Episode 1158 of Bitcoin And . . . is LIVE!
Topics for today:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/historic-first-u-s-government-posts-gdp-data-on-bitcoin-blockchain
https://cointelegraph.com/news/dutch-crypto-firm-amdax-targets-1-bitcoin-supply-with-23m-treasury-launch
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/print/lightning-is-misunderstood
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/nunchuck-wallet-brings-programmable-bitcoin-to-everyone-with-miniscript-support
Get You're Free Comfrey Owner's Manual Here:
https://www.bitcoinandshow.com/the-comfrey-owners-manual-is-here/
Topics for today:
- It's All Bitcoin Magazine's Fault
- US Gov. Puts Nothing On The Blockchain
- Amdex Proves BTC Treasury Co.s Not Dead Yet
- Full Blown Lightning Explainer
Today's Articles:
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/08/29/bitcoin-hammered-below-usd109k-as-conference-indicator-strikes-againhttps://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/historic-first-u-s-government-posts-gdp-data-on-bitcoin-blockchain
https://cointelegraph.com/news/dutch-crypto-firm-amdax-targets-1-bitcoin-supply-with-23m-treasury-launch
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/print/lightning-is-misunderstood
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/nunchuck-wallet-brings-programmable-bitcoin-to-everyone-with-miniscript-support
Get You're Free Comfrey Owner's Manual Here:
https://www.bitcoinandshow.com/the-comfrey-owners-manual-is-here/
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[00:00:02]
Unknown:
It is 10:03AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the August 2025 and this is episode eleven fifty eight of Bitcoin. And it's probably going to be a shorter show this morning, than I normally do. It is Friday. Yes. The price is getting hammered. We're gonna talk about it. We're gonna talk about all the Bitcoin news that you can use. And then I'm also gonna include a little bit of lightning network today. There's a pretty good write up about it in bitcoin magazine. So for anybody who's got, I don't know, an itch they need to scratch about lightning network, that this may help. This may help. But first, let's just get it out of the way.
Alright. Let's just let's just go ahead and bury this dumb son of a bitch right now. Bitcoin hammered below 109 as conference indicator strikes again. Yeah. You know, I I didn't think about it, but, this article by Steven Alfer at a coin desk, you never know. I mean, it could be fun. I'm just saying, this could be fun. Because historical data around Bitcoin Magazine's annual United States Bitcoin conference has shown a clear pattern of poor price performance for Bitcoin during and just after the event. The indicator didn't disappoint in 2025 with Bitcoin struggling in late May and early June alongside and then following this year's Las Vegas conference.
The logic behind that price action isn't that hard to decipher in the weeks leading up to the show. Conference organizers looking to sell tickets and generate media coverage over hype the speakers and what are sure to be massive announcements and announcements of announcements I might personally add. But what follows is the usual cast of influencers, Bitcoin OGs, and newcomers to the sector this year, the Trumps, extolling quote freedom money, quote massive institutional and sovereign adoption, and quote Bitcoin to the moon, end quote.
How could the price do anything but dump? And now we come to Bitcoin Asia. For those not paying close attention, Bitcoin Magazine's Bitcoin Asia Conference took place this week in Hong Kong. The featured speakers included Eric Trump, CZ, Atabek, Balaji Sinervison, and David Bailey. Among the subject matter covered, you guessed it, quote, freedom money, quote, massive institutional and sovereign adoption, and quote, bitcoin to the moon, end quote. The price action, sharply lower at around a $115,000 as attendees began arriving in Hong Kong earlier this week, Bitcoin has tumbled to the current $108,400 This includes about a 4% dive overnight in The United States, which is Friday in Hong Kong.
And now it's Friday here too. This was written a little while ago. As David Bailey and Eric Trump took the stage for a chat titled, quote, Bitcoin takes over the world. Seriously, that's the article. And you know what? It's probably spot on. You know, it probably is. Okay. Maybe it's a little bit of voodoo when it comes to the the price action. Is the Bitcoin Bitcoin magazine's Bitcoin Asia conference really that big of a deal that that is starting to reflect the imagery that we get in price during The US conference? Because that that one seems to actually hold true. That that little indicator does hold true. But I've never seen I've never seen a dump because of Bitcoin magazine's Bitcoin Asia conference before. At least I I I don't really remember it.
But that aside, I too am sick and tired of the freaking hyperbole. The the it's it's it's the same crap over and over and over and over and over again, which you know? And I'm I mean, I'm glad that Bitcoin magazine puts the thing on. I'm glad that that it's as big as it is, but I'm just not that's not the conference for me, man. I I I I dream of going to Riga. That conference, that kind of Bitcoin conference, that's the kind of conference I'm looking for, man. Bit block boom. That's the only Bitcoin conference I've ever been to. It's small. It's intimate. Only the most hardcore of the hardcore people actually go there. And in fact, some of the people that you think that are really hardcore aren't at these conferences, at the smaller ones.
And those are the conferences that I think do Bitcoin the most good because that's where people are talking in the hallways about what can actually be done instead of getting on stage and saying Bitcoin to the moon and retail adoption is right around the corner and million dollar Bitcoin and $21,000,000 Bitcoin in twenty one years and blah. It's just it's all crap it's all freaking crap just stop stop it just stop it but is it is Bitcoin Asia really affecting the price I don't know. I'd I who knows? There no. There's nothing that anybody can say that will tell you why price dump.
Maybe it also has something to do with this, though. Let's go to the next story up from Bitcoin magazine itself written by Nick. It's a historic first. United States government posts GDP data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Yeah. And, like, seven others, if I remember right. Again, the hyperbole doesn't quit. The US government has officially begun publishing gross domestic product data on public blockchains. According to Bloomberg, the commerce department's announcement on Thursday brings blockchain into the core of America's economic reporting making GDP available on nine, count them, nine networks including bitcoin and then they actually named two other shitcoins.
Don't even bother. Commerce officials emphasized that the blockchain rollout is not a replacement for traditional economic data releases, but but rather another avenue for distribution according to Bloomberg. The move, however, carries significant symbolic weight. The hyperbole won't quit as it effectively replaces the government's seal or rather effectively places the government's seal of approval on technology once viewed with deep skepticism in Washington DC. Quote, the entire administration has embraced this, said Mike Cahill, chief executive officer of Duro Labs or do yeah. Duro. Let's call it Duro Labs, who confirmed he has been working with the commerce department on the initiative for the past two months. Oh my god. Two months.
Quote, with today's announcement, we are now in a world where government data lives on blockchains and market participants can participate in real time, quote, end quote. Wait. Sorry. That confused me. How the hell am I able to participate real time in government data on a blockchain? That literally makes no sense. I can't I can read it if maybe that's a participation trophy right there that I can see it, that I can see the hash? Because that's essentially, from what I understand, that's all that's really there. But whatever, the blockchain initiative involves posting cryptographic hashes. There we go. Cryptographic hashes of GDP data would serve as digital fingerprints to verify the information's integrity.
That is that assumes the information would had integrity to begin with before the hash. Okay. I'm just I'm just saying. But while limited in scope initially, commerce department officials confirmed that president Donald Trump's administration intends to expand the program even further, Bloomberg reported. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick spearheaded the project telling Trump earlier this week that statistics would be issued via blockchain because you are the crypto president. Lutnick had previously suggested reshaping GDP reporting by removing the impact of government spending.
As as if that's going to help. The initiative reflects a sharp departure from the prior administration under former president Joe Biden. Joe Biden. Regulators adopted a cautious stance towards crypto, often clashing with exchanges and imposing restrictions on digital assets. And in contrast, Trump has moved quickly to integrate Bitcoin into government policy. Since taking office, he has created a US Bitcoin reserve, yawn, stockpiled coins such as Ether and Solana, yawn, signed legislation regulating stablecoins, yawn, and appointed crypto friendly regulators who ended enforcement actions against Coinbase, big yawn.
But Trump's family has also deepened its present presence in the digital asset space, backing ventures such as World Liberty Financial and, dude, yada yada yada yada. Let's go get to the meat. By leveraging public blockchains, the commerce department joins other agencies experimenting with crypto technology. The department of homeland security is considered blockchain for airport passenger screening, while California's DMV has digitized car titles on crypto, according to Bloomberg. As Trump positions himself as the crypto president, the adoption of blockchain for GDP distribution signals a profound shift in US economic policy and further cements Bitcoin as a powerful political and financial force in Washington bullshit.
This is bullshit. Everything I just read to you is bullshit and I apologize for wasting your time. However, I I do really do think it's important for us to understand the level of bullshit that this represents. It's a cryptographic hash of the information represented in the GDP. And I'm sorry, but unless you tell me the mechanics of like like for instance, what's the document you gave a computer to run a SHA-two 56 on it to get a hash? Because that's essentially what we're talking about here. I can hash anything. I can get a SHA-two 56 or a SHA-two.
There's all kinds of shaws out there ladies and gentlemen. Let's just assume that they're using the Bitcoin SHA two fifty six mechanisms here. I can I can type my name into a dot txt file and save it and and send that file or or the contents of that file like maybe just copy and paste it into a sha two fifty six generator and it will generate a particular string of numbers and letters that has no match except every time I put my name in the exact same way into that shaw two fifty six generator then and only then will that same hash come up that's the way this works If I were to include an extra space at the end of my name, the hash would be completely different than my name without an extra space at the end? You see how this works? So I don't give a shit what this guy, what Lutnick, what Trump, and and whoever's bragging about this. I don't care at all about that.
And even if you show me the document and the the the actual ASCII characters and the spaces and the line breaks and the paragraph for a carriage returns and paragraph starts and stops and all of the crap from whatever document they're feeding it yes, it'll generate a particular hash. And if you change any particular information inside that doc that original document and then re rehash it, it will not come out the same. So are they going to deliver in in public the actual physical document? No. I mean, I mean, the actual, you know, like the digital file so that I too can take can copy and paste all of that shit into a SHA two fifty six generator and come up with the exact same hash? Because if not, then this is nothing but bullshit.
Every did this this is the hyperbolic crap that we've I've had to live through since 2015. And I guarantee you, the people that have been in in this space since 02/2009, since that since the Genesis block, they've seen even more of it because they've been around longer. But please do not for a second think that this, quote, unquote, changes something or signals anything of any significance whatsoever because it doesn't. It just it just doesn't. Now let's let's just kind of skate on over to the Dutch. Let's hang out in The Netherlands for a little bit. Dutch crypto firm Amdax targets a 1% Bitcoin supply with a $23,000,000 treasury launch.
Yes. Yes, indeedy. It's yet another Bitcoin Treasury company. Oh, joy. I'm telling you, man, the hyperbole is just is just not going to stop. Adrian Smutsky from, Cointelegraph is writing this one. Dutch cryptocurrency service provider, Amdax, raised €20,000,000 to launch a Bitcoin Treasury company on Amsterdam's Euronext stock exchange. According to a Friday announcement, multiple investors have committed about $23,300,000 in an initial financing round for Amdex's Bitcoin Treasury. This follows an announcement earlier this month that it would launch the Treasury as an independent privately held company with its own governance, AMBTS.
