Join me today for Episode 881 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Bitcoin ETC Launches in Germany
- Morgan Stanley, UBS in Race to Bitcoin ETF
- Even Binance Hates Ordinals. Buh Bye
- Fedimint! Now with LNURLs
- Bisq, and Citrine Updates
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
Circle P:
The Circle P: Advertising with a Value for Value bent. Brought to you by The Bitcoin And Podcast.
The Circle P is where the circular economy spirit meets the value for value model. No middlemen, no bullshit.
It's about providing a platform for the plebs, by the plebs but instead of paying upfront advertising costs, you contribute based on the value you receive. Did The Circle P help you make a sale? Great, show some love to The Bitcoin And Podcast in Bitcoin. It's advertising that grows with you; direct support powered by Plebability.
The Circle P: Bringing advertising full circle.
(06:24) The Circle P
(10:10) Bitcoin ETC in Germany
(12:29) Race between Morgan Stanley and UBS for the first Bitcoin ETF
(15:53) Binance NFT Marketplace removing support for Bitcoin ordinals
(19:29) Hedge funds holding record bearish Bitcoin bets
(32:55) Tether awarding grant to BTC Pay Server Foundation
(38:39) Release of Fedimint version 0.3.0
(42:55) Release of BISQ version 2.0.2
Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/900-billion-dws-launches-physical-bitcoin-etc-in-germany
https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-beat-ubs-first-bitcoin-etf
https://decrypt.co/224788/binance-nft-marketplace-axes-bitcoin-ordinals
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/04/04/hedge-funds-hold-record-bearish-bitcoin-bets-data-show/
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://www.cnbc.com/bonds/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/citrine-v0-2-0/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/tether-awards-100k-grant-to-btcpay-server-foundation/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/bisq-v2-0-2/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/fedimint-v0-3-0/
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
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Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DavidB84567
StackerNews:
stacker.news/NunyaBidness
Podcasting 2.0:
fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
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Find Lightning Network Channel partners here:
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Music by:
Flutey Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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[00:00:00]
Unknown:
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin Ant, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, casting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of two systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system. And that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 10:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the, what, the 4th day of the 4th month of the 4th year of the 2nd decade of this millennium, this 2024 for anybody that can't count. And this is episode 881 of Bitcoin. And my, oh, my, I am not feeling all that well today.
You know, for Lent, I completely didn't drink except Dianna, like, a couple of glasses of wine midway through something like that. Nothing speck nothing special. But for the 40 days, I was basically 100% sober. And last night, I'm like, okay. You know, Lent's over. Easter's past. Let's, you know, let's tie one on. Dude, no. No. Alcohol's just bad for you, and it takes 40 days. It literally takes 40 days to get all that crap out of your system so that you can have a few drinks and realize holy crap, this shit is poison. It's bad for you guys.
So consider consider giving up alcohol and only, literally, only drinking maybe a glass of wine or 2 for a dinner, you know, at a restaurant once a month. Go ahead and pay the $7 a glass, and that'll, you know, that'll help you not wanna drink ever again as well because it's just a drain on the shitty money. Anyway, okay. So what do we got today? I got word I got word from my friends over at Leathermint Leathermint wallets and passport holders and belts, and they make them all out of leather. They're all stitched. It's all handmade, and they make some really high quality high high quality, equipment.
Apparently, somebody mentioned that they heard that they that they heard about Leatherman in the Circle P when they bought something from Leatherman on their website. And, lo and behold, as per the agreement that I have with people that are in the Circle P, which I'll get to here in a second, Leathermint shaved off a portion of that sale and gave it to me because I gave them free advertising, which well, value for value advertising is what this thing is is has become. That's I've been trying to figure out what it was that I was trying to do, and it's simple. It's just value for value advertising. It's the value for value model, but I front you the advertising.
And then if I make you a sale, then you get me on the back end. All it does is flip the script. So it's advertising with a value for value bent. And what what I wanted to do was is is do my part to get a circular economy for plebs going. I called it the circle p. That's why it's called the circle p. Right? Strange things are afoot at the circle p. And what could be more strange than somebody just throwing out an advertisement for somebody who's not a client, hasn't paid him any money. Who does that? Only crazy ass Bitcoiners figure out how to flip scripts. And that's what I'm going to continue to do. So now the Circle p, I think just because yeah. I mean, I've sold other goods and services for other plebs like Leathermint before, but there's something there was something about it because Leathermint, you know, they gave me, like, a there's a coupon code for, you know, like, just mention Bitcoin. And when you go buy something at leathermint.com, that's, you know, the leathermint.com.
In fact, let me put that up here. Well, actually, it's the leathermint.com. I'll just throw them up here so you guys can understand what I'm talking about. But somehow or another, when when they got a hold of me and said, hey. We got a sale directly from Bitcoin and podcast in the circle p. Therefore, have some sats. You know, draft me an invoice for the amount of sats that he wanted to pay me. And I said, sure. So I got a lightning invoice up, paid it, came in. I I named the invoice, you know, Leatherman invoice so I know exactly what it looks like. You know, I know exactly where it is on my lightning node. So now I think at this point it's just somehow or another it's just official in my mind.
So if you have if you're a pleb and you've got a good or service that you would like to, you know, see about getting into, I need copy. I need, like, the website. I need what the product is. I need, you know, like, a few words on why you think it's good. You know, why you think people need it, I need the prices, how is it shipped. If you give me that in writing and you could just, you know, you can DM it to me on, Nostr, you can get you could just get a hold of me, you know, in, like, on Nostr, if you don't wanna give that information on DMs because they're not exactly they're not exactly private on Nostra and and that's that's an issue, but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna clean that clock today. Just get in touch with me. I will try to get back with you, but if you wanna email me, it's david.bennett.cgmail.com.
[email protected]. Just email it to me. Just give me an email and say, hey. Let's talk. Let's let's talk about the circle p. Alright. So that's that's what the spiel is for the circle p. Right? It is a value for value advertisement for plebs that is hoping to start a circular Bitcoin pleb economy. So get into the circle p today. Alright. What do we got here in, the new actually, no. There's one other thing that I wanted to touch on. Last night, I collected up I I figured out that I had collected up on my lightning node through various means, You know, through the zap.stream live chat, through, like, you know, like, people streaming me satoshis for the podcast, and people giving me satoshi like boost, boostograms and whatnot.
They gave me enough satoshis to buy a RODECaster Pro 2 audio production studio bundle. Two mics, 2 headphones, a couple of stands, and, of course, the actual Rodecaster Pro 2, production module, which is, you know, like, 6 faders. It's got some touchpads on it. Adam Curry swears by it. So since he's been in the in the broadcast business for for a long for a lot longer than I have, I'm gonna take his word for it. He has good things to say, but the point is is that I not only got that. I gotta proof what I think is gonna be a pretty good looking travel case for it. I got 4 boom stands for the mics, like like, come the thing came with stands, but they're just cheapy ass stands. So I got 4 boom mics and a set of cables. Now the whole thing cost what did the whole thing cost? Just to to keep this shit transparent.
Fuck. It doesn't say what it cost. But it was I collected up about $1266. And how did I buy this on Amazon with Bitcoin? Well, I didn't. But I did go to bitrefill. That's bitrefill. If you want to buy gift cards with bitcoin using either main chain transactions or the way that I did it yesterday a shit ton of lightning transactions actually wasn't that many it was like I think I just did about like 5 or 6 or something like that But I gave them enough Satoshis to buy enough gift cards to equal over $1200. That all that money came from this podcast. It's not a lot of money. I get it, but it was a way that I could roll that thing into making the show better. Because with this thing, I will be able to go out on remote, which is something that I've been wanting to do. I don't like Zoom. I don't like all that crap. I'm I am not a fan.
