. But at least it gives the patient the ability to have some sovereignty over their own patient data.
And the fact that there are so many different places where medical records are used under so many different auspices that it makes sense to use a protocol like Nostr where your InPubInsect login will have will provide the exact same information to the MRI machine or the x-ray guys or like because like a lot in a lot of places amazingly enough they don't all use the same system even if they're in the same hospital. Ask me how I know I worked at a hospital in IT. It is it is was not universal back then and I guarantee you it is certainly not universal now especially if you move hospitals or if you move health care providers.
Right? So this is a $4,500,000,000,000 industry that these 3 guys are going to disrupt. I want them to disrupt it. I want you to want them to disrupt it. Now, let's shift gears. Let's go back to mining and talk about Mara, who warns that AI mirrors the 2000s internet boom and firms risk overbuilding their infrastructure according to Bernstein. James Hunt from the block is writing this one. In a recent interview with analyst and research and brokerage firm Bernstein, Fred Thiel, CEO of Bitcoin miner, Mara, formerly Marathon Digital, said the current AI environment resembles the early 2000s Internet boom. And many companies, particularly smaller players, risk overbuilding infrastructure without sufficient demand.
Well, this could lead to potential financial difficulties, if not disaster, if clients cannot generate revenues. Bernstein digital asset lead, Gottman Chugani, wrote in a Thursday note to clients. However, Thiel did not rule out the benefits of the emerging niche suggesting that successful Bitcoin miners will increasingly integrate AI into their operations leveraging low cost energy and becoming energy partners to AI data centers and hyperscalers in the long term Bitcoin miner strategies have diverged considerably in 2024 when the stocks of AI diversifiers like Core Scientific Iron and Terra Wolf outperforming their pure play Bitcoin mining counterparts.
AI diversifiers have benefited from increasing demand for high performance computing and AI data center hosting services given their valuable power contracts pipeline however pure play firms have argued the return on Bitcoin mining's cheaper infrastructure and faster energization is far quicker than AI gestation periods, especially amid a potential bull run for the foremost cryptocurrency. Despite his warning, Thiel's long term view is an interesting shift from the pure play operator that has transitioned from an asset light miner to consolidating 54% of previously third party hosted capacity.
It also mirrors recent comments from rival Bitcoin miner Riot Platform CEO Jason Less who said the firm would be open to considering AI opportunities if the right partner and deal structure came along. On the Bitcoin mining side of things, Thiel said the company's objective was to eventually own 100% of its mining capacity, helping to reduce its cost and improve profit margins. Marr is currently focused on on-site power generation using standard flare gas or stranded and or flare gas. That gives the company an advantage in terms of acquiring gas at much lower rates compared to the energy grid, saving on cost and avoiding curtailment issues. Quote, we really wanna be able to maximize the amount of Bitcoin we're collecting, Thiel said.
Because if I can mine Bitcoin at 0 energy cost, my cost to acquire Bitcoin is substantially lower than anybody else in the industry, including Michael Saylor, end quote. Mara also has an ownership interest in the Bitcoin mining manufacturer, Auradyne, where Teal serves as a member of its board of directors. Mara participated in Auradyne's 81,000,000 and 80,000,000 series a and b funding rounds and previously acquired $35,500,000 in Auradigm preferred stock. The collaboration gives Mara access to proprietary chip technology helping it to develop custom miners optimized for immersion cooling improved operational efficiency and reducing reliance on external suppliers such as Bitmain MicroBT and Kanan.
However, Thiel also acknowledged that modular data centers powered by Flare Gas were also particularly suited to inference sorry, hold on inference AI as demand picks up over time due to their flexibility and scalability. Mara is also aiming for 50% of its revenue to come from non Bitcoin mining and offshore operations within the next 4 years designed to create a diversified technology company that can transform energy into value. Okay. So we began this story with Teal giving a warning and I want you to keep keep your mind on that. Bitcoin miner Mara warns AI mirrors the 2000's Internet boom and firms risk over building infrastructure.