Ambits, I guess is how you would pronounce that, is being created to eventually eventually accumulate at least 1% of all Bitcoin that will ever be created or about 210,000 BTC. And such an amount of Bitcoin is currently worth over $23,000,000,000, ladies and gentlemen. Quote, Ambitz intends to leverage the capital markets to increase its Bitcoin holdings and sequentially generate equity appreciation and grow Bitcoin per share for its shareholders subject to market and other conditions. The suit speak is strong with this one. Ever since strategy demonstrated the viability of this approach, the Bitcoin Treasury tactic has been gaining momentum.
This trend has also led to multiple companies not focused solely on Bitcoin accumulation starting to acquire it. Such firms include US electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and a whole bunch of other people. And earlier this week, Bitcoin Treasury Meta Planet approved a plan to raise about $880,000,000 through an overseas share issuance with nearly $835,000,000 allocated for Bitcoin purchases. And then they talk about strategy buying more Bitcoin. I'm bringing this to you to let you know that I think this dog is about to die. I I just feel that at this point it's like it's a me too movement And everybody right at this point, they're just announcing their intention to become x, y, and z or or or in this case, a Bitcoin holding or a Bitcoin treasury company. And it's always the same language to increase our shareholder value.
Okay. Okay. What do you what do you do? What does the Dutch crypto firm Amdex actually do? It's a cryptocurrency service provider. What do they service? How do they service? What's their revenue stream? You see where I'm going with all this? Paper bitcoin summer God I I'm I'm I know I'm reinforcing the meme but paper bitcoin summer is just it's it's something we've never really seen before because it's turned bitcoin well it hasn't turned bitcoin into anything bitcoin is what bitcoin's gonna be it doesn't give a shit about what we think about it however at this point, the human perception, especially even in and amongst Bitcoiners themselves, the perception is seems to be changing a little bit to where Bitcoin itself has become kind of a shit coin when you put it into the hands of a bunch of freaking corporate suits. And what are we gonna do about it? Absolutely nothing. Why? Because we can't.
Bitcoin is for enemies. Watching this happen to Bitcoin is exactly what Bitcoin was designed for. And I know that sounds really dumb, and it sounds really vague, but it's not. The fact that we're seeing this happen to Bitcoin, it was inevitable. And if you think this is the worst thing that can happen, oh, Neli, you ain't seen nothing yet. I can only imagine the machinations that suits have for Bitcoin, and yet there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. And if there was, then Bitcoin would deserve to go away forever. And if you don't understand what I mean by all this, hit me up on on Fountain or hit me up on Nostr and say, you know, explain it to me.
But this is exactly what Bitcoin was built for, and this is exactly what Bitcoin is built to survive. There's good news. I'm literally telling you good news. Even in the face of all the hyperbole, all the bullshit, all the Bitcoin to the moon forever crap, all the conferences, all the price dumps, all the price pumps, everything. In the midst of all that, it's good news that Bitcoin is being used as a corporate shitcoin. At least in at least for the bottom What? I think there's 164 companies now that either have or have announced that they are a Bitcoin treasury company or going to become because there's like, oh, we intend to We we have the intention to. So at a 164 companies, the top five definitely gonna survive, probably do well. That includes strategy, meta planet, similar, been a couple up, like, '21 and maybe maybe Nakamoto.
That's the one that fused with, was it KindlyMD, I think, is was the name of the, company that and they merged and became Nakamoto or merged and and became Kindly MD. I'm I'm still unclear. I'm I'm getting I'm getting mixed messages about that. They'll they'll do well probably. The others? I don't know, man. And the ones that are just doing this to, like, literally, I here's what's happening with the people that are making the announcement that they're going to buy Bitcoin is because they need a price they need a stock price pump, and they have no intention of ever purchasing Bitcoin at all.
They're pumping their own stock by making these press releases saying they're going to buy 1% of Bitcoin. Well, talk is cheap. You know, it's like money talks, bullshit walks. Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities. West Texas Intermediate Oil down seven or eight tenths of a point to sixty four zero nine. Britain, North Sea down seven tenths to sixty eight twelve. Natural gas up one and a half to $2.98 per thousand. Gasoline is down one and a third. And my favorite, Mirban crude, is down 5.24%. What the hell happened to Mirban crude? Did we bomb the Middle East?
Maybe this has something to do with Israel. I don't know. Who gives a shit? It's down to $71.46. Shiny metal rocks doing well. Gold up 1.2. Silver up 2.76. Platinum up six tenths of a point. Copper is up 1.2. And ag is mixed fully. The biggest winner today is coffee, 2% to the upside, biggest loser is lumber, 1.3 to the downside. Live cattle up a half, lean hogs up a half, and feeder cattle up 0.5%. The Dow is down a third, S and P is down, wow, almost a full point, Nasdaq is down a point and a half, and the S and P Mini is down point 72%. Oh, I need to add, inflation some more inflation data came in today, and that's, honestly, that's probably why, Bitcoin price kinda tanked this morning along with clearly the Dow, the S and P, the Nasdaq, and and and, S and P Mini.
The numbers weren't weren't as good as people expected. And what again, if you're wondering why that affects the price of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is still generally perceived as a risk on asset. If we don't get a fed rate cut, they're not going to give us cheap money, and there's not free, you know, cheap money to buy risky assets. So, therefore, shit rotates out of risk assets and assets. So therefore, shit rotates out of risk assets and into, I don't know, equities because they're safe or treasuries because they're safe. It's all bullshit. Let's go to the dashboard. We have a price of $108,480 that is a pathetic $2,160,000,000,000 market cap. We can only purchase 31.4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,913,141.81 of. Fees remain very low.
It's only 0.02 BTC on a per block basis in fees. There are about 28 blocks carrying 80,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear. High priority is gonna cost you 4 sats per v byte. Low priority is gonna get you in at one. Hash rate continues to climb. We are now back to 989 hexahashes per second. So maybe the miners know something that we don't. Whatever. It it honestly, it doesn't really matter. But Paul Cernine has given me 500 sats, and he says, thanks for the long take on Bitcoin circular economy. Absolutely agree that it's more pertinent now than ever. Love the quote, though it sounds quite harsh in the article about how Bitcoin liberates us from ancestral abuse, l f g. And y'all know what that means. Turkey with 500 says, Tether is already on liquid.
I've been admonished. I did not know that Tether was indeed on liquid. But still, I I still maintain the the same thing I said yesterday. If it's on liquid, then why is everybody freaking out about RGB? It's on Tron. I I mean, Tether's on Tron, Tether's on Ethereum, Tether's on Solana, Tether's on RGB, Tether's on Liquid. And yet, I mean, I got there was always a little bit of pushback, you know, with the shit coinery and all. But at this point, we we should realize it's not gonna stop. So we would probably be better served if we didn't waste our mental energy getting mad at Tether for selecting yet one more shit chain to rail on. But, anyway, Debt Wheeler, with a 100 sat says Deb as in Debbie, Ian, Debian, Debian. Oh, oh, Debian. Okay.
I like Debian because it sounds like Plebeian, but okay. I'll I'll I'll take you up on it. Pies with one twenty one says thank you, sir. No thank you. And that's pretty much it. Not not a whole lot of donations probably because we're all seeing, seeing this price pressure. But if you like what I'm doing here, if you if you enjoyed the show, please consider actually cutting me some some some of those sweet sweet Satoshis even even if we're getting more of them per dollar than we were, which sounds weird sounds weird to say it that way. Donate to the show, man.
If you like what I do, donate to the show because that that's one of the ways that that that I feed myself and some kids and and and my wife and if you, you know, if you wanna help me out in that aspect of, you know, doing this work and continuously doing this work, consider donating to the show. You can do that through, like, you know, fountain. App. That's or that's the fountain app that I use or podcasting app that I use. It's podcasting two point o enabled. And if you're still using some old legacy podcasting app, you have really got to step up your game. And speaking of stepping up, it's a step function.
Podcasting two point o allows you to stream satoshis while you listen to your favorite podcast and podcasters and that that supports their shows and it supports my show you can boost with any number of sats that you really want well to I don't think anybody's gonna try to boost a whole Bitcoin because it does use the lightning network and, you know, you get my drift. Too much money and is probably, you know, not the best thing to do for for lightning network. But the the podcasting two point o is where it's at. I use fountain as my podcasting app it's my daily driver. I love it. I get transcripts. I get I get chapters. I get boosts. I get sat stream directly to me. It's it's awesome. So, if you're still using something like Apple Podcasts, you can get any podcast that you want from Fountain because all of the podcast apps including Apple, they all use the same index.
So if you think that you're not gonna be able to get a podcast unless unless you're listening to some of those chicks that that do the true crime podcast on Wondery because that's a that's kind of a closed ecosystem and I'm not I don't know if you can get those. I I'm not sure but I kind of don't care because closed ecosystems are just walled gardens by another name and I I just don't give a shit about it. But for most of the podcast apps that you're ever gonna want or podcast that you're ever gonna want, they they all use podcast index. There's like 4,000,000 indexed podcast only about 80,000 of them are actually active podcasts but you know they all reach for podcast index so don't be afraid go try out a podcasting two point zero application or podcaster today so that you can help support the Bitcoin Dan show and well that's the weather report Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. This is gonna be a bit of a longer read from Christian Corollis out of Bitcoin Magazine entitled lightning is misunderstood.
Well, we've talked about lightning a couple of times this during this episode. We might as well go ahead and do a deeper dive into it. So here we go. The lightning network is one of the most exciting and innovative technologies built on bitcoin, but it's also one of the most misunderstood. From its early days with grassroots efforts like PlebNet, to ambitious versions of Lightning applications, and the idea of earning passive yield as a routing node operator, enthusiasm around Lightning has often outpaced its practical realities. Many bitcoiners expected lightning to be a seamless plug and play extension of the bitcoin network just as sovereign, decentralized, and accessible as running a full bitcoin node but, well, the reality is more complex.
Setting up and maintaining a well connected Lightning node involves technical skills and capital requirements that most users aren't prepared to manage. This isn't a failure. It's simply a reflection of Lightning's overall design. As a result of these barriers, many users have turned to custodial solutions to access Lightning's benefits. Custodial wallets and neobanks like Strike, Blink, Wallet of Satoshi, Cash App, and others offer features such as Lightning URLs, instant low fee transactions, and the kind of reliability and user experience people expect from full featured banking style applications.
To some, this reliance on custodians feels more like a compromise and in a way it is. But more importantly, it reveals something often overlooked. Running Lightning infrastructure just isn't meant for everyone. Here's the controversial part. That's perfectly okay. Lightning's critics, both within the Bitcoin community and among altcoin promoters, often frame these trade offs as proof that Lightning has failed, suggesting it should be replaced with something else entirely. But that view misses the mark. Rather than seeing these limitations as fatal flaws, it's far more accurate and productive to understand the Lightning Network for what it truly is: enterprise grade infrastructure.