I'm not I want face to face interviews with people. I haven't been doing a lot of interviews because I cannot stand Zoom. I don't like it. I don't like sitting in a computer talking to somebody somewhere else. Okay? So you guys helped me get that. That wasn't somebody giving me a gift card like my wife or my, you know, sister or something like that and then saving them up for Christmas and all that shit. No. No. No. That was straight up zaps, streaming satoshis, boostagrams, that if it had anything to do with the Bitcoin and podcast, then those were the satoshis that I used over on bitrefill to buy amazon gift cards which I then put back into my amazon account and totaled over $1200 and bought a brand new production studio.
That's all you. I cannot thank you enough. Really. Alright. On with the show. Let's get into this one. Bitcoin magazine is first up, and if I can get it here, I will tell you what was going on. $900,000,000,000. DWS launches a physical Bitcoin ETC in Germany. Alright. What the hell is this? DWS, a prominent asset manager manager with over 900,000,000,000 in assets under management, has launched new X Tracker's exchange traded commodities in collaboration with everybody's favorite person, the guy that owns Galaxy Digital Holdings Limited, offering investors convenient access to Bitcoin exposure in Germany.
Quote, since the first Bitcoin transaction in 2009, digital assets have developed from a niche technology innovation to a globally recognized asset class. With a combined market cap of more than $1,700,000,000,000, Bitcoin and shitcoin number 1 alone are now too significant for investors and asset managers to ignore, end quote. The x Tracker's Galaxy physical Bitcoin e t c is now listed in or on Deutsche Borse, allowing investors to participate directly in the Bitcoin market with the security and transparency of exchange traded products. The ETCs are physically backed by BTC, ensuring that investors have direct exposure to Bitcoin's price movements.
DWS stated that it has strategically partnered with Galaxy to promote Bitcoin adoption in Europe, leveraging Galaxy's expertise in digital asset products and services. We're delighted to be working with Xtrackers to offer investors institutional great access to digital assets and to support them with our deep digital asset expertise, commented Steve Kurz, global head of asset management at Galaxy. State Street will serve as the issuing and paying agent and administration agent for the ETCs with MSCI providing reference prices for Bitcoin stated the official announcement. So an exchange traded commodity that tracks the price of Bitcoin but is not a direct holder of the asset itself has launched in Germany. Alright? So the the thing rolls on. It's just not gonna stop and it's not stopping even in this show because Morgan Stanley, well, they're in a race against UBS to become the first Bitcoin ETF bank according to Helen Parts out of Cointelegraph.
The launch of the spot Bitcoin ETF in the United States has fueled rivalry between investment banks over which will be the first wirehouse to add the products. Morgan Stanley is hoping to beat UBS in becoming the first wirehouse to fully approve the Bitcoin ETF, crypto enthusiast Andrew reported on Twitter on April 3rd. Citing internal Morgan Stanley notes, Andrew said that the bank, quote, may announce a few days before its move into Bitcoin ETFs. He also mentioned that global banks have been actively talking about the bitcoin ETF addition as a race. Bloomberg ETF expert Eric Balchunas added to Andrew's thread, noting that neither Morgan Stanley nor UBS has added Bitcoin ETFs yet citing a solid source. Quote, still in a holding pattern, in a compliance game of chicken, waiting for one of them to go first then gives the rest of them cover. So probably will be an all at once type movement when that is the question Balchunas suggested.
Prior to posting the new update, Andrew reported that UBS plans to add Bitcoin ETFs to its platform between April 8th April 12th. Guys, that's next week. Morgan Stanley and UBS, these are not small potatoes. These are massive houses. These are they have lots of asset and assets under management. They are the retail guys on the street to be. I I don't use them myself, but I I know these names. And UBS? Holy shit. Dude. Anyway, the latest speculation about Morgan Stanley's potential rival move against UBS comes just a few weeks after Andrew reported that the bank is set to approve Bitcoin ETFs.
Cointelegraph approached Morgan Stanley as well as UBS for a comment, but they did not receive a response. And you're not going to receive a response until they actually list the product. Okay? So just be aware. Anyway, a spokesperson close to UBS told CoinTelegraph back in January that spot Bitcoin ETFs could only be offered in a brokerage account and are only suitable for aggressive investors. Quote, it remains to be seen if the issuers will be able to distinguish themselves in terms of ability to manage the product during turbulent markets, UBS wrote in an official statement about spot Bitcoin ETFs on January 29th. Some other major banks in the US have continued to maintain skepticism about Bitcoin even after the approvals.
Quote, we do not think of it as an investment class, Goldman Sachs chief officer and known Bitcoin skeptic, Sharman Masavar Ramani, said in an April 2nd interview with The Wall Street Journal. We're not believers in crypto, she stated. Well, I'm not either, but you're really hanging yourself out to dry if you're not gonna do Bitcoin. I'm just saying. Alright. Let's get into this next one here. Binance NFT Marketplace has axed support for Bitcoin ordinals. That's right. In case you missed it, Binance, the NFT marketplace where all the shit is, they don't even want ordinals. Let's hear all about it, Steven Graves out of decrypt.co.
In a blog post, Binance noted that the decision to act support for the NFT like inscriptions was taken, quote, as part of its ongoing efforts to streamline product offerings on its NFT marketplace. Yeah. NFTs are staying, but ordinals are are well, they're they're going. They just are. From April 18th, users will no longer be able to trade Bitcoin ordinals on the Binance NFT marketplace. The exchange also advised users to withdraw their Bitcoin ordinals from the marketplace before May 18th. The exchange also noted that airdrops, benefits, and utilities linked to Bitcoin ordinals will no longer be supported, but they won't support that shit in a couple of days from April 10th. That's just a couple of days, man. Binance added that Runestone holders should withdraw their NFTs by that date to ensure that they still have the opportunity to receive any associated tokens, utilities, and or benefits linked to their shitty ass ordinals. Adding that, quote, the trading of Runestone NFTs will not be supported on Binance NFT.
Binance originally added support for the inscriptions and ordinals in Bay of last year. So they've been hanging out with this garbage for a long time. And if if you don't know what ordinals are, there's a brief description right here. Let me make sure it is brief yeah bitcoin ordinal inscriptions are unique digital assets inscribed on a satoshi the lowest denomination of a bitcoin. The ordinals protocol debuted in early of 2023 and quickly made an impact on the broader nft world. Following changes from the network's SegWit upgrade in 2017, developers created Bitcoin Ordinals using an inscription process that writes, or rather inscribes, the data of the content stored onto an individual satoshi or the smallest denomination of a bitcoin.
Like nfts, inscriptions are non fungible, meaning that they are provably unique and can be used for many of the same use cases such as digitally scarce work. Just yesterday, finance giant Franklin Templeton released a report hailing the positive momentum in innovations on the Bitcoin blockchain, which it said was primarily driven by ordinals. Don't trust the guys over at Franklin Templeton. They're shitcoiners, guys. The firm pointed to a surge in trading volume in recent months along with the growing of the market cap of ordinals relative to NFTs on other networks. Ordinals trading has made a sizable impact on the broader NFT world in recent months, helping to elevate cross chain marketplace Magic Eden to a leading share of the market.
Yeah. So that's what they that's what the guys at Decrypt think an ordinal is. Honestly, it's bullshit. I hate if you're holding an ordinal right now, I wish you weren't. It's all a lie. The inscriptions have been broken for a long time. They're misnumbered. There's some really funky crap going on behind the scenes and nobody talks about it because they're too busy taking money from stupid people. Don't be one of the stupid people. Now, let's do this one. Hedge fund holds record bearish Bitcoin bets, data show, according to Amkar Godbold writing for CoinDesk. Let's see what all this stuff is about. Leveraged funds, which the Commodity Futures Trading Commission describes as hedge funds and commodity trading advisers, held record, record, record bearish wagers on the Bitcoin price at the end of Q1 as the cryptocurrency's rally stalled near record highs.
Hedge funds boosted their net short positions in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's standard bitcoin futures contracts to 16,102. That's the most short contracts since the futures began trading in late 17 according to CFTC figures published last week. A short futures position is a trading strategy in which a trader sells a futures contract to profit from a hedge against an expected drop in the underlying asset price. Carry traders or arbitragers arbitragers short futures while simultaneously buying the asset to safely pocket the price differential between the spot and the futures market.