That's according to Bernstein. Right? So but even even Fred Thiel is saying, sort of, the same thing. But then he, kinda, he, kinda, backs off on that, which I find odd. Because if you've got this warning that AI reflects the same thing that was happening in the 2000, and, by the way, it is there the the hype around AI right now and I'm not saying that AI is a garbage cow there are some very neat things that large language models and AI and that kind of stuff there's some neat stuff that it can do. It's just not going to solve every problem. It's going to create new problems, but it's also going to create new jobs. It's going to create new ways of thinking about writing, whether it's code or newsletters or I've experimented myself with just packaging up an entire transcript of a single show and say give it to chat gpt and say read through this and hit the high points.
And then it will say, okay. Well, you know, this was important apparently and this was important. I go, okay. Well, now do the same thing, but but form that into a newsletter, but make sure that it's not any longer than 500 words. And it does it. It's not that great at it, but it will do it. And I got that entire thing done within a minute from from literally copying pasting the entirety of a one show's transcript into a text file, given that text file to chat gpt, and saying read this and do this and then do this and then do this other thing. That's all within 60 seconds. Now, that gives a that gives a, you know, a good writer at least a place to start because one of the hardest things in the world is coming up with stuff ex nilo, which means from nothing, from a blank sheet of paper, from a blank screen with a word processor on it.
Right? But the way that it's being presented in the news, the hype is so bad that it almost exactly looks and feels like what was going on in the early 2000s or the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Because in remember, in 2,000, 2,000 and 1, the entire Internet thing, the whole Internet companies and pets.com and flowers.com and everything.com, it all died. It all died and it died hardcore. It died real fast and fortunes were wiped out and people were actually stranded in places like Austin, Texas. They had come out of California and started all these weird internet companies in Austin because, man, Austin was the place to go.
And their companies folded up like a cheap suit and they had nowhere to go. There was no company for them to go back to in California. They didn't have enough money to move back to California. And it changed the face of Austin forever. Because I remember Austin before the internet. And it was a really cool laid back place. Now Austin is not so laid back. You have to actually find it in little pockets. Be that as it may, I find this next story also from the block interesting because JPMorgan analysts say that Bitcoin miners face a narrowing window of opportunity to secure AI data center deals.
We've got 2 we've got a conflicting set of issues right here. We've got we've got JP Morgan saying dude you better act fast. Buy now. Right? The deal closes in 24 hours. You better put your money on the table. You got Peter Thiel saying, wait wait hold on. This kind of resembles the Internet of the 2000s. What's JP Morgan's play here? Because I think Thiel's right. I think Bernstein's right. I think this looks exactly like 2000s yet. We've got the largest bank at least in the United States, if not the whole world, saying you better you better buy in and you better do it now. Brian MacLeanan from The Block.
Bitcoin miners have a limited window of opportunity, act now, to sign contracts with hyperscalers and AI startups in the United States for data center and high performance computing services according to analysts at JPMorgan. They estimate that miners have approximately 9 months. Oh, they're given a time. Wow. 9 months and 9 months only to negotiate favorable deals while data center applications await approval in grid connections. Quote, we think select miners have around 9 months to sign favorable deals with a handful of well funded hyperscalers slash AI startups while data center applications remain in limbo, awaiting approval and or grid interconnects.
JPMorgan analyst Reginald l Smith and Charles Pierce said in a new report. The analysts highlight that this opportunity arises as the demand for AI driven compute continues to surge. And the report noted that Bitcoin mining facilities are increasingly recognized for their potential as AI GPU hosting centers. However, the pool of potential partners for Bitcoin miners is relatively small, primarily consisting of major hyperscalers and well funded AI startups. Notably, outfitting a 100 megawatt site with the latest generation GPUs can cost up to $3,000,000,000 That's billion with a b, underscoring the significant investment required.
