Join me today for Episode 919 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- The Liability of Identity
- Germans Continue Selling Their Future
- Institutions Buy the Dip
- Samourai Developer TDev Makes Bail
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https://decrypt.co/238860/institutions-buy-dip-bitcoin-etfs-rebound-after-weeks-losses
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/us-government-agreed-to-release-tdev-on-bail/
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://www.cnbc.com/bonds/
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- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/x-coinbase-user-data-potentially-exposed-as-kyc-provider-au10tix-left-admin-credentials-open-for-18-months/
Liability of Identity
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Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. Uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:45 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 8th day of July 2024, and this is a palindrome episode 9 19 of Bitcoin, and the circle p is open for business. And today, it's sovereignty in style. You can get that sovereignty in style over at the leathermint dot com. That is the leathermint.com.
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Now, let's get into the show. Today's gonna be just a bit different. We are gonna start with news, but the second half, well, I'll just let you decide. We'll do it that way. Now the German government, these guys, I swear, I've never seen anybody just eviscerate the future of their citizenry more than the German gov well, no, I take that back. China, maybe. But as far as financial future and financial, future financial sovereignty is concerned, Dude, right now, the German government taking the cake, dude. And all the biscuits, by the way. The German government is selling yet more Bitcoin. $28, 000, 000 moves to exchanges and it does appear that these sales have already occurred.
The Bitcoin has already been sold. We'll have to wait for the rest of the day and into tomorrow and the rest of the week to see if they sell even more. And I'm sure that they will. But so far, according to Bitcoin Magazine, the German government has continued shifting portions of its massive Bitcoin trove to exchanges on Monday, transferring over $56, 000, 000 worth, worth of Bitcoin across multiple transactions. According to blockchain data, addresses linked to the German government moved a total of 500 BTC to Bitstamp and Coinbase, 250 BTC each, worth about $27, 900, 000 today and then transferred 500btc to an unmarked address.
They originally seized nearly 50, 000 BTC back in 2013, by the way. It's been a while that they've been holding this stuff and they just all of a sudden decided that now would be a good time to sell. They could have sold at 70. They could have sold at any like, we had a couple of bumps at, what, 6365 back when Elon Musk was sort of diving in. They could have sold it then, but no. No. No. No. No. They waited for Mt. Gox. This is on purpose, ladies and gentlemen. Don't think that it isn't. This comes after the government shifted around $390, 000, 000, in Bitcoin to various platforms since mid June.
And the steady flow of transfers to exchanges signals Germany's potential intentions to liquidate parts of its reserves. While reasons remain uncertain, the sales have fueled volatility in Bitcoin price, which has dipped below the $55, 000 mark last week. However, the amounts shifted so far equate to a relatively small portion of Germany's massive holdings. There's that word again, massive. I'll say something about that here in a second. After the latest transactions, the government still possesses around 40, 000 Bitcoin valued at nearly $2, 200, 000, 000 And nonetheless, the remaining reserves represent a significant share of daily Bitcoin trading volume. And as such, experts caution the threat of further turbulence lingering as long as Germany stays active in reducing its exposure.
The liquidations come just as long awaited creditor payouts from Mt. Gox's 2014 collapse appear set to begin. This timing might compound selling pressure on Bitcoin amid an already bearish macro environment. Yes. That's right. Vivek Sin is writing this, and he's got it correct. They waited. They waited. This this is on purpose. This is not coincidence. Nothing about what Germany is doing at all is coincidence. And I further posit the following, that they're doing it at the behest of people in the US Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Executive Administration of the United States of America. Because Germany is essentially the United States' little bitch.
I and my apologies to all German people out there. It's not you that I'm calling that. Your government has been a proxy for the United States government for years, as has the rest of Europe. That's just the way that it is. When we say do something, essentially Europe and the rest of the world says yes sir, we say jump, you say how high. It's it that needs to end. The it just needs it just needs to stop. And at least you guys got Joanna Couture, I believe is her name over there as a, minister of parliament and MP in the German Bundenstag.
And she says that she thinks what's going on is reprehensible and it just needs to stop. But nobody seems to be listening to the word or the voice of reason over there coming out of Joanna Kotag. Now institutions seem to be buying this dip because Bitcoin ETFs rebound after week after, sorry, weeks, not just week, a weeks of losses. This is out of decrypt written by Andrei Bogansky. As Bitcoin fell to its lowest price since February, some institutions likely bought the dip as digital asset investment products raked in $441, 000, 000 last week, according to Coinshares data. Tracking funds across multiple chains, Coinshares wrote that $398, 000, 000 was targeted by investors of Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Meanwhile, funds for Solana and Shitcoin numero uno saw $16, 010, 000, 000 respectively.
The The buying comes despite a 9% dip in price over the past week to 56, 000 spurred on by the German government's selling of seized bitcoin and looming repayments for Mt. Gox's creditors. And so far, Bitcoin based funds have seen $15, 800, 000, 000 in inflows this year. Excuse me. Recent price weakness prompted by selling pressure is likely being seen as a buying opportunity, Coinshares head of research James Butterfield wrote, adding that trading volumes for crypto related funds remain relatively subdued at $7, 900, 000. And this week's allocations followed a period of sustained outflows where crypto funds bled over $1, 000, 000, 000 over the 3 weeks prior.
From the perspective of inflows, Butterfield wrote that Solana solidified its stance as a top performer among shitcoins. Oh, for god's sakes. The people at Decrypt just you make me sad because then they talk about how well Cardano, Polkadot, and XRP are doing, whatever. Because altcoin altcoins have been punished much harder than Bitcoin, investors are taking a broader look at the crypto market. It's that simple. The shift coincides with the anticipation towards the approval of regulatory filings that would allow for spot Ethereum ETFs to trade. And that's 1 of the reasons why they're saying that ETFs or that that Ethereum products, seem to be doing a little bit better. But the great guts and feathers of the inflows into these products are coming back into Bitcoin even though there's this immense selling pressure. So it looks to me and I'm just spitballing here because I'm not a TA guy. I don't I I sometimes I do some charting stuff but not to trade, just to see if I can make a call to see if TA works.
But it just I don't know, man. It just seems that people kinda like the price somewhere around $55, 000 and they're okay with buying it at 55. They don't seem to be waiting for it to fall any further. It doesn't mean that it can't. I'm just saying that it seems that there's interest at 55 to through the $57, 000 market. And I just, I kinda actually find that just a bit interesting, just, you know, just so you know. Let me move I wanna move something over to here. Yeah. And I wanna do this 1. The United States government has agreed to release Samurais t dev on bail.
The US government has agreed to release samurai wallet founder William Longren Hill, or t dev, on bail, according to a letter filed on July 3rd, reports Lola Leitz for the rage. The filing states that Hill is expected to appear in the southern district of New York. Of course of course it's the southern district of New York. On July 9th or 10th, 2024 following his extradition from Portugal reveals a letter filed on July 3rd. And Hill's defense requests that he be released to his home in Lisbon, Portugal pending trial while the United States government wants him extradited to the United States. His bail is set currently at on a $2, 000, 000 bond provided by his family, which includes $200, 000 in cash and a family home in New York. The defense is willing to increase the bail package to 3, 000, 000 by adding additional family real estate in Europe if Hill is to be allowed to be released, to his home in Portugal.
The defense asserts that Hill poses no flight risk as the stringent bail package would leave his loved ones homeless if he failed to appear for trial. They also note that Hill is not facing a guaranteed sentence due to the novelty and aggressiveness of the charges. Hill's defense also describes the United States government's prosecution as aggressive, as it is expansive, akin to charging Apple for cybercrimes committed with Macbooks. And like such a charge, it impermissibly uses criminal law to effect policy change, he's facing charges that he can, should and will contest at trial.