In this context, enterprise grade means robust, scalable, and dependable enough to power real time low fee payments for mission critical services. It's not something every casual user will host themselves. Lightning is built for professional operators, Bitcoin exchanges, payment processors, wallet developers, and technically capable community projects. And for them, Lightning isn't a compromise, it's a competitive advantage. Moreover, the Lightning Network complements Bitcoin in many ways and is becoming increasingly interoperable with adjacent technologies such as eCash, Mints, and other layer two solutions.
It functions as a global open source and permissionless financial infrastructure that any serious operator anywhere in the world can tap into. In essence, the Lightning Network is evolving into the interoperable glue connecting external systems to the Bitcoin blockchain. Not everyone will run a lightning node and that's okay. This reality doesn't diminish lightning's significance in Bitcoin's scaling roadmap. On the contrary, lightning is a foundational layer that enables a wide range of tools and services. Far from being a centralizing force, it actually enhances decentralization by opening the door to permissionless payments anywhere in the world, creating new types of economic actors that weren't previously possible.
A great example of this is the Kenyan Bitcoin payments app, Tando. This app allows users to spend Bitcoin at any merchant or service that accepts m Pesa using the Lightning Network. M Pesa, if you didn't know, is a mobile money platform launched by Safaricom in Kenya that allows users to send, receive, and store money via mobile phones without needing a traditional bank account. As of 2024, it serves over 34,000,000 users in Kenya processing more than 30,000,000,000, that's billion with a b, transactions annually and accounts for nearly 60% of the country's gross domestic product.
Thanks to lightning, Tandos creators can build a seamless programmatic payment experience that interoperates directly with the m Pesa system, dramatically improving liquidity access for Bitcoin users in Kenya. But because everyone and their grandma in Kenya accepts M Pesa, with Tandoh, anyone can spend Bitcoin anywhere in Kenya even in the Maasai Mara, and I don't know what that is. Whatever. Without Lightning, on chain Bitcoin payments would simply be too slow to offer a practical experience for everyday M Pesa transactions. Transaction confirmation times on chain aren't suited to real time payments, especially in fast paced retail settings.
But by building a lightning payment gateway that connects directly to M Pesa wallets, Tandos has transformed the payment landscape for Bitcoin users in Kenya. Tandos is proof that Lightning unlocks real world use cases for builders without needing to ask for permission to build. The fact that Lightning enables this is amazing. Another excellent example of the edge that lightning gives businesses can be seen by comparing two global neobanks, PayPal and Strike. PayPal, the original internet payment company launched in 1998 and took over seventeen years to expand to more than 200 countries.
In contrast, Strike, a far more niche application built on lightning and launched in 2020, has already rolled out to over 100 countries in just five years, reaching markets across Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. Strike's global expansion not only rivals PayPal's in scope, but also dramatically outpaces it in speed and ease, highlighting the unique advantages of building on modern borderless infrastructure like the Lightning Network. Strike CEO Jack Mallers and his team largely bypassed working directly with banks, instead choosing to partner with Bitcoin exchanges around the world that already had established local banking relationships in the market they serve.
These partners use the Lightning Network to send value instantaneously across borders. When a user wants to convert their Strike app balance into local currency, the partner facilitates the exchange on the back end. This strategy allows Strike to launch a global payment service powered by universally accepted instant lightning payments faster than ever before. Stripe leveraged Bitcoin and lightning's borderless capabilities to build a truly global network combining this technical edge with strong business development to secure fiat conversion partnerships.
While legacy players remain bottlenecked by traditional banking rails, Strike uses Lightning to instantly move value anywhere on the planet. Not only does the Lightning Network open new doors for businesses, but it also enables permissionless payments, both large and small, within other open protocols. A premier example of this is Nostr, a decentralized protocol designed to support social media experiences and much more. In a post on x, Jack's door sorry. Jack Dorsey stated, quote, the greatest at scale example of Bitcoin as everyday payments are zaps on Nasr, end quote.
In a 2023 interview with Politico, he discussed his grounded optimism for both Nasr and lightning enabled zaps. Quote, he also argued that the user experience on Nasr had already surpassed that of Twitter, citing zaps, a feature that lets users tip each other in Bitcoin, part of a vision in which information and money flow together around the Internet without obstruction. End quote. Zaps on Nostra evolved from a basic lightning invoice system to a seamless micropayment feature largely thanks to the efforts of William Kasserin, also known as j b fifty five, the creator of Domus, if you didn't know.
Initially, users had to attach Bitcoin payment request to notes manually. Yes. I do remember that. It was a pain in the ass, but it was fun because we were able to do it. This is me talking right now, but I digress. In early twenty twenty three, Kasarin, the creator of the Domus client, authored nip 57, introducing event types 9734, a zap request, and 9735, a zap receipt, which formalized zaps as instant lightning powered Bitcoin transfers. Building on Nostra's early lightning integration, Kaserin's vision helped transform zaps into a native user friendly feature across every prominent Nostra client we have today.
The introduction of Zaps sparked a surge in Nostra adoption. By June 2023, Nostra users had sent over 1,000,000 Zaps across a network with roughly half a million users. Holy shit. Requiring only a lightning wallet and a Nostra client, Zaps eliminated all intermediaries and empowered creators to receive direct low fee payments for their posts, streams, or other content. This seamless integration of social interaction in Bitcoin's lightning economy has redefined the way value is exchanged online, one small or large transaction at a time. Even though casual users typically won't manage their own always online lightning infrastructure, the network empowers small teams and skilled individuals to offer financial services that once required a bank.
This dynamic is rapidly evolving into a broader trend, one that's driving lightning toward greater decentralization through community based infrastructure. Imagine if every local Bitcoin meetup had someone running a lightning node for their community. This could provide a neighborhood or region with an approachable trusted operator almost like modern day credit unions. In such a model, lightning infrastructure wouldn't be dominated solely by large enterprise nodes. Instead, trust and routing would be distributed among smaller, localized actors with different incentives.
Builders who prioritize resilience, privacy, and accessibility over scale or profit. This dynamic is already happening today. I've personally seen this in action through initiatives like Preya Bitcoin in Brazil and LaCrypta in Argentina. Both projects pair grassroots communities with locally managed payment systems built on lightning. Together, bitcoin and the lightning network are enabling a grassroots alternative to to traditional banking, and it's a beautiful thing. Lastly, I would be remiss not to mention the many incredible projects like Zeus, Phoenix, Breeze, Aqua, Moon and other lightning wallets that are innovating to create diverse user experiences, these teams are building feature rich applications without sacrificing user custody while navigating the still wild frontier of Bitcoin payments in 2025.
In a world where Bitcoin and Lightning remain niche and speculative behavior is as rampant as ever, delivering excellent non custodial payment experiences is no small feat. While not perfect, many of these projects are doing exactly that. The fact that so many builders are offering such a wide range of ways to interact with Lightning gives consumers real choice and ultimately reinforces my core argument. The Lightning Network was never meant to serve every user in every way, and that's precisely why it works. It's not failing because casual users may prefer custodial wallets.
It's succeeding because developers, businesses, and organizers are using it to solve real world problems without needing permission. What Lightning offers isn't universal simplicity is focused high level software or rather high leverage software. It's infrastructure that bridges Bitcoin to people and delivers innovative solutions to the edges of the global economy. When we stop expecting lightning to be something that it cannot be, we begin to understand its true purpose a dynamic foundational layer for those building the future of financial freedom.
That's the end of the article. I got a few words here. One, there was a a user on Noster, and I'm not gonna dox you, dude, but swore up and down that it was j b fifty five that created the lightning network. No. No. No. And there was I think it might might have, this person might have mentioned another name. And I'm not laughing at you. It's just that I can't believe that it's been, let's see, the first instance of lightning that I saw as a workable thing was 2017. And I think that was I think Breezewallet was the very first thing to integrate the lightning network and then right after that they put they dropped a a podcast player.
And they turned their their their bitcoin wallet, they added lightning functionality, and they turned that into a podcast app. And it's still around it's still around today. It's like, I think it's Breeze, b r e e z e. I I can't remember how to spell it. I haven't used it in a while, but that was 2017. Yo. That's seven years ago. Somewhere around there maybe I'll I'll be a little bit more conservative. The the the pay the white paper for lightning came out in 2016. I actually believe there was a functional test of lightning going on in 2017, and that was constructed by Elizabeth Stark and her team over at lightning labs.
I picked up I think I picked up Lightning in for real in 2018. And Elizabeth Stark coined the term well, she coined a meme and it's hashtag reckless because she was at a conference or was giving an interview or somewhere, and she was saying, please don't use the lightning network in its current state. Don't do shit that's stupid, like put 10,000 worth of Bitcoin on the lightning network because you're going to lose it. This is all nothing but a test. Don't be reckless. And all of a sudden, what did we do? We started spinning up lightning nodes and we started putting Bitcoin on those lightning nodes. Like like the reckless dumbasses that we were. And I never I never had I never had a problem with my lightning node. I've even changed to a different lightning node at this point. Haven't had a problem with this one either.
This is rock solid tech, But I want I want to shift gears just a little bit. Continuing on with this particular Bitcoin Magazine article, there's a a passage here that I want to reread. Imagine if every local Bitcoin meetup had someone running a lightning node for their community. This could provide a neighborhood or region with an approachable, trusted operator, almost like modern day credit unions. In such a model, lightning infrastructure wouldn't be dominated solely by large enterprise nodes. I'm reading that again because I wanna say one word, BitChat.
I'm going to say another word if you don't know what BitChat is, mesh network. It's coming. I haven't seen a paper on it. I haven't seen anybody actually say the words yet. Although, if you've heard somebody say these words, you know where I'm going and I'm just repeating it. I promise you, I have not heard about this yet. Right? From my from where I sit and from and I scan all this stuff every morning to bring you The Bitcoin Ann Show, and I still have yet to see anybody say the words, Lightning will be running over Meshnet in BitChat probably by next year.
I actually think that's going to happen. And I honestly also think that we're going to be combining I mean, Nostra and Lightning is already combined through, j b 50 fives, those two kinds with the the zap invoice and the zap receipt. Right? Those two event kinds on Nostr is what enables zaps. So we already have a very tight junction between the Lightning Network and Noster. Well, here comes Jack Dorsey, and he says, BitChat, and all of a sudden, we go fucking nuts. Right? There's a lot of people that that don't understand BitChat. There's a lot of people that do and hate it. There's a lot of people that do and love it. I I understand it, and I love it. I think it's great. The people that hate it think that it's taking away something from Nostr. I wholeheartedly disagree. Have I seen less traffic on Noster, like, over the last couple of weeks? A little bit. Because a lot of people are trying out BitChat. They're really trying to wrap their head about around what it means.