The record buildup in short positions likely reflects hedge funds renewed interest in what's called the carry trade according to Marcus Thelen, CEO of 10x Research. Quote, there is a massive demand from hedge funds to put on carry trades. Despite bitcoin's negative 10% from all time highs, the futures premium has remained in double digits and hedge funds are taking advantage of these high rates, Thielen told CoinDesk in an interview. While bitcoins bullish momentum stalled after hitting record highs above 33 notes 33 my ass 73,500.
In March, CME Futures continue to trade at an annualized 3 month premium of over 10% according to vlo data. In other words, carry trades still yield at least twice as much of the 10 year treasury note, which offered a so called risk free return of 4.36 percent at press time. That said, some hedge funds may have taken outright bearish bets as recent robust U. S. Economic data and the hawkish comments from the Fed weaken the case for rapid fire interest rate cuts in the near term. On Wednesday, take note guys, on Wednesday, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell emphasized the need to see how inflation evolves in the coming months, keeping the timing of the first rate cuts uncertain.
Since the release of upbeat manufacturing data on Monday, the probability of the Fed cutting rates in June has now dropped below 50%. In addition, some observers are skeptical that the impending mining reward having will live up to its bullish reputation. Okay, so be aware of people who continuously misconstrue what the having actually means. It means that the liquidity is going to go down. There will be less Bitcoin available, and you've got major hedge funds who are casting their sails on their little tiny sailboats as as far as, you know, being against something like BlackRock, against the wind, and think that they're gonna make headway. And in the short term, they very well might. But in the long term, if they keep this attitude, they're going to get hosed.
Alright. That's enough of that. Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities. I got oil. West Texas Intermediate is down slightly today, 0.21%, but it's hanging out at $85.25 a barrel. We're starting to see a bull run-in the oil futures market. I've been keeping track of this. Energy prices are going to start increasing. OPEC has kept their, production cuts in place. We'll see how that actually goes. And then I heard some kind of story that a couple of refineries or some production, facilities in Russia, as far as petroleum is concerned, got wasted or bombed or or taken out by some military thing.
I'm not sure. It it may have just been a rumor, but all that has con kinda conspired to lift the prices of oil. Brit, nor sea is also up. It's up just scant today, but it's almost $90 a barrel. Right? We haven't seen these prices in a few in in months. Not just a few months, like, months months. Natural gas, however, as is tradition, is in the red by 3.37 percent today down to $1.77 Gasoline is up to 2.76 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks, all except the gold, is doing well today. Gold has hit another all time high. $2310.30.
Silver is up 0.68%. Platinum is up 3 quarters of a point. Copper is up well over a point, and palladium is up over 2 points. Live cattle? Well, let's yeah. Let's do live cattle because it's up a quarter today. No. It's no. It's up 0.2%. Lean hogs are up a quarter and feeder cattle are up 0.62%. Let's get into the dashboard. Price is $68,790. That is a $1,350,000,000,000 market cap, 19,000,000 672,949 and a quarter Bitcoin are in circulation at this time. 602.2 exahashes per second is average hash rate over the last 2016 blocks, and fees are dropping again.
Point 20 BTC has taken in fees on a per block basis and the halving is still estimated to hit on April 20th 2024. So again, 420. 4 it's gonna be 420. And if you did not realize, April 20, 2024 is a solid palindrome. If you just line out all the numbers, solid palindrome. I can't wait. I hope I hope it happens on 4/20. Do we have anything else? Oh, 1.6% of all blocks are being used to take out the garbage that is ordinals and inscriptions. Uh-oh, wow. Only a 161 blocks today. And they're carrying what are they carrying? A 116,000 unconfirmed transactions are waiting to clear. High priority rates are going for 17 satoshis per v byte, low priorities for 11, and anything under 2 a third are being purged from mempools around the world. Now from Bitcoin and April fools, which was episode 880, I have the following people to thank. You guys all all all helped by me what I was talking about at the head of the show. Got a brand new studio for podcasting coming in the mail. It should be they'll they'll start coming in tomorrow.
And the Wild Hussle with 20 1,000 satoshis. Wow. Thanks for another great rib. No. Dude, thank you for the 20,000 satoshis. Golf Winch says, keep asking for more donations. This is a very important show that deserves more. Thank you for your contribution with 6,777 sats. Thank you, brother. Joey Delaje with 3, oh, 3333 says, I like Ray Youssef and trust that he has the best intentions for no one's. Go Ray. Go Africa. Agreed. Spiral crunch with row of ducks 2222 says goose. Blogging Bitcoin with 21100 says thank you for your service. No. Thank you. JC Denton with 21100 says libertarian president was an oxymoron from the start.
Yeah. Dubravco with 16/20 says I'll bet MT Knives. I'll take BTC. I bought 4 knives from Patrick through the years, and I'm happy with all of them. MT Knives probably does take BTC. He's the MT Knives. You'll hear about them on, Jack Spiroco's survival podcast, which is one of my longest listened to podcasts that I have in every it's one of the first things. If I get a new podcaster, it's one of the first things that I follow aside from the Bitcoin ad podcast because, you know, we just kick ass. Wild hustle with another 1,000 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. The bird with a 1,000 says, nothing. Cas Peland with a 1,000 says, thank you. We'll come back in IPFS.
God's depth with 337 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Spiral crunch with a short row of duck says, I will be buying as much KYC free Bitcoin before 15th. Duck Canada Post or whatever government asshole screwed this up. Agreed. Stacy with 200 says way more value than I have sats in my wallet. Thank you, sir, for all your hard work. No. Thank you. Pies with a 100 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And Pies comes back and says, this is the first podcast I listened to post surgery and brought me some joy through my misery laugh out loud. Pies, I am very glad that you made it through your surgery. I had not I did not know about it. If any of you guys want to send, prayers and or well wishes to people that you love that are having trying times or in surgery, let me know. I'll I'll shout them out on the air. Okay? Because everybody needs a little bit of love. Pies, I'm, again, really glad that you got through the whole surgery.
Glad you're back with us safe and sound. Now, going back to keep asking for donations, that's what I'm going to do. And again, that was golf winch. I'm asking for donations. It's been the donations to this show that just put me in a situation where I could buy a whole new raft of equipment. That was not going to happen out of my own pocket. It had to be the satoshis that I earned bringing value to you. If you think this show is valuable, donate to the show. I much would I would much rather have satoshis. Stream big time.
Not 2 sat's, not 10 sat's, not 12 sat's. Stream me 50. You know, if you can. If you want to give me a huge boost like 20,000 satoshis on like, through boostagram, do that. I would rather have the satoshis because I can just if I need something from Amazon, then I'll just go to bit refill and buy Amazon cards with satoshis over the lightning network. You have any idea how easy that shit was last night? It was ridiculously easy. It was like I just brought a Bitrefill. I had it construct a, you know, like, a a a an an invoice. I or, actually, I just got its ln URL. I plugged the ln URL into my node software that I have my lightning node on. It's on a raspberry pi along with my Bitcoin core node. You know, it's all running together. And I just gave it the ln URL and said just send it, you know, send 500,000 satoshis.
Boom. 2, you know, 5 seconds later, it's over at bitrefill. I, you know, digitally scraped the back of the card off and copied that son of a bitch and took it over to Amazon and redeemed the code. It was, like, like, 5 button clicks and and some typing. It's nothing. So donate to the Bitcoin and show. I wanna bring you better content. I wanna bring I want to start doing face to face interviews because I'm just re I fucking hate Zoom. I cannot stand it and Skype and all that stuff. No. No. No. The only interview is a solid face to face interview. That's gonna do it for the weather report.
Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use, citrine version 0.2.0, a nostril relay in your phone. Citrine is a nostril relay for Android. It allows any Nostril client that supports Android to send and receive events from this application. Quote, you can use Citrine as a cache relay in Nostrudel. For other clients, for now, you have to add it to your relay list, said developer greenart 7c3. That's greenart73c@greenart73c. Go check them out because I'm going to and I know that's probably gonna be on Noster. Issues and pull requests are very welcome and they give the GitHub repo.