JPMorgan suggests the Bitcoin miners could capitalize on the growing need for high performance compute hosting centers as they already possess much of the necessary infrastructure. Quote, US listed Bitcoin miners have access to more than 5 gigawatts of power in the United States with another 6 gigawatts in various stages of development, the analyst said. In contrast, there is a backlog of more than 12 gigawatts of data center capacity capacity in various stages of planning and construction, and approval and construction of those could take up to 6 years, the report added. The United States has approximately 1300 gigawatts of total electricity generation capacity, with data centers and bitcoin mining sites consuming just 2% or 21 gigawatts and less than 1% or 5 gigawatts of the country's energy, respectively.
The report said that the consensus views for NVIDIA and 5 of the largest US hyperscalers and a constrained power grid point to an insatiable demand for data center capacity throughout 2026. You're gonna believe Bernstein and Peter Thiel, or you're gonna believe JPMorgan? Because they're essentially sitting on opposite sides of the fence. They have a completely different take on this. I'm not sure what will happen. AI does have good usage potential, and that usage potential is fairly immediate. Just by logging into chatgpt, I can I can do some stuff?
You know, I'm not I'm not gonna, you know, release a new, you know, a daily newsletter given my transcripts just yet because it's easier to let gpt or chat gpt go through figure out what it is that you spent them that I spent the most time talking about And say, and and I can do that. I can say, given the amount of words written in this transcript about various various issues that are in this particular transcript, which one did I talk about the most and weight that as the most important and do that. And I can literally write that prompt. That is not a hard prompt to write. Right? And so it will I I can get it to do all kinds of neat stuff. But once I get it, I gotta rewrite it. I'm not I mean, it's like that's just kinda weak and cheap and and, you know, lazy to just let chat gpt do it all for you. But it's a good place to start instead of that ex nihilo I was talking about, you know, blank screen. It's easier to start and say, oh, well, shit. I've got stuff to work with. Now I can revamp, I can rewrite, I can reword, I can do all kinds of stuff.
Completely change the tone if I want to I can do all manner of things. So AI has utility. It does. And it's also not going away. This also mirrors the internet of the 2000s. Flowers.com from pets.com did not work that well because you still had to send them a check you couldn't pay for stuff online that was a real hindrance right In this particular case, we have some I mean, we could immediately see the the inventory of pets.com and see some fancy pictures and know how much it cost. But essentially, it was just a catalog. But AI, it's kind of the same kind of the same way. It's not there yet.
And it will probably crash. When? I think fairly soon. I think, honestly, within the next 9 to 12 months, you're going to see major players file for bankruptcy because they spent all their money. And I think one of them that's on the chopping block is OpenAI itself. They're burning through money at a rate that is unprecedented even in terms of the 2000 Internets if you adjust for stuff like, oh, I don't know, inflation. Right? But I find it it I'd still think that it's interesting that we've got these 2 voices in the dark, and they're telling, you know, western man to go left, and the other one is telling western man to go right, like the old meme.
There is some serious confusion about who thinks what, and that's going to be an interesting play to watch. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities also has the breaking story about the FBI arresting the Alabama man for the SEC Twitter hack. It's the top story. It's trending right now. Apparently, everybody is, like, really interested in this shit happening. But whatever. West Texas Intermediate is up scant. 0.01% to 70 and 39¢. Brent Norsey is down 0.15. Natural gas down 0.17. And gasoline is down 0.39% to $2.03 a gallon. Shining metal rocks are mostly in the red, but gold is doing well. It's up half a point, breaking the 27 100 mark to $2704.40.
Silver is down almost a point. Platinum is unchanged. Copper is down 1.2, but palladium is up 1 and a half. Ag is mostly in the red today. Biggest winner is sugar. A 0.68 percent to the upside. Biggest loser is coffee. 1 or no. Sorry. 1.16 to the downside. And livestock, live cattle is down 0.12, but lean hogs are up a 5th of a point. Feeder cattle are moving sideways down 0.07%. But the Dow is up a 3rd, the S and P is also up a 3rd, the Nasdaq is up 2 thirds, and the S and P mini is up 0.13%. We've had some downward pressure on Bitcoin this morning. We are at 67,410,000 well, sorry.
