Join me today for Episode 1055 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Kentucky BTC Bill Ready For Governor
- Strategy's Teeny Tiny Bitcoin Buy
- Russia Uses Bitcoin For Oil
- Wall Street Casino Moves Into Cyrpto
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/kentucky-senate-passes-bill-protecting-bitcoin-self-custody-rights
https://cointelegraph.com/news/michael-saylor-strategy-records-smallest-bitcoin-purchase
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/russia-is-using-bitcoin-and-crypto-for-its-oil-trades-with-china-and-india
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2025/03/13/bitdeer-wants-to-revolutionize-the-asic-manufacturing-market-here-s-how
https://decrypt.co/309971/us-court-approves-3acs-bid-to-expand-1-5b-claim-against-ftx
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://value4value.info/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
- https://geyser.fund/project/thebitcoinandpodcast
https://cointelegraph.com/news/rex-launches-bitcoin-corporate-treasury-convertible-bond-etf
https://www.theblock.co/post/346331/trump-backed-world-liberty-financial-concludes-550-million-public-token-sale
https://decrypt.co/309948/trump-admin-acquire-much-bitcoin-possible-white-house
https://atlas21.com/democrats-oppose-the-strategic-reserve-treasury-urged-to-block-trumps-plan/
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 09:24AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the March 2025. That means it's Saint Patrick's Day today. Did you wear green? I mean, are we actually still doing that shit as adults? Because I, honestly, I was so over it in seventh grade. It's not even funny. Pinch me. Just try it. I'm done. I will, I know. I will pinch your ass back. Just because I am wearing red today does not mean that I get to get pinched. I'm a full grown adult at this point. So I don't need this kind of childish crap. So just I'm just I'm just saying, but this is this is episode ten fifty five of Bitcoin, and I should have brought it to you on Friday, but the kids decided that they wanted to, I don't know, stay home from school for whatever reason. And honestly, thank god they did because we had a really great time, got to, you know, do some stuff with my son.
He wanted to make, sushi. Of course, we ended up making, you know, California rolls because good luck getting sushi, grade fish in a landlocked region like Eastern Washington. But it was fun. It was it was it was an excellent weekend, but I only brought you three shows last week. My apologies for that. I I feel terrible. So I'm going to make it up to you today. This may be a slightly longer show. I don't know. We'll have to see. But we are gonna just go ahead and jump right in because the Kentucky State Senate has passed a bill that protects Bitcoin self custody rights.
This is Nick writing from Bitcoin Magazine yesterday well, yesterday evening anyway. The Kentucky State Senate unanimously, unanimously passed a bill aimed at protecting Bitcoin's self custody rights as well as digital asset mining operations. With a very decisive 37 to zero vote, the legislation titled an act relating to blockchain digital assets or h b seven zero one now moves directly to the governor's desk for final approval. So let's just chew on what happened here. We've got this bill that protects Bitcoin self custody as well as digital asset mining operations.
It passed out of committee, probably a few committees. It then hit the house of representatives at the state level for Kentucky. It was clearly passed because that way is the only way that it's gonna get over to the senate where it probably had to go through a couple of committees over there, and then it went to the senate floor to vote after it passed out of whatever committees the senate had for it. And when they voted on it, it wasn't lopsided. It wasn't, you know, even Steven. It was 37 to zero. Every single Kentucky senator voted to allow people to self custody their own Bitcoin and allow for digital asset mining operations to occur in the state. That's a big deal.
The other issue here is that that's it. This bill is all the way through all the gates it was ever going to see except, of course, the final gate, which is the signature of the governor of Kentucky. Now the governor of Kentucky, as all states in The United States Governors have a veto power, very well maybe, you know, may decide that he doesn't wanna sign it or and just, you know, puts the veto stamp on it, in which case it goes back to wherever it originated from, or at least I assume. I'm not exactly sure how the state of Kentucky operates, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot like the US federal government.
So hats off to Kentucky, man. Let's see what's going on with the rest of it. It was sponsored by representatives Adam Bowling and j or TJ Roberts, and the bill does in fact affirm the right of individuals to self custody digital assets, not just Bitcoin, through self hosted wallets. Self hosted wallets and additionally, it prevents local zoning laws from discriminating against digital asset mining businesses ensuring that Bitcoin miners can operate freely within the state. The bill outlines several key provisions, including protection for Bitcoin self custody, of course.
We've already been through that one. Prohibition of discriminatory zoning laws, and to expand on that, local governments at the county and city level cannot impose zoning changes that unfairly target digital asset mining businesses. Pausing just to remind you, that language is a bit vague, and I don't know if it comes out of Bitcoin Magazine or out of the actual bill itself because and I say it's vague Because this, unfairly target digital asset mining businesses. What is unfair? How do you know it's targeted? We know we're pretty sure what's going to be listed as a digital asset mining business, but the unfair targeting of is a bit vague.
I really wish, I or wish I knew whether or not they have very clear language on that, and this is just a Bitcoin magazine thing. Number three, exemptions from money transmitter licensing. This is a huge one. This is actually bigger than the zoning thing, at least in my opinion. Home Bitcoin miners and digital asset mining businesses alike are exempt from Kentucky's money transmitter requirements. That's a big deal. Fourth and finally, the clarification of securities laws. Digital asset mining and staking as a service are explicitly not classified as securities under Kentucky law. Now at the federal level, that may be different. We'll we'll see. But after passing through the Kentucky house oh my god.
Check this shit out. After passing through the Kentucky house with a 91 to zero vote, on 02/28/2025, the bill then moved swiftly through the senate. The March 13 vote saw full bipartisan support with 37 senators voting in favor, zero opposed, and one not voting. The legislation now awaits the governor's signature, which would officially enshrine Bitcoin self custody protections and digital asset mining rights into Kentucky law. And if signed, Kentucky will become one of the more Bitcoin friendly states in the country, setting a precedent for other states to follow. Now this has nothing to do with the Kentucky Bitcoin strategic reserve. Alright. This is just about self custody and mining. And I think Kentucky's got another bill floating around, but the Kentucky house voting 91 to zero to pass this, and then the senate votes 37 to zero to pass it, the governor's not going to veto this.
I guarantee the governor is not going to veto this. If he does anything weird, it would be to delay the signature. That'd be the only thing that would be weird, and I kinda don't think that the governor's gonna do that. But, again, we will have to see. But Kentucky, at this point, they really seem to be leading the way and not any of the other states, and that includes my home state of Texas, which Michael Sailor is not a resident in. But if he was, he wouldn't have to pay state taxes. And if you know what I'm talking about, then you've been following Michael Saylor for as long as I have. Michael Saylor's strategy has made another Bitcoin purchase.
It's the smallest amount of Bitcoin that he's ever bought ever. Helen Parks, Cointelegraph says the following Michael Saylor strategy, the world's largest public corporate Bitcoin holder, has announced its smallest Bitcoin purchase on record. On March 17, they officially announced the latest 113 Bitcoin acquisition bought for around a measly, a a a smattering, a a worthless amount of $10,700,000 in cash, which is an average price of roughly $82,981 per Bitcoin. And this will be the first time that he's actually bought Bitcoin in any amount whatsoever that the price didn't immediately go south underneath where he actually bought those coins. But the latest purchase was made using the proceeds from the STRK ATM or the strike at the market, which is a new strategy program looking to raise up to $21,000,000,000 in fresh capital to acquire more BTC.
Strategy's new 130 BTC buy is the smallest one ever recorded since the company announced its first purchase of 21,454 Bitcoin for $250,000,000 in August of twenty twenty. And if you remember, that's what kicked off the whole MicroStrategy now called strategy ascension into the Bitcoin realm and Michael, Sailor becoming some kind of god amongst men when it comes to Bitcoin even though he had dismissed it previously. It really doesn't matter because here's the point. People are kinda freaking out. Well, they're not freaking out. Let let let me back up and say state it a better way. People are, like, going, see, even Michael Saylor's losing steam. Well, I don't know. Maybe Michael Saylor's, like, going, look. Every time Trump opens his mouth and says the word tariff, everything fucking tanks.
So how about we do this? How about we wait? We'll collect up a bunch of money. We'll figure out when orange man decides to stop saying the word tariff. You know? I mean, he he might not be able to call the direct bottom of which, you know, when when, Donald Trump stops saying the word tariff. But at one point or another, Donald Trump's going to stop talking about tariffs, either because we're not going to do them or we have already done them, and they're already in effect. And there is no real reason to talk about tariffs anymore.
I think that that's what Michael Saylor is waiting for. And in fact, this makes sense to me. In in fact, I've been waiting for Michael Saylor to stop buying tops because I'm like, dude, you you you have better business intelligence than anybody else. You know what's coming. You know what's over the wires before anybody else does. He probably has a Bloomberg terminal. He's probably getting the news and all stock quotes and any announcements being made fifteen to thirty minutes, if not a full hour or two before the rest of the world's public does. So, therefore, he's in probably the best position to be able to say, you know what? We pray orange man say in tariff again. We probably need to just not buy anything right now. I think that that's what's going on, and I think people are kind of freaking out for nothing. Now the circle p is in fact open for business. I've got a new vendor, and SoapMiner probably doesn't know that I'm actually talking about him in today's show. But if you don't know who SoapMiner is, s o a p, soap, you know, like soap like you wash yourself with, he is yet another person who is making tallow based soaps. And if you don't know what tallow is, well, it's beef fat.
Pork fat is lard. I don't know what deer fat is, and you probably don't you don't really get that much fat off a deer anyway. It's pretty damn lean meat. But it is like pork fat is lard, tallow is beef. We're talking moo moo cow. Right? And that's the fat base of these soaps, and all soaps have some kind of fatty base. But this is real animal product soap. So he has a stall on Shopster, s h o p s t r dot store, Shopster dot store. It is based on Nostr. He has his own stall. He's got a nice little pitcher of some soap here, and he will give you let's see. It says, let's see.
You can buy three bars of rough cut tallow soap, each weighing approximately four to four and a half ounces each. And here's the ingredient list because he respects his product and his potential customers. Pure grass fed beef tallow, lye, and distilled water. This is an unscented pure soap just like your great grandmother used to make. We only accept satoshis. Shipping is included in price within the Continental United States. This bar or three bar package will cost you precisely 21 United States dollars worth of Satoshis because he takes Bitcoin.
For his goods or services. Soap miner has been inducted into the circle p. This, the URL, it there's it's not human readable because it's got a nostril address at the very end of it. So go to the show notes. The the Shopster stall will be a full URL. All you gotta do is click on it, and it will take you to shopster.store. It will take you right to a stall. You however you do it, you make sure SoapMiner heard it about or heard that you heard about his soap here at the Circle p on the Bitcoin and podcast. SoapMiner, I hope we sell lots of soap together. Okay. Russia is using Bitcoin and other shitcoins for its oil trades with China and India.
Well, let's see what's changed. Vivek sent Bitcoin out of Bitcoin magazine says amid ongoing sanctions over the war in Ukraine, Russia has turned to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to facilitate some of its oil trade with major buyers China and India. And according to a Reuters report, this is out of Reuters. This isn't bat you know, Bob's backyard Bitcoin magazine or something like that. This is out of Reuters. Russian oil companies and traders increasingly conduct transactions in Bitcoin and crypto, allowing them to circumvent restrictions from Western nations.