It adds that FinCEN Guidance has long made clear that peer to peer apps like Samurai Wallet do not qualify as money transmitting services. The Southern District of New York held its first hearing on the DOJ's indictment against Samurai Wallet developers in May. The judge ruled that Keon Rodriguez, another samurai wallet developer, indicted and released on a $1, 000, 000 bond would remain under house arrest until the next hearing on September 4, 2024, scheduled to be at 11:30 AM Eastern Standard Time. So it's good that TDEV is actually gonna be released on bail.
How much money does he have stocked away? I mean, is he really not a flight risk? I don't I actually don't think he is because at that point, you're gonna burn your rep with your own family if you bail because they lose their house and their properties and stuff like that? I don't know, man. Seems a little, it seems like he's probably not going to run away. No matter how much money he has, sta socked away in Bitcoin and or other shit coins. So we have good news on that front. Now let's run some numbers. Okay. So before we start with CNBC Futures and Commodities, I wanted to say something about the I'm starting to see the use of the word massive a lot when we were talking about Germany's, Bitcoin reserves.
This kind of started like yesterday for me, but before that I really didn't see a whole lot of the word massive. And now I'm seeing it in a whole lot of different stories. And the reason that I find that important is that I wonder because 40, 000 bitcoin, honestly, it's a lot, but is it is it massive? I mean, shit that the United States government has more than that so I just I just want to caution people when we're seeing these headlines in the news that a lot of this may actually be more hyperbolic than factual. So just keep that in mind. Now, getting over to Futures and Commodities CNBC, CNBC Futures and Commodities, in fact. Oil is down quite a bit today. 0.87 percent back down to 8244 a barrel. Brent Norsee, likewise down 0.8% to 8584.
Natural gas doing what it does when oil goes down, natural gas goes up for whatever reason. 1.77% to the upside, $2.36 per 1, 000. Gasoline is down almost a half point. Gold and all of its brethren metal rocks are all down today. They're all stuck in swamp water. Gold is down 1 a third, silver is down 2 a quarter, platinum is down 3 points, copper is down 0.7%, Palladium down 2.61%. And almost everything in Ag is in the red too, save for rough rice, which is up 2.58%. The biggest loser today is wheat, almost a 4, sorry, a full 4 points to the downside. Livestock and live cattle.
0.66% of the downside. Lean hogs up 0.67%. Feeder cattle down a quarter. Your indices of legacy financial fame, the Dow, is down 0.09%. The S and P is unchanged. The Nasdaq is up 0.02%. The S and P mini is up 0.5%. Why are we moving sideways? Well, because people are waiting on financial news out of Jerome Powell, and there's some other numbers that are coming this week. So everybody's biding their time, just kinda holding on to see what yet another raft of numbers actually says. Since I've been, you know, covering, you know, the, futures and commodities and legacy markets, I've noticed something.
I have a question. How does anybody actually do any trading at all when there's always like this these hold times because everybody's always waiting on numbers? Oh, we can't do anything yet. We've gotta wait for the numbers. So there'll be, like, like, a whole week of nobody doing jack shit until numbers come out. And then there's like a week of trading. So for those of you who think that trading occurs all the time, no. It actually doesn't. There's a lot of times when people are basically doing a bunch of nothing. Why? Because we're waiting on numbers like this 1, $55, 810.
That's your price of Bitcoin. That is a $1, 100, 000, 000, 000 market cap. And now we can only buy 23.9 ounces of shiny metal rocks with that 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19, 720, 524.24 of. And fees have dropped again. 0.1 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis. And how many blocks are there? Well, there's a 172 and they're carrying a 187, 000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 12 satoshis per via byte. It was down to 6 earlier this morning. Low priorities are at 9 and anything under 2 are being purged from mempools around the world. Hash rate looks like it is at 646 exahashes per second, quite a bump up.
So, yeah, we are getting we are getting some blocks flying in, man. 27 minutes ago, 40 minutes ago, 44 minutes ago, 47 minutes ago. So, yeah, we're we're getting some some good hash rate going on now. From Blood Flood, the title of Bitcoin and episode 918. Letter 6173 boosted 5, 001 sat says, sat bottom girls make my rocking world go round. Slow slow with 21100 sat says, great show. Dobrovko with 2080 says, pleasant surprise to have 4th and 5th shows. I wrote this haiku while performing my work on the 3rd. Oh, damn it. I forgot to get that haiku up. Alright, Dubravco. You deserve it. Hold on for a sec. Let me see if I can get this in here.
He sent me a, a a noster link to this note. And if it will come up here, I will read it as such truckers July, I crest a hilltop. Separate firework shows at once. Work can have its perks. Blooms from a distance. Families sit in their awe. Why did I choose this? Is this a fair trade? More money for no home life? In quiet, I am numb. That's from our good friend de Bravo. Okay, de Bravo comes back with 20:7. He says people are stupid. Homo Sapiensapien are a cattle to be kept and a crop to be harvested. Tend to agree. Blogging Bitcoin with a 1000 says, I set up bloggingbitcoin.npubdot pro in about 3 minutes.
And all of the blogs I've written over the last 2 years appear on the page like mommy blogging magic. If you don't know what, inpub. Pro is, you need to go check it out, especially if you are a nostril and you have an inpub and an insect. User 507-40894 with a 1000 says great 1 today. Well, thank you brother. Perma nerds with 737 says a boost to keep you grounded. Pies with 420. Thank you, sir. No, thank you. God's death with 237. Thank you, sir. No, thank you. PGS with a 100, thank you, sir, no thank you. Satsmate with a 100, great podcast. New listener here. What I find crazy is how everyone panics at these levels when just 1 year ago it was 20, 000.
What does everyone think? All it is going to do is go up and to the right? Exactly. User 3864922 with a 100 says nothing, and Nostra Gang with a 100 says, glad you got your kitty back. Your neighbors are dumb. I know dude. They're I think it's just because they're more young than anything else. Alright. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use X, or rather Twitter, and Coinbase user data potentially exposed as KYC provider, Authentix, left admin credentials open for 18 months. Okay.
This has been in the news for long enough you probably know what this is sort of about. But I wanted to preface what I'm talking about next with this particular situation because what I wanna talk about right now is identity. Your identity for, you know, as a matter of fact, and my identity. Because honestly, here's the question, who do you think you are? And who do you think I am? Now you guys have a little bit more insight into who I am than a lot of other people as to my real identity. Like, if I were to tell you that I was, I don't know, Richard Bachman and that I've been lying about my name all this time.
What would you say? I mean, could you prove me wrong? You would you really wouldn't be able to prove me wrong. Not not in the not in the society that we live in today. So let me say let's just let's pretend that I'm Richard Bachman and who is that? Well, it's an American author. I write fiction And I decided a long time ago to separate my real name from my publishing name because I saw a real liability in having a singular identity for publishing purposes. And I've got a number in my head. And that number is about anywhere between a 154-100-500 people. We'll put it in there somewhere.
That's the number that defines a maximum social group that any 1 individual can actually know to the point that they can trust. Like, you're the like, if you're part of my social network under the Dunbar number, which is what this number is, then I trust you with my property. Or I most likely would be able to trust you over many other people that I do not know that well. I might trust you with coming to feed my cats while I'm on vacation. I might trust you enough to not leave my door unlocked when you leave the house after you fed my cats while I'm on vacation. I might actually trust you enough to go pick up my kids at school because I know you're not going to harm them because I know you personally.
I've drank, you know, maybe we've drank beer together, gone out to barbecues, I I don't know, hung out on so many occasions that I can consider you a friend. That's the way that we used to operate. All the way back well before the founding of the first kingdom of right? Like 15, 13, 12000 years ago, somewhere around there. Kingdoms, generally speaking, did not start getting established until what? Agriculture. Until we discovered that we could plant seeds and stay in the same place, we had no need for a kingdom or a city or anything like that.