But BitChat works with geohashing, and that is another way to locate on the planet a location. Like, think of longitude and latitude coordinates, like one zero one and twenty one minutes and, you know, four hours and twenty one minutes and so many seconds and and then you get another number and you the one goes east to west and one goes north to south and where they cross, that's that's the location. Geohashing does it a little different. Right? It's a preset, and we all agree on it. There's a preset grid around the globe that it it's imaginary grid. Okay? It's an imaginary grid, but it's like it's like a map. And and all the the people that use geohashes, somehow or another, we've all come to a consensus that this particular grid is the one that that we're calling geohashes.
And instead of latitude and longitude in numeric format, what we have is alphanumeric format. And it's like it would be like hashtag nine c, and that gets you to a particular region in, like, I don't know, North America, let's say. And then if you wanna if you zoom in, you're gonna get nine c eight. And if you zoom in some more, you might get nine C four eight four c. And it gets it gets to the point where you can get all the way down to right in front of a house. Actually, you can get down further than that, but for our purposes, that's a location.
So I could just back out a little bit and say, hey, this entire block, this is the Farmers Market. That that's a region. Now think of it again when I read this. Imagine if every local Bitcoin meetup, think farmers market, had someone riding a light running a lightning node for their community, think farmers market, mesh network, bit chat, nostril relays that are also running as lightning nodes. Just start lit. I mean, I don't have to answer all the questions about what it is that I'm that I'm trying to impart to you. You're this should be more Hitchcockian where you know the ladies and the the woman's in the bathroom taking a shower.
You know, she's getting stabbed, but you don't actually ever see it. And so it forces your mind to become the imagination engine that it is and starts filling in the gaps. Think re geo hashed region, think farmers market, think noster relays, think lightning nodes that are actually embedded in noster relays or vice versa where light the lightning network picks up and just as a sidecar just jams fricking nostril relays into it. Think Jack Dorsey and BitChat. And we're all chatting in like, if we're we're all on this mesh network and other people could join in through geohashing, but if we're all at a farmer's market and a lot of us have bit chat, we basically essentially have a very localized region and inside that particular mesh is buried maybe one maybe even two lightning nodes and on our phone we have a lightning wallet and we're able to access through bit chat using nostril relays that are somehow or another tight junctioned and cozied up next to a lightning node to provide liquidity all of a sudden we have a regional regional payment system that's just servicing that say, farmers market.
This is going to happen. I haven't heard it actually said yet. That's okay. It's also okay if you got if you've said, hey, dude, this other guy, he said that, you know, like, the day after Jack Dorsey, you know, came out with bitch at. Fine. I don't care. This needs to be done. And not only does it need to be done, it's going to be done. I almost I can almost guarantee it. In fact, I'm gonna I'm just gonna say yes. I guarantee it. If it doesn't happen sometime in the next year, and it could also it it it could probably happen this year, but I'm gonna give it I'm gonna give myself until 12/31/2026. And if I'm wrong all the way up there until then and I go into the new year 2027 and it still isn't here, then you you can you can bitch at me all you want. You can tell me I'm wrong and you can tell me I'm dumb and I'll I'll go, you know what? You're right. You're right.
You're right. Let's move on to Nunchuk. This is the last story of the day, by the way. Nunchuk wallet brings programmable Bitcoin to everyone with mini script support. Bitcoin magazine written by Shinobi. Today, which was probably yesterday, Nunchuk wallet releases support for a fully generalized MiniScript use, bringing a degree of flexibility and control to their users never seen before. For those unfamiliar with MiniScript, it is a policy language invented by core developer and former maintainer Peter Woollo to make the creation of customized Bitcoin scripts easier and safer.
ManyScript takes the most commonly used pieces of Bitcoin script, like signature locks, time locks, hash locks, etcetera and creates a higher level programming language for users to create custom scripts. This higher level language is designed to be safely analyzable and composable, meaning that once users create a customized script, they can be sure that it will behave exactly how they expect it to. Nunchuck provides two basic templates users can use, simply needing to fill in the keys they wish to use in the wallet. One is the decaying multisig, where after a time lock expires, less keys are required to spend in order to ensure that key loss does not result in losing funds.
The other is an expanding multisig, where over time, other keys can sign for a transaction beyond the core key set. For instance, initially, let's say a two of two is required but after some time lock a third key can sign instead In addition to these basic templates more advanced users can import any custom MiniScript template that they have created themselves. MiniScript templates can be applied to both native SegWit wallets as well as Taproot wallets. And out of the gate, the following hardware wallets will support native SegWit MiniScript. Coldcard, Tapsigner, Blockstream Jade, and Ledger.
The following will support Taproot MiniScript, Coldcard, and Ledger. So that means I'm pausing here to say that Coldcard is going to be the only one that will support native SegWit and Taproot MiniScript. And it doesn't surprise me. I love Coldcard. It's from CoinKite. Rodolfo Novak is an absolute scoundrel when it comes to being, you know, private. He he loves privacy, and he is like a fanatic about it. He's actually self described as paranoid about privacy. Absolute paranoia about security. And he built the cold card coming from that aspect. That's the person I want building my hardware wallet is somebody who's freaking paranoid about privacy and security, and you get SegWit MiniScript and Taproot MiniScript both only in the cold card from CoinKite.
Tell Rodolfo Novak that you heard it here on Bitcoin and alright. So, Nunchuk oh, I'm sorry. Hold on. Let's let's look at this. Musig two use with miniscript will be limited to software only keys for the time being. Nunchuck's end to end encrypted communication function has full support for ManyScript templates allowing collaboration between users in constructing and using template based wallets. In addition, Nunchuk has compiled a one zero one technical guide for users who wish to use or to make use of MiniScript in their own wallets. For those more inclined to dive into the nuts and bolts themselves, here also is a website put together by Peter Woollo with a breakdown of MiniScript itself and some basic tools.
That's that's the article, but this is kinda huge. We've been waiting for MiniScript for a long time. Why do you want it? Like that this this, key let's look at the key decay example as an answer to why what does MiniScript do? I wanna revisit this because this is important. Let's say I die with like a whole half Bitcoin and I want to leave it to my kids, you know, split it. Right? But let's just say that I'm going to leave it up to them to actually do the split. One of them holds a key and the other one holds a key, but but this is done with manuscript.
So both those keys would and I hold like let's say I hold a third key and like two any two of those keys can unlock that wallet and be able to vector the Bitcoin out to some other, Bitcoin address. Right? So I die and so my key is lost. They still have their two keys. So, technically, although you'd want to do it a little bit different, but technically for purposes of this example, the the will is like, oh, by the way, don't don't forget your daddy's half Bitcoin. You guys got the keys. The lawyer says, I don't have the keys. The kids got the keys, and and the kids, in fact, are, like, you know, were were bright enough to figure out a good way to store their keys, and they both have their keys.
And but right before something something terrible happens, and let's I'm not even gonna say my kids. Let's let's say I am a I'm now speaking I'm a fictitional dad with fictitional children because I don't want I don't I don't want I I Mojo is bad. I I don't wanna do it with as an example, my own kids, but something terrible happens to one of the children. Well, if the other child the surviving child cannot get a hold of the something terrible happened to the sibling child keys, then that's that kid is screwed for life. Never gonna get a hold of that that half Bitcoin.
But with decaying multisig, which is given by this mini script stuff, If if I had written the mini script to decay those keys to where if within after five years of my death that that that wallet hasn't been touched because something bad happened to one of the kids, then it decays from a two of three multisig to just either a single key or, like, I don't even know if it exists, but a one of two multisig, which is is dumb. That's why I don't think it exists because what's the point? But in this particular case, it would decay it over a period of five years to where after five years, the surviving child would be able to use their surviving key to unlock that half Bitcoin.
That's a huge deal. That is an intensely massive deal because it's sort of like having a third party a third party custody like what Unchained in Austin, Texas has a service where they will be your third party on like a two or three multisig. They'll be a third party. They'll hold a third key. So in case something bad happens to one of the original key holders, the survivor can get a hold of Unchained and say, here's what happened. I don't know. Unchained probably requires a death certificate or something or some kind of proof that this bad thing has happened and they say yes. We will help you, you know, vector this this Bitcoin into another, you know, to do whatever it is that you're gonna do with it. This is like that, except I don't need Unchained to be that third party.
It'll happen all by itself. All I got all the surviving kid has to do is wait. And that's under the extreme circumstances of inheritance and tragedy. Think of something happy. What what would decaying multi like like I don't know like let's say this is sort of like a savings bond right? I give I give my kids like two wallets. You give each one of them one wallet with a quarter of a bitcoin on it, right? And I'd say this is your bitcoin. And then they come back a day later I've taught them how to do everything and they come back a day later and they say daddy daddy daddy it doesn't work the keys don't work. Yeah. Because each one of them is a two or three multisig, and you won't be able to spend this Bitcoin for twenty five years.
And then they hate me for a little while, but all the while, all they can do is watch the amount of the amount of Bitcoin stays the same but its purchasing power over time rises. And then at the end of twenty five years those keys decay, I'm long gone, I'm planted underneath one of my black walnut trees and cathedral or whatever and all of a sudden the unlock happens without me even being there because that's the way the mini script described the twenty five years. It will go from a two or three multisig down to a single signature key using multisig decay.
That's a hat I mean, other than the fact that I'm dead, that's a happy thought. Right? That, like, you know, that they it's like a savings bond. It there's a maturity date on it. Like a US savings bond, all of them had a maturity date. Some were a year, some were ten years. Or actually not ten years, but some were a year, some were six months. I think I think there was one that was like a two year bond. I mean, you you know, my dad would buy me a $100 bond. He'd pay, like, I don't know, $90 for it. And upon maturity, it would it would turn into a $100 because of interest, and that's the way that savings bonds worked. Any anyway, this is the same thing, except that it doesn't depend on a government.
Thank God, because they'd screw that all up. It doesn't depend on the government to have purchasing power increase over the period of time that the multisig decay takes to complete. So that's that's that's the happy example. So I've given you a tragic example which is not good, and I've also tried to you know be a good person and give you a happy example so that you can go into your weekend with a great big smile on your face. Now, I still really believe that the mesh network, a localized farmers market in a localized region that has a couple of lightning nodes for liquidity hanging right next to noster relays, which are helping everything happen.
And even if there weren't relays involved, even if there were because bit chat works completely without relays, except you can only do it with Bluetooth and line of sight and, like, the 100 meter or 100 foot, you know, range or whatever. But still, somebody's phone could run a lightning node, which means that they'd have to run a a Bitcoin full node, or I can put a mesh mesh net like a LoRa or LoRa. That's one of the ways you it's it's like I think it's LoRa from meshtastic. It's a mesh device. I could put an antenna on maybe a start nine node that is running a full Bitcoin node and running a lightning node and, maybe a cellular antenna or I'm have it connected to my phone as a hotspot so that it's able to get the blockchain data from the Bitcoin for the Bitcoin core node which is essential to be able to run the lightning node. But anyway since Laura mesh tastic is on it you would be able to connect that with the the local mesh of BitChat with all the phones at a local farmers market, and you are that farmer market farmers market real time bank that only opens when the farmers market is open and only closes and remains closed when the farmers mark farmer markets close and then reopens.