Since my show notes now work, thanks to podhome.fm, you can go find them, the github repo if you want to actually check this shit out. Alright, on to Tether. They have awarded a $100,000 grant to one of my favorite projects in the world, BTC Pay Server Foundation. Quote, Tether announced that it has awarded a $100,000 grant to BTC Pay Server Foundation, further underscoring the company's unwavering support for the FOSS movement that's free and open source software as was stated in the press release. Quote, our grant to the BTC Payserver Foundation is a testament to Tether's commitment to the open source community and our belief in the transformative power of technology, said Paolo Arduino, CEO of Tether.
Quote, I'm thankful to Tether for recognizing BTCPay Server's significance as a Bitcoin Fos project and for its generous grant. This contribution greatly empowers us to concentrate on our mission, enabling anyone to accept Bitcoin unhindered by geographic, political, and financial barriers, said Rockstar Dev, a core contributor and founding member of the BTC pay server group, and, that's what he was quoted as of saying. So I am not a fan of Tether and people on Nostra asked me why. Because they're attack surface area for Bitcoin. You might not think it because they're they deal in the stable coin Tether USDT or United States dollar tether. It's a peg.
Whatever. So far, beat, so far Tether as a company has not done anything relatively nefarious. Not like FTX, you know, not like, I don't know. There's a whole whole list of names that I could rattle off I'm not going to. They haven't done anything like that, but that doesn't mean that I trust them. I don't. And one of the reasons that I don't trust them is that it took a long time for them to come clean as to how they were actually backing the Tether value. As because it's got I mean, yeah. Sure. They can say it's pegged to the dollar, but unless you're carrying some paper and some t bills and possibly some Bitcoin or even gold in a vault to shore that up, then all it is is just words on a sheet of paper. So they it took them a long time to come clean that a lot of the paper that they were holding to back up Tether was United States Treasury Bonds. And what have I called United States Treasury Bonds as of late?
Toxic assets. They're toxic assets. They cannot be trusted. Right? For 45 years, we had a bond market bull run. That shit's over. It's all over. Rates started out at, like, 18% 40 years ago. If you were gonna buy a house, your mortgage was 18% on a 30 year for for the United States. As those interest rate if you bought were buying bonds, as those interest rates decreased, the face value of the bonds increased. So you were quote unquote in a bull market for 45 years. That shit's over. And when it stopped, when the music stopped, the first people that found out that they didn't have a chair to sit in were large banks like SVB, and they just went away because the toxic debt of the US Treasury bond was sitting square on their books.
And when those treasure when those interest rates on those assets started going back up, the face value on what they were holding to back their bank went down, and it started runs on banks. That shit's not over yet. And with Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell stating what he just stated, and I told you about it earlier in the show that there he's in no rush. He's in no rush whatsoever to rate to, put the interest rates back below, you know, 5%. And now a lot of people want sub, you know, sub 5%, and you're not gonna see it. We're at 5.255 and a half Federal Reserve Fund rate. Right? You're not gonna see it. You're not gonna see it this quarter. I don't at this point, I don't think you're actually going to see it in the Q3.
We might get a hint that they're gonna do it in the Q4, but they're not doing it. And that means these toxic, these assets just remain as toxic as ever, and now they can't be trusted. So Tether has a lot of that on their on their books, but what's the other thing that they're holding that I don't like? Bitcoin. And it's not because I don't like Bitcoin. It's that every single time one of these companies has said, look we're buying Bitcoin. Yeah, FTX did too, and then they didn't have very much. That's been a theme throughout cryptocurrency since I ever got in. Look, we're buying Bitcoin.
And and I was one of the first people to get duped and say rah rah this is good for Bitcoin. No, it wasn't because it's a honeypot. This is why I don't trust Tether. I'm sure the people that work there are are fine people and maybe just maybe they won't screw this all up, but they have the potential to screw this all up. It's not that you don't that you don't be evil. You want to build something that can't be evil and Tether has not done that. We have to trust them that they're not going to be evil. Finishing up this morning, Fediment.
In stark contrast in stark contrast to the people over there at tether and what they offer we have Fedimint's Fedimint version 0.3.0 has been released. It offers improved version compatibility some new features and some fixes. Fedimint is a module based system for building federated applications. It is meant to be trust minimized, censorship resistant, and a private alternative to centralized applications. It ships with hips with or it ships with 3 default modules. Bitcoin, lightning, and Chaumian e cash. We made huge progress on automated testing of the version compatibility and thanks to that version 3.0 federations and clients should be fully backwards and forward compatible with the 0.2.x versions. For upgrading instructions, please refer to the release page.
Since our last release 3 months ago, 26 developers have contributed over 400 pull requests, implementing countless features and bug fixes. A big thank you to everyone who helped us achieve this milestone. If you want to contribute, go to their, discord or go to their GitHub and figure out how to do that. New features, dynamic metafields, improved load test metrics, capability to pass an auth flag to Fedimint CLI dev app APIs, enhanced ln payment privacy for lnd, cli improvements and more configurable options, added support to pay a lnurl.
Thank God. Oh, that is awesome because now I can just, like here's one of the things that bugs me about lightning. It's kind of confusing sometimes because it depends on what you're using to interact with lightning or somebody's website that wants to get paid like bitrefill. They you have to copy an invoice which means that you have to structure the invoice and that invoice comes with a certain amount of satoshis. But an ln URL is sort of like a blank check. It's like a it's like you write your sister a check, but all you from your account, but you just literally sign the check and have her go out and do whatever it's a it's a it's a high degree of trust, but that check, all she has to do is fill it out and the bank, my bank, will honor that check. Right? This is what a lnurl is. I just paste the lnurl into, like, this is how I did it with bitrefill into my lightning software because, mynodebtc has on it thunderhub and thunderhub lightning software uses lnurls.
It also does invoices, but it also does lnurls. I paste the lnurl in there and I can just start writing I can just ping that same address over and over and over. 10,000 satoshis here, a 100,000 there, 500,000, you know, this time and on and on and on. And I never have to draft an invoice, and it makes things like it takes an entire two steps away from the ability for me to get satoshis over. Now we're gonna be able to do that with Chaumy and e cash and Fedimint? Holy shit. This is awesome. They've also implemented a special case descriptor for single Guardian instances on smaller on chain transactions.
They've introduced versioned gateway API for backward compatibility and introduced a latency test for restore functions, and then they fixed and updated a whole bunch of other stuff. And that's yeah. That's it. But this is this is gonna be awesome. The fact that they're letting Charmian e cache, applications use lnurls is much bigger than I think any of us really understand. Alright. That's gonna do it for the morning round. Alright. Gonna do a dad says jokes but before I begin, I forgot that I do have one other piece of news. And this is important, especially considering that the Canada post office is like, you know, they kinda screwed bull Bitcoin in the way that you could, use money orders at the Canadian post office to buy Bitcoin KYC free. Yeah. They shut all that down. People were asking, well, what do I do now? Well, here's what you do now. BISQ, b I s q, BISQ version 2.0.2 has been released bisque 2 is the successor to the original bisque version 1 It's currently in beta. It has been developed from the ground up to allow for multiple trade protocols to be accessed via a single decentralized exchange. Quote, we're thrilled to announce the release of version 2.0.2, the latest update packed with fantastic features and enhancements.
Please update as soon as possible for best trading experience. Latest version, the minimum required reputation score got reduced to 10,000 to allow more sellers to engage in trades. Also, there may be some there are many bug fixes as well as improvements. So there you go. If you have not tried bisque, then you gotta try it. The reason is it's non k y c. It's non you know, it's it's like no AML, no k y c, at least for now, and it's been that way ever since I got into the space. Bisc used to be called something else and I cannot remember what it was, but shortly after I think it was like a year after they had been doing this, they changed their name over to Bisk, and they've been with us since at least 2015.