Sources say monthly trade volumes are already already in the tens of millions of dollars. The mechanism involves Chinese or Indian buyers purchasing oil and depositing won or rupees into an offshore account owned by a middleman company, probably in The Caymans. The middleman then converts the fiat currency into crypto and transfers it to an account in Russia where it is exchanged into rubles. While crypto based oil payments are still a fraction of Russia's One Hundred And Ninety Two Billion Dollar total oil trade, the practice is growing as sanctions bite.
The trend highlights the utility of Bitcoin and crypto in enabling transaction settlement for sanctioned nations. Iran and Venezuela have adopted similar crypto strategies. Bitcoin and crypto censorship resistance allows value transfers beyond the reach of sanctions. In late twenty twenty four, Russia's finance minister publicly endorsed using crypto in foreign trade. The Kremlin sees Bitcoin and crypto as one of several effective strategies to overcome financial penalties imposed over the invasion of Ukraine. The Bank of Russia also recently proposed legalizing crypto investments for wealthy citizens. However, Russia's oil trade still relies primarily on fiat currency.
Donald Trump's administration is debating whether or not to ease some restrictions to improve relations with Moscow. With the Ukraine conflict still fully unresolved, for those of you who were unsure, yeah, the situation in Ukraine is fully 100% unresolved. Russia's pivot toward leveraging Bitcoin and decentralized technologies appear to aim to reduce its reliance on traditional finance and dollar settlements. Other countries under US sanctions are likely to be monitored closely. See, this is how it begins. Or this is rather how it accelerates.
The use of Bitcoin already began. But this is this is another segment that we don't really we don't really look at it this much. We have been ultra concerned with nations and or central banks putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. What we what we forgot about is that about, you know, between nine months ago and, like, the, you know, between then and, like, the two years prior, we were talking about nation states using Bitcoin for foreign trade. And we were really all into that. And then all of a sudden, they you know, Donald Trump, you know, flashed something shiny in front of us, and we all got distracted. We should not be distracted from this. However, it still seems a little odd that I mean, it's I don't know. There still seems to be some there's something about what was in here about how the middleman receives this, you know, fiat currency and then converts it into Bitcoin, and then it goes to Russia, and then it converts back. From the middleman to Russia and then Russia internally converting Bitcoin back to to rubles, I could see that.
However, China has to deposit one into this offshore account. And, I mean, how? Is it using SWIFT? See see what I get what I'm getting at is that there still seems to be a little bit of, yeah, you know, China should just be buying Bitcoin and and trade trading it directly with Russia for oil. And screw this middleman thing because that middleman, it's a man in the middle attack vector. And at one point or another, we're gonna figure out how to screw that up in either event. I just think that it's important to understand that Russia is not what they just weren't blowing smoke when they said, hey, man. We're gonna start circumventing sanctions with Bitcoin because they're doing it. Alright. Let's get into this one.
You know what? I'm not gonna do that one. Well, no. I'm I'm gonna have to do this one. Sorry, guys. But, I wanna talk about how BitDeer is transforming Bitcoin mining machines. And we want to talk about this because Tom Carreras is writing it for CoinDesk. It's a little long, but I find it interesting because we've been dealing with ASICs for a while, and BitDeer may be about to change the game. Let's find out. Application specific integrated circuit or ASIC chips form the backbone of the Bitcoin mining industry. ASIC machines are made as a single purpose machine to solve Bitcoin's SHA two fifty six algorithm as fast as possible.
And they're extremely good at it. One of the most widely used ASIC machines, the Antminer s 19, is capable of making 82,000,000,000,000 computations per second, which is 820 times the number of stars in the Milky Way. The 30,000,000,000 ASIC manufacturing market is dominated by Bitmain. The Chinese company's machines power roughly 80% of Bitcoin's hash rate, according to Miner Mag. But the Singapore based Bitcoin mining firm BitDeer intends to shake things up with a release of a brand new ASIC chip architecture. These new chips could bring a huge jump in efficiency, the company claims anyway, while improving transparency in the ASIC manufacturing process. Quote, the two dominant players, Bitmain and MicroBT, are both private companies and very opaque. Jeff Laberge, head of capital markets and strategic initiatives at BitDeer, told CoinDesk during an interview, quote, they don't really engage with the media or give any type of guidance at all about what they're doing from an r and d standpoint, and that makes it very difficult for end users and end buyers to plan around.
Quote, we want our customers to know where we're at in our manufacturing process, what our roadmap is in terms of new chip designs, and where we're at in our production cycles, Laberge said. Shannon Squires, chief mining officer at Bitcoin hosting firm Compass Mining, told CoinDesk that increased visibility into ASIC production would help miners plan for new hardware shipments and make it easier to predict Bitcoin's difficulty growth. Quote, Bitcoin or BitDeer's commitment to transparency is great for the mining industry. While Canaan discloses its annual sales volume for various mining models, Bittir takes it just a step further by providing more frequent delivery volume updates, said Wolfie Zhao, head of research at MinerMag.
Although both are smaller players in the hardware market, their efforts do show good faith in promoting transparency. Hopefully, this will encourage the larger market incumbents to take note, end quote. ASIC chips have been used mostly or been using mostly the same blueprint since 2014. Over the last decade, the the biggest increase in ASIC power efficiency have come at the foundry level as leading global chipmaker TSMC has refined its manufacturing process. While miners have also made alterations to chip design, such modifications have only brought incremental grain gains. Even so, progress has been tremendous.
The very first ever ASIC, which was Canaan's Avalon 2013, in or in the year 2013, it had a power efficiency of 6,000 joules per terahash. Bitmain's Antminer s 21 XP hydro, the current most efficient on the market, 12 jewels per terahash. So from 6,000 jewels per terahash all the way down to 12 jewels per terahash from the year 2013 is rather amazing if you ask my opinion. But continuing with continuing with the article, BitDeer is listed on Nasdaq and it wants to create a completely new architecture for its own ASICs. Quote, we feel like it's going to be necessary to break into what we call the single digit efficiency range, Laber said, referring to mining rigs with less than 10 joules per terahash of efficiency.
Scaling up with the traditional blueprint means using progressively thinner chips, but thinner means chips are more likely to be defective, and yields per batch tend to fall. Quote, you're also competing with Apple and NVIDIA and some of the other larger companies in the world for the same materials, Laberge said. BitDeer's chief strategy officer, Harris Bassett, is or Bassett, sorry. Bassett is probably how it's pronounced, is leading a team of engineers to create a new framework. Some members of that team worked on the designs found at Bitmain's very first ASIC chips back in 2014, the chips whose architecture became the standard across the industry.
BitDeer's research has already had success. The company's most recent product, the Seal Miner a three, achieved a power efficiency of 9.7 joules per terra hash during performance trials the firm reported on Monday. And that would be last Monday, not today. That means that the a three, which still uses the traditional ASIC blueprint, could end up taking the efficiency crown from the s 21 XP hydro out of Bitmain. Yet the miner's Seal Miner a four, which will employ the firm's new chip architecture, is expected to consume only five joules per terahash, and it will likely be the most efficient ASIC machine on the market by a significant margin. Quote, people have known for a long time that you could recycle, the electric charge on a chip, but no one's really been able to figure out how to do that in a way that allows for high performance.
We've cracked the code on how to do this in a very high performance application, Bassett told the Coin Stories podcast back in December. Instead of just using charge once and then discharging it, we use it several times, four, five, six times. So we get a 75 to 80% improvement in efficiency by doing that. Our CL miner a four chips will use this technology, but should also be applicable more generally in digital chips, especially digital chips that are highly active, you know, like GPUs and signal processing chips. Making ASICs isn't easy either.
BitDeer's research team is divided into two units, one in Singapore and the other one in Silicon Valley, and they both work on the new chip designs. Quote, for such a simple machine, because all it does is solve SHA two fifty six algorithms, it's extremely complicated to design. We've got some of the best engineers in the world working on this, said Liberge. So far, the firm has been delivering new products at a fast pace. BitDeer pushed out both the Seal Miner a one and a two last year, 2024, and is expecting the a three to enter mass production in the latter half of this year. And it says that the a four should reach tape out, which is the last stage of its design process, in the third quarter of the year with a release likely in very late twenty twenty five or early twenty twenty six. My gut feeling says mid to late twenty twenty six. You're talking about new architecture, people. It's not exactly all that easy.
When a new chip design is finalized, BitDear sends the plans over to TSMC. And not only is the Taiwanese firm the largest chip manufacturer in the world, it's also the most advanced on a technological level, which makes BitDear's partnership with it crucial. Quote, you can't just go to TSMC and say, hey. I want a hundred x a hash worth of chips in the, I don't know, next three months. There's a process for going through that, Laberge said. Quote, you go in and you ask them for chip allocation, and then they'll give that based on priority, end quote. Once the plans or once it has the plans in hand, TSMC produces a mask, which is essentially it essentially functions as a template for the chips, like the platen in a printing press.
The mask is sent to BitDeer alongside RISC chips, which is a small batch of chips that the company can use for trials to make sure that the design works properly. If the firm needs any alterations to be made to the design, that's when it happens. In that case, TSMC makes corrections based on BitDear's feedback and sends over a new mask with new RISC chips. All of this happens at significant cost. Bit Dear spent 40 or 14 sorry, 14,000,000 on the a two's tape out and then 26,000,000 on the tape out for the a threes. When BitDeer is then satisfied with the design, TSMC uses the mask to mass produce the wafers.
LaBerge compared wafers to sheets, each containing hundreds of chips. Technically, a mask can be used to create almost an unlimited number of wafers, but TSMC has finite resources and can only produce a certain number of chips, so firms end up competing for them. One of the advantages of the a four design, according to Liberge, is that it's supposed to make the firm's chip allocation process easier. Quote, Bassett challenged the team to come up with a new architecture that did not need to undergo TSMC's latest processes, but could step back a couple of generations which would allow us to use a node that is much less in demand, he said. A semiconductor node is basically a specific version of the firm's chip manufacturing technology.
TSMC is constantly building new nodes in an effort to refine its processes. It takes roughly three months for BitDeer to receive its mask and risk chips after first submitting its design to TSMC. Then, it's another three to four months for the company to receive its chips once it has given the foundry the green light for mass production. The chips are then sent straight to BitDeer's manufacturing facilities in Asia, and from there, it can take four to eight weeks for the mining rigs to be fully built and then packaged. Despite all of the cost incurred during production, some of the capital required for manufacturing ASICs comes from BitDeer's customers.
Miners interested in purchasing BitDeer's ASICs typically put down a deposit of 25 to 50% of the total cost of the order. The production cycle tends to average six to seven months, so it doesn't take long for the company to recuperate its funds and make a profit. Building ASICs also creates advantages for BitDeer's own mining operations because up until recently, the firm, which was founded in 2021, focused on the hosting business, meaning that it provided facilities for other Bitcoin miners to place their rigs. BitDeer is slowly transitioning out of that model and expanding its own mining operations alongside its ASIC manufacturing arm.
The acquisition of ASICs is typically the most expensive part of building up a Bitcoin mining operation. These machines usually only last around three or four years before newer models make them obsolete, so they're constantly looking to acquire more and newer machines. Not only is BitDeer able to considerably reduce the cost by producing its own machines, but it also has the options of selling its mining rigs to other firms depending on their own needs. Down the line, BitDeer aims to give Bitmain and MicroBT a run for their money and disrupt what Liberge calls the duopoly of the ASIC market.
Quote, we want to be the top player in the market absolutely. We believe we have a team and the technology to do that. So it's important to understand that we've been basically dealing with you know, honestly, we've been kind of dealing with the same architecture on ASIC chips for years and years, and the only difference the only why they say it's incremental efficiency increases is simply because we go from, like, 17 nanometers to 14 nanometers to, I don't know, 12 nanometers to seven to five. These guys are talking about a brand new architecture. And the fact that they can recycle the electrons through the chip is an interesting notion.
