Join me today for Episode 970 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- HBO Documentary is a Disaster
- Coinbase Adds Taproot Capability (3 years late)
- Alemeda Boss Losses Ill-gotten Gains
- Babylon Protocol is an FTX "Replay"
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
The King Ranch Donation Pages:
https://www.ruralamericainaction.com/fundraising/save-king-ranch-and-agriculture-in-washington
https://www.givesendgo.com/Kingranch
Articles:
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/10/08/former-bitcoin-dev-peter-todd-denies-hes-satoshi-hours-before-hbo-documentary-airs/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/money-electric-insult-bitcoin-cynical-stupid-dangerous
https://cointelegraph.com/news/caroline-ellison-gives-up-all-assets-ftx-settlement
https://decrypt.co/285295/coinbase-users-can-finally-send-bitcoin-taproot-addresses
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
- https://geyser.fund/project/thebitcoinandpodcast
https://decrypt.co/285379/ethereum-founder-vitalik-buterin-nobel-prize
https://decrypt.co/285218/bitcoin-holders-stake-1-4-billion-babylon
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find me on nostr
npub1vwymuey3u7mf860ndrkw3r7dz30s0srg6tqmhtjzg7umtm6rn5eq2qzugd (npub)
6389be6491e7b693e9f368ece88fcd145f07c068d2c1bbae4247b9b5ef439d32 (Hex)
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DavidB84567
StackerNews:
stacker.news/NunyaBidness
Podcasting 2.0:
fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
Apple Podcasts:
tinyurl.com/unm35bjh
Mastodon:
https://noauthority.social/@NunyaBidness
Support Bitcoin And . . . on Patreon:
patreon.com/BitcoinAndPodcast
Find Lightning Network Channel partners here:
https://t.me/+bj-7w_ePsANlOGEx (Nodestrich)
https://t.me/plebnet (Plebnet)
Music by:
Flutey Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 10:15 am Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 9th day of October 2024.
This is episode 9 70 of Bitcoin and the HBO documentary where they tried to air out who exactly was Satoshi Nakamoto dropped. And it seems to have fallen flat. And it certainly has pissed off a few people. And we're gonna get into that one right now. We're gonna do this one from CoinDesk. Then we're gonna do another one about the same issue from a different perspective, from Bitcoin Magazine. And then we've got some FTX stuff coming up and some Vitalik Buterin news, which is hilarious. And I've just it's not yes, I know. We're gonna be talking about some shit coinery today. But sometimes you just gotta do it so that we can remind ourselves why you'd never shit coin.
It's the Vitalik news is almost it's almost a laugh in, dude. So let's just start this one out. CoinDesk, Mark Hochstein and Cheyenne Ligon writing for CoinDesk, former Bitcoin developer, Peter Todd. That's right. Peter Todd has denied that he is Satoshi, and he did so hours before the HBO documentary airs. Peter Todd, I can't believe that this is going this way. Of all the people, it was, Peter Todd was not on my bingo card, dude. Okay. So, clips from HBO's Satoshi Nakamoto documentary which leaked hours before the film premiered Tuesday night seemed to finger former Bitcoin developer Peter Todd as the cryptocurrency's creator.
But Peter Todd denies it. In an email to CoinDesk Todd said filmmaker, Cullen Hoback, best known for identifying the person behind the QAnon conspiracy theory in an earlier series for HBO, was grasping at straws if he's identifying Todd as Satoshi. Quote, yes. That interview did happen, and I believe that specific shot isn't deep faked. He confirmed though he added he had not yet seen the documentary. Quote, of course I'm not Satoshi, Todd said. It's ironic that a director who is also known for a documentary on q anon has resorted to q anon style coincidence based conspiracy thinking here too, end quote.
Even in the clip circulating on social media, Todd called the theory that he is Satoshi ludicrous. On Tuesday afternoon in New York, hours before the scheduled premiere of money electric, the Bitcoin mystery, the odds on poly markets bet over whom the film would identify as Satoshi overwhelmingly favored other slash multiple. And I don't know what the hell other slash multiple means, but bear with me. At the time of the Poly Market Bets creation, Todd was not listed as a possibility. Ah, okay. Now I get it. Now I get it. So, anyone who wanted to bet on him being the film's reveal would have to choose the other slash multiple category. That makes sense.
Previously, cypherpunk, Lynn Sassaman and then computer programmer, Nick Szabo, held the lead on PolyMarkets' list of possible HBO Toshi's. Oh, for God's sakes. The documentary, which lasted about a 100 minutes, delved into the history of both Bitcoin and other crypto projects but did not present any firm evidence supporting the idea that Peter Todd was indeed Satoshi. There was some circumstantial evidence including Todd's interest in cryptography from a young age his relationship with Adam Back, who emailed with Satoshi his technical ability and Satoshi's use of British Canadian spellings juxtaposed with the fact that Todd is from Canada.