$67,400. It just flipped over and it it it you know, I get distracted. Shiny shit. $1,330,000,000,000 of market cap. We can only purchase 24.9 ounces of the shiny metal rock with our 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,768,802.36 of, and fees have freaking skyrocketed. Half of bitcoin in fees on average on a per block basis what in the hell change son of a bitch mempool is listing a 114 blocks carrying 232 unconfirmed transactions, clearing at high priorities rates of, 20 satoshis per vbyte, which is high. But how the hell we I that must have happened overnight. We must have had some extremely high fees last night while I was sleeping, probably why I had, like, 5 nightmares in a row. Who knows? Low priority is gonna get you in at 14 satoshas per vbyte.
Hash rate is chilling out at 60 671.3 xahashes per second. And from black and tan Bitcoin, I got de bravo with 23140 sats says cheers. Thank you, brother. Dabravko comes back again with 2340 says, please, someone think of the children. And he gives me a YouTube link on both of these, and I haven't watched them yet. God's death with 537 says, thank the wait. The k u, sir. Either he missed the n and added a space or he's saying, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Tobias De Pleb with a 100 says, cheers, and I think a hand clap. I'm not exactly sure. I'm kinda blind right now. Nostra Gang with a 100 says, Sola Satoshi is giving away a bid axe. Find the note. Like, share, follow. Good luck.
Chris Hartsell says, hey. Don't pick on bus drivers. Some of us aren't stupid. Sorry, Chris. I didn't mean to do that. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use for reasons that Elon Musk's Tesla may have moved $760,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. That may have been what happened last night. God, you know, Musk is spooking the market again. Let's find out what the hell is going on from CoinDesk and Sharra Malwa is riding at Elon Musk controlled Tesla. Created ripples earlier this week as it moved over $750,000,000 with the Bitcoin to new wallets after nearly 2 years of the stash being untouched.
The action sparked conversation around Tesla's intentions and concerns of further selling pressure the electric car maker as of the time of the move, roughly, oh, 40 hours ago. Okay. So that happened quite a while ago. Was the 4th largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, Bitcoin treasuries data showed, with about 10,000 Bitcoin. Tesla accumulated its holdings in 2021 and sold a sizable chunk amid the 2022 bear market. Available data from ARCEM Intelligence on the Wednesday move showed the BTC was transferred to new wallets and not to any exchange alleviating early fears of a sizable sale.
Tesla or Musk are yet to publicly comment on the movement. The reasons for now are limited to speculation and they range from wallet management to restructuring. CryptoQuant community analyst Martin told CoinDesk in a Telegram interview on Thursday. Another possible reason getting some social media chatter could be the consolidation of UTXOs like the process of combining multiple UTXO's into 1 or fewer UTXO's and those can be considered as individual unspent amounts of any token waiting to be used in future transactions Each UTXO used in a transaction increases the transaction size, which can lead to higher fees because miners charge based on the data size of the transaction.
Consolidating those leads to fewer inputs for future transactions, potentially reducing the cost and increasing the speed of a larger transaction in the future well here's the thing if we know these if we know these wallets then we and and we can see these transactions it's easy to to spot a consolidation transaction. You've got a lot of little UTXOs getting combined into one great big UTXO and this story says nothing about somebody saying that's in fact what happened. It's easy to see. We we know Tesla's wallet address. We know where shit moved. Just look at the transactions. Did they was there a bunch of little transact or little UTXOs that were combined together? If so, that is a consolidation event.
If there's a whole if there's a huge UTXO and it splits off into a whole bunch of little tiny UTXOs, but there's a whole, you know, big, you know, remaining UTXO left over, but there's, like, 40 payouts? Those are probably minor payouts. I mean, these these things we we know what these things look like. There are patterns. And humans are the best pattern recognition machine ever to happen in the universe. Right? So there's some other reasons that this could have happened. Compliance or possibly internal audits. Tesla may transfer the Bitcoin to meet accounting or legal obligations related to reporting or possibly internal audits Number 2 reason Tesla likely uses multiple wallets for operational purposes Why? They they don't actually operate with Bitcoin.