It's it's a bank with a single purpose. It's only alive to service that particular region. It will be done on mesh net. It will be done in conjunction with Nasr. It will be done in conjunction with BitChat. It will be done in conjunction with Bitcoin and lightning networks, and it's gonna be fucking awesome. I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 10:03AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the August 2025 and this is episode eleven fifty eight of Bitcoin. And it's probably going to be a shorter show this morning, than I normally do. It is Friday. Yes. The price is getting hammered. We're gonna talk about it. We're gonna talk about all the Bitcoin news that you can use. And then I'm also gonna include a little bit of lightning network today. There's a pretty good write up about it in bitcoin magazine. So for anybody who's got, I don't know, an itch they need to scratch about lightning network, that this may help. This may help. But first, let's just get it out of the way.
Alright. Let's just let's just go ahead and bury this dumb son of a bitch right now. Bitcoin hammered below 109 as conference indicator strikes again. Yeah. You know, I I didn't think about it, but, this article by Steven Alfer at a coin desk, you never know. I mean, it could be fun. I'm just saying, this could be fun. Because historical data around Bitcoin Magazine's annual United States Bitcoin conference has shown a clear pattern of poor price performance for Bitcoin during and just after the event. The indicator didn't disappoint in 2025 with Bitcoin struggling in late May and early June alongside and then following this year's Las Vegas conference.
The logic behind that price action isn't that hard to decipher in the weeks leading up to the show. Conference organizers looking to sell tickets and generate media coverage over hype the speakers and what are sure to be massive announcements and announcements of announcements I might personally add. But what follows is the usual cast of influencers, Bitcoin OGs, and newcomers to the sector this year, the Trumps, extolling quote freedom money, quote massive institutional and sovereign adoption, and quote Bitcoin to the moon, end quote.
How could the price do anything but dump? And now we come to Bitcoin Asia. For those not paying close attention, Bitcoin Magazine's Bitcoin Asia Conference took place this week in Hong Kong. The featured speakers included Eric Trump, CZ, Atabek, Balaji Sinervison, and David Bailey. Among the subject matter covered, you guessed it, quote, freedom money, quote, massive institutional and sovereign adoption, and quote, bitcoin to the moon, end quote. The price action, sharply lower at around a $115,000 as attendees began arriving in Hong Kong earlier this week, Bitcoin has tumbled to the current $108,400 This includes about a 4% dive overnight in The United States, which is Friday in Hong Kong.
And now it's Friday here too. This was written a little while ago. As David Bailey and Eric Trump took the stage for a chat titled, quote, Bitcoin takes over the world. Seriously, that's the article. And you know what? It's probably spot on. You know, it probably is. Okay. Maybe it's a little bit of voodoo when it comes to the the price action. Is the Bitcoin Bitcoin magazine's Bitcoin Asia conference really that big of a deal that that is starting to reflect the imagery that we get in price during The US conference? Because that that one seems to actually hold true. That that little indicator does hold true. But I've never seen I've never seen a dump because of Bitcoin magazine's Bitcoin Asia conference before. At least I I I don't really remember it.
But that aside, I too am sick and tired of the freaking hyperbole. The the it's it's it's the same crap over and over and over and over and over again, which you know? And I'm I mean, I'm glad that Bitcoin magazine puts the thing on. I'm glad that that it's as big as it is, but I'm just not that's not the conference for me, man. I I I I dream of going to Riga. That conference, that kind of Bitcoin conference, that's the kind of conference I'm looking for, man. Bit block boom. That's the only Bitcoin conference I've ever been to. It's small. It's intimate. Only the most hardcore of the hardcore people actually go there. And in fact, some of the people that you think that are really hardcore aren't at these conferences, at the smaller ones.
And those are the conferences that I think do Bitcoin the most good because that's where people are talking in the hallways about what can actually be done instead of getting on stage and saying Bitcoin to the moon and retail adoption is right around the corner and million dollar Bitcoin and $21,000,000 Bitcoin in twenty one years and blah. It's just it's all crap it's all freaking crap just stop stop it just stop it but is it is Bitcoin Asia really affecting the price I don't know. I'd I who knows? There no. There's nothing that anybody can say that will tell you why price dump.
Maybe it also has something to do with this, though. Let's go to the next story up from Bitcoin magazine itself written by Nick. It's a historic first. United States government posts GDP data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Yeah. And, like, seven others, if I remember right. Again, the hyperbole doesn't quit. The US government has officially begun publishing gross domestic product data on public blockchains. According to Bloomberg, the commerce department's announcement on Thursday brings blockchain into the core of America's economic reporting making GDP available on nine, count them, nine networks including bitcoin and then they actually named two other shitcoins.
Don't even bother. Commerce officials emphasized that the blockchain rollout is not a replacement for traditional economic data releases, but but rather another avenue for distribution according to Bloomberg. The move, however, carries significant symbolic weight. The hyperbole won't quit as it effectively replaces the government's seal or rather effectively places the government's seal of approval on technology once viewed with deep skepticism in Washington DC. Quote, the entire administration has embraced this, said Mike Cahill, chief executive officer of Duro Labs or do yeah. Duro. Let's call it Duro Labs, who confirmed he has been working with the commerce department on the initiative for the past two months. Oh my god. Two months.
Quote, with today's announcement, we are now in a world where government data lives on blockchains and market participants can participate in real time, quote, end quote. Wait. Sorry. That confused me. How the hell am I able to participate real time in government data on a blockchain? That literally makes no sense. I can't I can read it if maybe that's a participation trophy right there that I can see it, that I can see the hash? Because that's essentially, from what I understand, that's all that's really there. But whatever, the blockchain initiative involves posting cryptographic hashes. There we go. Cryptographic hashes of GDP data would serve as digital fingerprints to verify the information's integrity.
That is that assumes the information would had integrity to begin with before the hash. Okay. I'm just I'm just saying. But while limited in scope initially, commerce department officials confirmed that president Donald Trump's administration intends to expand the program even further, Bloomberg reported. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick spearheaded the project telling Trump earlier this week that statistics would be issued via blockchain because you are the crypto president. Lutnick had previously suggested reshaping GDP reporting by removing the impact of government spending.
As as if that's going to help. The initiative reflects a sharp departure from the prior administration under former president Joe Biden. Joe Biden. Regulators adopted a cautious stance towards crypto, often clashing with exchanges and imposing restrictions on digital assets. And in contrast, Trump has moved quickly to integrate Bitcoin into government policy. Since taking office, he has created a US Bitcoin reserve, yawn, stockpiled coins such as Ether and Solana, yawn, signed legislation regulating stablecoins, yawn, and appointed crypto friendly regulators who ended enforcement actions against Coinbase, big yawn.
But Trump's family has also deepened its present presence in the digital asset space, backing ventures such as World Liberty Financial and, dude, yada yada yada yada. Let's go get to the meat. By leveraging public blockchains, the commerce department joins other agencies experimenting with crypto technology. The department of homeland security is considered blockchain for airport passenger screening, while California's DMV has digitized car titles on crypto, according to Bloomberg. As Trump positions himself as the crypto president, the adoption of blockchain for GDP distribution signals a profound shift in US economic policy and further cements Bitcoin as a powerful political and financial force in Washington bullshit.
This is bullshit. Everything I just read to you is bullshit and I apologize for wasting your time. However, I I do really do think it's important for us to understand the level of bullshit that this represents. It's a cryptographic hash of the information represented in the GDP. And I'm sorry, but unless you tell me the mechanics of like like for instance, what's the document you gave a computer to run a SHA-two 56 on it to get a hash? Because that's essentially what we're talking about here. I can hash anything. I can get a SHA-two 56 or a SHA-two.
There's all kinds of shaws out there ladies and gentlemen. Let's just assume that they're using the Bitcoin SHA two fifty six mechanisms here. I can I can type my name into a dot txt file and save it and and send that file or or the contents of that file like maybe just copy and paste it into a sha two fifty six generator and it will generate a particular string of numbers and letters that has no match except every time I put my name in the exact same way into that shaw two fifty six generator then and only then will that same hash come up that's the way this works If I were to include an extra space at the end of my name, the hash would be completely different than my name without an extra space at the end? You see how this works? So I don't give a shit what this guy, what Lutnick, what Trump, and and whoever's bragging about this. I don't care at all about that.
And even if you show me the document and the the the actual ASCII characters and the spaces and the line breaks and the paragraph for a carriage returns and paragraph starts and stops and all of the crap from whatever document they're feeding it yes, it'll generate a particular hash. And if you change any particular information inside that doc that original document and then re rehash it, it will not come out the same. So are they going to deliver in in public the actual physical document? No. I mean, I mean, the actual, you know, like the digital file so that I too can take can copy and paste all of that shit into a SHA two fifty six generator and come up with the exact same hash? Because if not, then this is nothing but bullshit.
Every did this this is the hyperbolic crap that we've I've had to live through since 2015. And I guarantee you, the people that have been in in this space since 02/2009, since that since the Genesis block, they've seen even more of it because they've been around longer. But please do not for a second think that this, quote, unquote, changes something or signals anything of any significance whatsoever because it doesn't. It just it just doesn't. Now let's let's just kind of skate on over to the Dutch. Let's hang out in The Netherlands for a little bit. Dutch crypto firm Amdax targets a 1% Bitcoin supply with a $23,000,000 treasury launch.
Yes. Yes, indeedy. It's yet another Bitcoin Treasury company. Oh, joy. I'm telling you, man, the hyperbole is just is just not going to stop. Adrian Smutsky from, Cointelegraph is writing this one. Dutch cryptocurrency service provider, Amdax, raised €20,000,000 to launch a Bitcoin Treasury company on Amsterdam's Euronext stock exchange. According to a Friday announcement, multiple investors have committed about $23,300,000 in an initial financing round for Amdex's Bitcoin Treasury. This follows an announcement earlier this month that it would launch the Treasury as an independent privately held company with its own governance, AMBTS.
Ambits, I guess is how you would pronounce that, is being created to eventually eventually accumulate at least 1% of all Bitcoin that will ever be created or about 210,000 BTC. And such an amount of Bitcoin is currently worth over $23,000,000,000, ladies and gentlemen. Quote, Ambitz intends to leverage the capital markets to increase its Bitcoin holdings and sequentially generate equity appreciation and grow Bitcoin per share for its shareholders subject to market and other conditions. The suit speak is strong with this one. Ever since strategy demonstrated the viability of this approach, the Bitcoin Treasury tactic has been gaining momentum.