The film's most tangible evidence hinged on a 2010 public forum post in which Todd responded to one of Satoshi's posts. Hoback argued Todd's post was a continuation of satoshi's post but accidentally sent from an account with Todd's name on it instead of satoshi's. However, the documentary did not definitively conclude that Todd was indeed Satoshi. Even the final confrontation between Hoback and Todd, the clip that was earlier leaked on social media, was speculative. Hoback followed up by citing another blog post where Todd said he was probably the world's leading expert on how to sacrifice bitcoin, though even the filmmaker acknowledges that this was a tenuous confirmation at best. Quote, it was hard not to read this as an admission. Like, Peter wanted his inner circle of trust that he had, in fact, sacrificed the Bitcoins and destroyed all access. But this wasn't proof, he said.
Bitcoin, the Bitcoin that satoshi had mined, has never moved from its wallet, leading to speculation that satoshi is either dead or purposefully prevented themselves from touching the coins. In the documentary, Hoback confronts Todd laying out his theory of how and why Todd hid his supposed involvement in the invention of Bitcoin. Todd shakes his head and laughs at Hoback's assertions. I will admit you're pretty creative. You come up with some crazy theories. It's ludicrous. But I'll say yeah of course I'm Satoshi and I'm Craig Wright, Todd said in the film.
This is clearly a joke not a confession. Todd has previously made similar cracks that he is Satoshi telling what Bitcoin did podcast host Peter McCormack in a 2019 interview I am Satoshi as is everyone else Todd still laughing warns Hoback that he's drawn an incorrect conclusion quote This is going to be very funny when you put this into the documentary and a bunch of Bitcoiners watch it. I suspect a lot of them will be very happy if you go this route because it's yet another example of journalists missing the point in a way that's very funny, end quote. PubKey, a Bitcoin bar in New York City, showed the documentary on Tuesday night. Viewers there laughed at the suggestion Todd is satoshi. Someone said, quote, they left enough plausible deniability that you, a random person, could be satoshi.
Oh my god. Hovach responds by asking what the point is. Quote, the point is to make Bitcoin the global currency, Todd responds. Back, Adam Back, the CEO of Bitcoin development firm Blockstream, who was standing next to Todd in the confrontation scene, did not respond to a request for comment from CoinDesk. I wouldn't either, dude. Though an early Bitcoin developer and someone deeply involved in the early years of Bitcoin, Todd has never been a prime suspect in journalists' years long hunt for Satoshi. Figures like Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and Adam Back are most frequently suggested to be the creator, though all have denied it.
During the McCormick podcast, Todd said that he bought his first Bitcoin when the price was, 20¢ per coin, which would mean he made the purchase around October of 2010, 2 years after Bitcoin's white paper was released. Bak posted on Twitter Monday that quote, for people betting, they are betting on what the documentary concluded, which is probably not going to be true because no one knows who Satoshi is. So they should keep that in mind. Previous attempts by the media to unveil Satoshi's true identity have failed, with outlets incorrectly naming figures like program Dorian Nakamoto and known pretender Craig Wright as Satoshi.
Yeah, the Craig Wright thing, that whole if you don't know where Craig Wright came from, he came from a GQ interview. It was Gentleman's Quarterly. That's what started that boat rolling. So if you didn't know that, that's where that hole where Craig Wright nobody knew who the hell Craig Wright was. But some crackpot out at GQ somehow got a hold of him and they ended up creating this monster that destroyed lives and just burned money. That's all Craig Wright did, was destroy lives and burns people's money. Now, let's look at this from a different angle.
Bitcoin Magazine's Pete Rizzo has written this article entitled money electric is an insult to bitcoin, cynical, stupid, and dangerous. Some say we live in the golden age of documentaries. Certainly, they are being created at a volume far higher than at any other point in history. But for every mister or rather my octopus teacher, a genuinely inspiring and unusual human story, there's the opposite. Cynical trash like Money Electric. Let's start by acknowledging that Money Electric upped its own stakes mounting a week long hype cycle with the promise of a big reveal that the world would at last know the actual identity of Bitcoin's anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto maybe let's also put aside the historical baggage there sure many journalists have died on this hill, but surely money electric might have something to add to the conversation?
After all, from the trailer, they seemingly spent 1,000,000 of dollars paying for Samson Moe's dinner as he dinners as he evangelized Bitcoin around the world it's always great to subsidize education there were even hints that maybe there would be something inspired here a still shot showing a progression of cypherpunks, all of whom have interesting stories. Maybe the big reveal was just a ruse to keep our attention. And maybe there'd be a series of reveals, none taken too seriously, that added up to a compelling story about what bitcoin is and could be sadly not for most of its runtime money electric hides its motives following its star director director Colin Hoback as he dives into the bitcoin world but it's clear as the film unfolds that the creators had no other motive than outing someone as Satoshi.