This doesn't seem likely because the newly created addresses use similar pay to pubkey hash addresses. Well, whatever. Okay. Maybe it's restructuring. This could be part of a strategy to reorganize Bitcoin Holdings in anticipation of future sales or loans similar to movement seen with Mt. Gox. However, that speculation should be avoided until there is evidence of a sale such as a transfer to Coinbase. And for now, that's not the case. So I why do I think he happened? Because he wants to pump Doge. He wants to scare the living piss out of everybody. And everybody like, not everybody, but there's many people in the Bitcoin community, many holders that are have weaker hands than you can possibly imagine. They get spooked for no reason whatsoever.
And Elon's not stupid. He knows that. And when he did that, you know what happened? He also if the timing is what I think it is, when he moved these coins, he also sent out a tweet somehow or another pumping Dogecoin. So Dogecoin pumped yesterday around 10%. We're seeing some weakness in the Bitcoin price since last night. All Elon Musk has to do is rattle your cage and Bitcoin just spills out. It's so easy. It's just that easy. Okay. Wait a minute. I got a I just screwed up and screwed up something. I need to get this story back. I accidentally closed something out. And it is Christopher Rourke from Cointelegraph telling us the five reasons why Trump's World Liberty Financial Token crashed and burned.
Now, I don't know if it actually crashed and burned, but it wouldn't surprise me. Let's find out what's going on here. Former president Donald Trump's token launch was something of a flop. On October 16th, yesterday, former president Donald Trump launched his World Liberty Financial token. The token's website claimed that it would allow investors to gain voting rights over a future decentralized financial protocol. However, after nearly a full day of trading, the token sales have been tepid. As of 10 am UTC October 17th, the token's website shows that only 848,630,000 of the token, which is about $12,700,000 worth on its presale price, has actually been sold, leaving an additional 19,100,000,000 coins.
1,000,000,000. Wow. That's $287,000,000 worth unsold. The amount sold on the 1st day constitutes just 4.24 percent of the total amount of coins minted. But why did the token flop? Here are five causes. There were limits on who could purchase Trump's token. Okay, that makes sense. Number 2, the token is not transferrable nor is it tradable. And then and then the website crashed. Oh, that's not that's not very helpful. And people people think it's a grift. Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you think it's a grift? It's a shitcoin. This is the dumbest thing that I've seen Donald Trump do in the presidency. This is like Kamala Harris telling whoever it was that was interviewing her that she wouldn't have changed a damn thing that Biden did. He's got like a 40% approval rating. It's one of the lowest approval ratings in the history of US presidents.
There's not a lot of people that like Joe Biden at this point. And she's like, nah man, I would have done the exact same thing. Are you shitting me? You're saying that you would you would you want a 40% approval rating as the president of the United States on day 1. That's what this is like. Why on earth would you risk would you risk it? Why would you risk doing this? This is the thing from Donald Trump. I don't understand. It's a bad it's a bad choice. It's a bad choice. And 5, and finally, the buying process is apparently very tedious. And there are whole sections of text that go along with these five points. But do you really want me to read them? I think not.
That's all we need to know. This is a this is the website's crashing. You can't transfer it. It's not tradable. It's there were limits. This is a I mean, even under, like, even under what I know of past ICO sales, this is a shitty ICO sale, man. Good luck, brother. I whatever. Maybe he'll do better in the elections than he did on his token sale. But Electrum 4.5.6 has been released. Testnet 4 and new hardware wallet support. Electrum is a lightweight Bitcoin and lightning wallet for all desktop platforms as well as Android. Sorry, iOS. This release integrates testnet 4, adds support for TrezorSafe 5 and Ledger Flex devices, and brings the ability to export multisig wallets over to Coldcard with USB alongside multiple bug fixes and improvements.