This trend has also led to multiple companies not focused solely on Bitcoin accumulation starting to acquire it. Such firms include US electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and a whole bunch of other people. And earlier this week, Bitcoin Treasury Meta Planet approved a plan to raise about $880,000,000 through an overseas share issuance with nearly $835,000,000 allocated for Bitcoin purchases. And then they talk about strategy buying more Bitcoin. I'm bringing this to you to let you know that I think this dog is about to die. I I just feel that at this point it's like it's a me too movement And everybody right at this point, they're just announcing their intention to become x, y, and z or or or in this case, a Bitcoin holding or a Bitcoin treasury company. And it's always the same language to increase our shareholder value.
Okay. Okay. What do you what do you do? What does the Dutch crypto firm Amdex actually do? It's a cryptocurrency service provider. What do they service? How do they service? What's their revenue stream? You see where I'm going with all this? Paper bitcoin summer God I I'm I'm I know I'm reinforcing the meme but paper bitcoin summer is just it's it's something we've never really seen before because it's turned bitcoin well it hasn't turned bitcoin into anything bitcoin is what bitcoin's gonna be it doesn't give a shit about what we think about it however at this point, the human perception, especially even in and amongst Bitcoiners themselves, the perception is seems to be changing a little bit to where Bitcoin itself has become kind of a shit coin when you put it into the hands of a bunch of freaking corporate suits. And what are we gonna do about it? Absolutely nothing. Why? Because we can't.
Bitcoin is for enemies. Watching this happen to Bitcoin is exactly what Bitcoin was designed for. And I know that sounds really dumb, and it sounds really vague, but it's not. The fact that we're seeing this happen to Bitcoin, it was inevitable. And if you think this is the worst thing that can happen, oh, Neli, you ain't seen nothing yet. I can only imagine the machinations that suits have for Bitcoin, and yet there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. And if there was, then Bitcoin would deserve to go away forever. And if you don't understand what I mean by all this, hit me up on on Fountain or hit me up on Nostr and say, you know, explain it to me.
But this is exactly what Bitcoin was built for, and this is exactly what Bitcoin is built to survive. There's good news. I'm literally telling you good news. Even in the face of all the hyperbole, all the bullshit, all the Bitcoin to the moon forever crap, all the conferences, all the price dumps, all the price pumps, everything. In the midst of all that, it's good news that Bitcoin is being used as a corporate shitcoin. At least in at least for the bottom What? I think there's 164 companies now that either have or have announced that they are a Bitcoin treasury company or going to become because there's like, oh, we intend to We we have the intention to. So at a 164 companies, the top five definitely gonna survive, probably do well. That includes strategy, meta planet, similar, been a couple up, like, '21 and maybe maybe Nakamoto.
That's the one that fused with, was it KindlyMD, I think, is was the name of the, company that and they merged and became Nakamoto or merged and and became Kindly MD. I'm I'm still unclear. I'm I'm getting I'm getting mixed messages about that. They'll they'll do well probably. The others? I don't know, man. And the ones that are just doing this to, like, literally, I here's what's happening with the people that are making the announcement that they're going to buy Bitcoin is because they need a price they need a stock price pump, and they have no intention of ever purchasing Bitcoin at all.
They're pumping their own stock by making these press releases saying they're going to buy 1% of Bitcoin. Well, talk is cheap. You know, it's like money talks, bullshit walks. Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities. West Texas Intermediate Oil down seven or eight tenths of a point to sixty four zero nine. Britain, North Sea down seven tenths to sixty eight twelve. Natural gas up one and a half to $2.98 per thousand. Gasoline is down one and a third. And my favorite, Mirban crude, is down 5.24%. What the hell happened to Mirban crude? Did we bomb the Middle East?
Maybe this has something to do with Israel. I don't know. Who gives a shit? It's down to $71.46. Shiny metal rocks doing well. Gold up 1.2. Silver up 2.76. Platinum up six tenths of a point. Copper is up 1.2. And ag is mixed fully. The biggest winner today is coffee, 2% to the upside, biggest loser is lumber, 1.3 to the downside. Live cattle up a half, lean hogs up a half, and feeder cattle up 0.5%. The Dow is down a third, S and P is down, wow, almost a full point, Nasdaq is down a point and a half, and the S and P Mini is down point 72%. Oh, I need to add, inflation some more inflation data came in today, and that's, honestly, that's probably why, Bitcoin price kinda tanked this morning along with clearly the Dow, the S and P, the Nasdaq, and and and, S and P Mini.
The numbers weren't weren't as good as people expected. And what again, if you're wondering why that affects the price of Bitcoin, Bitcoin is still generally perceived as a risk on asset. If we don't get a fed rate cut, they're not going to give us cheap money, and there's not free, you know, cheap money to buy risky assets. So, therefore, shit rotates out of risk assets and assets. So therefore, shit rotates out of risk assets and into, I don't know, equities because they're safe or treasuries because they're safe. It's all bullshit. Let's go to the dashboard. We have a price of $108,480 that is a pathetic $2,160,000,000,000 market cap. We can only purchase 31.4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,913,141.81 of. Fees remain very low.
It's only 0.02 BTC on a per block basis in fees. There are about 28 blocks carrying 80,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear. High priority is gonna cost you 4 sats per v byte. Low priority is gonna get you in at one. Hash rate continues to climb. We are now back to 989 hexahashes per second. So maybe the miners know something that we don't. Whatever. It it honestly, it doesn't really matter. But Paul Cernine has given me 500 sats, and he says, thanks for the long take on Bitcoin circular economy. Absolutely agree that it's more pertinent now than ever. Love the quote, though it sounds quite harsh in the article about how Bitcoin liberates us from ancestral abuse, l f g. And y'all know what that means. Turkey with 500 says, Tether is already on liquid.
I've been admonished. I did not know that Tether was indeed on liquid. But still, I I still maintain the the same thing I said yesterday. If it's on liquid, then why is everybody freaking out about RGB? It's on Tron. I I mean, Tether's on Tron, Tether's on Ethereum, Tether's on Solana, Tether's on RGB, Tether's on Liquid. And yet, I mean, I got there was always a little bit of pushback, you know, with the shit coinery and all. But at this point, we we should realize it's not gonna stop. So we would probably be better served if we didn't waste our mental energy getting mad at Tether for selecting yet one more shit chain to rail on. But, anyway, Debt Wheeler, with a 100 sat says Deb as in Debbie, Ian, Debian, Debian. Oh, oh, Debian. Okay.
I like Debian because it sounds like Plebeian, but okay. I'll I'll I'll take you up on it. Pies with one twenty one says thank you, sir. No thank you. And that's pretty much it. Not not a whole lot of donations probably because we're all seeing, seeing this price pressure. But if you like what I'm doing here, if you if you enjoyed the show, please consider actually cutting me some some some of those sweet sweet Satoshis even even if we're getting more of them per dollar than we were, which sounds weird sounds weird to say it that way. Donate to the show, man.
If you like what I do, donate to the show because that that's one of the ways that that that I feed myself and some kids and and and my wife and if you, you know, if you wanna help me out in that aspect of, you know, doing this work and continuously doing this work, consider donating to the show. You can do that through, like, you know, fountain. App. That's or that's the fountain app that I use or podcasting app that I use. It's podcasting two point o enabled. And if you're still using some old legacy podcasting app, you have really got to step up your game. And speaking of stepping up, it's a step function.
Podcasting two point o allows you to stream satoshis while you listen to your favorite podcast and podcasters and that that supports their shows and it supports my show you can boost with any number of sats that you really want well to I don't think anybody's gonna try to boost a whole Bitcoin because it does use the lightning network and, you know, you get my drift. Too much money and is probably, you know, not the best thing to do for for lightning network. But the the podcasting two point o is where it's at. I use fountain as my podcasting app it's my daily driver. I love it. I get transcripts. I get I get chapters. I get boosts. I get sat stream directly to me. It's it's awesome. So, if you're still using something like Apple Podcasts, you can get any podcast that you want from Fountain because all of the podcast apps including Apple, they all use the same index.
So if you think that you're not gonna be able to get a podcast unless unless you're listening to some of those chicks that that do the true crime podcast on Wondery because that's a that's kind of a closed ecosystem and I'm not I don't know if you can get those. I I'm not sure but I kind of don't care because closed ecosystems are just walled gardens by another name and I I just don't give a shit about it. But for most of the podcast apps that you're ever gonna want or podcast that you're ever gonna want, they they all use podcast index. There's like 4,000,000 indexed podcast only about 80,000 of them are actually active podcasts but you know they all reach for podcast index so don't be afraid go try out a podcasting two point zero application or podcaster today so that you can help support the Bitcoin Dan show and well that's the weather report Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. This is gonna be a bit of a longer read from Christian Corollis out of Bitcoin Magazine entitled lightning is misunderstood.
Well, we've talked about lightning a couple of times this during this episode. We might as well go ahead and do a deeper dive into it. So here we go. The lightning network is one of the most exciting and innovative technologies built on bitcoin, but it's also one of the most misunderstood. From its early days with grassroots efforts like PlebNet, to ambitious versions of Lightning applications, and the idea of earning passive yield as a routing node operator, enthusiasm around Lightning has often outpaced its practical realities. Many bitcoiners expected lightning to be a seamless plug and play extension of the bitcoin network just as sovereign, decentralized, and accessible as running a full bitcoin node but, well, the reality is more complex.
Setting up and maintaining a well connected Lightning node involves technical skills and capital requirements that most users aren't prepared to manage. This isn't a failure. It's simply a reflection of Lightning's overall design. As a result of these barriers, many users have turned to custodial solutions to access Lightning's benefits. Custodial wallets and neobanks like Strike, Blink, Wallet of Satoshi, Cash App, and others offer features such as Lightning URLs, instant low fee transactions, and the kind of reliability and user experience people expect from full featured banking style applications.
To some, this reliance on custodians feels more like a compromise and in a way it is. But more importantly, it reveals something often overlooked. Running Lightning infrastructure just isn't meant for everyone. Here's the controversial part. That's perfectly okay. Lightning's critics, both within the Bitcoin community and among altcoin promoters, often frame these trade offs as proof that Lightning has failed, suggesting it should be replaced with something else entirely. But that view misses the mark. Rather than seeing these limitations as fatal flaws, it's far more accurate and productive to understand the Lightning Network for what it truly is: enterprise grade infrastructure.
In this context, enterprise grade means robust, scalable, and dependable enough to power real time low fee payments for mission critical services. It's not something every casual user will host themselves. Lightning is built for professional operators, Bitcoin exchanges, payment processors, wallet developers, and technically capable community projects. And for them, Lightning isn't a compromise, it's a competitive advantage. Moreover, the Lightning Network complements Bitcoin in many ways and is becoming increasingly interoperable with adjacent technologies such as eCash, Mints, and other layer two solutions.