How else does a big budget film end up indulging in straight conspiracy theory dredging up the alternative history of the block size wars as a way to introduce accusations that are almost entirely uninteresting. Hint, the impetus for the big reveal here is that Peter Todd may have worked with a covert government agent to promote his ideas for the Bitcoin roadmap. It's here where things go off the rails or start going to the master plan after making us suffer his own misdirection. Hoback and company finally play their cards unearthing a series of purported evidences that show Adam Back and Peter Todd as well as Greg Maxwell for some reason were all secretly satoshi truly the most banal and oft repeated of theories from there we see a series of gotchas that would all have been easily disproved if the directors had done the basic follow-up research.
Let's review, shall we? Number 1. Peter Todd and Adam Back corresponded on the cryptography mailing list when he was young. This is true and widely known. It's something Peter and Adam comment on publicly and doesn't really say much of anything besides the fact that the cryptography list was open to the public and included possibly 100 of members. Number 2. Peter Todd's 1st Bitcoin Talk post occurred around the same time that Satoshi left. Again, another known. In fact, the post is written in Todd's snarky style but we're supposed to believe this was him misremembering that he was actually Satoshi and responding to himself or so the director thinks. Never mind that his forum name at the time was Retep, r e t e p. And being that no one knew who he was, he could have easily deleted it. Number 3. Peter Todd once made a joke about deleting Bitcoin.
This is used somehow to support the idea that he burned satoshi's keys. Number 4, Adam Back discussed bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list after bitcoin was launched. Giving credit where credit is due, this is also something I didn't actually know. But again, once looking at the archive, we can see the material supports Bak's claim that he wasn't interested in Bitcoin. Not yet, anyway. In the emails, Bak is passively reacting to the hype around Bitcoin, then surging right around $30 And there's even a reply where he makes a complaint about why Satoshi, whose name he misspelled, didn't add some feature he thought would be beneficial.
Again, dude, 5 minutes of googling. And number 5, Todd and Back were in cahoots involved in a cover up to mask the fact that they created Bitcoin. Tada. That's why he never joined Blockstream. Seriously, this is stated actually by the director in the film. Now taking a step back, it's hard to know what to say about this sequence except that it's both a marvel of creativity and cynicism. And in saying this, no, that's in no way a compliment. To start, Hoback makes no legitimate attempt to engage Bak or Todd on his finding. He merely presents the material as he found it, films them reacting, and closes up shop.
It makes sense. Even someone like me will admit there's a non zero chance Bak or Todd was Satoshi. There aren't many people you can't rule out entirely and they're among them. Sadly, a non zero chance is not a smoking gun. It ain't proof. Todd and Bak's Internet presence, while scrubbed from the web, is accessible. I've read it. No. They weren't the only ones involved in digital cash who erased things. Of course, with the magic of editing and by exposing the quote findings to no criticism, I'm sure many viewers will walk away thinking that they've been shown a clever and well researched theory. All Hoback proved to me is that he understands the shortcuts you can take when making a documentary.
It alone, among creative works, allows you to hide all of your errors behind editing while making baseless and dangerous accusations seem plausible. And to be clear, claiming that someone is satoshi without evidence is exactly that, dangerous and baseless. Let's hope no one gets hurt because of his idiocy. That's a better article than the other one that I just read. Pete really nails it on the head. This is this is something that we should not be playing with. If you want to play with it, by all means, go ahead and play with it. But understand that this is a very dangerous situation.
I stopped conjecturing long ago about who I think Satoshi might be. And I'm not even going to say who I thought it was anymore. I'm I'm probably it's probably in the in the podcast somewhere. If you wanna go scrub through all the 969 episodes, be my guest. Please do it. Play them several times. I need all the help that I can get. But if you say if you point the finger at somebody and say that and you have some kind of credibility and you have some kind of, like, reach, like a larger voice, like a a larger platform than most other people. And you point the finger at somebody and says, that guy is sitting on, like, $69,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin or whatever the whatever it is. It's like a 1,000,000 Bitcoin. Alright? That's a lot of dough, brother. That's a lot of money.
By directing the world and shining a light onto Peter Todd, this film director has actually put Peter Todd in the crosshairs of some of the, like, out of humanity there is at least a handful of people that are bat shit crazy and ready to believe anything that they see and act on it and are psychopaths and sociopaths, which means that they will have absolutely no regrets if they cause Peter Todd some physical harm or God forbid end his life or just straight up make his life a living hell for years. Hoback has done this. Now, I can only hope that Peter Todd took my advice I wrote him on Noster and I said, Look, man, I'm really sorry that the light was shined on you because you didn't deserve this.