How do they handle heat? Because they'll you know, I mean, I'm just thinking that, well, I mean, will that help with heat? Would does that do nothing for the heat generation? Does it I don't you know? It it it it's odd. But I've never really thought about you just pump electrons through a chip, it does what it's gonna do, and then that's it. And we don't really think about what happens to the electrons after that. You know, generally speaking, they're kinda consumed on on processes, but not all of it and not all of it gets converted into heat. So if there's residual electrons that could be recycled and they can pump it back through the chip, well, hell, yeah. I could see massive efficiency gains. It does seem a little bit science fictiony, but, again, as usual, we'll we'll have to wait and see. They're either blowing smoke up our butts or they've got something on their hands. And if they can do what they say they can do, they're gonna be able to compete. And it would be nice to have a third major manufacturer of ASIC chips in the Bitcoin market.
Okay. The US court or rather a US court has approved Three Arrows Capital bid to expand $1,500,000,000 claim against FTX. If you remember, Three Arrows Capital was one of the firms that went down in the FTX debacle. Sebastian Sinclair from Decrypt. A bankruptcy court has granted liquidators of defunct hedge fund, Three Arrows Capital or three AC, permission to expand their claim against FTX to $1,530,000,000 rejecting objections from FTX's debtors that the move was untimely and unfair, judge John t Dorsey of the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware ruled on Thursday, that would be last Thursday, that three AC's liquidators had provided sufficient notice of their claim and were hampered in their investigation by FTX's failure to share relevant records in a timely manner. Quote, the evidence suggests that the delay in filing the amended proof of claim was in large part caused by the debtors themselves.
FTX's debtors led by CEO John Ray the third, meanwhile, objected to the amendment, arguing that it introduced new legal theories and significantly increased the claim size. However, the court found that three AC's original filing had put FTX, quote, on notice of the possibility of the latter asserted claims dismissing the debtor's objections. Legal representatives for FTX debtors did not immediately respond for a request for comment, but three a c, which was one of the most significant crypto hedge funds with over $3,000,000,000 in assets, collapsed in June of twenty twenty two following a sharp downturn in crypto markets.
No. That no. The the whole debacle caused the downturn in crypto markets. It all boiled down to Changpeng Zhao out of, Bitfinex. It was a bit not Bitfinex. Oh, god. Shit. I can't remember. Anyway, you know, Changpeng is out. C z, dude. C z. Yeah. He blew the whistle on a whole bunch of stuff, and everybody freaked out. But what he was blowing the whistle on was FTX balance sheets and their relationships with people like three a c. So, no, the downturn in the market did not cause the collapse of FTX. That was going to happen, and it was going to take all of those companies along with it. But regardless, the collapse of three AC triggered a wave a wave of liquidations across the industry affecting lenders such as Voyager Digital and BlockFi.
The fund entered court ordered liquidation in the British Virgin Islands in late the late June of twenty twenty two. And according to court filings, three a c held 1,530,000,000.00 in assets on FTX as of 06/12/2022. And over the next two days, those assets were liquidated to cover a $1,300,000,000 debt owed to FTX, court documents show. Well, three AC's liquidators initially filed a 20,000,000 claim in FTX's bankruptcy case in June of twenty twenty three, but then expanded the alleged claims including breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and yada yada yada, breach of fiduciary duty. The ruling comes fifteen months after three a c's liquidators also secured a worldwide freeze on 1,400,000,000.0 in assets tied to the fund's cofounders.
The December 2023 order issued by a British Virgin Islands court blocks Suzu Davies and Davies' wife, Kelly Chin, from accessing funds while claims against them are pursued. And liquidators argue that the founders should be held accountable for allegedly deepening three AC's financial woes in the weeks before its collapse. There's all manner of chicanery that is still being uncovered in the three AC, BlockFi, Alameda Research, FTX. That was a much bigger deal than I think people really gave it credit for. Yeah. Sure. I mean, everything just kinda fell apart because of it, but still the amount of fiduciary chicanery underneath that, just eye watering, dude. Let let's run the numbers.
Futures and commodities, I got oil up a third of a point to $67.44 in West Texas. Over there, Britt, North Sea, it's up a half a point to $70.94. Natural gas going the opposite direction, two thirds of the downside, $4.07 per thousand cubic feet, and gasoline is up 1.2 to two dollars and seventeen cents a gallon. Shiny metal rocks doing pretty much okay today. Gold is up, well, kinda moving sideways, 0.04%, but it has topped $3,000. Again, twice. This be the second time that it's done it. Silver is down two thirds of a point, but platinum is up one and a quarter. Copper is up 1.12. Palladium is up a quarter of a percent.
Now over down in ag, we've got a fully mixed band of of of merry men here. Let's see. Biggest winner. Sugar. Wow. Four percent to the upside. Biggest loser is gonna be lumber, a full half point to the downside. Live cattle up a third. Lean hogs up 1.85%, and feeder cattle are up two thirds of a point. The Dow seems to be be recovering from tariff talk over the last god only knows how many weeks. It's slightly up point 62% to the upside. S and P is also up a quarter. Nasdaq is down point zero six. Not much going on there. It's basically crab walking. S and P Mini, however, shooting for the moon, 1.07% to the upside.
Oh, did I mention SoapMiner? Circle p. Just a reminder, SoapMiner has his own website, soapminer.com. If you don't wanna if you if you just wanna remember how to get to SoapMiner, all you got to do dude, you don't got to go to my show notes. You can just go to soapminer.com. He's got a shop. He's got all kinds of like he's got lavender tallow soap. He's got peppermint tallow soap. Pine tar, rustic, tea tree, they're all tallow. They're all soap, and they're all mined by SoapMiner. Get yours today at soapminer.com and tell them you heard about it here on the circle p. Bitcoin doing $83,530.
That brings us to a market capitalization of $1,660,000,000,000, and we can only get 27.6 ounces of the shiny metal rock with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,837,929.09 of. And average fees per block are about as low as I've seen them in a long time. 0.03 Bitcoin taken in fees on a per block basis, and there are 30 blocks carrying 21,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of three. Count them one, two, three. Satoshis per v byte. Low priorities is the same. 806.5 exahashes per second is the hash rate for the Bitcoin network, so highly secure.
Nothing at all to worry about for me. And from Thursday's or last week's last show of Bitcoin and entitled Interpol Dance, I had a few people comment on the cover art for that one. I'm glad that y'all enjoyed it. It is kind of funny. Bitcoin arborist with 5,000 sats. Dude, thanks, bro. He says, I owe you an apology, good sir. I accused you of doing something I myself did, which is why I say well, sorry. Which is to say mispronounce Samson's name. You have met the man and I merely listened to podcasts. Podcasts where Samson has been humble enough to let people pronounce his name incorrect. Thanks for not telling me to eat a bag of shit.
Why on earth would I tell somebody who gives me satoshis to eat a bag of shit? That's no. You gotta you gotta pull a rabbit out of your hat for me to do that kind of stuff. And, also, yes, I was one of the people that always pronounce Sampson Moe's last name Mao. And then I listened to a couple of other podcasts where Sampson was on there, and, they started pronouncing it Moe. And then I saw him on CNBC, and they pronounced his last name Moe. And I'm like, but it's actually anyway, so it turns out that I was right because I interviewed him a long time ago at the very first years of this podcast. And before we started recording, I actually asked him. I'm like, dude, how how do you pronounce it? Is it Mao or Moe? And he's pretty humble about it. He's like going, it's actually Moe, but it doesn't matter. You can call me whatever you want. So, yeah, pretty cool guy. Graham with two thousand says, thank you, sir, for the news.
I can use. You're welcome. Oak Grove with +1 says, long time caller, first time listener here. If you look at communities as superorganisms like cities, kingdoms, larger sports teams, corporations, then theft through asset seizure makes sense as an act of autophagy. Autophagy basically means to eat oneself. Just I'm just giving you some background. The organism wants to survive, so it will liquidate useful macro and micronutrients and tissues from what it considers less useful members while labeling them a tumor or cancerous. Quote, they sold drugs as just an excuse to exercise a grandma and leave them on the street. The Bolsheviks and the Red Army literally starved villages of families and came back to make sure that they were dead or dying to take farms.
It isn't outside our government to do something to take Bitcoin from people. If you aren't depressed, give this episode called the anti humans a listen to hear what the wave of Soviet Russia coming to town was like. Yeah. I might have to I might have to wait on that one there, Oak Grove. Thank you. Psyduck with five sixty five says, Psyduck. Bitcoin for president with 500 says, I really appreciate your show. Thank you for your time. No. No, sir. Thank you. God's death with two 30 seven says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. God's death with another 237 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. A hundred sats from I can't tell. It doesn't have his name, but says great show, so I appreciate that. Pies with a hundred says thank you, sir. Hashtag 40 contra says doesn't give me anything, but he does say is Trump's striking an under the table deal with Binance.
It's possible, but they denied it. So we don't really know what the hell Binance c z. That's it. Binance, not Bitfinex. Binance. That's what that thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Contra, for, unwittingly making me remind myself what the hell company I was trying to think of that CZ used to run. But yeah. No. I I don't I don't think I don't think so because that is so transparent that I don't well, I don't know. I mean, the Trump coin itself is very transparent, and I I don't know why anybody would want to give your political enemies any ammunition. And God knows they've got enough just with Trump and Melania coin.
I wouldn't give them any more by working a damn deal with Binance under the table. I'll tell you that much. Alright. That's it for the weather report. Alrighty dighty. Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Rex launches Bitcoin corporate treasury convertible bond ETF. You're going I corporate treasury convertible bond e I don't wanna know. Yeah. You do. You wanna know about this. And I'll tell you why here in a second after we get finished with Vince Quill out of Cointelegraph. Rexhares, an exchange traded fund provider with over $6,000,000,000 in assets under management, launched its Bitcoin corporate treasury convertible bond called Bmax is the ticker symbol ETF that invest in the convertible bonds of companies with BTC corporate reserve strategies.
Okay. Pausing. This is why I'm bringing this to you. This is the casino. Somebody will say you know, you'll say, hey. What do you do? And they'll say something like impressive, like, oh, I invest in corporate treasury convertible bond ETFs because they're, you know, they're they're all hoity toity. They're they went to Hobbit, you know, wearing the Hobbit tie, and they're drinking their their, I don't know, their their Tom Collins or whatever the hoity toity drink of the day is for those richy riches over there on Wall Street. It's fucking junk. It's just this is just a giant casino. This is a bet on a bet on a bet on a bet on a bet. If you haven't watched The Big Short, you need to watch that movie not once, not twice, not even three times.
If you have not watched that movie at least five times, then you have no idea just how bad the casino can get. This is a bullshit product. This is a bad product. It it might make you a lot of money. I'm just saying that it doesn't do anything. It is a bet. It's not it's when you buy a share of this ETF, you have nothing to do with corporate treasuries. You don't need to bond prices and yields. It in my opinion, it kinda makes people think that they know more about economies and financial instrumentation than they actually do. And it makes them think that they're smart, and they're not because they're gambling in a casino, and you might as well go to Vegas and have fun with hookers and blow.