I think they actually started that shit up in 2014. Anyway, it is a non k y c, non AML Bitcoin exchange. You can buy Bitcoin, you can trade Bitcoin, and you can sell your Bitcoin all AML compliant free. Depending on what part of the country or what part the world you live in, that could be a little bit more finicky than others. But if you're wondering, go check out Bisc. I have not actually used them myself. So the reason that I feel comfortable telling you about them is because they've been in the space for this long. They haven't rugged a single person and nobody has anything but good things to say about Bisk. I've been in this situation or this, part well, in I've been doing this since 2015.
I've known Bisk for that many years. I don't have to use them to understand that what they're doing is probably above board. Why? Because they haven't gone bankrupt, nobody's been thrown into prison, and they haven't rubbed a single customer. So if you want KYC free Bitcoin, b I s q. That's bisque, as in like, you know, soup. The soup. Dad says jokes. There's a fine line between a numerator and a denominator, but only a fraction of people understand that. Alright. I'm gonna just cut it off right here. 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.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin Ant, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, casting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of two systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system. And that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 10:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the, what, the 4th day of the 4th month of the 4th year of the 2nd decade of this millennium, this 2024 for anybody that can't count. And this is episode 881 of Bitcoin. And my, oh, my, I am not feeling all that well today.
You know, for Lent, I completely didn't drink except Dianna, like, a couple of glasses of wine midway through something like that. Nothing speck nothing special. But for the 40 days, I was basically 100% sober. And last night, I'm like, okay. You know, Lent's over. Easter's past. Let's, you know, let's tie one on. Dude, no. No. Alcohol's just bad for you, and it takes 40 days. It literally takes 40 days to get all that crap out of your system so that you can have a few drinks and realize holy crap, this shit is poison. It's bad for you guys.
So consider consider giving up alcohol and only, literally, only drinking maybe a glass of wine or 2 for a dinner, you know, at a restaurant once a month. Go ahead and pay the $7 a glass, and that'll, you know, that'll help you not wanna drink ever again as well because it's just a drain on the shitty money. Anyway, okay. So what do we got today? I got word I got word from my friends over at Leathermint Leathermint wallets and passport holders and belts, and they make them all out of leather. They're all stitched. It's all handmade, and they make some really high quality high high quality, equipment.
Apparently, somebody mentioned that they heard that they that they heard about Leatherman in the Circle P when they bought something from Leatherman on their website. And, lo and behold, as per the agreement that I have with people that are in the Circle P, which I'll get to here in a second, Leathermint shaved off a portion of that sale and gave it to me because I gave them free advertising, which well, value for value advertising is what this thing is is has become. That's I've been trying to figure out what it was that I was trying to do, and it's simple. It's just value for value advertising. It's the value for value model, but I front you the advertising.
And then if I make you a sale, then you get me on the back end. All it does is flip the script. So it's advertising with a value for value bent. And what what I wanted to do was is is do my part to get a circular economy for plebs going. I called it the circle p. That's why it's called the circle p. Right? Strange things are afoot at the circle p. And what could be more strange than somebody just throwing out an advertisement for somebody who's not a client, hasn't paid him any money. Who does that? Only crazy ass Bitcoiners figure out how to flip scripts. And that's what I'm going to continue to do. So now the Circle p, I think just because yeah. I mean, I've sold other goods and services for other plebs like Leathermint before, but there's something there was something about it because Leathermint, you know, they gave me, like, a there's a coupon code for, you know, like, just mention Bitcoin. And when you go buy something at leathermint.com, that's, you know, the leathermint.com.
In fact, let me put that up here. Well, actually, it's the leathermint.com. I'll just throw them up here so you guys can understand what I'm talking about. But somehow or another, when when they got a hold of me and said, hey. We got a sale directly from Bitcoin and podcast in the circle p. Therefore, have some sats. You know, draft me an invoice for the amount of sats that he wanted to pay me. And I said, sure. So I got a lightning invoice up, paid it, came in. I I named the invoice, you know, Leatherman invoice so I know exactly what it looks like. You know, I know exactly where it is on my lightning node. So now I think at this point it's just somehow or another it's just official in my mind.
So if you have if you're a pleb and you've got a good or service that you would like to, you know, see about getting into, I need copy. I need, like, the website. I need what the product is. I need, you know, like, a few words on why you think it's good. You know, why you think people need it, I need the prices, how is it shipped. If you give me that in writing and you could just, you know, you can DM it to me on, Nostr, you can get you could just get a hold of me, you know, in, like, on Nostr, if you don't wanna give that information on DMs because they're not exactly they're not exactly private on Nostra and and that's that's an issue, but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna clean that clock today. Just get in touch with me. I will try to get back with you, but if you wanna email me, it's david.bennett.cgmail.com.
[email protected]. Just email it to me. Just give me an email and say, hey. Let's talk. Let's let's talk about the circle p. Alright. So that's that's what the spiel is for the circle p. Right? It is a value for value advertisement for plebs that is hoping to start a circular Bitcoin pleb economy. So get into the circle p today. Alright. What do we got here in, the new actually, no. There's one other thing that I wanted to touch on. Last night, I collected up I I figured out that I had collected up on my lightning node through various means, You know, through the zap.stream live chat, through, like, you know, like, people streaming me satoshis for the podcast, and people giving me satoshi like boost, boostograms and whatnot.
They gave me enough satoshis to buy a RODECaster Pro 2 audio production studio bundle. Two mics, 2 headphones, a couple of stands, and, of course, the actual Rodecaster Pro 2, production module, which is, you know, like, 6 faders. It's got some touchpads on it. Adam Curry swears by it. So since he's been in the in the broadcast business for for a long for a lot longer than I have, I'm gonna take his word for it. He has good things to say, but the point is is that I not only got that. I gotta proof what I think is gonna be a pretty good looking travel case for it. I got 4 boom stands for the mics, like like, come the thing came with stands, but they're just cheapy ass stands. So I got 4 boom mics and a set of cables. Now the whole thing cost what did the whole thing cost? Just to to keep this shit transparent.
Fuck. It doesn't say what it cost. But it was I collected up about $1266. And how did I buy this on Amazon with Bitcoin? Well, I didn't. But I did go to bitrefill. That's bitrefill. If you want to buy gift cards with bitcoin using either main chain transactions or the way that I did it yesterday a shit ton of lightning transactions actually wasn't that many it was like I think I just did about like 5 or 6 or something like that But I gave them enough Satoshis to buy enough gift cards to equal over $1200. That all that money came from this podcast. It's not a lot of money. I get it, but it was a way that I could roll that thing into making the show better. Because with this thing, I will be able to go out on remote, which is something that I've been wanting to do. I don't like Zoom. I don't like all that crap. I'm I am not a fan.
I'm not I want face to face interviews with people. I haven't been doing a lot of interviews because I cannot stand Zoom. I don't like it. I don't like sitting in a computer talking to somebody somewhere else. Okay? So you guys helped me get that. That wasn't somebody giving me a gift card like my wife or my, you know, sister or something like that and then saving them up for Christmas and all that shit. No. No. No. That was straight up zaps, streaming satoshis, boostagrams, that if it had anything to do with the Bitcoin and podcast, then those were the satoshis that I used over on bitrefill to buy amazon gift cards which I then put back into my amazon account and totaled over $1200 and bought a brand new production studio.
That's all you. I cannot thank you enough. Really. Alright. On with the show. Let's get into this one. Bitcoin magazine is first up, and if I can get it here, I will tell you what was going on. $900,000,000,000. DWS launches a physical Bitcoin ETC in Germany. Alright. What the hell is this? DWS, a prominent asset manager manager with over 900,000,000,000 in assets under management, has launched new X Tracker's exchange traded commodities in collaboration with everybody's favorite person, the guy that owns Galaxy Digital Holdings Limited, offering investors convenient access to Bitcoin exposure in Germany.