You should go to Mexico and go cave diving for the entirety of the winter. You know, because you gotta have south enough in Mexico, even in the northern hemisphere it's north of the equator, it's not gonna matter. This is gonna be some nice, beautiful, warm, crystal clear blue water and cave diving, which Peter Todd is a spelunker. If you didn't know that, he likes to go explore caves. And he's he is done. Hold on for a sec. Sorry. I got distracted by shiny things. Peter Todd likes to go cave diving and spelunking and stuff, so I was like going, you know what? You should just get the hell out, drop out of the public sphere, go to somewhere where no where there's no comms, no nothing, go go spelunking, go cave diving, take, you know, if you got to, you know, take a communications device for emergency purposes only, but stay out of the public.
Let the public forget you. I don't know if he's going to take that advice. He probably won't. Maybe he doesn't. I don't know if he's got the money to do it or not or the time. Maybe he's working on a project. I don't know. But it's not fair that Colin Hoback pointed the finger at Peter Todd. It it could have been anybody. If he pointed the finger directly at Adam back, that wouldn't have been fair either. But it just so happens that Peter Todd was the target, or at least that's what people are going to come away with. That's why this is dangerous.
We need to stop conjecturing about who Satoshi is. Does it even matter? Does it matter? It doesn't matter to me. I don't give a shit. My life is not going to change one iota if I find definitive proof of who Satoshi is, and it's beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's there's not a single shred of evidence that somebody could bring to change that some guy x is actually Satoshi Nakamoto. It's not gonna do It won't change the numbers in my bank accounts. It won't change the fact that you know I don't know that that I'm going to be doing show number 971 tomorrow of Bitcoin and podcast none of this changes if I find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is why do we care?
Why does it matter? And why on earth would somebody care about it so much that they would forget to care about someone like Peter Todd? Now, one of the other stories about Peter Todd one of the reasons why I know Peter Todd is not Satoshi Nakamoto it's not because he doesn't have the chops. He just isn't the guy. His attitude is not it's not the attitude that you need for this. It's just everything about Peter Todd just screams no. He was involved. And I'm I will give it up to the filmmaker here and say, it's possible that at one point or another, Peter Todd may have been on the early satoshi Nakamoto crew, but he wasn't satoshi Nakamoto. And I say that because of the accidentally signing in under a different, you know, email thing on the on the, on the the list serve or whatever and responded to his, you know, his own email and forgot and all that thing. I okay.
Let's say he was part of the early development crew of Bitcoin. So what? So what? There were lots of people on the early development crew. We still don't know if Satoshi Nakamoto was one person or a group of people. I'm leaning towards a small group of people that rapidly expanded the second that that white pay or the second that the actual first Bitcoin was mined on January 3rd after October 31st the previous year when the white paper dropped I can imagine that that small core of people expanded rapidly had rapid explosion of people that wanted to get their fingers into that code and did so because the bitcoin code has always been open to the public Peter Todd was one of the guys that ushered in Zcash right I mean he did he he was what he was one of the guys that he drove cross country with laptops to do this super secret signing procedure that inaugurated Zcash to come to life and even he calls bullshit on that Right? This is not your guy.
And honestly, we need to stop looking for the guy. We you know, we've we've got better things. We've we've got better things to worry about, like Carolyn Ellison, who's got to give up all of her assets in the FTX settlement according to Martin Young and Cointelegraph. FTX has filed a motion seeking the approval for a settlement agreement with former Alameda Research boss, oh, boss girl, Carolyn Ellison that would see her turn over substantially all of her assets. The motion filed on October 7th requests that the court authorize the settlement with Ellison who agreed to transfer any assets not forfeited to the government in her criminal case or used for legal fees to the FTX creditors.
The motion noted that once she meets those terms, Ellison will have no remaining assets other than certain physical personal property, but did not specify the value of the assets that she would forfeit. She also agreed to cooperate with the bankrupt crypto exchanges, investigations, and court cases, which may include sharing documents or knowledge that she gained as the former head of FTX's sister trading firm and ex girlfriend of the Exchange's founder, Sam Bankman Fried. FTX argued that the settlement is as beneficial as continuing to pursue Ellison in an adjacent court case because it gives substantially all that they could recover anyway, and her additional cooperation provides significant value.
They noted that pursuing litigation would just deplete Ellison's remaining resources and cost time and money. FTX's bankruptcy estate sued Ellison in 2023 alleging breaches of fiduciary duties, waste of corporate assets, and fraudulent transfers. They sought to recover $22,500,000 in bonus payments dated to February of 2022 and $6,300,000 in bonus payments in 2021. Additionally, the latest filing mentions call options and FTX Equity fraudulently transferred to Ellison. A hearing on the proposed settlement is scheduled for November 20th. Ellison did cooperate with federal prosecutors in the criminal case against Bankman Fried and received a reduced sentence of 2 years on September 24th for her role in the fraud.