Let's continue. According to the March 14 announcement, the ETF will purchase the convertible notes of companies such as strategy. Convertible notes are commercial paper that could be converted into equity at a predetermined rate if an investor chooses. Typically, these convertible bonds are purchased by institutional investors, including pension funds, some of which specialize in convertible note investing. Greg King, CEO of Rex Financial said, quote, until now, these bonds have been difficult for individual investors to reach. BMax removes those barriers. No. You know. I'll explain why. Making it easier to invest in the strategy pioneered by Michael Saylor, leveraging corporate debt to acquire Bitcoin as a treasury asset.
You do not own the bonds. When you buy this ETF, you own a share of a pool of bonds, but you do not own the bonds. It's the same thing as the Bitcoin ETF. If you are foolish enough to purchase Bitcoin ETFs and think you have Bitcoin, I'm here to tell you, you are fooling yourself. It is a foolish way to go about thinking whether or not you have Bitcoin. You don't. You have, at best, an IOU. That's at best. Same thing here. You don't they're removing no barriers to retail. They're offering you another door into the casino. That's it. Anyway, investing in convertible bonds, ETFs, and the equity of companies such as Strategy, Marathon, and Meta Planet provides investors with indirect exposure to Bitcoin that removes the technical barriers to entry and self custody risks of holding BTC directly.
And, honestly, there is nothing else in this article that we need to go over. It's just you're going to see this crap. Remember how I kept telling you that you're going to see a train load of stable coins? And I used to tell you that altcoins are never going to go away and you're going to see more and more. They kinda finally started dying off, but it took years. But before that, I was telling him, like, this isn't going to end. You're going to have altcoins all over the place. Now I'm saying the same thing with meme coins, and I'm saying the same thing with stablecoins. Well, now I'm saying the same thing with Wall Street generated financial instrumentations that seem to suggest that you're smart if you buy them.
You're not. Sure. You can look at them and say, okay. I get the underlying asset. I completely understand. And let's let's presume for the moment that you do, that you completely understand every mechanistical nuance that could possibly underlie one of Sailor's corporate bond offerings at a 0% coupon rate. You know all of it. You know it so well. You can you can feel it. It's like a guitar player learning a song for the very first time, and they suck at playing guitar for the first in the first place versus a guitar player that's been playing for fifty straight years learning the song for the first time, we you you know the difference. Okay? It's it's gonna be way harder. There's no feeling.
You feel the bond. Let's say you so you so succinctly understand this instrument, this underlying instrument, and you so completely understand the way ETFs work and how they're represented or how they are representative of the underlying asset. Let's say you know all that. Okay. Then that makes you a qualified investor at at least in my book. Even if you don't have a million dollars, which is one of the other stipulations in The United States for a qualified investment is I think it's a million dollars. You gotta have it be worth a million dollars. Right? Okay. Then go on. You you go ahead and do it, and and and, you know, more power to you. I hope you win.
But most people don't understand that. And they think they understand the underlying asset, but they don't really understand the underlying asset. In my view, this is just another in a long line of Wall Street based financial instrumentation that's going to hit the street, and you might as well say, you know what that sounds like? That sounds like a new shit coin. And if you do that, you will be in a much better position to go, I think I need to dig into this more if you are at all interested in investing in something like a corporate bond, corporate treasury, ETF.
In my opinion, I just find it ridiculous. But we've got other fish to fry, and his name is Trump. The Trump backed World Liberty Financial concludes a $550,000,000 public token sale as if his enemies did not need more ammunition. He's just giving it right to him. Not that it'll the ammunition will work. I mean, just because you have ammo doesn't mean that you're a good shot. Alright? You need both. But this is out of the block. Danny Park riding it. Donald Trump backed DeFi project World Liberty Financial's official website has completed its latest round of token sales, raising around $550,000,000 since launching the site or since launching the public sale. The public sale brings World Liberty Financial's total funds raised to $590,000,000, which means that they only had $40,000,000 raised in the first round. And then they raised 550 in the second. Is that what you're telling me? Oh my god. And it includes private rounds according to data from ICO drops.
The latest round wraps up the sale of 25% of WLFI's one hundred billion token supply, WLFI. I wish let's just call it Wilphi. Wilphi cofounder Zach Folkman said 63% of the total supply would be sold to the public, suggesting that more token sales may come in the future. Yeah. I think it's a pre mine, so I think they're just gonna hold on to them. Let the bag holders pump their bags for them. The crypto project launched the initial public sale of 20,000,000,000 tokens last October, selling 20% of its supply at, oh god, 1 and a half pennies per token to white listed investors, which means plebs on the street were not invited.
While the project initially saw underwhelming demand for its native token, The sale experienced a boost following the launch of Trump and Melania Trump's me and Melania Trump's meme coins, which drove greater interest in WilFi tokens. After the 20% initial sale was completed in January, raising 300,000,000, the project opened another, okay, another 5,000,000,000 tokens for sale for a higher price of 5 United States pennies per token. This additional sale was completed on Friday, raising 250,000,000. Tron founder and crypto personality, Justin Sun. Yeah. He's definitely a personality.
Announced. Oh my god. Justin Sun announced. If you don't understand why I'm kinda giggling about this, that's part of Justin Sun's personality. He had this thing where for a long time where he would make announcements of announcements. And then the announcement would come, and it was like nothing. And it just became a big joke. So it's kinda funny that Justin Sun is announcing that in November, Tron invested 30,000,000 in WillFi project, which led the crypto project to name Sun as an advisor on January 27 investment platform, Web three Port, also announced a $10,000,000 investment in the project.
The WillFi project was launched in September of twenty twenty four with a focus on promoting decentralized finance and dollar peg stablecoins. It's a casino. I I don't have to love Trump, be neutral on Trump, or hate Trump to know that this is gambling. This is a casino. You don't wanna have anything to do with it. Is it possible that you could get rich by participating? Yeah. But in my opinion, it's more than likely that you're gonna lose your ass and make somebody else who's already rich a lot more money, and you probably could have used that money. Please, for the love of god, stay away from this crap.
Stop buying convertible note treasury based on Bitcoin ETFs. Stop buying Trump tokens and Melania tokens. Stop buying shit coins. It none of this is all casino. It's all affinity scam. It's very once you see it, you can never unsee it. And I look at this and I'm like going, this is just garbage. And I don't eat and I don't hate Trump. I but I'm looking at this and I'm like, yeah, but I gotta call a spade a spade, and this one looks like shit. Speaking of Trump, his administration wants to acquire as much Bitcoin as possible according to the White House. Then why aren't you buying any?
Maybe Sander Lutz has the answer to that from dcrypt.co. A White House official told a room of crypto industry leaders this week that the Trump administration wants to acquire as much Bitcoin as possible. Well, get on it, son. It's not that hard. Just start cutting the checks. Anyway, at a closed door roundtable hosted by the Bitcoin Policy Institute on Tuesday, Beau Hines, executive director of the presidential working group on digital assets, told participants the White House is intent on acquiring as much as it can according to multiple attendees. When asked by someone in the room exactly how much Bitcoin the US government might ultimately acquire, Hines joked the question was akin to asking someone how many dollars they'd want, one roundtable attendee told Decrypt.
Well, a White House official confirmed to Decrypt that Hines indeed made the statement about acquiring as much Bitcoin as possible, but added the caveat that any such acquisitions would be made, quote, in a, say it with me, budget neutral way that doesn't cost the taxpayers a dime, end quote. The private round table, which followed a public, quote, Bitcoin for America policy summit hosted Bitcoin heavyweights, including, of course, strategy cofounder Michael Saylor, Mara Holdings, previously Marathon Digital CEO Fred Teal, Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan Macaulay, and Bitcoin Magazine CEO David Bailey. It also featured three US senators, Cynthia Lummis, Bill Hagerty, and Bernie Moreno.
It would have been funny if I've been Bernie Sanders. Anyway, they're all Republicans. At one point during the roundtable, a participant then asked Beau Hines whether the White House supports the Bitcoin Act, which is a piece of legislation reintroduced in the senate by Lummis on Tuesday that would require the US government to buy up to 1,000,000 BTC worth roughly $80,000,000,000 and would enshrine in the law of the strategic Bitcoin reserve established by president Donald Trump's executive order. Well, after receiving the question, according to one roundtable attendee, Hines then turned to Lummis, whom he was sat next to and said the White House plans to support legislation that puts a strategic Bitcoin reserve into law and will apply pressure to make sure it passes congress.
A White House official emphasized to decrypt that Hines did not, however, endorse any specific piece of legislation during the event. It is currently estimated the US government holds nearly 200,000 BTC acquired via civil and criminal forfeitures. Senior White House officials have pushed the line in recent days that they support the government purchasing additional Bitcoin to buttress a strategic reserve so long as those acquisitions are budget neutral. Say it with me. Budget neutral in a way that doesn't cost taxpayers a dime.
Whatever. In a debatable it is debatable rather whether Lummis' Bitcoin act could be considered budget neutral. The bill does call for The US to purchase some $80,000,000,000 worth of BTC at current prices, but plans to do so principally by obligating the Federal Reserve to hand over revenues that would theoretically be generated if the central bank were to have its gold certificates revalued at market prices. That would be $3,000 an ounce versus the $45 or whatever that we're at right now. That would be quite a bump. Anyway, the certificates were last priced in 1971 when The United States went off the gold standard.
Gold has since increased by over 6800% in value. And the more I think about that, the more it's the more that I'm intrigued of revaluing gold from $45 an ounce to 3,000. What the hell does that do to the gold market? Now you might say, oh my god. It's gonna make people buy gold. Not really. I don't think so. I I I either think it would be neutral and nobody would give a shit, or it could potentially cause a a I would say a small sell off. I don't think gold's in danger, but what I am saying is that it would be I think it would actually end up being very market neutral to the gold market globally if The United States were to revalue its gold from $45 to $3,000 an ounce.
Cynthia Lummis then would not be wrong. She would, in a budget neutral way that, quote, unquote, doesn't cost The US taxpayer a dime, a way to purchase a shit ton of bit cold not bit gold, of Bitcoin by selling a just a smattering of the amount of gold that we would have because they would have revalued it from 45 to $3,000 an ounce. You wouldn't and and I don't think it would be a good idea at all for the United States government to get rid of its big or its, its gold reserves to buy Bitcoin. I think I honestly think you should have both. I I've never hated gold. I don't really hate Peter Schiff. I think sometimes he says really stupid things, but it doesn't mean I hate the guy. I'm just saying that when it comes to revaluing gold from 45 to 3,000, I don't think it would cause a run on gold causing it to go, like, just skyrocket to something like $25,000 an ounce, but I also don't think it would cause a sell off. I really do believe it would be neutral, and we would have, in a budget neutral way, a shit ton of capital to just purchase Bitcoin hand over fist, and that would cause a run on the price of Bitcoin.
I guarantee it. Last up for the day, there's some people that don't like this whole strategic reserve idea, and they are all Democrats. Apparently, they are opposing the strategic reserve, and they're urging the treasury to block Trump's plan altogether. This is out of atlas21.com. Representative Gerald Connolly, a democrat on the house committee of oversight and government reform, has formally requested the US Department of Treasury end plans for the creation of a strategic reserve of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies promoted by Donald Trump.
In a letter sent to treasury on March 13, the Virginia Democrat highlighted, quote, clear conflicts of interest. Yeah. I told you I told you Trump was giving them ammunition. I don't I don't think they're gonna be able to shoot it very well, but they he has given them ammunition. And he warned of the risks to taxpayer monies in Trump's initiative. He emphasized that the president had neither consulted congress nor sought the necessary legislative authorization to proceed with the creation of the reserve. And in his request, he stated, quote, the creation of a strategic cryptocurrency reserve is poised to enrich the president and his closest allies at the expense of the American taxpayer.