We were hunter gatherers and we moved around. And we moved around in tribes that were not all that big. And 1 of the reasons why those tribes were small or at least this is what's posited by quote unquote scientists, is this notion of Dunbar's number. How well can you possibly know anybody? Well, that type of me knowing somebody, that persisted from well before the founding of all the way up until about mid-twentieth century 1950s 60s 70s what happened I you know in 1913 I could have probably gone into a bank with just me and gotten a bank account We didn't have Social Security in 1913, so I didn't have a Social Security card. Maybe they might have said, do you got a birth certificate? Maybe.
But chances are good, no. Because my bank would have been in my neighborhood. I would have known the people that worked at the bank and they could vouch for me saying, yeah, I know where that dude lives. And this is part of the Dunbar's we call it Dunbar's number, but I'm going to start referring to it as Dunbar's identity for purposes of the rest of the talk. Now, in the realm of living under Dunbar's identity where enough people know each other that we can meet all of our goods and services that we need between each other whether it's banking or you're run a restaurant or you've got a fruit stand or I fix shoes we have trade we have trust we have the ability to meet each other's needs but around the 60s 70s and getting into the 80s things changed drastically and now what we have is institutional numbers not done not the Dunbar's number no we have the institutional number because we are are close to 8, 000, 000, 000 people on the planet a 170 ish countries and all of us are intermingled with each other.
And if you take just the United States, what are your institutional numbers? You got a social security number most likely. You've got bank account numbers. You've got a driver's license. May unless you're too young to drive in which case you might have a state licensed ID you got payroll There's a number associated with that. You got a mortgage. There's another number associated with that. That's an institutional number. Retirement account Investment account There's all kinds of shit. But all of those identities, those institutional numbers are due to the centralization because of so many people A nation of 350, 375, 000, 000 such as the United States is right now.
When you start consolidating and centralizing institutions that give us huge banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America, I'm no longer trusting my neighborhood bank. When I call Wells Fargo because I've got a problem, not only am I trusting that person on the other end of the line with my bank account number my social security number and all the personal information that they can bring up on their screen I have to trust the human resources department corporate wise of Wells Fargo to hire somebody that I can trust. I have to trust the 10, 000 people at Wells Fargo with a single phone call to fix a problem.
That everything is going to work that way and that's due to centralization and centralization comes 1 of the pressures that causes centralization comes from more and more population it's not the only place that it comes from but it definitely comes from more and more population. So what's the liability? Well, we just saw the hack. We just these guys left these guys that were doing authentic autentix, a u 10 t I x, autentix. Get it? That's a horrible name. But they left their credentials open for 18 months and they were the guys that were taking all of your personal information for being on dead bird site and coinbase And we've seen hacks like this before. There's been hacks of credit ratings agencies. There's been hacks of health care agencies.
200, 000, 000 Americans got their health care information stolen, and God only knows what information they absconded with. I guarantee you Social Security numbers were part of it. As to whether or not your full medical records went along for the ride, who knows? But enough identifying information about you is now out in the wind to twist. There is a real functional liability to having an institutional grade identity. So there's a Dunbar and now there's what I'm calling the institutional identity. And these social security numbers and these banks accounts and these driver's licenses, these payrolls and these mortgages, they all link together but none of those actually link back to me as an identity. Now, and here's what I mean by that. You're gonna say, oh, you're crazy, but check this out.
If I walk into a bank that I've never done business with and I want to open up an account, what is it that they want from me? They're gonna want my social security number at a bare minimum. They don't care that I'm standing right in front of them they don't know me and they're not going to a) take the time to get to know me and b) they don't have the time to take to get to know me because of all the centralized centralizing forces of the modern world. So now, I all all they care about is that I have a Social Security number and that they can run through a machine and it says this is a valid Social Security number this guy is who he says he is but I'm standing right there yet I would not be able to have an identity without the Social Security number the number has become my identity that's why I'm saying that it doesn't these numbers they identify each other but they don't really identify me as a person who I am and whether or not I'm going to steal all of your shit.
We used to do that with the Dunbar identity. You could trust me because you knew me. I didn't present back in like if we were 10000 years ago and we were in the city of or whatever like little actually let's you know I don't know Somewhere in the Fertile Crescent. Right? Some city in the Fertile Crescent, couple 1000 years into agriculture, I don't have a Social Security number there's not that many numbers that they're going to issue back in those days record keeping was a bitch they're just they just want to know who I am I am my identity but not today today is different Today I have a raft of interlinked numbers and those are now my identity.
And sure they can link back to me but what I'm trying to say is that I no longer represent my identity These numbers now represent my identity, and that is a huge liability. In China, if you were a youth and you went to 1 of these protests that the government did not really like, kind of critical of the Chinese government, if you were caught on camera, that camera was going to link your facial structure back to a set of numbered identities. And they were going to say ah that person can no longer buy public transportation tickets You can't get on a train anymore. That happened. That's not fiction. That actually occurred.
That's a fact. Let's go we don't even have to go to China to figure this shit out. We can just go up north to our to the great white north, the land of John Candy, Canada, the Canadian trucker protest. And no matter what side of the fence you sat on, that you liked what happened to the Canadian truckers or that you felt it was abhorrent that of what happened to the Canadian truckers. It doesn't matter because the fact of the matter is is that as those people were identified, their true institutional identity was compromised because they lost their bank account. They lost their ability to do any kind of banking. Their credit cards were shut down. Their debit cards were shut down. They had money in a bank. They couldn't even go to the bank physically And they because they were saying, no. You're you're not allowed to have your money. You cannot access this bank account.
And then they would tell them that they gotta go find another bank, but the other bank also knew about their institutional identity. And they said, no, you can't have a bank account. And we forgot about this. Some of these people are still struggling with this today. That's the liability behind these numbers. That's the liability now behind your institutional identity. What was our liability with the Dunbar identity? Reputation. If I stole from you or did you some kind of harm and you were able to prove it to the small group of people between 154 100 to 500 people, my reputation would burn to the ground instantly it would take me years to develop the reputation and seconds to burn it down But that identity is directly linked to me and my actions.
Not some interpretation of my actions. Not I just don't like what this guy is doing and since I have the power to shut off his bank accounts I'm going to do just that or your social media whatever because all of that was linked together right the Dunbar's identity had much less general liability involved with it than these institutional identities that we've been given today. I didn't ask for mine. Did you ask for your institutional set of numbers that is your modern identity? Probably not. In a way you did, and I did because I went to go get a driver's license. I went to go get a bank account but when you're having to navigate the modern world and there's no other way to do it then you're sort of forced to take on this institutional identity.
You're also forced to take on the liability. Now other other podcasters, especially Bitcoiners in the space, basically just say this is just k y c bullshit and they're right but I'm looking at it from a different perspective. I wanna look at it from from the people who think that they're just, you know, they're they love government, they think that city state is great, they, you know, rah rah patriotic, and they'll get every single piece of identifying information that they possibly can and they're just fine with it until the day that they're not. Until the day that they do something that somebody else really doesn't like. And they'll use their institutional identity and the liability that comes along for the ride to screw them over and make their life a misery.
Whereas, with the Dunbar liability, let's say that you lied about me, then it's 1 person's word against 5 or 4 99 other people that know who I am. I'm part of their social network. I'm part of their physical I trust you I've known this guy for years years years social network and they're like we just can't see him doing that 4 99 attitudes are going to Trump but in the modern world if that 1 attitude is the president of a bank and I pissed him off because maybe I accidentally ran over his dog and he was able to correctly identify me from a raft of institutional numbers, boom, my bank account can get shut down or all my social media deleted.