Quote, since the first Bitcoin transaction in 2009, digital assets have developed from a niche technology innovation to a globally recognized asset class. With a combined market cap of more than $1,700,000,000,000, Bitcoin and shitcoin number 1 alone are now too significant for investors and asset managers to ignore, end quote. The x Tracker's Galaxy physical Bitcoin e t c is now listed in or on Deutsche Borse, allowing investors to participate directly in the Bitcoin market with the security and transparency of exchange traded products. The ETCs are physically backed by BTC, ensuring that investors have direct exposure to Bitcoin's price movements.
DWS stated that it has strategically partnered with Galaxy to promote Bitcoin adoption in Europe, leveraging Galaxy's expertise in digital asset products and services. We're delighted to be working with Xtrackers to offer investors institutional great access to digital assets and to support them with our deep digital asset expertise, commented Steve Kurz, global head of asset management at Galaxy. State Street will serve as the issuing and paying agent and administration agent for the ETCs with MSCI providing reference prices for Bitcoin stated the official announcement. So an exchange traded commodity that tracks the price of Bitcoin but is not a direct holder of the asset itself has launched in Germany. Alright? So the the thing rolls on. It's just not gonna stop and it's not stopping even in this show because Morgan Stanley, well, they're in a race against UBS to become the first Bitcoin ETF bank according to Helen Parts out of Cointelegraph.
The launch of the spot Bitcoin ETF in the United States has fueled rivalry between investment banks over which will be the first wirehouse to add the products. Morgan Stanley is hoping to beat UBS in becoming the first wirehouse to fully approve the Bitcoin ETF, crypto enthusiast Andrew reported on Twitter on April 3rd. Citing internal Morgan Stanley notes, Andrew said that the bank, quote, may announce a few days before its move into Bitcoin ETFs. He also mentioned that global banks have been actively talking about the bitcoin ETF addition as a race. Bloomberg ETF expert Eric Balchunas added to Andrew's thread, noting that neither Morgan Stanley nor UBS has added Bitcoin ETFs yet citing a solid source. Quote, still in a holding pattern, in a compliance game of chicken, waiting for one of them to go first then gives the rest of them cover. So probably will be an all at once type movement when that is the question Balchunas suggested.
Prior to posting the new update, Andrew reported that UBS plans to add Bitcoin ETFs to its platform between April 8th April 12th. Guys, that's next week. Morgan Stanley and UBS, these are not small potatoes. These are massive houses. These are they have lots of asset and assets under management. They are the retail guys on the street to be. I I don't use them myself, but I I know these names. And UBS? Holy shit. Dude. Anyway, the latest speculation about Morgan Stanley's potential rival move against UBS comes just a few weeks after Andrew reported that the bank is set to approve Bitcoin ETFs.
Cointelegraph approached Morgan Stanley as well as UBS for a comment, but they did not receive a response. And you're not going to receive a response until they actually list the product. Okay? So just be aware. Anyway, a spokesperson close to UBS told CoinTelegraph back in January that spot Bitcoin ETFs could only be offered in a brokerage account and are only suitable for aggressive investors. Quote, it remains to be seen if the issuers will be able to distinguish themselves in terms of ability to manage the product during turbulent markets, UBS wrote in an official statement about spot Bitcoin ETFs on January 29th. Some other major banks in the US have continued to maintain skepticism about Bitcoin even after the approvals.
Quote, we do not think of it as an investment class, Goldman Sachs chief officer and known Bitcoin skeptic, Sharman Masavar Ramani, said in an April 2nd interview with The Wall Street Journal. We're not believers in crypto, she stated. Well, I'm not either, but you're really hanging yourself out to dry if you're not gonna do Bitcoin. I'm just saying. Alright. Let's get into this next one here. Binance NFT Marketplace has axed support for Bitcoin ordinals. That's right. In case you missed it, Binance, the NFT marketplace where all the shit is, they don't even want ordinals. Let's hear all about it, Steven Graves out of decrypt.co.
In a blog post, Binance noted that the decision to act support for the NFT like inscriptions was taken, quote, as part of its ongoing efforts to streamline product offerings on its NFT marketplace. Yeah. NFTs are staying, but ordinals are are well, they're they're going. They just are. From April 18th, users will no longer be able to trade Bitcoin ordinals on the Binance NFT marketplace. The exchange also advised users to withdraw their Bitcoin ordinals from the marketplace before May 18th. The exchange also noted that airdrops, benefits, and utilities linked to Bitcoin ordinals will no longer be supported, but they won't support that shit in a couple of days from April 10th. That's just a couple of days, man. Binance added that Runestone holders should withdraw their NFTs by that date to ensure that they still have the opportunity to receive any associated tokens, utilities, and or benefits linked to their shitty ass ordinals. Adding that, quote, the trading of Runestone NFTs will not be supported on Binance NFT.
Binance originally added support for the inscriptions and ordinals in Bay of last year. So they've been hanging out with this garbage for a long time. And if if you don't know what ordinals are, there's a brief description right here. Let me make sure it is brief yeah bitcoin ordinal inscriptions are unique digital assets inscribed on a satoshi the lowest denomination of a bitcoin. The ordinals protocol debuted in early of 2023 and quickly made an impact on the broader nft world. Following changes from the network's SegWit upgrade in 2017, developers created Bitcoin Ordinals using an inscription process that writes, or rather inscribes, the data of the content stored onto an individual satoshi or the smallest denomination of a bitcoin.
Like nfts, inscriptions are non fungible, meaning that they are provably unique and can be used for many of the same use cases such as digitally scarce work. Just yesterday, finance giant Franklin Templeton released a report hailing the positive momentum in innovations on the Bitcoin blockchain, which it said was primarily driven by ordinals. Don't trust the guys over at Franklin Templeton. They're shitcoiners, guys. The firm pointed to a surge in trading volume in recent months along with the growing of the market cap of ordinals relative to NFTs on other networks. Ordinals trading has made a sizable impact on the broader NFT world in recent months, helping to elevate cross chain marketplace Magic Eden to a leading share of the market.
Yeah. So that's what they that's what the guys at Decrypt think an ordinal is. Honestly, it's bullshit. I hate if you're holding an ordinal right now, I wish you weren't. It's all a lie. The inscriptions have been broken for a long time. They're misnumbered. There's some really funky crap going on behind the scenes and nobody talks about it because they're too busy taking money from stupid people. Don't be one of the stupid people. Now, let's do this one. Hedge fund holds record bearish Bitcoin bets, data show, according to Amkar Godbold writing for CoinDesk. Let's see what all this stuff is about. Leveraged funds, which the Commodity Futures Trading Commission describes as hedge funds and commodity trading advisers, held record, record, record bearish wagers on the Bitcoin price at the end of Q1 as the cryptocurrency's rally stalled near record highs.
Hedge funds boosted their net short positions in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's standard bitcoin futures contracts to 16,102. That's the most short contracts since the futures began trading in late 17 according to CFTC figures published last week. A short futures position is a trading strategy in which a trader sells a futures contract to profit from a hedge against an expected drop in the underlying asset price. Carry traders or arbitragers arbitragers short futures while simultaneously buying the asset to safely pocket the price differential between the spot and the futures market.
The record buildup in short positions likely reflects hedge funds renewed interest in what's called the carry trade according to Marcus Thelen, CEO of 10x Research. Quote, there is a massive demand from hedge funds to put on carry trades. Despite bitcoin's negative 10% from all time highs, the futures premium has remained in double digits and hedge funds are taking advantage of these high rates, Thielen told CoinDesk in an interview. While bitcoins bullish momentum stalled after hitting record highs above 33 notes 33 my ass 73,500.
In March, CME Futures continue to trade at an annualized 3 month premium of over 10% according to vlo data. In other words, carry trades still yield at least twice as much of the 10 year treasury note, which offered a so called risk free return of 4.36 percent at press time. That said, some hedge funds may have taken outright bearish bets as recent robust U. S. Economic data and the hawkish comments from the Fed weaken the case for rapid fire interest rate cuts in the near term. On Wednesday, take note guys, on Wednesday, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell emphasized the need to see how inflation evolves in the coming months, keeping the timing of the first rate cuts uncertain.