It functions as a global open source and permissionless financial infrastructure that any serious operator anywhere in the world can tap into. In essence, the Lightning Network is evolving into the interoperable glue connecting external systems to the Bitcoin blockchain. Not everyone will run a lightning node and that's okay. This reality doesn't diminish lightning's significance in Bitcoin's scaling roadmap. On the contrary, lightning is a foundational layer that enables a wide range of tools and services. Far from being a centralizing force, it actually enhances decentralization by opening the door to permissionless payments anywhere in the world, creating new types of economic actors that weren't previously possible.
A great example of this is the Kenyan Bitcoin payments app, Tando. This app allows users to spend Bitcoin at any merchant or service that accepts m Pesa using the Lightning Network. M Pesa, if you didn't know, is a mobile money platform launched by Safaricom in Kenya that allows users to send, receive, and store money via mobile phones without needing a traditional bank account. As of 2024, it serves over 34,000,000 users in Kenya processing more than 30,000,000,000, that's billion with a b, transactions annually and accounts for nearly 60% of the country's gross domestic product.
Thanks to lightning, Tandos creators can build a seamless programmatic payment experience that interoperates directly with the m Pesa system, dramatically improving liquidity access for Bitcoin users in Kenya. But because everyone and their grandma in Kenya accepts M Pesa, with Tandoh, anyone can spend Bitcoin anywhere in Kenya even in the Maasai Mara, and I don't know what that is. Whatever. Without Lightning, on chain Bitcoin payments would simply be too slow to offer a practical experience for everyday M Pesa transactions. Transaction confirmation times on chain aren't suited to real time payments, especially in fast paced retail settings.
But by building a lightning payment gateway that connects directly to M Pesa wallets, Tandos has transformed the payment landscape for Bitcoin users in Kenya. Tandos is proof that Lightning unlocks real world use cases for builders without needing to ask for permission to build. The fact that Lightning enables this is amazing. Another excellent example of the edge that lightning gives businesses can be seen by comparing two global neobanks, PayPal and Strike. PayPal, the original internet payment company launched in 1998 and took over seventeen years to expand to more than 200 countries.
In contrast, Strike, a far more niche application built on lightning and launched in 2020, has already rolled out to over 100 countries in just five years, reaching markets across Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. Strike's global expansion not only rivals PayPal's in scope, but also dramatically outpaces it in speed and ease, highlighting the unique advantages of building on modern borderless infrastructure like the Lightning Network. Strike CEO Jack Mallers and his team largely bypassed working directly with banks, instead choosing to partner with Bitcoin exchanges around the world that already had established local banking relationships in the market they serve.
These partners use the Lightning Network to send value instantaneously across borders. When a user wants to convert their Strike app balance into local currency, the partner facilitates the exchange on the back end. This strategy allows Strike to launch a global payment service powered by universally accepted instant lightning payments faster than ever before. Stripe leveraged Bitcoin and lightning's borderless capabilities to build a truly global network combining this technical edge with strong business development to secure fiat conversion partnerships.
While legacy players remain bottlenecked by traditional banking rails, Strike uses Lightning to instantly move value anywhere on the planet. Not only does the Lightning Network open new doors for businesses, but it also enables permissionless payments, both large and small, within other open protocols. A premier example of this is Nostr, a decentralized protocol designed to support social media experiences and much more. In a post on x, Jack's door sorry. Jack Dorsey stated, quote, the greatest at scale example of Bitcoin as everyday payments are zaps on Nasr, end quote.
In a 2023 interview with Politico, he discussed his grounded optimism for both Nasr and lightning enabled zaps. Quote, he also argued that the user experience on Nasr had already surpassed that of Twitter, citing zaps, a feature that lets users tip each other in Bitcoin, part of a vision in which information and money flow together around the Internet without obstruction. End quote. Zaps on Nostra evolved from a basic lightning invoice system to a seamless micropayment feature largely thanks to the efforts of William Kasserin, also known as j b fifty five, the creator of Domus, if you didn't know.
Initially, users had to attach Bitcoin payment request to notes manually. Yes. I do remember that. It was a pain in the ass, but it was fun because we were able to do it. This is me talking right now, but I digress. In early twenty twenty three, Kasarin, the creator of the Domus client, authored nip 57, introducing event types 9734, a zap request, and 9735, a zap receipt, which formalized zaps as instant lightning powered Bitcoin transfers. Building on Nostra's early lightning integration, Kaserin's vision helped transform zaps into a native user friendly feature across every prominent Nostra client we have today.
The introduction of Zaps sparked a surge in Nostra adoption. By June 2023, Nostra users had sent over 1,000,000 Zaps across a network with roughly half a million users. Holy shit. Requiring only a lightning wallet and a Nostra client, Zaps eliminated all intermediaries and empowered creators to receive direct low fee payments for their posts, streams, or other content. This seamless integration of social interaction in Bitcoin's lightning economy has redefined the way value is exchanged online, one small or large transaction at a time. Even though casual users typically won't manage their own always online lightning infrastructure, the network empowers small teams and skilled individuals to offer financial services that once required a bank.
This dynamic is rapidly evolving into a broader trend, one that's driving lightning toward greater decentralization through community based infrastructure. Imagine if every local Bitcoin meetup had someone running a lightning node for their community. This could provide a neighborhood or region with an approachable trusted operator almost like modern day credit unions. In such a model, lightning infrastructure wouldn't be dominated solely by large enterprise nodes. Instead, trust and routing would be distributed among smaller, localized actors with different incentives.
Builders who prioritize resilience, privacy, and accessibility over scale or profit. This dynamic is already happening today. I've personally seen this in action through initiatives like Preya Bitcoin in Brazil and LaCrypta in Argentina. Both projects pair grassroots communities with locally managed payment systems built on lightning. Together, bitcoin and the lightning network are enabling a grassroots alternative to to traditional banking, and it's a beautiful thing. Lastly, I would be remiss not to mention the many incredible projects like Zeus, Phoenix, Breeze, Aqua, Moon and other lightning wallets that are innovating to create diverse user experiences, these teams are building feature rich applications without sacrificing user custody while navigating the still wild frontier of Bitcoin payments in 2025.
In a world where Bitcoin and Lightning remain niche and speculative behavior is as rampant as ever, delivering excellent non custodial payment experiences is no small feat. While not perfect, many of these projects are doing exactly that. The fact that so many builders are offering such a wide range of ways to interact with Lightning gives consumers real choice and ultimately reinforces my core argument. The Lightning Network was never meant to serve every user in every way, and that's precisely why it works. It's not failing because casual users may prefer custodial wallets.
It's succeeding because developers, businesses, and organizers are using it to solve real world problems without needing permission. What Lightning offers isn't universal simplicity is focused high level software or rather high leverage software. It's infrastructure that bridges Bitcoin to people and delivers innovative solutions to the edges of the global economy. When we stop expecting lightning to be something that it cannot be, we begin to understand its true purpose a dynamic foundational layer for those building the future of financial freedom.
That's the end of the article. I got a few words here. One, there was a a user on Noster, and I'm not gonna dox you, dude, but swore up and down that it was j b fifty five that created the lightning network. No. No. No. And there was I think it might might have, this person might have mentioned another name. And I'm not laughing at you. It's just that I can't believe that it's been, let's see, the first instance of lightning that I saw as a workable thing was 2017. And I think that was I think Breezewallet was the very first thing to integrate the lightning network and then right after that they put they dropped a a podcast player.
And they turned their their their bitcoin wallet, they added lightning functionality, and they turned that into a podcast app. And it's still around it's still around today. It's like, I think it's Breeze, b r e e z e. I I can't remember how to spell it. I haven't used it in a while, but that was 2017. Yo. That's seven years ago. Somewhere around there maybe I'll I'll be a little bit more conservative. The the the pay the white paper for lightning came out in 2016. I actually believe there was a functional test of lightning going on in 2017, and that was constructed by Elizabeth Stark and her team over at lightning labs.
I picked up I think I picked up Lightning in for real in 2018. And Elizabeth Stark coined the term well, she coined a meme and it's hashtag reckless because she was at a conference or was giving an interview or somewhere, and she was saying, please don't use the lightning network in its current state. Don't do shit that's stupid, like put 10,000 worth of Bitcoin on the lightning network because you're going to lose it. This is all nothing but a test. Don't be reckless. And all of a sudden, what did we do? We started spinning up lightning nodes and we started putting Bitcoin on those lightning nodes. Like like the reckless dumbasses that we were. And I never I never had I never had a problem with my lightning node. I've even changed to a different lightning node at this point. Haven't had a problem with this one either.
This is rock solid tech, But I want I want to shift gears just a little bit. Continuing on with this particular Bitcoin Magazine article, there's a a passage here that I want to reread. Imagine if every local Bitcoin meetup had someone running a lightning node for their community. This could provide a neighborhood or region with an approachable, trusted operator, almost like modern day credit unions. In such a model, lightning infrastructure wouldn't be dominated solely by large enterprise nodes. I'm reading that again because I wanna say one word, BitChat.
I'm going to say another word if you don't know what BitChat is, mesh network. It's coming. I haven't seen a paper on it. I haven't seen anybody actually say the words yet. Although, if you've heard somebody say these words, you know where I'm going and I'm just repeating it. I promise you, I have not heard about this yet. Right? From my from where I sit and from and I scan all this stuff every morning to bring you The Bitcoin Ann Show, and I still have yet to see anybody say the words, Lightning will be running over Meshnet in BitChat probably by next year.
I actually think that's going to happen. And I honestly also think that we're going to be combining I mean, Nostra and Lightning is already combined through, j b 50 fives, those two kinds with the the zap invoice and the zap receipt. Right? Those two event kinds on Nostr is what enables zaps. So we already have a very tight junction between the Lightning Network and Noster. Well, here comes Jack Dorsey, and he says, BitChat, and all of a sudden, we go fucking nuts. Right? There's a lot of people that that don't understand BitChat. There's a lot of people that do and hate it. There's a lot of people that do and love it. I I understand it, and I love it. I think it's great. The people that hate it think that it's taking away something from Nostr. I wholeheartedly disagree. Have I seen less traffic on Noster, like, over the last couple of weeks? A little bit. Because a lot of people are trying out BitChat. They're really trying to wrap their head about around what it means.
But BitChat works with geohashing, and that is another way to locate on the planet a location. Like, think of longitude and latitude coordinates, like one zero one and twenty one minutes and, you know, four hours and twenty one minutes and so many seconds and and then you get another number and you the one goes east to west and one goes north to south and where they cross, that's that's the location. Geohashing does it a little different. Right? It's a preset, and we all agree on it. There's a preset grid around the globe that it it's imaginary grid. Okay? It's an imaginary grid, but it's like it's like a map. And and all the the people that use geohashes, somehow or another, we've all come to a consensus that this particular grid is the one that that we're calling geohashes.