So she's got to give up all of her ill gotten gains and she's gonna be left with nothing but some personal property. And God only knows what the hell that is. Okay. Coinbase users can rejoice because now now they can finally send Bitcoin to Taproot addresses. I'm actually kinda shocked that they did this because they Coinbase drags its feet on any implementation of Bitcoin all the time, but Vismaya v has it from decrypt. So after years of missing out, Coinbase users can finally access the major upgrade, the ability to send Bitcoin to Taproot addresses. On Tuesday, Coinbase addressed this gap allowing its millions of users to take advantage of Taproot's privacy and cost saving features creating access to more on chain destinations.
The address or the update addresses long standing frustrations for Coinbase users who since Taproot's launch in November 2021 have been unable to take full advantage of the upgrade. Prior to this update, many Coinbase users had reported difficulties in sending Bitcoin to Taproot addresses leading to delays and failed transactions. With the new integration coinbase users can now send bitcoin to Taproot addresses joining platforms like OkX, Binance, and Kraken. Introduced as the largest bitcoin upgrade since Segwit in 2017 Taproot promised enhanced privacy but Coinbase users were left behind for years.
Proposed by Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell, Taproot uses Schnorr signatures which compress complex transactions into smaller more efficient data packages. This reduces the amount of information stored on the blockchain improving scalability and of course lowering transaction fees. With the Taproot upgrade, complex transactions like those requiring multiple signatures can be made to look like standard bitcoin transfers. This limits the amount of data exposed on the public blockchain making it more difficult to trace transactions. Yeah. But it's not a miracle pill. You still we still have to be careful with that kind of stuff depending on what you're doing. So just be aware of that. But finally, Coinbase got off its ass and and added something that I didn't realize how long it had been since uh-uh taproot November of 2021.
So coinbase I guess I'm not surprised that coinbase took this long for some reason or another I went through a time warp there and didn't realize that wow, November of 2021 is when Taproot launched. Shit, man. I'm losing time. Let's run the numbers. Oil is down again, I guess because Israel isn't bombing the living shit out of some brown people. West Texas Intermediate is down 1.39% to 72.50. Brent Norsee likewise down 1.5 to 7595. Natural gas following suit, 3.4% to the downside. Gasoline chilling out down 0.76% to the downside.
$2.5 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks are mixed. Gold is down a third, silver is up 0.18%. Platinum is down a quarter, and copper is down as well, 1.18% to the downside. Palladium, however, knocking it out of the park 3.5% to the upside. Ag is looking pretty much green today. Biggest winner is chocolate, 4.8% to the upside. Biggest loser is sugar, one 0.8% to the downside. Live cattle down a 3rd. Lean hogs down 2. And feeder cattle are down 2 thirds. But the Dow, whoop dee doody day, having a 400 point changeover after 0.94% uptick.
S and P is up a half. Nasdaq is up over a half. S and P Mini is, wow, 2 thirds to the upside. So I guess those guys are doing well, but we are still 15 minutes away by my clock for the FOMAC minutes. We'll have to wait and see. Bitcoin took it on the chin today, $61,790. That brings us back to a $1,220,000,000,000 market cap, but we can still get twenty 3.4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,765,171.11 of. And average fees per block have risen to the highest I've seen it in a long time. 0.12 BTC on average in fees on a per block basis, of which there are 97 blocks carrying 203,000 unconfirmed transactions, waiting to clear at high priority rates of 12. Count them 12 satoshis per vbyte.
Low priority is gonna get you in at 9. And the hash rate has fallen considering that we just had a difficulty adjustment. We are now back down to 587.2 exahashes per second. So I'm seeing a pattern. Right before the difficulty adjustment changes, the amount of hash rate steadily increases. Right after the difficulty adjustment, we lose a shit ton of hash rate off the network. Why? Man, I don't know. There's probably all manner of reasons, but I don't have them for you here. But from gas, grass, or BTC, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin, and I got Golf Winch.
6,777 says, this is my favorite podcast to support. Please donate to the show. Thank you for the information. Your information diet is important. Choose your sources wisely. Oh, man. That is one hell of a compliment there, Golf Winch. I appreciate that. Ghost of Whitman with a 1,000 says, Here's a boost, you fucker. God's death with 537 says, Thank you, sir. No, thank you. User 115-568-42 with 500 says gas, grass, or sats? Yeah. I probably should have named it that. Pies to Pleb with 4:20. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And wartime with 333 says thanks.
No. Thanks user with a shit ton of numbers and a 100 sat says another great informative show not sure if you've talked about it but can you talk about the 3 best hot bitcoin wallets I know cold storage is what we should be doing Not everyone will own enough to make it worth the purchase. Sure. I'll tell you what hot 2 hot wallets. Cash App and Strike. That I don't have a third one for you. I probably should, but I don't. Because I spend if I'm gonna spend Bitcoin I generally do it out of my hot wallet. If you have your own lightning node, and which means you're running your own Bitcoin node, you can use either the Bitcoin node wallet which I don't suggest.