Since the release of upbeat manufacturing data on Monday, the probability of the Fed cutting rates in June has now dropped below 50%. In addition, some observers are skeptical that the impending mining reward having will live up to its bullish reputation. Okay, so be aware of people who continuously misconstrue what the having actually means. It means that the liquidity is going to go down. There will be less Bitcoin available, and you've got major hedge funds who are casting their sails on their little tiny sailboats as as far as, you know, being against something like BlackRock, against the wind, and think that they're gonna make headway. And in the short term, they very well might. But in the long term, if they keep this attitude, they're going to get hosed.
Alright. That's enough of that. Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities. I got oil. West Texas Intermediate is down slightly today, 0.21%, but it's hanging out at $85.25 a barrel. We're starting to see a bull run-in the oil futures market. I've been keeping track of this. Energy prices are going to start increasing. OPEC has kept their, production cuts in place. We'll see how that actually goes. And then I heard some kind of story that a couple of refineries or some production, facilities in Russia, as far as petroleum is concerned, got wasted or bombed or or taken out by some military thing.
I'm not sure. It it may have just been a rumor, but all that has con kinda conspired to lift the prices of oil. Brit, nor sea is also up. It's up just scant today, but it's almost $90 a barrel. Right? We haven't seen these prices in a few in in months. Not just a few months, like, months months. Natural gas, however, as is tradition, is in the red by 3.37 percent today down to $1.77 Gasoline is up to 2.76 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks, all except the gold, is doing well today. Gold has hit another all time high. $2310.30.
Silver is up 0.68%. Platinum is up 3 quarters of a point. Copper is up well over a point, and palladium is up over 2 points. Live cattle? Well, let's yeah. Let's do live cattle because it's up a quarter today. No. It's no. It's up 0.2%. Lean hogs are up a quarter and feeder cattle are up 0.62%. Let's get into the dashboard. Price is $68,790. That is a $1,350,000,000,000 market cap, 19,000,000 672,949 and a quarter Bitcoin are in circulation at this time. 602.2 exahashes per second is average hash rate over the last 2016 blocks, and fees are dropping again.
Point 20 BTC has taken in fees on a per block basis and the halving is still estimated to hit on April 20th 2024. So again, 420. 4 it's gonna be 420. And if you did not realize, April 20, 2024 is a solid palindrome. If you just line out all the numbers, solid palindrome. I can't wait. I hope I hope it happens on 4/20. Do we have anything else? Oh, 1.6% of all blocks are being used to take out the garbage that is ordinals and inscriptions. Uh-oh, wow. Only a 161 blocks today. And they're carrying what are they carrying? A 116,000 unconfirmed transactions are waiting to clear. High priority rates are going for 17 satoshis per v byte, low priorities for 11, and anything under 2 a third are being purged from mempools around the world. Now from Bitcoin and April fools, which was episode 880, I have the following people to thank. You guys all all all helped by me what I was talking about at the head of the show. Got a brand new studio for podcasting coming in the mail. It should be they'll they'll start coming in tomorrow.
And the Wild Hussle with 20 1,000 satoshis. Wow. Thanks for another great rib. No. Dude, thank you for the 20,000 satoshis. Golf Winch says, keep asking for more donations. This is a very important show that deserves more. Thank you for your contribution with 6,777 sats. Thank you, brother. Joey Delaje with 3, oh, 3333 says, I like Ray Youssef and trust that he has the best intentions for no one's. Go Ray. Go Africa. Agreed. Spiral crunch with row of ducks 2222 says goose. Blogging Bitcoin with 21100 says thank you for your service. No. Thank you. JC Denton with 21100 says libertarian president was an oxymoron from the start.
Yeah. Dubravco with 16/20 says I'll bet MT Knives. I'll take BTC. I bought 4 knives from Patrick through the years, and I'm happy with all of them. MT Knives probably does take BTC. He's the MT Knives. You'll hear about them on, Jack Spiroco's survival podcast, which is one of my longest listened to podcasts that I have in every it's one of the first things. If I get a new podcaster, it's one of the first things that I follow aside from the Bitcoin ad podcast because, you know, we just kick ass. Wild hustle with another 1,000 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. The bird with a 1,000 says, nothing. Cas Peland with a 1,000 says, thank you. We'll come back in IPFS.
God's depth with 337 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Spiral crunch with a short row of duck says, I will be buying as much KYC free Bitcoin before 15th. Duck Canada Post or whatever government asshole screwed this up. Agreed. Stacy with 200 says way more value than I have sats in my wallet. Thank you, sir, for all your hard work. No. Thank you. Pies with a 100 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And Pies comes back and says, this is the first podcast I listened to post surgery and brought me some joy through my misery laugh out loud. Pies, I am very glad that you made it through your surgery. I had not I did not know about it. If any of you guys want to send, prayers and or well wishes to people that you love that are having trying times or in surgery, let me know. I'll I'll shout them out on the air. Okay? Because everybody needs a little bit of love. Pies, I'm, again, really glad that you got through the whole surgery.
Glad you're back with us safe and sound. Now, going back to keep asking for donations, that's what I'm going to do. And again, that was golf winch. I'm asking for donations. It's been the donations to this show that just put me in a situation where I could buy a whole new raft of equipment. That was not going to happen out of my own pocket. It had to be the satoshis that I earned bringing value to you. If you think this show is valuable, donate to the show. I much would I would much rather have satoshis. Stream big time.
Not 2 sat's, not 10 sat's, not 12 sat's. Stream me 50. You know, if you can. If you want to give me a huge boost like 20,000 satoshis on like, through boostagram, do that. I would rather have the satoshis because I can just if I need something from Amazon, then I'll just go to bit refill and buy Amazon cards with satoshis over the lightning network. You have any idea how easy that shit was last night? It was ridiculously easy. It was like I just brought a Bitrefill. I had it construct a, you know, like, a a a an an invoice. I or, actually, I just got its ln URL. I plugged the ln URL into my node software that I have my lightning node on. It's on a raspberry pi along with my Bitcoin core node. You know, it's all running together. And I just gave it the ln URL and said just send it, you know, send 500,000 satoshis.
Boom. 2, you know, 5 seconds later, it's over at bitrefill. I, you know, digitally scraped the back of the card off and copied that son of a bitch and took it over to Amazon and redeemed the code. It was, like, like, 5 button clicks and and some typing. It's nothing. So donate to the Bitcoin and show. I wanna bring you better content. I wanna bring I want to start doing face to face interviews because I'm just re I fucking hate Zoom. I cannot stand it and Skype and all that stuff. No. No. No. The only interview is a solid face to face interview. That's gonna do it for the weather report.
Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use, citrine version 0.2.0, a nostril relay in your phone. Citrine is a nostril relay for Android. It allows any Nostril client that supports Android to send and receive events from this application. Quote, you can use Citrine as a cache relay in Nostrudel. For other clients, for now, you have to add it to your relay list, said developer greenart 7c3. That's greenart73c@greenart73c. Go check them out because I'm going to and I know that's probably gonna be on Noster. Issues and pull requests are very welcome and they give the GitHub repo.
Since my show notes now work, thanks to podhome.fm, you can go find them, the github repo if you want to actually check this shit out. Alright, on to Tether. They have awarded a $100,000 grant to one of my favorite projects in the world, BTC Pay Server Foundation. Quote, Tether announced that it has awarded a $100,000 grant to BTC Pay Server Foundation, further underscoring the company's unwavering support for the FOSS movement that's free and open source software as was stated in the press release. Quote, our grant to the BTC Payserver Foundation is a testament to Tether's commitment to the open source community and our belief in the transformative power of technology, said Paolo Arduino, CEO of Tether.