I urge you to cease all plans to create a strategic cryptocurrency reserve and request that you provide a briefing to the staff of the committee on oversight and government reform. Well, I'm sorry, Connolly. You sent the letter to the wrong people. The Treasury Department does not get to override an executive order. You may wish they did, but they do not. So this letter is falling on deaf ears. I guarantee it, which is why we're gonna end here. Nailed it. Sixty three minutes and thirty seconds. I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.
Have a great day.
It is 09:24AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the March 2025. That means it's Saint Patrick's Day today. Did you wear green? I mean, are we actually still doing that shit as adults? Because I, honestly, I was so over it in seventh grade. It's not even funny. Pinch me. Just try it. I'm done. I will, I know. I will pinch your ass back. Just because I am wearing red today does not mean that I get to get pinched. I'm a full grown adult at this point. So I don't need this kind of childish crap. So just I'm just I'm just saying, but this is this is episode ten fifty five of Bitcoin, and I should have brought it to you on Friday, but the kids decided that they wanted to, I don't know, stay home from school for whatever reason. And honestly, thank god they did because we had a really great time, got to, you know, do some stuff with my son.
He wanted to make, sushi. Of course, we ended up making, you know, California rolls because good luck getting sushi, grade fish in a landlocked region like Eastern Washington. But it was fun. It was it was it was an excellent weekend, but I only brought you three shows last week. My apologies for that. I I feel terrible. So I'm going to make it up to you today. This may be a slightly longer show. I don't know. We'll have to see. But we are gonna just go ahead and jump right in because the Kentucky State Senate has passed a bill that protects Bitcoin self custody rights.
This is Nick writing from Bitcoin Magazine yesterday well, yesterday evening anyway. The Kentucky State Senate unanimously, unanimously passed a bill aimed at protecting Bitcoin's self custody rights as well as digital asset mining operations. With a very decisive 37 to zero vote, the legislation titled an act relating to blockchain digital assets or h b seven zero one now moves directly to the governor's desk for final approval. So let's just chew on what happened here. We've got this bill that protects Bitcoin self custody as well as digital asset mining operations.
It passed out of committee, probably a few committees. It then hit the house of representatives at the state level for Kentucky. It was clearly passed because that way is the only way that it's gonna get over to the senate where it probably had to go through a couple of committees over there, and then it went to the senate floor to vote after it passed out of whatever committees the senate had for it. And when they voted on it, it wasn't lopsided. It wasn't, you know, even Steven. It was 37 to zero. Every single Kentucky senator voted to allow people to self custody their own Bitcoin and allow for digital asset mining operations to occur in the state. That's a big deal.
The other issue here is that that's it. This bill is all the way through all the gates it was ever going to see except, of course, the final gate, which is the signature of the governor of Kentucky. Now the governor of Kentucky, as all states in The United States Governors have a veto power, very well maybe, you know, may decide that he doesn't wanna sign it or and just, you know, puts the veto stamp on it, in which case it goes back to wherever it originated from, or at least I assume. I'm not exactly sure how the state of Kentucky operates, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot like the US federal government.
So hats off to Kentucky, man. Let's see what's going on with the rest of it. It was sponsored by representatives Adam Bowling and j or TJ Roberts, and the bill does in fact affirm the right of individuals to self custody digital assets, not just Bitcoin, through self hosted wallets. Self hosted wallets and additionally, it prevents local zoning laws from discriminating against digital asset mining businesses ensuring that Bitcoin miners can operate freely within the state. The bill outlines several key provisions, including protection for Bitcoin self custody, of course.
We've already been through that one. Prohibition of discriminatory zoning laws, and to expand on that, local governments at the county and city level cannot impose zoning changes that unfairly target digital asset mining businesses. Pausing just to remind you, that language is a bit vague, and I don't know if it comes out of Bitcoin Magazine or out of the actual bill itself because and I say it's vague Because this, unfairly target digital asset mining businesses. What is unfair? How do you know it's targeted? We know we're pretty sure what's going to be listed as a digital asset mining business, but the unfair targeting of is a bit vague.
I really wish, I or wish I knew whether or not they have very clear language on that, and this is just a Bitcoin magazine thing. Number three, exemptions from money transmitter licensing. This is a huge one. This is actually bigger than the zoning thing, at least in my opinion. Home Bitcoin miners and digital asset mining businesses alike are exempt from Kentucky's money transmitter requirements. That's a big deal. Fourth and finally, the clarification of securities laws. Digital asset mining and staking as a service are explicitly not classified as securities under Kentucky law. Now at the federal level, that may be different. We'll we'll see. But after passing through the Kentucky house oh my god.
Check this shit out. After passing through the Kentucky house with a 91 to zero vote, on 02/28/2025, the bill then moved swiftly through the senate. The March 13 vote saw full bipartisan support with 37 senators voting in favor, zero opposed, and one not voting. The legislation now awaits the governor's signature, which would officially enshrine Bitcoin self custody protections and digital asset mining rights into Kentucky law. And if signed, Kentucky will become one of the more Bitcoin friendly states in the country, setting a precedent for other states to follow. Now this has nothing to do with the Kentucky Bitcoin strategic reserve. Alright. This is just about self custody and mining. And I think Kentucky's got another bill floating around, but the Kentucky house voting 91 to zero to pass this, and then the senate votes 37 to zero to pass it, the governor's not going to veto this.
I guarantee the governor is not going to veto this. If he does anything weird, it would be to delay the signature. That'd be the only thing that would be weird, and I kinda don't think that the governor's gonna do that. But, again, we will have to see. But Kentucky, at this point, they really seem to be leading the way and not any of the other states, and that includes my home state of Texas, which Michael Sailor is not a resident in. But if he was, he wouldn't have to pay state taxes. And if you know what I'm talking about, then you've been following Michael Saylor for as long as I have. Michael Saylor's strategy has made another Bitcoin purchase.
It's the smallest amount of Bitcoin that he's ever bought ever. Helen Parks, Cointelegraph says the following Michael Saylor strategy, the world's largest public corporate Bitcoin holder, has announced its smallest Bitcoin purchase on record. On March 17, they officially announced the latest 113 Bitcoin acquisition bought for around a measly, a a a smattering, a a worthless amount of $10,700,000 in cash, which is an average price of roughly $82,981 per Bitcoin. And this will be the first time that he's actually bought Bitcoin in any amount whatsoever that the price didn't immediately go south underneath where he actually bought those coins. But the latest purchase was made using the proceeds from the STRK ATM or the strike at the market, which is a new strategy program looking to raise up to $21,000,000,000 in fresh capital to acquire more BTC.
Strategy's new 130 BTC buy is the smallest one ever recorded since the company announced its first purchase of 21,454 Bitcoin for $250,000,000 in August of twenty twenty. And if you remember, that's what kicked off the whole MicroStrategy now called strategy ascension into the Bitcoin realm and Michael, Sailor becoming some kind of god amongst men when it comes to Bitcoin even though he had dismissed it previously. It really doesn't matter because here's the point. People are kinda freaking out. Well, they're not freaking out. Let let let me back up and say state it a better way. People are, like, going, see, even Michael Saylor's losing steam. Well, I don't know. Maybe Michael Saylor's, like, going, look. Every time Trump opens his mouth and says the word tariff, everything fucking tanks.
So how about we do this? How about we wait? We'll collect up a bunch of money. We'll figure out when orange man decides to stop saying the word tariff. You know? I mean, he he might not be able to call the direct bottom of which, you know, when when, Donald Trump stops saying the word tariff. But at one point or another, Donald Trump's going to stop talking about tariffs, either because we're not going to do them or we have already done them, and they're already in effect. And there is no real reason to talk about tariffs anymore.
I think that that's what Michael Saylor is waiting for. And in fact, this makes sense to me. In in fact, I've been waiting for Michael Saylor to stop buying tops because I'm like, dude, you you you have better business intelligence than anybody else. You know what's coming. You know what's over the wires before anybody else does. He probably has a Bloomberg terminal. He's probably getting the news and all stock quotes and any announcements being made fifteen to thirty minutes, if not a full hour or two before the rest of the world's public does. So, therefore, he's in probably the best position to be able to say, you know what? We pray orange man say in tariff again. We probably need to just not buy anything right now. I think that that's what's going on, and I think people are kind of freaking out for nothing. Now the circle p is in fact open for business. I've got a new vendor, and SoapMiner probably doesn't know that I'm actually talking about him in today's show. But if you don't know who SoapMiner is, s o a p, soap, you know, like soap like you wash yourself with, he is yet another person who is making tallow based soaps. And if you don't know what tallow is, well, it's beef fat.
Pork fat is lard. I don't know what deer fat is, and you probably don't you don't really get that much fat off a deer anyway. It's pretty damn lean meat. But it is like pork fat is lard, tallow is beef. We're talking moo moo cow. Right? And that's the fat base of these soaps, and all soaps have some kind of fatty base. But this is real animal product soap. So he has a stall on Shopster, s h o p s t r dot store, Shopster dot store. It is based on Nostr. He has his own stall. He's got a nice little pitcher of some soap here, and he will give you let's see. It says, let's see.
You can buy three bars of rough cut tallow soap, each weighing approximately four to four and a half ounces each. And here's the ingredient list because he respects his product and his potential customers. Pure grass fed beef tallow, lye, and distilled water. This is an unscented pure soap just like your great grandmother used to make. We only accept satoshis. Shipping is included in price within the Continental United States. This bar or three bar package will cost you precisely 21 United States dollars worth of Satoshis because he takes Bitcoin.
For his goods or services. Soap miner has been inducted into the circle p. This, the URL, it there's it's not human readable because it's got a nostril address at the very end of it. So go to the show notes. The the Shopster stall will be a full URL. All you gotta do is click on it, and it will take you to shopster.store. It will take you right to a stall. You however you do it, you make sure SoapMiner heard it about or heard that you heard about his soap here at the Circle p on the Bitcoin and podcast. SoapMiner, I hope we sell lots of soap together. Okay. Russia is using Bitcoin and other shitcoins for its oil trades with China and India.
Well, let's see what's changed. Vivek sent Bitcoin out of Bitcoin magazine says amid ongoing sanctions over the war in Ukraine, Russia has turned to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to facilitate some of its oil trade with major buyers China and India. And according to a Reuters report, this is out of Reuters. This isn't bat you know, Bob's backyard Bitcoin magazine or something like that. This is out of Reuters. Russian oil companies and traders increasingly conduct transactions in Bitcoin and crypto, allowing them to circumvent restrictions from Western nations.
Sources say monthly trade volumes are already already in the tens of millions of dollars. The mechanism involves Chinese or Indian buyers purchasing oil and depositing won or rupees into an offshore account owned by a middleman company, probably in The Caymans. The middleman then converts the fiat currency into crypto and transfers it to an account in Russia where it is exchanged into rubles. While crypto based oil payments are still a fraction of Russia's One Hundred And Ninety Two Billion Dollar total oil trade, the practice is growing as sanctions bite.
The trend highlights the utility of Bitcoin and crypto in enabling transaction settlement for sanctioned nations. Iran and Venezuela have adopted similar crypto strategies. Bitcoin and crypto censorship resistance allows value transfers beyond the reach of sanctions. In late twenty twenty four, Russia's finance minister publicly endorsed using crypto in foreign trade. The Kremlin sees Bitcoin and crypto as one of several effective strategies to overcome financial penalties imposed over the invasion of Ukraine. The Bank of Russia also recently proposed legalizing crypto investments for wealthy citizens. However, Russia's oil trade still relies primarily on fiat currency.