Android users can now see seed phrases and wallet details and adjust screen brightness when displaying QR codes. Nice. So there's that. If you are an Electra Wallet user, you may wanna go check that out. ESP miner version 2.3.0. Improvements and bug fixes. Now, this espminer this is an open source firmware designed to run on the bitaxe version 2 plus machines. So we're talking a little bit just about, you know, we're talking about bitaxe as well as this ESP. So the new bitaxe firmware, ESPminer 2.3.0, been released. A lot of bug fixes, so make sure that you go give it a try. All single chip hardware versions are supported, announced Scott 9,000.
The update sets the default CPU frequency to 240 megahertz adds stratum fallback support introduces separate network and regular settings in the UI, fixes firmware error handling, adds overheat mode alerts, and includes many other fixes and improvements. Quote, Huge thanks to the crude open source miners United for the contributions to the release. Open source wins, added Scott 9000. There is a whole laundry list of things that have been fixed or added. And I'm not going to read them. Well, I'll read the first few. Allow the password. Okay.
It literally says allow the password. Password by E Anderson in 3347. Allow connecting to open Wi Fi networks. Oh, I kind of don't like that. Web UI fix for power, watts, circle, visual visualization, version mask. And, dude, there's like 50. It just goes on and on and on. So this is not only an upgrade to the ESP stuff. This is a huge improvement. It is massive. So be sure and go get that thing if you are a BitX miner. Now, mentioned in there with Stratum well, Stratum themselves has a release. Stratumv2 SRI version 1.1.0 has been released, improved protocol crates documentation, and more testing abilities.
SRI is a reference implementation of the Stratum v 2 protocol written in Rust. Stratum v 2 is a next generation Bitcoin mining protocol designed to enhance the network efficiency and security and flexibility as well as decentralization new stratumv2sri release is out the release is focused on improving the protocol crates documentation and adding more testing abilities to the project moreover we have refined our release and git branching processes, announced the project. Quote, kudos to our contributors for making it happen and to all the community testers. You can use stratum benchmarking tools to check out the benefits of SV 2. Check out this updated guide here to get started with Stratum V2.
And then it's, like, what's new? Okay. Creates documentation has been rewritten. There's new integration test framework. There's new release and contribution process. And that seems to be it. So not as big as a release as the ESP thing, but hey, if you are running stratumv2, you might wanna consider getting this. And for those who don't know, Stratumv2 is something that is desperately needed in the world of mining. And it's going to be picked up by solo miners first, most likely. It somehow or another is not gaining as much traction in large mining, facilities.
Probably because it is a it's a bitch to change out your firmware, dude. On one computer, much less 1,000? So don't expect Stratum V2 to take everything over by storm. But it does do a lot for efficiency. It enables miners to select and have control over their own mining templates. It's it's really nice. And I I hope to see it more widely used than it is right now. But like I said, I think stratumv2 is firmly gonna be in the hands of the solo miners. And I really hope that more and more solo mining comes online. When I first got my, my my node BTC, software to put on a raspberry pi 4 and start up my own bitcoin node, people would ask me why are you running a bitcoin node? And I'd say I'm supporting the network and they're they just kinda laugh at me because I kinda knew better. Not really supporting the network that way.
I personally, I kinda disagree. I think I am. And you can have, you know, you can give me like any amount of why I'm not really helping support the network and why my, you know, my mempool in my bitcoin node may be doing more harm than good. I'm not going to listen to you. We need as many bitcoin full nodes running as possible. Now the same thing kinda happened with lightning my when I started a lightning network node on my node BTC software, I didn't have any open channels. And then I actually thought I was supporting the network. No. At that point, you're not doing anything.
You actually have to have open channels. You have to have incoming liquidity. You also have to have outgoing liquidity. Otherwise, you're not really supporting anything. And it took me a long time to figure that out. But, hey, you gotta start somewhere. I think the same thing is happening with solo mining. I think it's one of those things where we're gonna get a solo miner and half of us are gonna get it. We understand what it is. How do you do mining? What does the mining infrastructure and landscape look like? Then there's gonna be the other half of us who get it because we think we're actually going to get 3.125 Bitcoin because we're gonna hit a solo block.