Quote, I'm thankful to Tether for recognizing BTCPay Server's significance as a Bitcoin Fos project and for its generous grant. This contribution greatly empowers us to concentrate on our mission, enabling anyone to accept Bitcoin unhindered by geographic, political, and financial barriers, said Rockstar Dev, a core contributor and founding member of the BTC pay server group, and, that's what he was quoted as of saying. So I am not a fan of Tether and people on Nostra asked me why. Because they're attack surface area for Bitcoin. You might not think it because they're they deal in the stable coin Tether USDT or United States dollar tether. It's a peg.
Whatever. So far, beat, so far Tether as a company has not done anything relatively nefarious. Not like FTX, you know, not like, I don't know. There's a whole whole list of names that I could rattle off I'm not going to. They haven't done anything like that, but that doesn't mean that I trust them. I don't. And one of the reasons that I don't trust them is that it took a long time for them to come clean as to how they were actually backing the Tether value. As because it's got I mean, yeah. Sure. They can say it's pegged to the dollar, but unless you're carrying some paper and some t bills and possibly some Bitcoin or even gold in a vault to shore that up, then all it is is just words on a sheet of paper. So they it took them a long time to come clean that a lot of the paper that they were holding to back up Tether was United States Treasury Bonds. And what have I called United States Treasury Bonds as of late?
Toxic assets. They're toxic assets. They cannot be trusted. Right? For 45 years, we had a bond market bull run. That shit's over. It's all over. Rates started out at, like, 18% 40 years ago. If you were gonna buy a house, your mortgage was 18% on a 30 year for for the United States. As those interest rate if you bought were buying bonds, as those interest rates decreased, the face value of the bonds increased. So you were quote unquote in a bull market for 45 years. That shit's over. And when it stopped, when the music stopped, the first people that found out that they didn't have a chair to sit in were large banks like SVB, and they just went away because the toxic debt of the US Treasury bond was sitting square on their books.
And when those treasure when those interest rates on those assets started going back up, the face value on what they were holding to back their bank went down, and it started runs on banks. That shit's not over yet. And with Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell stating what he just stated, and I told you about it earlier in the show that there he's in no rush. He's in no rush whatsoever to rate to, put the interest rates back below, you know, 5%. And now a lot of people want sub, you know, sub 5%, and you're not gonna see it. We're at 5.255 and a half Federal Reserve Fund rate. Right? You're not gonna see it. You're not gonna see it this quarter. I don't at this point, I don't think you're actually going to see it in the Q3.
We might get a hint that they're gonna do it in the Q4, but they're not doing it. And that means these toxic, these assets just remain as toxic as ever, and now they can't be trusted. So Tether has a lot of that on their on their books, but what's the other thing that they're holding that I don't like? Bitcoin. And it's not because I don't like Bitcoin. It's that every single time one of these companies has said, look we're buying Bitcoin. Yeah, FTX did too, and then they didn't have very much. That's been a theme throughout cryptocurrency since I ever got in. Look, we're buying Bitcoin.
And and I was one of the first people to get duped and say rah rah this is good for Bitcoin. No, it wasn't because it's a honeypot. This is why I don't trust Tether. I'm sure the people that work there are are fine people and maybe just maybe they won't screw this all up, but they have the potential to screw this all up. It's not that you don't that you don't be evil. You want to build something that can't be evil and Tether has not done that. We have to trust them that they're not going to be evil. Finishing up this morning, Fediment.
In stark contrast in stark contrast to the people over there at tether and what they offer we have Fedimint's Fedimint version 0.3.0 has been released. It offers improved version compatibility some new features and some fixes. Fedimint is a module based system for building federated applications. It is meant to be trust minimized, censorship resistant, and a private alternative to centralized applications. It ships with hips with or it ships with 3 default modules. Bitcoin, lightning, and Chaumian e cash. We made huge progress on automated testing of the version compatibility and thanks to that version 3.0 federations and clients should be fully backwards and forward compatible with the 0.2.x versions. For upgrading instructions, please refer to the release page.
Since our last release 3 months ago, 26 developers have contributed over 400 pull requests, implementing countless features and bug fixes. A big thank you to everyone who helped us achieve this milestone. If you want to contribute, go to their, discord or go to their GitHub and figure out how to do that. New features, dynamic metafields, improved load test metrics, capability to pass an auth flag to Fedimint CLI dev app APIs, enhanced ln payment privacy for lnd, cli improvements and more configurable options, added support to pay a lnurl.
Thank God. Oh, that is awesome because now I can just, like here's one of the things that bugs me about lightning. It's kind of confusing sometimes because it depends on what you're using to interact with lightning or somebody's website that wants to get paid like bitrefill. They you have to copy an invoice which means that you have to structure the invoice and that invoice comes with a certain amount of satoshis. But an ln URL is sort of like a blank check. It's like a it's like you write your sister a check, but all you from your account, but you just literally sign the check and have her go out and do whatever it's a it's a it's a high degree of trust, but that check, all she has to do is fill it out and the bank, my bank, will honor that check. Right? This is what a lnurl is. I just paste the lnurl into, like, this is how I did it with bitrefill into my lightning software because, mynodebtc has on it thunderhub and thunderhub lightning software uses lnurls.
It also does invoices, but it also does lnurls. I paste the lnurl in there and I can just start writing I can just ping that same address over and over and over. 10,000 satoshis here, a 100,000 there, 500,000, you know, this time and on and on and on. And I never have to draft an invoice, and it makes things like it takes an entire two steps away from the ability for me to get satoshis over. Now we're gonna be able to do that with Chaumy and e cash and Fedimint? Holy shit. This is awesome. They've also implemented a special case descriptor for single Guardian instances on smaller on chain transactions.
They've introduced versioned gateway API for backward compatibility and introduced a latency test for restore functions, and then they fixed and updated a whole bunch of other stuff. And that's yeah. That's it. But this is this is gonna be awesome. The fact that they're letting Charmian e cache, applications use lnurls is much bigger than I think any of us really understand. Alright. That's gonna do it for the morning round. Alright. Gonna do a dad says jokes but before I begin, I forgot that I do have one other piece of news. And this is important, especially considering that the Canada post office is like, you know, they kinda screwed bull Bitcoin in the way that you could, use money orders at the Canadian post office to buy Bitcoin KYC free. Yeah. They shut all that down. People were asking, well, what do I do now? Well, here's what you do now. BISQ, b I s q, BISQ version 2.0.2 has been released bisque 2 is the successor to the original bisque version 1 It's currently in beta. It has been developed from the ground up to allow for multiple trade protocols to be accessed via a single decentralized exchange. Quote, we're thrilled to announce the release of version 2.0.2, the latest update packed with fantastic features and enhancements.
Please update as soon as possible for best trading experience. Latest version, the minimum required reputation score got reduced to 10,000 to allow more sellers to engage in trades. Also, there may be some there are many bug fixes as well as improvements. So there you go. If you have not tried bisque, then you gotta try it. The reason is it's non k y c. It's non you know, it's it's like no AML, no k y c, at least for now, and it's been that way ever since I got into the space. Bisc used to be called something else and I cannot remember what it was, but shortly after I think it was like a year after they had been doing this, they changed their name over to Bisk, and they've been with us since at least 2015.
I think they actually started that shit up in 2014. Anyway, it is a non k y c, non AML Bitcoin exchange. You can buy Bitcoin, you can trade Bitcoin, and you can sell your Bitcoin all AML compliant free. Depending on what part of the country or what part the world you live in, that could be a little bit more finicky than others. But if you're wondering, go check out Bisc. I have not actually used them myself. So the reason that I feel comfortable telling you about them is because they've been in the space for this long. They haven't rugged a single person and nobody has anything but good things to say about Bisk. I've been in this situation or this, part well, in I've been doing this since 2015.
I've known Bisk for that many years. I don't have to use them to understand that what they're doing is probably above board. Why? Because they haven't gone bankrupt, nobody's been thrown into prison, and they haven't rubbed a single customer. So if you want KYC free Bitcoin, b I s q. That's bisque, as in like, you know, soup. The soup. Dad says jokes. There's a fine line between a numerator and a denominator, but only a fraction of people understand that. Alright. I'm gonna just cut it off right here. 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.
The Circle P