And anything that I've anybody I've ever followed, anybody's ever followed me, anything that I've ever written, just gone in the blink of an eye. So let's go back to this Richard Bachman character that I was talking about when I first started into the second part of the show. Who is Richard Bachman? Well, he's not me. I really am David Bennett. I I say my name at the start of every show. It's it's it's odd. I've been I've been called out for being anonymous and I'm like have you actually listened to the show? Just because I use a a nim for, when I was about back on Twitter or and I still use a NIM when I whenever it is that I go to Twitter. I use a NIM when I'm on Nostra.
Most people a lot of people know me as none new business, but I've gotten accused of of hiding behind a NIM. And I said, go listen to podcast. Every at the I say, good morning. This is David Bennett. I I don't know how to be much more clear about that. So, clearly, I'm lying about my identity being Richard Bachman. So who is Richard Bachman? Well, that's the pen name for Stephen King, The author. And in case you don't know who Stephen King is, if you're the in the United States or Europe, I don't know what rock you're living under, but if you're from, like, India or, you know, somebody that's not in the west, I can almost understand it. Great author, been around for decades, written hundreds of books. I mean this guy is prolific.
And he's so prolific that he actually had to get a pen name. And that's why he came up with Richard Bachman. And it wasn't because he wanted to publish, I don't know, ideas that that were foul in the face of government or institutions or even the populace at large. No. He got a pen name because at the time that he was coming up in his career it was just unheard of that any author would write more than 1 book every year and I don't know if you've seen Stephen King's body of work but he clearly can write more than 1 book a year and he wanted to publish more than 1 book a year and his publisher said no we you don't do that that's just not kosher we can't allow that shit to happen so he convinced his publisher to let him have a pen name a second identity, a NIM if you were, so that he would be able to publish a whole bunch of other work without running afoul of his publishing house, and without his publishing house running afoul of what is generally accepted practice in the written publishing world at the time that he was doing this so what does that mean?
That means that Stephen King himself, even back in the 70s identified his having a singular identity as a liability to his career at the time to his future career. His publishing house identified a liability of allowing this other identity to do this thing and it would have hurt their identity so Stephen King's prolific writing his ability to just just get it on a typewriter and just knock these things out was a liability for them. So they had to come up with a new identity for Stephen King so that neither Stephen King as a brand or the publishing house which at the time I believe was Doubleday would not have their identity impinged.
You see how this works? This is even back in the seventies when many of us were still running on Dunbar's number or Dunbar's identity. And even then, there was some liability. But now where are we? I told you about social security's numbers and bank account numbers and driver's license and payroll and mortgage or retirement investment accounts. They all have numbers. Now we can link all that to everything about social media, and Twitter, and YouTube, and threads, and blue sky, and what else is there, TikTok, and, I mean, there's a whole host of them. You know it, I know it. And we've seen people just become canceled like that.
After they get their bank account shut down then all of a sudden Twitter deletes their Twitter account and then all of a sudden they're just black hold as a person in a society that operates in a digital matter. But what if I told you? What if I told you that there was another way? That there was another way to represent who you are? A digital Dunbar's identity. Well, there is. And it's called a Nostra key pair. So, when all the people that listen to me that don't get on Noster, when all of you guys rolled your eyes back in your head, stop it and listen, We are coming to a time when we should not, not only can we not, we should no longer trust our identity as given by the institutions.
Your institutional identity is really an institutional liability. And the only way to get past that is to start operating at a different level of identity I posit that the privatepubliccryptographickeypair that is provided to you by Noster is going to be the way that we start moving forward to start regenerating ideas in a safe manner of which we cannot be canceled. And if we do it right, cannot be connected back to our institutional identity. And you don't really we really shouldn't be doing that. We really shouldn't be allowing our digital Dunbar's identity to connect back to our institutional identity.
That is a very dangerous situation. So be aware for all of you guys that do use Nostr, keep your identities separate. You're not going to go delete your bank account some of you have some of you will but most of you probably won't you're not going to cut your driver's license up You can't get rid of your Social Security number, right? You could become a hermit, but in general generally speaking you're not going to do it and you're not going to tell payroll that you don't want your payroll number anymore because they're going to need that to process your payroll. You're not going to tell your mortgage company that you're not going to identify as, you know, any longer as this name with this with this mortgage number. You're you're not going to do that.
So, there's going to be a large section of the population that is alive today that is going to continue to operate in the legacy world whether we want to whether we like it or not then we're some of us that are alive today have our foot firmly planted in the digital Dunbar identity that which is provided right now by Nostr. That's going to contain a lot more than just Nostr because the connections are starting to form even though I don't like Blue Sky it's connecting to nostr I used to use mastodon a lot I don't anymore because I have noster yet there are connections forming between nostril protocol and mastodon also known as activity pub mastodon sort of a layer on top of this protocol called activity pub right others are coming along for the ride as those networks start to fuse together we're going to see things that is unbelievable some of it's gonna be unbelievably bad maybe Not exactly sure if it's gonna be all roses, but some of it is going to come up roses. Some of it is going to be so much better and you're going to feel so much freer. But if you're not going to even try to look at what I'm saying by getting a nostril identity, then you deserve everything that's going to come to you sometime somewhere soon in the future you're going to do something and you're going to be identified as the 1 who did it even though you didn't think it was wrong and you're going to get host for it.
So finally for the day if you are listening to me and you have not got on nostril you are missing not just Noster because it's not just social media in fact social media in my opinion is about maybe a tenth of the potential and that's saying quite a lot it's probably more like 5 somewhere in single digit percentages of social media the rest of it we have yet to discover I told you last week that now events in not or websites are now events in Nostra because of npub.pro entire websites are events and those are tied to 2 pieces of information and those are the only 2 pieces of information that you'll ever need which means that they really don't have to be crossed with any other pieces of information.
Not like we do in institutional identification where it's not only your Social Security number but they also need your driver's license to open a bank account. So now you have 3 pieces of information that are forever linked together: your social security number, your driver's license number, and your bank account number. In Nostriland or in the digital Dunbar's identity, you only need your NSEC, your private key, and your NPUB, your public key. That's it. Those are the only 2 linked pieces of information that you need moving forward in the future.
Pablo is teased that he's able to put money on relays, on nostril relays. I'm hoping I get to interview him about that but he doesn't want to say anything else until he has a huge solid working model of how this works He actually has a small working model and it does work. He zapped me directly from a relay that he runs using his Insec Inpub directly to my Insec Inpub via Master. And it didn't come from an e cash wallet. It didn't come from, as far as I know, unless he embedded an e cash wallet inside the relay. But from what I understand, it came directly from the relay. So does that mean that bank accounts are now just my insect input?
Could be. It's not impossible. And if I were you, I would I would seriously start thinking about that. I can put videos up I can put long form blog post up all on the nostril protocol and I don't I can go to any 1 of a 100 different clients that do a completely different thing than what primal does or what coreacle does although coreacle is starting to expand quite nicely and that's coreacle. Social that's my my friend huddlebod that that's his baby and it's coming along quite nicely. But there's highlighter from Pablo f 7 z. This guy was just talking about about putting money on relays, And it does something that primal doesn't do.
If you're going to continue to sleep on Nostr while the rest of the institutional identity numbers are burning to the ground I cannot help you any longer. It doesn't take all that much energy. And if you, you know, if you don't even try it, then you don't have any excuses. It is not just okay, I spun up a number and I got over on Primal and I don't like it. That's that's not trying. That's not putting any real energy into figuring out what it is that I'm trying to tell you about. I'm going to do another show at 1 point or another, probably next week, that talks more about the digital Dunbar number.