But if you're running like LND, the, hot wallet for Bitcoin is actually pretty good. It it it it's up to date. It does what it's supposed to do. And that node is under your control, but it's still a hot wallet, which means that its keys are exposed to the universe of the of the of the World Wide Web. So please be aware. But I mean, honestly, dude, there's nothing wrong. I've used the hot wallet out of Cash App on many occasions. It's fine. I've used the strike hot the strike Bitcoin wallet. It works just fine. But if you really want to get knowledgeable about different kinds of wallets that are hot wallets, then you really really really really want to, either ask BTC sessions, but more importantly, I think I think more the more knowledgeable guy about the wallet stuff is gonna be Matt Odell.
And I think he's act I think he curates a list of wallets on, his website, which I've never actually been to. Because I don't actually go to many people's websites. I don't know why, but that's just me. Anyway, that's the weather report. Did you want to laugh? Well, welcome to part 2 of the news that you can laugh at. Check this shit out from decrypt Ryan s Gladwin. Economists vouch for Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin as Nobel Prize Contender. Oh my God. The Nobel Prize has lost all credibility. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin may be up for the Nobel Prize in economics thanks to his contribution to cryptocurrency. 2 notable economists argued on a recent podcast.
This comes ahead of the award announcement on Monday, October 14th. Tyler Cohen and Alex Tabarro, 2 ex economics professors, spoke on the podcast for their joint economic blog marginal revolution as they questioned who may win the upcoming Nobel Prize in economics. Well, after throwing around a few names, they eventually pondered if Ethereum co founder could win I have an unusual picked pick? I suspect you'll agree with me I would give it to Vitalik Buterin, Cohen explained Vitalik has built a platform created a You could say refuted Mises regression theorem in the process obviously following in the footsteps of Satoshi Nakamoto end quote Oh my God, this is making me sick After the list of accomplishments he quipped my goodness.
What does someone have to do to get a Nobel Prize? Buterin co founded Ethereum alongside 4 others in 2013. The asset has since established itself as the second largest well, actually the first, the largest shit coin that there is in the world at a market capitalization of $293,500,000,000 although there's no way to know because nobody knows how much Ethereum is actually in circulation. And if people tell you that they do know ask them to prove it I can do it just by going to my node nobody can run a full ethereum node this has been known this is an issue there's no way to know if Ethereum is has a market cap of $293,500,000,000.
It's bullshit. Buterin has remained at the forefront of the Ethereum community pushing conversations around account abstraction, decentralization, and industry alignment. Quote, I think you would have thought Bitcoin and Ethereum were impossible if you had thought about it in advance, yet they're actually working in the real world, Tabarro said in response. Quote, not only that, but Vitalik has continued to contribute towards the mechanism design of Ethereum by going to proof of stake. Yeah. Just like you fiat assholes want. In 2022, Ethereum changed from, you know, real proof of work consensus mechanisms to proof of stake in what's colloquially being called the merge.
This move reduced the network's energy consumption by 99% and was completed with relatively no hitches. Cohen and Tabarro laughed together at how smoothly it went, comparing it to changing car tires while the car is still moving. Quote, he writes on monetary economics, and there's no economist who has anything better to say on the topics that he writes on. Talk about kissing ass. Oh, my God. And quote, and that to me is worth a lot in this consideration, Cowan said. And he's super polite. He would bow to the king or whatever is required. He'd be wonderful at the ceremony.
There's no issues there at all. The pair also suggested Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, but speculated if the award could even be given to someone who is anonymous or not. On Tuesday, an HBO documentary claimed to have identified Bitcoin Core developer, Peter Todd's, as the crypto's elusive inventor. This has since been denied by Todd himself as we've seen and rejected by most of the crypto Twitter community. That talk about a throwaway paragraph at the were you just trying to make up the word count, guys? Really? That had nothing to do with this.
For God's sis. You know what that was? That's probably, search engine optimization. That's probably why that's in there. Okay. So the SAP dripping out of these 2 fiat economists mouths is everything you need to know about what is wrong with ethereum vitalik buterin and the rest of that crew I mean the amount of changes that the economic policy of this one shit coin has gone through since its inception is eye watering it's as bad if not worse than any fiat central bank's monetary policy. In fact, I conjecture that you will not be able to find a central bank anywhere in the world that changes its economic policy as much as Ethereum has in the same time span?