Donald Trump's administration is debating whether or not to ease some restrictions to improve relations with Moscow. With the Ukraine conflict still fully unresolved, for those of you who were unsure, yeah, the situation in Ukraine is fully 100% unresolved. Russia's pivot toward leveraging Bitcoin and decentralized technologies appear to aim to reduce its reliance on traditional finance and dollar settlements. Other countries under US sanctions are likely to be monitored closely. See, this is how it begins. Or this is rather how it accelerates.
The use of Bitcoin already began. But this is this is another segment that we don't really we don't really look at it this much. We have been ultra concerned with nations and or central banks putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. What we what we forgot about is that about, you know, between nine months ago and, like, the, you know, between then and, like, the two years prior, we were talking about nation states using Bitcoin for foreign trade. And we were really all into that. And then all of a sudden, they you know, Donald Trump, you know, flashed something shiny in front of us, and we all got distracted. We should not be distracted from this. However, it still seems a little odd that I mean, it's I don't know. There still seems to be some there's something about what was in here about how the middleman receives this, you know, fiat currency and then converts it into Bitcoin, and then it goes to Russia, and then it converts back. From the middleman to Russia and then Russia internally converting Bitcoin back to to rubles, I could see that.
However, China has to deposit one into this offshore account. And, I mean, how? Is it using SWIFT? See see what I get what I'm getting at is that there still seems to be a little bit of, yeah, you know, China should just be buying Bitcoin and and trade trading it directly with Russia for oil. And screw this middleman thing because that middleman, it's a man in the middle attack vector. And at one point or another, we're gonna figure out how to screw that up in either event. I just think that it's important to understand that Russia is not what they just weren't blowing smoke when they said, hey, man. We're gonna start circumventing sanctions with Bitcoin because they're doing it. Alright. Let's get into this one.
You know what? I'm not gonna do that one. Well, no. I'm I'm gonna have to do this one. Sorry, guys. But, I wanna talk about how BitDeer is transforming Bitcoin mining machines. And we want to talk about this because Tom Carreras is writing it for CoinDesk. It's a little long, but I find it interesting because we've been dealing with ASICs for a while, and BitDeer may be about to change the game. Let's find out. Application specific integrated circuit or ASIC chips form the backbone of the Bitcoin mining industry. ASIC machines are made as a single purpose machine to solve Bitcoin's SHA two fifty six algorithm as fast as possible.
And they're extremely good at it. One of the most widely used ASIC machines, the Antminer s 19, is capable of making 82,000,000,000,000 computations per second, which is 820 times the number of stars in the Milky Way. The 30,000,000,000 ASIC manufacturing market is dominated by Bitmain. The Chinese company's machines power roughly 80% of Bitcoin's hash rate, according to Miner Mag. But the Singapore based Bitcoin mining firm BitDeer intends to shake things up with a release of a brand new ASIC chip architecture. These new chips could bring a huge jump in efficiency, the company claims anyway, while improving transparency in the ASIC manufacturing process. Quote, the two dominant players, Bitmain and MicroBT, are both private companies and very opaque. Jeff Laberge, head of capital markets and strategic initiatives at BitDeer, told CoinDesk during an interview, quote, they don't really engage with the media or give any type of guidance at all about what they're doing from an r and d standpoint, and that makes it very difficult for end users and end buyers to plan around.
Quote, we want our customers to know where we're at in our manufacturing process, what our roadmap is in terms of new chip designs, and where we're at in our production cycles, Laberge said. Shannon Squires, chief mining officer at Bitcoin hosting firm Compass Mining, told CoinDesk that increased visibility into ASIC production would help miners plan for new hardware shipments and make it easier to predict Bitcoin's difficulty growth. Quote, Bitcoin or BitDeer's commitment to transparency is great for the mining industry. While Canaan discloses its annual sales volume for various mining models, Bittir takes it just a step further by providing more frequent delivery volume updates, said Wolfie Zhao, head of research at MinerMag.
Although both are smaller players in the hardware market, their efforts do show good faith in promoting transparency. Hopefully, this will encourage the larger market incumbents to take note, end quote. ASIC chips have been used mostly or been using mostly the same blueprint since 2014. Over the last decade, the the biggest increase in ASIC power efficiency have come at the foundry level as leading global chipmaker TSMC has refined its manufacturing process. While miners have also made alterations to chip design, such modifications have only brought incremental grain gains. Even so, progress has been tremendous.
The very first ever ASIC, which was Canaan's Avalon 2013, in or in the year 2013, it had a power efficiency of 6,000 joules per terahash. Bitmain's Antminer s 21 XP hydro, the current most efficient on the market, 12 jewels per terahash. So from 6,000 jewels per terahash all the way down to 12 jewels per terahash from the year 2013 is rather amazing if you ask my opinion. But continuing with continuing with the article, BitDeer is listed on Nasdaq and it wants to create a completely new architecture for its own ASICs. Quote, we feel like it's going to be necessary to break into what we call the single digit efficiency range, Laber said, referring to mining rigs with less than 10 joules per terahash of efficiency.
Scaling up with the traditional blueprint means using progressively thinner chips, but thinner means chips are more likely to be defective, and yields per batch tend to fall. Quote, you're also competing with Apple and NVIDIA and some of the other larger companies in the world for the same materials, Laberge said. BitDeer's chief strategy officer, Harris Bassett, is or Bassett, sorry. Bassett is probably how it's pronounced, is leading a team of engineers to create a new framework. Some members of that team worked on the designs found at Bitmain's very first ASIC chips back in 2014, the chips whose architecture became the standard across the industry.
BitDeer's research has already had success. The company's most recent product, the Seal Miner a three, achieved a power efficiency of 9.7 joules per terra hash during performance trials the firm reported on Monday. And that would be last Monday, not today. That means that the a three, which still uses the traditional ASIC blueprint, could end up taking the efficiency crown from the s 21 XP hydro out of Bitmain. Yet the miner's Seal Miner a four, which will employ the firm's new chip architecture, is expected to consume only five joules per terahash, and it will likely be the most efficient ASIC machine on the market by a significant margin. Quote, people have known for a long time that you could recycle, the electric charge on a chip, but no one's really been able to figure out how to do that in a way that allows for high performance.
We've cracked the code on how to do this in a very high performance application, Bassett told the Coin Stories podcast back in December. Instead of just using charge once and then discharging it, we use it several times, four, five, six times. So we get a 75 to 80% improvement in efficiency by doing that. Our CL miner a four chips will use this technology, but should also be applicable more generally in digital chips, especially digital chips that are highly active, you know, like GPUs and signal processing chips. Making ASICs isn't easy either.
BitDeer's research team is divided into two units, one in Singapore and the other one in Silicon Valley, and they both work on the new chip designs. Quote, for such a simple machine, because all it does is solve SHA two fifty six algorithms, it's extremely complicated to design. We've got some of the best engineers in the world working on this, said Liberge. So far, the firm has been delivering new products at a fast pace. BitDeer pushed out both the Seal Miner a one and a two last year, 2024, and is expecting the a three to enter mass production in the latter half of this year. And it says that the a four should reach tape out, which is the last stage of its design process, in the third quarter of the year with a release likely in very late twenty twenty five or early twenty twenty six. My gut feeling says mid to late twenty twenty six. You're talking about new architecture, people. It's not exactly all that easy.
When a new chip design is finalized, BitDear sends the plans over to TSMC. And not only is the Taiwanese firm the largest chip manufacturer in the world, it's also the most advanced on a technological level, which makes BitDear's partnership with it crucial. Quote, you can't just go to TSMC and say, hey. I want a hundred x a hash worth of chips in the, I don't know, next three months. There's a process for going through that, Laberge said. Quote, you go in and you ask them for chip allocation, and then they'll give that based on priority, end quote. Once the plans or once it has the plans in hand, TSMC produces a mask, which is essentially it essentially functions as a template for the chips, like the platen in a printing press.
The mask is sent to BitDeer alongside RISC chips, which is a small batch of chips that the company can use for trials to make sure that the design works properly. If the firm needs any alterations to be made to the design, that's when it happens. In that case, TSMC makes corrections based on BitDear's feedback and sends over a new mask with new RISC chips. All of this happens at significant cost. Bit Dear spent 40 or 14 sorry, 14,000,000 on the a two's tape out and then 26,000,000 on the tape out for the a threes. When BitDeer is then satisfied with the design, TSMC uses the mask to mass produce the wafers.
LaBerge compared wafers to sheets, each containing hundreds of chips. Technically, a mask can be used to create almost an unlimited number of wafers, but TSMC has finite resources and can only produce a certain number of chips, so firms end up competing for them. One of the advantages of the a four design, according to Liberge, is that it's supposed to make the firm's chip allocation process easier. Quote, Bassett challenged the team to come up with a new architecture that did not need to undergo TSMC's latest processes, but could step back a couple of generations which would allow us to use a node that is much less in demand, he said. A semiconductor node is basically a specific version of the firm's chip manufacturing technology.
TSMC is constantly building new nodes in an effort to refine its processes. It takes roughly three months for BitDeer to receive its mask and risk chips after first submitting its design to TSMC. Then, it's another three to four months for the company to receive its chips once it has given the foundry the green light for mass production. The chips are then sent straight to BitDeer's manufacturing facilities in Asia, and from there, it can take four to eight weeks for the mining rigs to be fully built and then packaged. Despite all of the cost incurred during production, some of the capital required for manufacturing ASICs comes from BitDeer's customers.
Miners interested in purchasing BitDeer's ASICs typically put down a deposit of 25 to 50% of the total cost of the order. The production cycle tends to average six to seven months, so it doesn't take long for the company to recuperate its funds and make a profit. Building ASICs also creates advantages for BitDeer's own mining operations because up until recently, the firm, which was founded in 2021, focused on the hosting business, meaning that it provided facilities for other Bitcoin miners to place their rigs. BitDeer is slowly transitioning out of that model and expanding its own mining operations alongside its ASIC manufacturing arm.
The acquisition of ASICs is typically the most expensive part of building up a Bitcoin mining operation. These machines usually only last around three or four years before newer models make them obsolete, so they're constantly looking to acquire more and newer machines. Not only is BitDeer able to considerably reduce the cost by producing its own machines, but it also has the options of selling its mining rigs to other firms depending on their own needs. Down the line, BitDeer aims to give Bitmain and MicroBT a run for their money and disrupt what Liberge calls the duopoly of the ASIC market.
Quote, we want to be the top player in the market absolutely. We believe we have a team and the technology to do that. So it's important to understand that we've been basically dealing with you know, honestly, we've been kind of dealing with the same architecture on ASIC chips for years and years, and the only difference the only why they say it's incremental efficiency increases is simply because we go from, like, 17 nanometers to 14 nanometers to, I don't know, 12 nanometers to seven to five. These guys are talking about a brand new architecture. And the fact that they can recycle the electrons through the chip is an interesting notion.
How do they handle heat? Because they'll you know, I mean, I'm just thinking that, well, I mean, will that help with heat? Would does that do nothing for the heat generation? Does it I don't you know? It it it it's odd. But I've never really thought about you just pump electrons through a chip, it does what it's gonna do, and then that's it. And we don't really think about what happens to the electrons after that. You know, generally speaking, they're kinda consumed on on processes, but not all of it and not all of it gets converted into heat. So if there's residual electrons that could be recycled and they can pump it back through the chip, well, hell, yeah. I could see massive efficiency gains. It does seem a little bit science fictiony, but, again, as usual, we'll we'll have to wait and see. They're either blowing smoke up our butts or they've got something on their hands. And if they can do what they say they can do, they're gonna be able to compete. And it would be nice to have a third major manufacturer of ASIC chips in the Bitcoin market.