But I haven't written that yet, and I'm out of time, So I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. Uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:45 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 8th day of July 2024, and this is a palindrome episode 9 19 of Bitcoin, and the circle p is open for business. And today, it's sovereignty in style. You can get that sovereignty in style over at the leathermint dot com. That is the leathermint.com.
You can get wallets and belts and passport holders and all manner of hand built leather goods. Some of the finest craftsmanship that I've seen in a very very long time. Get a hold of them directly at the leathermint.com and put in bitcoinand, all 1 word, just bitcoinand, nothing else, just bitcoinand. And you will get 10% off. And that is the only way that they're gonna know that I sent you from the show and the circle p, and they will give me some of those sweet sweet satoshis back. If you wanna get a hold of them over on Nostra, it is at Leathermint. And on dead birds' sight, it is at the Leather Mint.
Now, let's get into the show. Today's gonna be just a bit different. We are gonna start with news, but the second half, well, I'll just let you decide. We'll do it that way. Now the German government, these guys, I swear, I've never seen anybody just eviscerate the future of their citizenry more than the German gov well, no, I take that back. China, maybe. But as far as financial future and financial, future financial sovereignty is concerned, Dude, right now, the German government taking the cake, dude. And all the biscuits, by the way. The German government is selling yet more Bitcoin. $28, 000, 000 moves to exchanges and it does appear that these sales have already occurred.
The Bitcoin has already been sold. We'll have to wait for the rest of the day and into tomorrow and the rest of the week to see if they sell even more. And I'm sure that they will. But so far, according to Bitcoin Magazine, the German government has continued shifting portions of its massive Bitcoin trove to exchanges on Monday, transferring over $56, 000, 000 worth, worth of Bitcoin across multiple transactions. According to blockchain data, addresses linked to the German government moved a total of 500 BTC to Bitstamp and Coinbase, 250 BTC each, worth about $27, 900, 000 today and then transferred 500btc to an unmarked address.
They originally seized nearly 50, 000 BTC back in 2013, by the way. It's been a while that they've been holding this stuff and they just all of a sudden decided that now would be a good time to sell. They could have sold at 70. They could have sold at any like, we had a couple of bumps at, what, 6365 back when Elon Musk was sort of diving in. They could have sold it then, but no. No. No. No. No. They waited for Mt. Gox. This is on purpose, ladies and gentlemen. Don't think that it isn't. This comes after the government shifted around $390, 000, 000, in Bitcoin to various platforms since mid June.
And the steady flow of transfers to exchanges signals Germany's potential intentions to liquidate parts of its reserves. While reasons remain uncertain, the sales have fueled volatility in Bitcoin price, which has dipped below the $55, 000 mark last week. However, the amounts shifted so far equate to a relatively small portion of Germany's massive holdings. There's that word again, massive. I'll say something about that here in a second. After the latest transactions, the government still possesses around 40, 000 Bitcoin valued at nearly $2, 200, 000, 000 And nonetheless, the remaining reserves represent a significant share of daily Bitcoin trading volume. And as such, experts caution the threat of further turbulence lingering as long as Germany stays active in reducing its exposure.
The liquidations come just as long awaited creditor payouts from Mt. Gox's 2014 collapse appear set to begin. This timing might compound selling pressure on Bitcoin amid an already bearish macro environment. Yes. That's right. Vivek Sin is writing this, and he's got it correct. They waited. They waited. This this is on purpose. This is not coincidence. Nothing about what Germany is doing at all is coincidence. And I further posit the following, that they're doing it at the behest of people in the US Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the Executive Administration of the United States of America. Because Germany is essentially the United States' little bitch.
I and my apologies to all German people out there. It's not you that I'm calling that. Your government has been a proxy for the United States government for years, as has the rest of Europe. That's just the way that it is. When we say do something, essentially Europe and the rest of the world says yes sir, we say jump, you say how high. It's it that needs to end. The it just needs it just needs to stop. And at least you guys got Joanna Couture, I believe is her name over there as a, minister of parliament and MP in the German Bundenstag.
And she says that she thinks what's going on is reprehensible and it just needs to stop. But nobody seems to be listening to the word or the voice of reason over there coming out of Joanna Kotag. Now institutions seem to be buying this dip because Bitcoin ETFs rebound after week after, sorry, weeks, not just week, a weeks of losses. This is out of decrypt written by Andrei Bogansky. As Bitcoin fell to its lowest price since February, some institutions likely bought the dip as digital asset investment products raked in $441, 000, 000 last week, according to Coinshares data. Tracking funds across multiple chains, Coinshares wrote that $398, 000, 000 was targeted by investors of Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Meanwhile, funds for Solana and Shitcoin numero uno saw $16, 010, 000, 000 respectively.
The The buying comes despite a 9% dip in price over the past week to 56, 000 spurred on by the German government's selling of seized bitcoin and looming repayments for Mt. Gox's creditors. And so far, Bitcoin based funds have seen $15, 800, 000, 000 in inflows this year. Excuse me. Recent price weakness prompted by selling pressure is likely being seen as a buying opportunity, Coinshares head of research James Butterfield wrote, adding that trading volumes for crypto related funds remain relatively subdued at $7, 900, 000. And this week's allocations followed a period of sustained outflows where crypto funds bled over $1, 000, 000, 000 over the 3 weeks prior.
From the perspective of inflows, Butterfield wrote that Solana solidified its stance as a top performer among shitcoins. Oh, for god's sakes. The people at Decrypt just you make me sad because then they talk about how well Cardano, Polkadot, and XRP are doing, whatever. Because altcoin altcoins have been punished much harder than Bitcoin, investors are taking a broader look at the crypto market. It's that simple. The shift coincides with the anticipation towards the approval of regulatory filings that would allow for spot Ethereum ETFs to trade. And that's 1 of the reasons why they're saying that ETFs or that that Ethereum products, seem to be doing a little bit better. But the great guts and feathers of the inflows into these products are coming back into Bitcoin even though there's this immense selling pressure. So it looks to me and I'm just spitballing here because I'm not a TA guy. I don't I I sometimes I do some charting stuff but not to trade, just to see if I can make a call to see if TA works.
But it just I don't know, man. It just seems that people kinda like the price somewhere around $55, 000 and they're okay with buying it at 55. They don't seem to be waiting for it to fall any further. It doesn't mean that it can't. I'm just saying that it seems that there's interest at 55 to through the $57, 000 market. And I just, I kinda actually find that just a bit interesting, just, you know, just so you know. Let me move I wanna move something over to here. Yeah. And I wanna do this 1. The United States government has agreed to release Samurais t dev on bail.
The US government has agreed to release samurai wallet founder William Longren Hill, or t dev, on bail, according to a letter filed on July 3rd, reports Lola Leitz for the rage. The filing states that Hill is expected to appear in the southern district of New York. Of course of course it's the southern district of New York. On July 9th or 10th, 2024 following his extradition from Portugal reveals a letter filed on July 3rd. And Hill's defense requests that he be released to his home in Lisbon, Portugal pending trial while the United States government wants him extradited to the United States. His bail is set currently at on a $2, 000, 000 bond provided by his family, which includes $200, 000 in cash and a family home in New York. The defense is willing to increase the bail package to 3, 000, 000 by adding additional family real estate in Europe if Hill is to be allowed to be released, to his home in Portugal.
The defense asserts that Hill poses no flight risk as the stringent bail package would leave his loved ones homeless if he failed to appear for trial. They also note that Hill is not facing a guaranteed sentence due to the novelty and aggressiveness of the charges. Hill's defense also describes the United States government's prosecution as aggressive, as it is expansive, akin to charging Apple for cybercrimes committed with Macbooks. And like such a charge, it impermissibly uses criminal law to effect policy change, he's facing charges that he can, should and will contest at trial.