And instead of latitude and longitude in numeric format, what we have is alphanumeric format. And it's like it would be like hashtag nine c, and that gets you to a particular region in, like, I don't know, North America, let's say. And then if you wanna if you zoom in, you're gonna get nine c eight. And if you zoom in some more, you might get nine C four eight four c. And it gets it gets to the point where you can get all the way down to right in front of a house. Actually, you can get down further than that, but for our purposes, that's a location.
So I could just back out a little bit and say, hey, this entire block, this is the Farmers Market. That that's a region. Now think of it again when I read this. Imagine if every local Bitcoin meetup, think farmers market, had someone riding a light running a lightning node for their community, think farmers market, mesh network, bit chat, nostril relays that are also running as lightning nodes. Just start lit. I mean, I don't have to answer all the questions about what it is that I'm that I'm trying to impart to you. You're this should be more Hitchcockian where you know the ladies and the the woman's in the bathroom taking a shower.
You know, she's getting stabbed, but you don't actually ever see it. And so it forces your mind to become the imagination engine that it is and starts filling in the gaps. Think re geo hashed region, think farmers market, think noster relays, think lightning nodes that are actually embedded in noster relays or vice versa where light the lightning network picks up and just as a sidecar just jams fricking nostril relays into it. Think Jack Dorsey and BitChat. And we're all chatting in like, if we're we're all on this mesh network and other people could join in through geohashing, but if we're all at a farmer's market and a lot of us have bit chat, we basically essentially have a very localized region and inside that particular mesh is buried maybe one maybe even two lightning nodes and on our phone we have a lightning wallet and we're able to access through bit chat using nostril relays that are somehow or another tight junctioned and cozied up next to a lightning node to provide liquidity all of a sudden we have a regional regional payment system that's just servicing that say, farmers market.
This is going to happen. I haven't heard it actually said yet. That's okay. It's also okay if you got if you've said, hey, dude, this other guy, he said that, you know, like, the day after Jack Dorsey, you know, came out with bitch at. Fine. I don't care. This needs to be done. And not only does it need to be done, it's going to be done. I almost I can almost guarantee it. In fact, I'm gonna I'm just gonna say yes. I guarantee it. If it doesn't happen sometime in the next year, and it could also it it it could probably happen this year, but I'm gonna give it I'm gonna give myself until 12/31/2026. And if I'm wrong all the way up there until then and I go into the new year 2027 and it still isn't here, then you you can you can bitch at me all you want. You can tell me I'm wrong and you can tell me I'm dumb and I'll I'll go, you know what? You're right. You're right.
You're right. Let's move on to Nunchuk. This is the last story of the day, by the way. Nunchuk wallet brings programmable Bitcoin to everyone with mini script support. Bitcoin magazine written by Shinobi. Today, which was probably yesterday, Nunchuk wallet releases support for a fully generalized MiniScript use, bringing a degree of flexibility and control to their users never seen before. For those unfamiliar with MiniScript, it is a policy language invented by core developer and former maintainer Peter Woollo to make the creation of customized Bitcoin scripts easier and safer.
ManyScript takes the most commonly used pieces of Bitcoin script, like signature locks, time locks, hash locks, etcetera and creates a higher level programming language for users to create custom scripts. This higher level language is designed to be safely analyzable and composable, meaning that once users create a customized script, they can be sure that it will behave exactly how they expect it to. Nunchuck provides two basic templates users can use, simply needing to fill in the keys they wish to use in the wallet. One is the decaying multisig, where after a time lock expires, less keys are required to spend in order to ensure that key loss does not result in losing funds.
The other is an expanding multisig, where over time, other keys can sign for a transaction beyond the core key set. For instance, initially, let's say a two of two is required but after some time lock a third key can sign instead In addition to these basic templates more advanced users can import any custom MiniScript template that they have created themselves. MiniScript templates can be applied to both native SegWit wallets as well as Taproot wallets. And out of the gate, the following hardware wallets will support native SegWit MiniScript. Coldcard, Tapsigner, Blockstream Jade, and Ledger.
The following will support Taproot MiniScript, Coldcard, and Ledger. So that means I'm pausing here to say that Coldcard is going to be the only one that will support native SegWit and Taproot MiniScript. And it doesn't surprise me. I love Coldcard. It's from CoinKite. Rodolfo Novak is an absolute scoundrel when it comes to being, you know, private. He he loves privacy, and he is like a fanatic about it. He's actually self described as paranoid about privacy. Absolute paranoia about security. And he built the cold card coming from that aspect. That's the person I want building my hardware wallet is somebody who's freaking paranoid about privacy and security, and you get SegWit MiniScript and Taproot MiniScript both only in the cold card from CoinKite.
Tell Rodolfo Novak that you heard it here on Bitcoin and alright. So, Nunchuk oh, I'm sorry. Hold on. Let's let's look at this. Musig two use with miniscript will be limited to software only keys for the time being. Nunchuck's end to end encrypted communication function has full support for ManyScript templates allowing collaboration between users in constructing and using template based wallets. In addition, Nunchuk has compiled a one zero one technical guide for users who wish to use or to make use of MiniScript in their own wallets. For those more inclined to dive into the nuts and bolts themselves, here also is a website put together by Peter Woollo with a breakdown of MiniScript itself and some basic tools.
That's that's the article, but this is kinda huge. We've been waiting for MiniScript for a long time. Why do you want it? Like that this this, key let's look at the key decay example as an answer to why what does MiniScript do? I wanna revisit this because this is important. Let's say I die with like a whole half Bitcoin and I want to leave it to my kids, you know, split it. Right? But let's just say that I'm going to leave it up to them to actually do the split. One of them holds a key and the other one holds a key, but but this is done with manuscript.
So both those keys would and I hold like let's say I hold a third key and like two any two of those keys can unlock that wallet and be able to vector the Bitcoin out to some other, Bitcoin address. Right? So I die and so my key is lost. They still have their two keys. So, technically, although you'd want to do it a little bit different, but technically for purposes of this example, the the will is like, oh, by the way, don't don't forget your daddy's half Bitcoin. You guys got the keys. The lawyer says, I don't have the keys. The kids got the keys, and and the kids, in fact, are, like, you know, were were bright enough to figure out a good way to store their keys, and they both have their keys.
And but right before something something terrible happens, and let's I'm not even gonna say my kids. Let's let's say I am a I'm now speaking I'm a fictitional dad with fictitional children because I don't want I don't I don't want I I Mojo is bad. I I don't wanna do it with as an example, my own kids, but something terrible happens to one of the children. Well, if the other child the surviving child cannot get a hold of the something terrible happened to the sibling child keys, then that's that kid is screwed for life. Never gonna get a hold of that that half Bitcoin.
But with decaying multisig, which is given by this mini script stuff, If if I had written the mini script to decay those keys to where if within after five years of my death that that that wallet hasn't been touched because something bad happened to one of the kids, then it decays from a two of three multisig to just either a single key or, like, I don't even know if it exists, but a one of two multisig, which is is dumb. That's why I don't think it exists because what's the point? But in this particular case, it would decay it over a period of five years to where after five years, the surviving child would be able to use their surviving key to unlock that half Bitcoin.
That's a huge deal. That is an intensely massive deal because it's sort of like having a third party a third party custody like what Unchained in Austin, Texas has a service where they will be your third party on like a two or three multisig. They'll be a third party. They'll hold a third key. So in case something bad happens to one of the original key holders, the survivor can get a hold of Unchained and say, here's what happened. I don't know. Unchained probably requires a death certificate or something or some kind of proof that this bad thing has happened and they say yes. We will help you, you know, vector this this Bitcoin into another, you know, to do whatever it is that you're gonna do with it. This is like that, except I don't need Unchained to be that third party.
It'll happen all by itself. All I got all the surviving kid has to do is wait. And that's under the extreme circumstances of inheritance and tragedy. Think of something happy. What what would decaying multi like like I don't know like let's say this is sort of like a savings bond right? I give I give my kids like two wallets. You give each one of them one wallet with a quarter of a bitcoin on it, right? And I'd say this is your bitcoin. And then they come back a day later I've taught them how to do everything and they come back a day later and they say daddy daddy daddy it doesn't work the keys don't work. Yeah. Because each one of them is a two or three multisig, and you won't be able to spend this Bitcoin for twenty five years.
And then they hate me for a little while, but all the while, all they can do is watch the amount of the amount of Bitcoin stays the same but its purchasing power over time rises. And then at the end of twenty five years those keys decay, I'm long gone, I'm planted underneath one of my black walnut trees and cathedral or whatever and all of a sudden the unlock happens without me even being there because that's the way the mini script described the twenty five years. It will go from a two or three multisig down to a single signature key using multisig decay.
That's a hat I mean, other than the fact that I'm dead, that's a happy thought. Right? That, like, you know, that they it's like a savings bond. It there's a maturity date on it. Like a US savings bond, all of them had a maturity date. Some were a year, some were ten years. Or actually not ten years, but some were a year, some were six months. I think I think there was one that was like a two year bond. I mean, you you know, my dad would buy me a $100 bond. He'd pay, like, I don't know, $90 for it. And upon maturity, it would it would turn into a $100 because of interest, and that's the way that savings bonds worked. Any anyway, this is the same thing, except that it doesn't depend on a government.
Thank God, because they'd screw that all up. It doesn't depend on the government to have purchasing power increase over the period of time that the multisig decay takes to complete. So that's that's that's the happy example. So I've given you a tragic example which is not good, and I've also tried to you know be a good person and give you a happy example so that you can go into your weekend with a great big smile on your face. Now, I still really believe that the mesh network, a localized farmers market in a localized region that has a couple of lightning nodes for liquidity hanging right next to noster relays, which are helping everything happen.
And even if there weren't relays involved, even if there were because bit chat works completely without relays, except you can only do it with Bluetooth and line of sight and, like, the 100 meter or 100 foot, you know, range or whatever. But still, somebody's phone could run a lightning node, which means that they'd have to run a a Bitcoin full node, or I can put a mesh mesh net like a LoRa or LoRa. That's one of the ways you it's it's like I think it's LoRa from meshtastic. It's a mesh device. I could put an antenna on maybe a start nine node that is running a full Bitcoin node and running a lightning node and, maybe a cellular antenna or I'm have it connected to my phone as a hotspot so that it's able to get the blockchain data from the Bitcoin for the Bitcoin core node which is essential to be able to run the lightning node. But anyway since Laura mesh tastic is on it you would be able to connect that with the the local mesh of BitChat with all the phones at a local farmers market, and you are that farmer market farmers market real time bank that only opens when the farmers market is open and only closes and remains closed when the farmers mark farmer markets close and then reopens.
It's it's a bank with a single purpose. It's only alive to service that particular region. It will be done on mesh net. It will be done in conjunction with Nasr. It will be done in conjunction with BitChat. It will be done in conjunction with Bitcoin and lightning networks, and it's gonna be fucking awesome. I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Episode Overview
Market Updates and Economic Indicators
Future of Bitcoin and Lightning with Mesh Networks