Okay. The US court or rather a US court has approved Three Arrows Capital bid to expand $1,500,000,000 claim against FTX. If you remember, Three Arrows Capital was one of the firms that went down in the FTX debacle. Sebastian Sinclair from Decrypt. A bankruptcy court has granted liquidators of defunct hedge fund, Three Arrows Capital or three AC, permission to expand their claim against FTX to $1,530,000,000 rejecting objections from FTX's debtors that the move was untimely and unfair, judge John t Dorsey of the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware ruled on Thursday, that would be last Thursday, that three AC's liquidators had provided sufficient notice of their claim and were hampered in their investigation by FTX's failure to share relevant records in a timely manner. Quote, the evidence suggests that the delay in filing the amended proof of claim was in large part caused by the debtors themselves.
FTX's debtors led by CEO John Ray the third, meanwhile, objected to the amendment, arguing that it introduced new legal theories and significantly increased the claim size. However, the court found that three AC's original filing had put FTX, quote, on notice of the possibility of the latter asserted claims dismissing the debtor's objections. Legal representatives for FTX debtors did not immediately respond for a request for comment, but three a c, which was one of the most significant crypto hedge funds with over $3,000,000,000 in assets, collapsed in June of twenty twenty two following a sharp downturn in crypto markets.
No. That no. The the whole debacle caused the downturn in crypto markets. It all boiled down to Changpeng Zhao out of, Bitfinex. It was a bit not Bitfinex. Oh, god. Shit. I can't remember. Anyway, you know, Changpeng is out. C z, dude. C z. Yeah. He blew the whistle on a whole bunch of stuff, and everybody freaked out. But what he was blowing the whistle on was FTX balance sheets and their relationships with people like three a c. So, no, the downturn in the market did not cause the collapse of FTX. That was going to happen, and it was going to take all of those companies along with it. But regardless, the collapse of three AC triggered a wave a wave of liquidations across the industry affecting lenders such as Voyager Digital and BlockFi.
The fund entered court ordered liquidation in the British Virgin Islands in late the late June of twenty twenty two. And according to court filings, three a c held 1,530,000,000.00 in assets on FTX as of 06/12/2022. And over the next two days, those assets were liquidated to cover a $1,300,000,000 debt owed to FTX, court documents show. Well, three AC's liquidators initially filed a 20,000,000 claim in FTX's bankruptcy case in June of twenty twenty three, but then expanded the alleged claims including breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and yada yada yada, breach of fiduciary duty. The ruling comes fifteen months after three a c's liquidators also secured a worldwide freeze on 1,400,000,000.0 in assets tied to the fund's cofounders.
The December 2023 order issued by a British Virgin Islands court blocks Suzu Davies and Davies' wife, Kelly Chin, from accessing funds while claims against them are pursued. And liquidators argue that the founders should be held accountable for allegedly deepening three AC's financial woes in the weeks before its collapse. There's all manner of chicanery that is still being uncovered in the three AC, BlockFi, Alameda Research, FTX. That was a much bigger deal than I think people really gave it credit for. Yeah. Sure. I mean, everything just kinda fell apart because of it, but still the amount of fiduciary chicanery underneath that, just eye watering, dude. Let let's run the numbers.
Futures and commodities, I got oil up a third of a point to $67.44 in West Texas. Over there, Britt, North Sea, it's up a half a point to $70.94. Natural gas going the opposite direction, two thirds of the downside, $4.07 per thousand cubic feet, and gasoline is up 1.2 to two dollars and seventeen cents a gallon. Shiny metal rocks doing pretty much okay today. Gold is up, well, kinda moving sideways, 0.04%, but it has topped $3,000. Again, twice. This be the second time that it's done it. Silver is down two thirds of a point, but platinum is up one and a quarter. Copper is up 1.12. Palladium is up a quarter of a percent.
Now over down in ag, we've got a fully mixed band of of of merry men here. Let's see. Biggest winner. Sugar. Wow. Four percent to the upside. Biggest loser is gonna be lumber, a full half point to the downside. Live cattle up a third. Lean hogs up 1.85%, and feeder cattle are up two thirds of a point. The Dow seems to be be recovering from tariff talk over the last god only knows how many weeks. It's slightly up point 62% to the upside. S and P is also up a quarter. Nasdaq is down point zero six. Not much going on there. It's basically crab walking. S and P Mini, however, shooting for the moon, 1.07% to the upside.
Oh, did I mention SoapMiner? Circle p. Just a reminder, SoapMiner has his own website, soapminer.com. If you don't wanna if you if you just wanna remember how to get to SoapMiner, all you got to do dude, you don't got to go to my show notes. You can just go to soapminer.com. He's got a shop. He's got all kinds of like he's got lavender tallow soap. He's got peppermint tallow soap. Pine tar, rustic, tea tree, they're all tallow. They're all soap, and they're all mined by SoapMiner. Get yours today at soapminer.com and tell them you heard about it here on the circle p. Bitcoin doing $83,530.
That brings us to a market capitalization of $1,660,000,000,000, and we can only get 27.6 ounces of the shiny metal rock with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,837,929.09 of. And average fees per block are about as low as I've seen them in a long time. 0.03 Bitcoin taken in fees on a per block basis, and there are 30 blocks carrying 21,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of three. Count them one, two, three. Satoshis per v byte. Low priorities is the same. 806.5 exahashes per second is the hash rate for the Bitcoin network, so highly secure.
Nothing at all to worry about for me. And from Thursday's or last week's last show of Bitcoin and entitled Interpol Dance, I had a few people comment on the cover art for that one. I'm glad that y'all enjoyed it. It is kind of funny. Bitcoin arborist with 5,000 sats. Dude, thanks, bro. He says, I owe you an apology, good sir. I accused you of doing something I myself did, which is why I say well, sorry. Which is to say mispronounce Samson's name. You have met the man and I merely listened to podcasts. Podcasts where Samson has been humble enough to let people pronounce his name incorrect. Thanks for not telling me to eat a bag of shit.
Why on earth would I tell somebody who gives me satoshis to eat a bag of shit? That's no. You gotta you gotta pull a rabbit out of your hat for me to do that kind of stuff. And, also, yes, I was one of the people that always pronounce Sampson Moe's last name Mao. And then I listened to a couple of other podcasts where Sampson was on there, and, they started pronouncing it Moe. And then I saw him on CNBC, and they pronounced his last name Moe. And I'm like, but it's actually anyway, so it turns out that I was right because I interviewed him a long time ago at the very first years of this podcast. And before we started recording, I actually asked him. I'm like, dude, how how do you pronounce it? Is it Mao or Moe? And he's pretty humble about it. He's like going, it's actually Moe, but it doesn't matter. You can call me whatever you want. So, yeah, pretty cool guy. Graham with two thousand says, thank you, sir, for the news.
I can use. You're welcome. Oak Grove with +1 says, long time caller, first time listener here. If you look at communities as superorganisms like cities, kingdoms, larger sports teams, corporations, then theft through asset seizure makes sense as an act of autophagy. Autophagy basically means to eat oneself. Just I'm just giving you some background. The organism wants to survive, so it will liquidate useful macro and micronutrients and tissues from what it considers less useful members while labeling them a tumor or cancerous. Quote, they sold drugs as just an excuse to exercise a grandma and leave them on the street. The Bolsheviks and the Red Army literally starved villages of families and came back to make sure that they were dead or dying to take farms.
It isn't outside our government to do something to take Bitcoin from people. If you aren't depressed, give this episode called the anti humans a listen to hear what the wave of Soviet Russia coming to town was like. Yeah. I might have to I might have to wait on that one there, Oak Grove. Thank you. Psyduck with five sixty five says, Psyduck. Bitcoin for president with 500 says, I really appreciate your show. Thank you for your time. No. No, sir. Thank you. God's death with two 30 seven says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. God's death with another 237 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. A hundred sats from I can't tell. It doesn't have his name, but says great show, so I appreciate that. Pies with a hundred says thank you, sir. Hashtag 40 contra says doesn't give me anything, but he does say is Trump's striking an under the table deal with Binance.
It's possible, but they denied it. So we don't really know what the hell Binance c z. That's it. Binance, not Bitfinex. Binance. That's what that thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Contra, for, unwittingly making me remind myself what the hell company I was trying to think of that CZ used to run. But yeah. No. I I don't I don't think I don't think so because that is so transparent that I don't well, I don't know. I mean, the Trump coin itself is very transparent, and I I don't know why anybody would want to give your political enemies any ammunition. And God knows they've got enough just with Trump and Melania coin.
I wouldn't give them any more by working a damn deal with Binance under the table. I'll tell you that much. Alright. That's it for the weather report. Alrighty dighty. Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Rex launches Bitcoin corporate treasury convertible bond ETF. You're going I corporate treasury convertible bond e I don't wanna know. Yeah. You do. You wanna know about this. And I'll tell you why here in a second after we get finished with Vince Quill out of Cointelegraph. Rexhares, an exchange traded fund provider with over $6,000,000,000 in assets under management, launched its Bitcoin corporate treasury convertible bond called Bmax is the ticker symbol ETF that invest in the convertible bonds of companies with BTC corporate reserve strategies.
Okay. Pausing. This is why I'm bringing this to you. This is the casino. Somebody will say you know, you'll say, hey. What do you do? And they'll say something like impressive, like, oh, I invest in corporate treasury convertible bond ETFs because they're, you know, they're they're all hoity toity. They're they went to Hobbit, you know, wearing the Hobbit tie, and they're drinking their their, I don't know, their their Tom Collins or whatever the hoity toity drink of the day is for those richy riches over there on Wall Street. It's fucking junk. It's just this is just a giant casino. This is a bet on a bet on a bet on a bet on a bet. If you haven't watched The Big Short, you need to watch that movie not once, not twice, not even three times.
If you have not watched that movie at least five times, then you have no idea just how bad the casino can get. This is a bullshit product. This is a bad product. It it might make you a lot of money. I'm just saying that it doesn't do anything. It is a bet. It's not it's when you buy a share of this ETF, you have nothing to do with corporate treasuries. You don't need to bond prices and yields. It in my opinion, it kinda makes people think that they know more about economies and financial instrumentation than they actually do. And it makes them think that they're smart, and they're not because they're gambling in a casino, and you might as well go to Vegas and have fun with hookers and blow.
Let's continue. According to the March 14 announcement, the ETF will purchase the convertible notes of companies such as strategy. Convertible notes are commercial paper that could be converted into equity at a predetermined rate if an investor chooses. Typically, these convertible bonds are purchased by institutional investors, including pension funds, some of which specialize in convertible note investing. Greg King, CEO of Rex Financial said, quote, until now, these bonds have been difficult for individual investors to reach. BMax removes those barriers. No. You know. I'll explain why. Making it easier to invest in the strategy pioneered by Michael Saylor, leveraging corporate debt to acquire Bitcoin as a treasury asset.