It adds that FinCEN Guidance has long made clear that peer to peer apps like Samurai Wallet do not qualify as money transmitting services. The Southern District of New York held its first hearing on the DOJ's indictment against Samurai Wallet developers in May. The judge ruled that Keon Rodriguez, another samurai wallet developer, indicted and released on a $1, 000, 000 bond would remain under house arrest until the next hearing on September 4, 2024, scheduled to be at 11:30 AM Eastern Standard Time. So it's good that TDEV is actually gonna be released on bail.
How much money does he have stocked away? I mean, is he really not a flight risk? I don't I actually don't think he is because at that point, you're gonna burn your rep with your own family if you bail because they lose their house and their properties and stuff like that? I don't know, man. Seems a little, it seems like he's probably not going to run away. No matter how much money he has, sta socked away in Bitcoin and or other shit coins. So we have good news on that front. Now let's run some numbers. Okay. So before we start with CNBC Futures and Commodities, I wanted to say something about the I'm starting to see the use of the word massive a lot when we were talking about Germany's, Bitcoin reserves.
This kind of started like yesterday for me, but before that I really didn't see a whole lot of the word massive. And now I'm seeing it in a whole lot of different stories. And the reason that I find that important is that I wonder because 40, 000 bitcoin, honestly, it's a lot, but is it is it massive? I mean, shit that the United States government has more than that so I just I just want to caution people when we're seeing these headlines in the news that a lot of this may actually be more hyperbolic than factual. So just keep that in mind. Now, getting over to Futures and Commodities CNBC, CNBC Futures and Commodities, in fact. Oil is down quite a bit today. 0.87 percent back down to 8244 a barrel. Brent Norsee, likewise down 0.8% to 8584.
Natural gas doing what it does when oil goes down, natural gas goes up for whatever reason. 1.77% to the upside, $2.36 per 1, 000. Gasoline is down almost a half point. Gold and all of its brethren metal rocks are all down today. They're all stuck in swamp water. Gold is down 1 a third, silver is down 2 a quarter, platinum is down 3 points, copper is down 0.7%, Palladium down 2.61%. And almost everything in Ag is in the red too, save for rough rice, which is up 2.58%. The biggest loser today is wheat, almost a 4, sorry, a full 4 points to the downside. Livestock and live cattle.
0.66% of the downside. Lean hogs up 0.67%. Feeder cattle down a quarter. Your indices of legacy financial fame, the Dow, is down 0.09%. The S and P is unchanged. The Nasdaq is up 0.02%. The S and P mini is up 0.5%. Why are we moving sideways? Well, because people are waiting on financial news out of Jerome Powell, and there's some other numbers that are coming this week. So everybody's biding their time, just kinda holding on to see what yet another raft of numbers actually says. Since I've been, you know, covering, you know, the, futures and commodities and legacy markets, I've noticed something.
I have a question. How does anybody actually do any trading at all when there's always like this these hold times because everybody's always waiting on numbers? Oh, we can't do anything yet. We've gotta wait for the numbers. So there'll be, like, like, a whole week of nobody doing jack shit until numbers come out. And then there's like a week of trading. So for those of you who think that trading occurs all the time, no. It actually doesn't. There's a lot of times when people are basically doing a bunch of nothing. Why? Because we're waiting on numbers like this 1, $55, 810.
That's your price of Bitcoin. That is a $1, 100, 000, 000, 000 market cap. And now we can only buy 23.9 ounces of shiny metal rocks with that 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19, 720, 524.24 of. And fees have dropped again. 0.1 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis. And how many blocks are there? Well, there's a 172 and they're carrying a 187, 000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 12 satoshis per via byte. It was down to 6 earlier this morning. Low priorities are at 9 and anything under 2 are being purged from mempools around the world. Hash rate looks like it is at 646 exahashes per second, quite a bump up.
So, yeah, we are getting we are getting some blocks flying in, man. 27 minutes ago, 40 minutes ago, 44 minutes ago, 47 minutes ago. So, yeah, we're we're getting some some good hash rate going on now. From Blood Flood, the title of Bitcoin and episode 918. Letter 6173 boosted 5, 001 sat says, sat bottom girls make my rocking world go round. Slow slow with 21100 sat says, great show. Dobrovko with 2080 says, pleasant surprise to have 4th and 5th shows. I wrote this haiku while performing my work on the 3rd. Oh, damn it. I forgot to get that haiku up. Alright, Dubravco. You deserve it. Hold on for a sec. Let me see if I can get this in here.
He sent me a, a a noster link to this note. And if it will come up here, I will read it as such truckers July, I crest a hilltop. Separate firework shows at once. Work can have its perks. Blooms from a distance. Families sit in their awe. Why did I choose this? Is this a fair trade? More money for no home life? In quiet, I am numb. That's from our good friend de Bravo. Okay, de Bravo comes back with 20:7. He says people are stupid. Homo Sapiensapien are a cattle to be kept and a crop to be harvested. Tend to agree. Blogging Bitcoin with a 1000 says, I set up bloggingbitcoin.npubdot pro in about 3 minutes.
And all of the blogs I've written over the last 2 years appear on the page like mommy blogging magic. If you don't know what, inpub. Pro is, you need to go check it out, especially if you are a nostril and you have an inpub and an insect. User 507-40894 with a 1000 says great 1 today. Well, thank you brother. Perma nerds with 737 says a boost to keep you grounded. Pies with 420. Thank you, sir. No, thank you. God's death with 237. Thank you, sir. No, thank you. PGS with a 100, thank you, sir, no thank you. Satsmate with a 100, great podcast. New listener here. What I find crazy is how everyone panics at these levels when just 1 year ago it was 20, 000.
What does everyone think? All it is going to do is go up and to the right? Exactly. User 3864922 with a 100 says nothing, and Nostra Gang with a 100 says, glad you got your kitty back. Your neighbors are dumb. I know dude. They're I think it's just because they're more young than anything else. Alright. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use X, or rather Twitter, and Coinbase user data potentially exposed as KYC provider, Authentix, left admin credentials open for 18 months. Okay.
This has been in the news for long enough you probably know what this is sort of about. But I wanted to preface what I'm talking about next with this particular situation because what I wanna talk about right now is identity. Your identity for, you know, as a matter of fact, and my identity. Because honestly, here's the question, who do you think you are? And who do you think I am? Now you guys have a little bit more insight into who I am than a lot of other people as to my real identity. Like, if I were to tell you that I was, I don't know, Richard Bachman and that I've been lying about my name all this time.
What would you say? I mean, could you prove me wrong? You would you really wouldn't be able to prove me wrong. Not not in the not in the society that we live in today. So let me say let's just let's pretend that I'm Richard Bachman and who is that? Well, it's an American author. I write fiction And I decided a long time ago to separate my real name from my publishing name because I saw a real liability in having a singular identity for publishing purposes. And I've got a number in my head. And that number is about anywhere between a 154-100-500 people. We'll put it in there somewhere.
That's the number that defines a maximum social group that any 1 individual can actually know to the point that they can trust. Like, you're the like, if you're part of my social network under the Dunbar number, which is what this number is, then I trust you with my property. Or I most likely would be able to trust you over many other people that I do not know that well. I might trust you with coming to feed my cats while I'm on vacation. I might trust you enough to not leave my door unlocked when you leave the house after you fed my cats while I'm on vacation. I might actually trust you enough to go pick up my kids at school because I know you're not going to harm them because I know you personally.
I've drank, you know, maybe we've drank beer together, gone out to barbecues, I I don't know, hung out on so many occasions that I can consider you a friend. That's the way that we used to operate. All the way back well before the founding of the first kingdom of right? Like 15, 13, 12000 years ago, somewhere around there. Kingdoms, generally speaking, did not start getting established until what? Agriculture. Until we discovered that we could plant seeds and stay in the same place, we had no need for a kingdom or a city or anything like that.