I'll bet you can't find 1. I'll bet you you can't. Moving from proof of work to proof of stake, all that did was lock Ethereum into what we've already built in the fiat legacy world. And putting this guy up for a Nobel Prize, I mean, they're not as far as I can tell, unless they have nomination power at the Nobel Prize Committee, whatever the hell they call it, then he's not technically being, you know, nominated. But these 2 assholes it's like hold on here. Where see? Pewdiepie steak. This one. This this paragraph right here. He writes on monetary economics and there's no economist who has anything better to say on the topics he writes on. And he's super polite, guys. Super polite. He would bow to a king or whatever is required. Yeah.
Yes, he would. That's the point. Not only do we know who he is, he's completely malleable. He will do what ever he's told. And if you hold any of your wealth or something that you consider value in that shit chain of his, I would get it out today. I would have gotten it out yesterday, but yesterday's gone and we only have today. If you have any Ethereum, you need to get rid of it. You need to sell it directly into Bitcoin. Please do that. Not yes. It's not investment advice. This is getting your money out of a clear losing proposition.
It may not lose tomorrow. It may not lose the next day, but it's going to lose sooner than you think. It's not that it's going away kind of loss. Ethereum, for God forbid, is always like Jesus and the poor. Jesus said this about the poor, the poor will always be with you. Well, Ethereum is always going to be with us. There's no way to get rid of this rat that has hitched its little red wagon to the boat that is Bitcoin. We talk about riding shirt tails. This kid has taken everybody to the cleaners, and nobody figures out the fact that every time you change economic policy, you're just doing the same thing that all the people that we're trying to run away from are doing they're going to inflate the value of that chit chain away I guarantee it Now, that doesn't mean Bitcoiners can't be stupid.
We can. As evidenced in this one by Andrei Bogansky writing for Decrypt, Bitcoin holders lock up $1,400,000,000 as Babylon staking expands. So again, this is a warning. I'm not I'm not suggesting you look at Babylon other than to figure out where it is so that you can run-in the opposite direction, run away and run away fast. The Bitcoin staking protocol, Babylon, pulled in roughly 23,000 Bitcoin on Tuesday during its second staking round, a much larger sum than the first wave, And a much smoother experience for network users since bitcoin fees did not surge this time around. Babylon co founder, and here it is, Stanford University professor David See.
What is Stanford? It's a spook school. It's like Georgetown University. If you wanna be a spook, you go to Harvard or Stanford or Georgetown or Brown. It is a spook school. David See helped launch the staking startup's mainnet 6 weeks ago, and he told Decrypt that the round dubbed cap 2 went pretty well. Having users delegate $1,400,000,000 worth of bitcoin to the protocol was certainly beyond expectations, he said in an interview on Tuesday. Babylon has been constructing a 2 sided marketplace rooted in bitcoin's reserves. On the one side, users will be able to lock up their Bitcoin in exchange for rewards one day.
While proof of stake networks can leverage that capital to provide security on the other. We already have proof of work. We don't need this. This is all bullshit, but the project is focused on building up Babylon supply side before integrating with various roll ups and networks previously indicating that networks like Ethereum and Solana could benefit from bitcoin staking. How? I don't know how. Nobody does either. And though Tuesday's staking round saw whopping amounts of bitcoin delegated, the process proved far more orderly than the initial lockup back in August, Limiting the amount of bitcoin staked to 1,000 BTC, the median cost per bitcoin transaction cost skyrocketed to $132 during the first staking round. But this time, the median cost per bitcoin transaction only rose as high as $2.37 skirting a network wide headache for bitcoin users.
The difference can be attributed to updated parameters in the protocol's developers, Babylon Labs, set for Tuesday's intake. Instead of limiting the number of bitcoin that could be staked, Babylon's developers shifted to a so called duration based approach. During Tuesday's 10 block window beginning at block number 864790 users could stake an unlimited amount of bitcoin while being limited to 500 bitcoin per transaction. Previously, users were limited to staking 0.5 bitcoin per transaction with an overall cap of 1,000 on the first staking round the parameters for Babylon's initial staking round created a situation where speed was crucial and people paid a premium to participate Luxor Mining CEO Nick Hanson told Decrypt quote when there's a limited amount of space and everybody's racing to get into that space that produces a high time preference for transactions The only way to speed up transactions is to increase the fee, Hanson said in an interview.
The parameters were changed ahead of Tuesday's staking round to broaden access to the protocol, Cee said, adding that there will likely be similar opportunities in the future. Of course, because scammers never stop scamming. The delay between the first and second staking rounds was technical in nature, he explained. The first round was very, very small, mainly for security reasons. We wanted to make sure that our protocol was secure and had a bounty program to get people to attack the system. Babylon announced that it had completed a $70,000,000 funding round in late May that was led by Paradigm also drawing participation from Galaxy and Polychain Capital.