You do not own the bonds. When you buy this ETF, you own a share of a pool of bonds, but you do not own the bonds. It's the same thing as the Bitcoin ETF. If you are foolish enough to purchase Bitcoin ETFs and think you have Bitcoin, I'm here to tell you, you are fooling yourself. It is a foolish way to go about thinking whether or not you have Bitcoin. You don't. You have, at best, an IOU. That's at best. Same thing here. You don't they're removing no barriers to retail. They're offering you another door into the casino. That's it. Anyway, investing in convertible bonds, ETFs, and the equity of companies such as Strategy, Marathon, and Meta Planet provides investors with indirect exposure to Bitcoin that removes the technical barriers to entry and self custody risks of holding BTC directly.
And, honestly, there is nothing else in this article that we need to go over. It's just you're going to see this crap. Remember how I kept telling you that you're going to see a train load of stable coins? And I used to tell you that altcoins are never going to go away and you're going to see more and more. They kinda finally started dying off, but it took years. But before that, I was telling him, like, this isn't going to end. You're going to have altcoins all over the place. Now I'm saying the same thing with meme coins, and I'm saying the same thing with stablecoins. Well, now I'm saying the same thing with Wall Street generated financial instrumentations that seem to suggest that you're smart if you buy them.
You're not. Sure. You can look at them and say, okay. I get the underlying asset. I completely understand. And let's let's presume for the moment that you do, that you completely understand every mechanistical nuance that could possibly underlie one of Sailor's corporate bond offerings at a 0% coupon rate. You know all of it. You know it so well. You can you can feel it. It's like a guitar player learning a song for the very first time, and they suck at playing guitar for the first in the first place versus a guitar player that's been playing for fifty straight years learning the song for the first time, we you you know the difference. Okay? It's it's gonna be way harder. There's no feeling.
You feel the bond. Let's say you so you so succinctly understand this instrument, this underlying instrument, and you so completely understand the way ETFs work and how they're represented or how they are representative of the underlying asset. Let's say you know all that. Okay. Then that makes you a qualified investor at at least in my book. Even if you don't have a million dollars, which is one of the other stipulations in The United States for a qualified investment is I think it's a million dollars. You gotta have it be worth a million dollars. Right? Okay. Then go on. You you go ahead and do it, and and and, you know, more power to you. I hope you win.
But most people don't understand that. And they think they understand the underlying asset, but they don't really understand the underlying asset. In my view, this is just another in a long line of Wall Street based financial instrumentation that's going to hit the street, and you might as well say, you know what that sounds like? That sounds like a new shit coin. And if you do that, you will be in a much better position to go, I think I need to dig into this more if you are at all interested in investing in something like a corporate bond, corporate treasury, ETF.
In my opinion, I just find it ridiculous. But we've got other fish to fry, and his name is Trump. The Trump backed World Liberty Financial concludes a $550,000,000 public token sale as if his enemies did not need more ammunition. He's just giving it right to him. Not that it'll the ammunition will work. I mean, just because you have ammo doesn't mean that you're a good shot. Alright? You need both. But this is out of the block. Danny Park riding it. Donald Trump backed DeFi project World Liberty Financial's official website has completed its latest round of token sales, raising around $550,000,000 since launching the site or since launching the public sale. The public sale brings World Liberty Financial's total funds raised to $590,000,000, which means that they only had $40,000,000 raised in the first round. And then they raised 550 in the second. Is that what you're telling me? Oh my god. And it includes private rounds according to data from ICO drops.
The latest round wraps up the sale of 25% of WLFI's one hundred billion token supply, WLFI. I wish let's just call it Wilphi. Wilphi cofounder Zach Folkman said 63% of the total supply would be sold to the public, suggesting that more token sales may come in the future. Yeah. I think it's a pre mine, so I think they're just gonna hold on to them. Let the bag holders pump their bags for them. The crypto project launched the initial public sale of 20,000,000,000 tokens last October, selling 20% of its supply at, oh god, 1 and a half pennies per token to white listed investors, which means plebs on the street were not invited.
While the project initially saw underwhelming demand for its native token, The sale experienced a boost following the launch of Trump and Melania Trump's me and Melania Trump's meme coins, which drove greater interest in WilFi tokens. After the 20% initial sale was completed in January, raising 300,000,000, the project opened another, okay, another 5,000,000,000 tokens for sale for a higher price of 5 United States pennies per token. This additional sale was completed on Friday, raising 250,000,000. Tron founder and crypto personality, Justin Sun. Yeah. He's definitely a personality.
Announced. Oh my god. Justin Sun announced. If you don't understand why I'm kinda giggling about this, that's part of Justin Sun's personality. He had this thing where for a long time where he would make announcements of announcements. And then the announcement would come, and it was like nothing. And it just became a big joke. So it's kinda funny that Justin Sun is announcing that in November, Tron invested 30,000,000 in WillFi project, which led the crypto project to name Sun as an advisor on January 27 investment platform, Web three Port, also announced a $10,000,000 investment in the project.
The WillFi project was launched in September of twenty twenty four with a focus on promoting decentralized finance and dollar peg stablecoins. It's a casino. I I don't have to love Trump, be neutral on Trump, or hate Trump to know that this is gambling. This is a casino. You don't wanna have anything to do with it. Is it possible that you could get rich by participating? Yeah. But in my opinion, it's more than likely that you're gonna lose your ass and make somebody else who's already rich a lot more money, and you probably could have used that money. Please, for the love of god, stay away from this crap.
Stop buying convertible note treasury based on Bitcoin ETFs. Stop buying Trump tokens and Melania tokens. Stop buying shit coins. It none of this is all casino. It's all affinity scam. It's very once you see it, you can never unsee it. And I look at this and I'm like going, this is just garbage. And I don't eat and I don't hate Trump. I but I'm looking at this and I'm like, yeah, but I gotta call a spade a spade, and this one looks like shit. Speaking of Trump, his administration wants to acquire as much Bitcoin as possible according to the White House. Then why aren't you buying any?
Maybe Sander Lutz has the answer to that from dcrypt.co. A White House official told a room of crypto industry leaders this week that the Trump administration wants to acquire as much Bitcoin as possible. Well, get on it, son. It's not that hard. Just start cutting the checks. Anyway, at a closed door roundtable hosted by the Bitcoin Policy Institute on Tuesday, Beau Hines, executive director of the presidential working group on digital assets, told participants the White House is intent on acquiring as much as it can according to multiple attendees. When asked by someone in the room exactly how much Bitcoin the US government might ultimately acquire, Hines joked the question was akin to asking someone how many dollars they'd want, one roundtable attendee told Decrypt.
Well, a White House official confirmed to Decrypt that Hines indeed made the statement about acquiring as much Bitcoin as possible, but added the caveat that any such acquisitions would be made, quote, in a, say it with me, budget neutral way that doesn't cost the taxpayers a dime, end quote. The private round table, which followed a public, quote, Bitcoin for America policy summit hosted Bitcoin heavyweights, including, of course, strategy cofounder Michael Saylor, Mara Holdings, previously Marathon Digital CEO Fred Teal, Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan Macaulay, and Bitcoin Magazine CEO David Bailey. It also featured three US senators, Cynthia Lummis, Bill Hagerty, and Bernie Moreno.
It would have been funny if I've been Bernie Sanders. Anyway, they're all Republicans. At one point during the roundtable, a participant then asked Beau Hines whether the White House supports the Bitcoin Act, which is a piece of legislation reintroduced in the senate by Lummis on Tuesday that would require the US government to buy up to 1,000,000 BTC worth roughly $80,000,000,000 and would enshrine in the law of the strategic Bitcoin reserve established by president Donald Trump's executive order. Well, after receiving the question, according to one roundtable attendee, Hines then turned to Lummis, whom he was sat next to and said the White House plans to support legislation that puts a strategic Bitcoin reserve into law and will apply pressure to make sure it passes congress.
A White House official emphasized to decrypt that Hines did not, however, endorse any specific piece of legislation during the event. It is currently estimated the US government holds nearly 200,000 BTC acquired via civil and criminal forfeitures. Senior White House officials have pushed the line in recent days that they support the government purchasing additional Bitcoin to buttress a strategic reserve so long as those acquisitions are budget neutral. Say it with me. Budget neutral in a way that doesn't cost taxpayers a dime.
Whatever. In a debatable it is debatable rather whether Lummis' Bitcoin act could be considered budget neutral. The bill does call for The US to purchase some $80,000,000,000 worth of BTC at current prices, but plans to do so principally by obligating the Federal Reserve to hand over revenues that would theoretically be generated if the central bank were to have its gold certificates revalued at market prices. That would be $3,000 an ounce versus the $45 or whatever that we're at right now. That would be quite a bump. Anyway, the certificates were last priced in 1971 when The United States went off the gold standard.
Gold has since increased by over 6800% in value. And the more I think about that, the more it's the more that I'm intrigued of revaluing gold from $45 an ounce to 3,000. What the hell does that do to the gold market? Now you might say, oh my god. It's gonna make people buy gold. Not really. I don't think so. I I I either think it would be neutral and nobody would give a shit, or it could potentially cause a a I would say a small sell off. I don't think gold's in danger, but what I am saying is that it would be I think it would actually end up being very market neutral to the gold market globally if The United States were to revalue its gold from $45 to $3,000 an ounce.
Cynthia Lummis then would not be wrong. She would, in a budget neutral way that, quote, unquote, doesn't cost The US taxpayer a dime, a way to purchase a shit ton of bit cold not bit gold, of Bitcoin by selling a just a smattering of the amount of gold that we would have because they would have revalued it from 45 to $3,000 an ounce. You wouldn't and and I don't think it would be a good idea at all for the United States government to get rid of its big or its, its gold reserves to buy Bitcoin. I think I honestly think you should have both. I I've never hated gold. I don't really hate Peter Schiff. I think sometimes he says really stupid things, but it doesn't mean I hate the guy. I'm just saying that when it comes to revaluing gold from 45 to 3,000, I don't think it would cause a run on gold causing it to go, like, just skyrocket to something like $25,000 an ounce, but I also don't think it would cause a sell off. I really do believe it would be neutral, and we would have, in a budget neutral way, a shit ton of capital to just purchase Bitcoin hand over fist, and that would cause a run on the price of Bitcoin.
I guarantee it. Last up for the day, there's some people that don't like this whole strategic reserve idea, and they are all Democrats. Apparently, they are opposing the strategic reserve, and they're urging the treasury to block Trump's plan altogether. This is out of atlas21.com. Representative Gerald Connolly, a democrat on the house committee of oversight and government reform, has formally requested the US Department of Treasury end plans for the creation of a strategic reserve of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies promoted by Donald Trump.
In a letter sent to treasury on March 13, the Virginia Democrat highlighted, quote, clear conflicts of interest. Yeah. I told you I told you Trump was giving them ammunition. I don't I don't think they're gonna be able to shoot it very well, but they he has given them ammunition. And he warned of the risks to taxpayer monies in Trump's initiative. He emphasized that the president had neither consulted congress nor sought the necessary legislative authorization to proceed with the creation of the reserve. And in his request, he stated, quote, the creation of a strategic cryptocurrency reserve is poised to enrich the president and his closest allies at the expense of the American taxpayer.
I urge you to cease all plans to create a strategic cryptocurrency reserve and request that you provide a briefing to the staff of the committee on oversight and government reform. Well, I'm sorry, Connolly. You sent the letter to the wrong people. The Treasury Department does not get to override an executive order. You may wish they did, but they do not. So this letter is falling on deaf ears. I guarantee it, which is why we're gonna end here. Nailed it. Sixty three minutes and thirty seconds. I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.
Have a great day.
Introduction and Saint Patrick's Day Musings
Weekend Recap and Apology for Shortened Shows