We were hunter gatherers and we moved around. And we moved around in tribes that were not all that big. And 1 of the reasons why those tribes were small or at least this is what's posited by quote unquote scientists, is this notion of Dunbar's number. How well can you possibly know anybody? Well, that type of me knowing somebody, that persisted from well before the founding of all the way up until about mid-twentieth century 1950s 60s 70s what happened I you know in 1913 I could have probably gone into a bank with just me and gotten a bank account We didn't have Social Security in 1913, so I didn't have a Social Security card. Maybe they might have said, do you got a birth certificate? Maybe.
But chances are good, no. Because my bank would have been in my neighborhood. I would have known the people that worked at the bank and they could vouch for me saying, yeah, I know where that dude lives. And this is part of the Dunbar's we call it Dunbar's number, but I'm going to start referring to it as Dunbar's identity for purposes of the rest of the talk. Now, in the realm of living under Dunbar's identity where enough people know each other that we can meet all of our goods and services that we need between each other whether it's banking or you're run a restaurant or you've got a fruit stand or I fix shoes we have trade we have trust we have the ability to meet each other's needs but around the 60s 70s and getting into the 80s things changed drastically and now what we have is institutional numbers not done not the Dunbar's number no we have the institutional number because we are are close to 8, 000, 000, 000 people on the planet a 170 ish countries and all of us are intermingled with each other.
And if you take just the United States, what are your institutional numbers? You got a social security number most likely. You've got bank account numbers. You've got a driver's license. May unless you're too young to drive in which case you might have a state licensed ID you got payroll There's a number associated with that. You got a mortgage. There's another number associated with that. That's an institutional number. Retirement account Investment account There's all kinds of shit. But all of those identities, those institutional numbers are due to the centralization because of so many people A nation of 350, 375, 000, 000 such as the United States is right now.
When you start consolidating and centralizing institutions that give us huge banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America, I'm no longer trusting my neighborhood bank. When I call Wells Fargo because I've got a problem, not only am I trusting that person on the other end of the line with my bank account number my social security number and all the personal information that they can bring up on their screen I have to trust the human resources department corporate wise of Wells Fargo to hire somebody that I can trust. I have to trust the 10, 000 people at Wells Fargo with a single phone call to fix a problem.
That everything is going to work that way and that's due to centralization and centralization comes 1 of the pressures that causes centralization comes from more and more population it's not the only place that it comes from but it definitely comes from more and more population. So what's the liability? Well, we just saw the hack. We just these guys left these guys that were doing authentic autentix, a u 10 t I x, autentix. Get it? That's a horrible name. But they left their credentials open for 18 months and they were the guys that were taking all of your personal information for being on dead bird site and coinbase And we've seen hacks like this before. There's been hacks of credit ratings agencies. There's been hacks of health care agencies.
200, 000, 000 Americans got their health care information stolen, and God only knows what information they absconded with. I guarantee you Social Security numbers were part of it. As to whether or not your full medical records went along for the ride, who knows? But enough identifying information about you is now out in the wind to twist. There is a real functional liability to having an institutional grade identity. So there's a Dunbar and now there's what I'm calling the institutional identity. And these social security numbers and these banks accounts and these driver's licenses, these payrolls and these mortgages, they all link together but none of those actually link back to me as an identity. Now, and here's what I mean by that. You're gonna say, oh, you're crazy, but check this out.
If I walk into a bank that I've never done business with and I want to open up an account, what is it that they want from me? They're gonna want my social security number at a bare minimum. They don't care that I'm standing right in front of them they don't know me and they're not going to a) take the time to get to know me and b) they don't have the time to take to get to know me because of all the centralized centralizing forces of the modern world. So now, I all all they care about is that I have a Social Security number and that they can run through a machine and it says this is a valid Social Security number this guy is who he says he is but I'm standing right there yet I would not be able to have an identity without the Social Security number the number has become my identity that's why I'm saying that it doesn't these numbers they identify each other but they don't really identify me as a person who I am and whether or not I'm going to steal all of your shit.
We used to do that with the Dunbar identity. You could trust me because you knew me. I didn't present back in like if we were 10000 years ago and we were in the city of or whatever like little actually let's you know I don't know Somewhere in the Fertile Crescent. Right? Some city in the Fertile Crescent, couple 1000 years into agriculture, I don't have a Social Security number there's not that many numbers that they're going to issue back in those days record keeping was a bitch they're just they just want to know who I am I am my identity but not today today is different Today I have a raft of interlinked numbers and those are now my identity.
And sure they can link back to me but what I'm trying to say is that I no longer represent my identity These numbers now represent my identity, and that is a huge liability. In China, if you were a youth and you went to 1 of these protests that the government did not really like, kind of critical of the Chinese government, if you were caught on camera, that camera was going to link your facial structure back to a set of numbered identities. And they were going to say ah that person can no longer buy public transportation tickets You can't get on a train anymore. That happened. That's not fiction. That actually occurred.
That's a fact. Let's go we don't even have to go to China to figure this shit out. We can just go up north to our to the great white north, the land of John Candy, Canada, the Canadian trucker protest. And no matter what side of the fence you sat on, that you liked what happened to the Canadian truckers or that you felt it was abhorrent that of what happened to the Canadian truckers. It doesn't matter because the fact of the matter is is that as those people were identified, their true institutional identity was compromised because they lost their bank account. They lost their ability to do any kind of banking. Their credit cards were shut down. Their debit cards were shut down. They had money in a bank. They couldn't even go to the bank physically And they because they were saying, no. You're you're not allowed to have your money. You cannot access this bank account.
And then they would tell them that they gotta go find another bank, but the other bank also knew about their institutional identity. And they said, no, you can't have a bank account. And we forgot about this. Some of these people are still struggling with this today. That's the liability behind these numbers. That's the liability now behind your institutional identity. What was our liability with the Dunbar identity? Reputation. If I stole from you or did you some kind of harm and you were able to prove it to the small group of people between 154 100 to 500 people, my reputation would burn to the ground instantly it would take me years to develop the reputation and seconds to burn it down But that identity is directly linked to me and my actions.
Not some interpretation of my actions. Not I just don't like what this guy is doing and since I have the power to shut off his bank accounts I'm going to do just that or your social media whatever because all of that was linked together right the Dunbar's identity had much less general liability involved with it than these institutional identities that we've been given today. I didn't ask for mine. Did you ask for your institutional set of numbers that is your modern identity? Probably not. In a way you did, and I did because I went to go get a driver's license. I went to go get a bank account but when you're having to navigate the modern world and there's no other way to do it then you're sort of forced to take on this institutional identity.
You're also forced to take on the liability. Now other other podcasters, especially Bitcoiners in the space, basically just say this is just k y c bullshit and they're right but I'm looking at it from a different perspective. I wanna look at it from from the people who think that they're just, you know, they're they love government, they think that city state is great, they, you know, rah rah patriotic, and they'll get every single piece of identifying information that they possibly can and they're just fine with it until the day that they're not. Until the day that they do something that somebody else really doesn't like. And they'll use their institutional identity and the liability that comes along for the ride to screw them over and make their life a misery.
Whereas, with the Dunbar liability, let's say that you lied about me, then it's 1 person's word against 5 or 4 99 other people that know who I am. I'm part of their social network. I'm part of their physical I trust you I've known this guy for years years years social network and they're like we just can't see him doing that 4 99 attitudes are going to Trump but in the modern world if that 1 attitude is the president of a bank and I pissed him off because maybe I accidentally ran over his dog and he was able to correctly identify me from a raft of institutional numbers, boom, my bank account can get shut down or all my social media deleted.