The funding round followed an $18,000,000 series a funding round late last year. While the project is still in its early stages, Babylon will eventually build out its own proof of stake network called Babylon Chain, Seeh said. That network will serve as a primary coordination layer, he added, allowing others to tap locked Bitcoin to help secure other chains. And it's all 100% bullshit scam. It's designed to take your Bitcoin away from you. They're offering you a carrot that does not exist, but the stick that it's hanging from does. And they will beat you around the head and shoulders with it when they finally rug pull your ass. There's no reason for the existence of Babylon chain.
Why did they get 2 rounds of funding that did that was actually USD funding? Not Bitcoin funding. No. No. Nobody was staking in their Series A round. They were giving them cold hard cash. For what? Did they need to build a building? How much did how many developers did does it take to screw in this particular light bulb? And did they get paid $1,000,000 each? Because that's a lot of that's still like 90 developers. If they all got a million I mean, did they have to buy a supercomputer? Because you don't need one to run Bitcoin. So what was the initial funding round for?
That that's really the canary in the coal mine. That's how I know this is a scam. And they're running the exact same playbook that I watched FTX run. And when FTX was buying all the Bitcoin, they were like going they were just buying Bitcoin hand over fist or at least that's what they were saying. And it looked that way given that the price was skyrocketing around the time that FTX was in existence and doing all announcing that they were buying these massive tranches of Bitcoin. And even I made the mistake of saying, this is good for Bitcoin. I was wrong.
It wasn't good for Bitcoin. It was good for Bitcoin's price in the short term. That's the only good that came from it. Because then everything blew the fuck up. Bitcoin's price crashed again. And we've been waiting to get out of the doldrums ever since. And here we have the exact same playbook. They're announcing how much Bitcoin is going into this system. Now they're not buying it here. People are they they they're doing away with that. They they they're they've read the bankruptcy proceedings from FTX. They know how to keep their little noses clean this time around, by God. And they're just gonna use staking instead of actually having people give them the money so that they can, you know, or or or buy the bitcoin on the open market or whatever. Right? This time, they're letting the user themselves give them the money by staking the Bitcoin on the chain. So they have the Bitcoin.
It's an asset. It exists inside one of their other assets, this whatever this chain is called, this Babylon crap. They could probably show that on their books but they didn't actually buy the bitcoin this time so maybe that gets them out of maybe when this shit hits when the shit hits the fan on this one and it will maybe they won't go to jail. Maybe there will be some plausible deniability that they can pull because people were staking the Bitcoin. I don't know, man. Everything about this smells bad, and I don't think you should take part of it. And that is investment advice. And, sure, if you want to get mad at me and say that you lost out on being a millionaire, fine. Whatever. I don't care. But I'm telling you, everything about this, we've seen it before.
It ends in tears. It ends in the suicide hotline number being posted to Reddit. It ends with you having no money or much less, you know, money in the form of Bitcoin than you started out with. And you end up making these people rich. And they will go spend their money on Lambos and houses in the south of France. And you will never get your money back. Stay away from this guy. This Stanford dude, you don't want to have nothing to do with spook school. Alright? Alright. That's the end of the show. Please remember donate to the show. Send me, send me, like, some, some good boostograms. And and, like, if you got a birthday coming up and you want me to say happy birthday to you on the air, do it. I mean, I I I like interacting with the people that listen to this show. That's the boostergrams is the best way to interact. And it's part of the value for value issue that I'm trying to really push nowadays.
It's the only way forward, guys. The legacy media is already dead. It just hasn't started rotting, so we can't tell by the stench that something is actually dead. Not yet, but soon. I mean, everything in legacy media has just fallen by the wayside. It's it's all dead. All the gatekeepers are dead. They're just walking around like zombies. And if we wait on them to die fully, then we're not going to have any outlets at all. And the only outlets that we can point to right now is stuff like Nostr and, like like doing a podcast that has the ability to take in boostograms and you can stream these satoshis and if you do that I can make the show better the less I worry about the external world by making the money that I need to make with this show, the better the show can get.
That's the feedback loop of value for value, as well. It's like, if I can do right by you to a degree that you guys give me some, you know, give me some satoshis and then I can do stuff like, you know, buy a mobile rig with those satoshis as I have done and go out and record other people, then I now I need to be able to grab the time involved instead of worrying about the rest of the stuff. If I can grab the time to go do some of these other things then the show gets better. And I can do that with donations and you guys leveraging your end of the value for value ecosystem. Because the legacy media is that in 10 years is going to look completely different. And if you think it's bad now, oh, boy.
Just wait. In fact, the first thing that I'm gonna go do is I'm going to make myself some lunch, and I'm gonna watch this piece of shit Bitcoin documentary. I don't wanna do it, but I'm doing it for you. I'll see you on the other side of that. 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.
Peter Todd's Denial and Documentary Critique
The Dangers of Speculating Satoshi's Identity
Conclusion and Call for Support