Some people have, but the chances are kind of astronomical. It's a safer bet. If you're going to spend the money on a bit ax, just bet that you're not going to hit that. Do it for the right reasons. Use it as a learning tool to figure out what the landscape of mining actually looks like You only need this one little thing It makes almost no noise It doesn't get that hot It doesn't take that much electricity And yet it puts you in the same position as if you had a 1,000 miners in Iraq. And had, like, you know well, the one thing that you won't learn how to do with the bid acts is negotiate an electrical or an electricity contract with a provider. You're not going to be doing that. You're just going to plug it into your wall outlet.
But how to switch mine switch pools, how to solo mine, use stratumv2, what templates are. It'll get you into all of that for like I think like $300 to $400. I don't know what the the newest one the gamma cost, but let's just say $400. I spent like $900 or somewhere between $7 $900 on my start nine compute node. Right? And I had just decided that my raspberry pi was just getting too slow. You know, the block, the time chain was getting, you know, you know, especially after ordinals and inscriptions and all that crap, just it started getting real slow. So I was like, you know what? It's time, you know, and I plopped down the money. I'm going to plop down money for this bidax.
When there's enough gammas that are online, yeah, you're damn right, I'm going to buy 1. And it's not because I'm gonna be quote supporting mining. It's be gonna it's gonna be this one is gonna be because I want to learn about it. And I don't want to have to have an s19 screaming its ass off in the back room making my wife pissed off at me. I don't want to do that. I want to have a nice little mining experience so that I can learn how this shit works. And that's what I think is the the third the third rail. And what I mean by 3rd rail is that Bitcoin full node, which you need to be able to run the 2nd rail, a lightning full lightning node with open channels that have incoming and outgoing liquidity, and Bitcoin mining is the 3rd rail. I think, in fact, what I'm waiting for here is for start 9 to offer a power supply or a power supply that's enclosed within a chassis that allows me to plug in different start 9 modules.
Just, like, have a rack of 5, server ones that are all enclosed in this one thing that I put on the shelf. It's got a single network connection to my router. It's got a single plug that goes into my wall. And one whole node does nothing but a Bitcoin node. And another entire node does another Bitcoin node and maybe a lightning node. While another node has nothing or another one of the start nines has nothing to do with Bitcoin at all. It's just storage for pictures and documents that I share with my family. You see how this works? Because I think that we're kinda headed here. I think we're headed in this direction. I think we're headed in very small servers that serve particular purposes that can be run by a single or a couple of family members that services the entire family for well under, you know, a1000 well, let's let's call it $5, right?
You can do most of this with just a single server. With a single with a single start 9, like server 1 or server pure or whatever, you can do most of that shit. But if you're, like, a geek like me and you want, like, you don't mind spending a few extra dollars you might wanna separate some of this out. I'd love to be able to plug, like, a BitX miner that has a form factor that conforms to a start 9 spec that allows me to shove that son of a bitch right alongside my Bitcoin node. And it has the ability to get new air and vent old hot air.
Right? I love that. Like to have a space that's got like it's got like like like I don't know, 7 spaces. If I want to fill them all out, I could spend up to $5. If I only want to fill 3 of them out, I can still be under $1,000 and still have like a Bitcoin node, a Lightning node in place for all my pitchers, possibly like Bitwarden going on. I want to see that product live and in the wild. But back to the BitX thing, I really I haven't seen very many people laughing at other people who have said that they bought BitXs lately. I hope I had a hand in that. Please stop making fun of these people. Let's all learn how to mine.
That way, if something bad happens to the big miners in the world, we know how to mine. We're not left with our, you know, thumbs up our butts or standing around trying to pound sand. We actually know what to do. We may not have the hash rate that was once there, but we can still secure the network because we're competent in mining and we can have, like, people like bitaxe and Scott 9000 to thank for that. Alright. So that's the spiel. That's all I got for today. I am hungry. I am thirsty, and I'm going to 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.
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