And anything that I've anybody I've ever followed, anybody's ever followed me, anything that I've ever written, just gone in the blink of an eye. So let's go back to this Richard Bachman character that I was talking about when I first started into the second part of the show. Who is Richard Bachman? Well, he's not me. I really am David Bennett. I I say my name at the start of every show. It's it's it's odd. I've been I've been called out for being anonymous and I'm like have you actually listened to the show? Just because I use a a nim for, when I was about back on Twitter or and I still use a NIM when I whenever it is that I go to Twitter. I use a NIM when I'm on Nostra.
Most people a lot of people know me as none new business, but I've gotten accused of of hiding behind a NIM. And I said, go listen to podcast. Every at the I say, good morning. This is David Bennett. I I don't know how to be much more clear about that. So, clearly, I'm lying about my identity being Richard Bachman. So who is Richard Bachman? Well, that's the pen name for Stephen King, The author. And in case you don't know who Stephen King is, if you're the in the United States or Europe, I don't know what rock you're living under, but if you're from, like, India or, you know, somebody that's not in the west, I can almost understand it. Great author, been around for decades, written hundreds of books. I mean this guy is prolific.
And he's so prolific that he actually had to get a pen name. And that's why he came up with Richard Bachman. And it wasn't because he wanted to publish, I don't know, ideas that that were foul in the face of government or institutions or even the populace at large. No. He got a pen name because at the time that he was coming up in his career it was just unheard of that any author would write more than 1 book every year and I don't know if you've seen Stephen King's body of work but he clearly can write more than 1 book a year and he wanted to publish more than 1 book a year and his publisher said no we you don't do that that's just not kosher we can't allow that shit to happen so he convinced his publisher to let him have a pen name a second identity, a NIM if you were, so that he would be able to publish a whole bunch of other work without running afoul of his publishing house, and without his publishing house running afoul of what is generally accepted practice in the written publishing world at the time that he was doing this so what does that mean?
That means that Stephen King himself, even back in the 70s identified his having a singular identity as a liability to his career at the time to his future career. His publishing house identified a liability of allowing this other identity to do this thing and it would have hurt their identity so Stephen King's prolific writing his ability to just just get it on a typewriter and just knock these things out was a liability for them. So they had to come up with a new identity for Stephen King so that neither Stephen King as a brand or the publishing house which at the time I believe was Doubleday would not have their identity impinged.
You see how this works? This is even back in the seventies when many of us were still running on Dunbar's number or Dunbar's identity. And even then, there was some liability. But now where are we? I told you about social security's numbers and bank account numbers and driver's license and payroll and mortgage or retirement investment accounts. They all have numbers. Now we can link all that to everything about social media, and Twitter, and YouTube, and threads, and blue sky, and what else is there, TikTok, and, I mean, there's a whole host of them. You know it, I know it. And we've seen people just become canceled like that.
After they get their bank account shut down then all of a sudden Twitter deletes their Twitter account and then all of a sudden they're just black hold as a person in a society that operates in a digital matter. But what if I told you? What if I told you that there was another way? That there was another way to represent who you are? A digital Dunbar's identity. Well, there is. And it's called a Nostra key pair. So, when all the people that listen to me that don't get on Noster, when all of you guys rolled your eyes back in your head, stop it and listen, We are coming to a time when we should not, not only can we not, we should no longer trust our identity as given by the institutions.
Your institutional identity is really an institutional liability. And the only way to get past that is to start operating at a different level of identity I posit that the privatepubliccryptographickeypair that is provided to you by Noster is going to be the way that we start moving forward to start regenerating ideas in a safe manner of which we cannot be canceled. And if we do it right, cannot be connected back to our institutional identity. And you don't really we really shouldn't be doing that. We really shouldn't be allowing our digital Dunbar's identity to connect back to our institutional identity.
That is a very dangerous situation. So be aware for all of you guys that do use Nostr, keep your identities separate. You're not going to go delete your bank account some of you have some of you will but most of you probably won't you're not going to cut your driver's license up You can't get rid of your Social Security number, right? You could become a hermit, but in general generally speaking you're not going to do it and you're not going to tell payroll that you don't want your payroll number anymore because they're going to need that to process your payroll. You're not going to tell your mortgage company that you're not going to identify as, you know, any longer as this name with this with this mortgage number. You're you're not going to do that.
So, there's going to be a large section of the population that is alive today that is going to continue to operate in the legacy world whether we want to whether we like it or not then we're some of us that are alive today have our foot firmly planted in the digital Dunbar identity that which is provided right now by Nostr. That's going to contain a lot more than just Nostr because the connections are starting to form even though I don't like Blue Sky it's connecting to nostr I used to use mastodon a lot I don't anymore because I have noster yet there are connections forming between nostril protocol and mastodon also known as activity pub mastodon sort of a layer on top of this protocol called activity pub right others are coming along for the ride as those networks start to fuse together we're going to see things that is unbelievable some of it's gonna be unbelievably bad maybe Not exactly sure if it's gonna be all roses, but some of it is going to come up roses. Some of it is going to be so much better and you're going to feel so much freer. But if you're not going to even try to look at what I'm saying by getting a nostril identity, then you deserve everything that's going to come to you sometime somewhere soon in the future you're going to do something and you're going to be identified as the 1 who did it even though you didn't think it was wrong and you're going to get host for it.
So finally for the day if you are listening to me and you have not got on nostril you are missing not just Noster because it's not just social media in fact social media in my opinion is about maybe a tenth of the potential and that's saying quite a lot it's probably more like 5 somewhere in single digit percentages of social media the rest of it we have yet to discover I told you last week that now events in not or websites are now events in Nostra because of npub.pro entire websites are events and those are tied to 2 pieces of information and those are the only 2 pieces of information that you'll ever need which means that they really don't have to be crossed with any other pieces of information.
Not like we do in institutional identification where it's not only your Social Security number but they also need your driver's license to open a bank account. So now you have 3 pieces of information that are forever linked together: your social security number, your driver's license number, and your bank account number. In Nostriland or in the digital Dunbar's identity, you only need your NSEC, your private key, and your NPUB, your public key. That's it. Those are the only 2 linked pieces of information that you need moving forward in the future.
Pablo is teased that he's able to put money on relays, on nostril relays. I'm hoping I get to interview him about that but he doesn't want to say anything else until he has a huge solid working model of how this works He actually has a small working model and it does work. He zapped me directly from a relay that he runs using his Insec Inpub directly to my Insec Inpub via Master. And it didn't come from an e cash wallet. It didn't come from, as far as I know, unless he embedded an e cash wallet inside the relay. But from what I understand, it came directly from the relay. So does that mean that bank accounts are now just my insect input?
Could be. It's not impossible. And if I were you, I would I would seriously start thinking about that. I can put videos up I can put long form blog post up all on the nostril protocol and I don't I can go to any 1 of a 100 different clients that do a completely different thing than what primal does or what coreacle does although coreacle is starting to expand quite nicely and that's coreacle. Social that's my my friend huddlebod that that's his baby and it's coming along quite nicely. But there's highlighter from Pablo f 7 z. This guy was just talking about about putting money on relays, And it does something that primal doesn't do.
If you're going to continue to sleep on Nostr while the rest of the institutional identity numbers are burning to the ground I cannot help you any longer. It doesn't take all that much energy. And if you, you know, if you don't even try it, then you don't have any excuses. It is not just okay, I spun up a number and I got over on Primal and I don't like it. That's that's not trying. That's not putting any real energy into figuring out what it is that I'm trying to tell you about. I'm going to do another show at 1 point or another, probably next week, that talks more about the digital Dunbar number.
But I haven't written that yet, and I'm out of time, So 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.
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