Join me today for Episode 887 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Spot Flow Has Slowed
- Swiss Central Bank Gets Nudged Into Bitcoin
- The Last Satoshi
- Braiins Turns on LN Payouts for All
- Pool of Pools?
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
Circle P:
npub: npub1ugnq57hn8va6xqr5zywy2eunem6c624583vkt0dmv40ep7tnnxkqrr898l (faster)
email: [email protected] (slower)
Product: Comfrey
One full root for 20$
Or root cutting for 1$ each
Buyer pays shipping
All about Comfrey: Episode 726
KC Cattle Co. npub1w6yuyqth6vhsf4d55rya5vnpwkmv5ye6gncadhjzk8zzu8valvdsyk5pt8
Jason Wrich: npub1h64t3jme86528cu4tpuchf2kr9vgfg6naz6twl44ssdaaytr37rquegcxk
Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/swiss-central-bank-urged-to-add-bitcoin-to-balance-sheet
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-etf-demand-negative-btc-halving
https://decrypt.co/227296/what-happens-when-last-bitcoin-mined
- 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/bisq-v2-0-3/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/braiins-pool-lightning-payouts-public-release/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/cashu-nutshell-v0-15-3/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/bitmain-antpool-pool-of-pools-report/
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Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. Uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 10:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 22nd day of April 2024. This is episode 887 of Bitcoin and, well, the havening happened.
And I know I'm I'm already gonna get backlash because I slipped up and I called it the havin'ing. People are having an allergic reaction to when other people say it was the havin'ing instead of the havin'ing or what one of the things that I like the most is the Hal Finning. I like Hal Finning. That actually makes a lot of sense to me. But, wow, did we see some frickin' fireworks go off then? Hopefully, if I remember, because I've got, you know, all of 2 brain cells to rub together, I will talk a little bit about, the aftermath of the halving or the having and block 400, no 840,000 and the shenanigans that went on a little bit before and a little bit after that particular block. But first, we've got some new entrants into Noster and a couple that I want to bring directly to your attention.
It's hard for people to wrap their head around yet a new and and I'm going to say the word social media. Right? I don't believe that that's what Nostra is, but we're here to try to help understand normies and the way that they think. And the way that normal people are thinking when they hear us talk about noster, a, they think, oh joy, yet a new social media platform that I have to spend time with, that I have to do stuff with. They don't understand it yet. It's up to us for them to understand that noster is more than a social media platform. It is an it is an uncensorable communications protocol.
And with that comes, well, how many things do you communicate? How many different ways can we communicate with each other? And Nostra brings it all together and ties it up into one nice, neat little package. So, the person that I'm gonna bring to you first today is Jason Rick of Rick Ranches. He's a rancher, he's a banker, he's out there in eastern, well, the western portion of Colorado. I think he's up there by Black Canyon of the Gunnison. He is one of the first people that came he drove all the way from his ranch in Northwestern Colorado all the way down to, Central Texas where Texas Slim and the Beef Initiative had their 1st Beef Initiative Micro Summit.
And I was there and so I got to meet Jason Rick and a cup with a couple of other people. But I was surprised when Jason Rick said or or started posting on Noster. Now, again, let's be let's be honest with ourselves. I'm not sure it's actually Jason Rick, but I have no reason not to believe that it's not Jason Rick. If it's somebody like me who just put up the beef initiative Noster account, then it's somebody that's close to Jason Rick that really gives a shit about what Jason Rick's doing. In either event, it's Jason Rick and that is spelled. And the reason I'm spelling this for you is because I need you to go follow him and show him some love on Noster because this is the way that we get normal normie people to understand what the hell Noster actually is.
Jason Rick. It's all one word. Jas0n w rich. W r I c h. It's kind of pronounced Rick. It's a lot some people pronounce it rich, but it's w r I c h. Go throw him a follow because he's one of the one of the earliest entrants into the beef initiative that we had and it's a real pleasure to see him here. I want him to learn how to post more of his content to Nostr. And for the guys over there in zap. Stream, I've got him up on the screen. Now, second entrance, entrant to Nostr is K and C cattle company out of central Texas. That is knccattlecompany.com if you wanna go check out their website.
Also, ranchers. Clearly. Also, some of the very earliest entrants into the beef initiative and they are now representing themselves or somebody close to them is representing them in the Noster namespace, please go over to KC cattle company, all one word on Noster. Just search for it, add it, do whatever it is that you got to do to find it. I'll try to remember to put these end pubs down in the show notes, But like I said, man, I'm running out of brain cells to rub together to to start fires. But it's KC Cattle Company, and they got on roughly around the same time that Jason Rick got on, which makes me wonder. Okay? Maybe it's the same person that's doing this. I don't know.
But it's important for people to start claiming their namespaces on Nostr, even if you don't intend on using it. At least get your insect and n pub key pair from some client. Go use Primal. Go use Coracle. Go use any of the Nostr clients and that will generate you a key pair. Keep them secret, keep them safe. Well, not your in pub. Your in pub's gonna get out there. But your insec, that one you need to keep secret and you need to keep it safe. Again, we want to welcome both Jason Rick and K&C Cattle Company to Noster. I hope they have a good time and and we can teach them exactly why it is the most important uncensorable communications platform that the earth and its people have ever seen.
Now, for what what are we doing? Oh, the circle p. The circle p is open for business. Yes, it is. It certainly is open for business. And today's circle p is, well, it's XiXi. And XiXi will sell you comfrey. It's a plant. You want this plant. This plant is magic. And it is prolific. Wherever you plant this thing, it'll most likely never die. It's perennial. It comes back again and again. It does all manner of stuff. Right? It's a good medicine. It heals wounds. It's great as a nitrogen addition for compost, it's a great like you just mulch your plants with the dead leaves You cut them all off or not dead leaves. You cut all the leaves off the top of it. You mulch a plant with it. It grows back. You cut it all off again. You mulch another plant. You can divide this thing ad infinitum and get more and more plants. By the time I left my home in Canyon, Texas, I had well over a 100, if not 200, separate individual confre plants just generating biomass for me and it's the best biomass that you can generate because it does all this wonderful stuff. If you want to know all the stuff that it does go back to the Bitcoin and episode 726 where I give you an in-depth view of why it is you want this plant. You can get one full root of comfrey and he will ship it to you for $20.
However, you are going to pay the shipping. You can get a smattering of root cuttings, which is what I recommend, but get 20 or 25 or 30 of them and start 30 plants because this thing, if you do it, you don't need I mean, you plug it in the, you know, dig a hole in the ground, you shove a root cutting in there, you cover it over and you keep it watered until it starts coming up. It's almost foolproof. Almost foolproof. It's almost impossible to kill this plant. Right? So get 30 of them. You will be happy that you did. However, just be aware wherever you put this plant, make sure that this is where you want this plant because it's going to be there forever. You will never get rid of it. You don't want to get rid of it.
What I recommend is full like it the the further southern latitudes you are Texas Oklahoma, you know where shit gets real hot. It does not like full sun. It can take full sun in the morning, but not in the afternoon. It does not like that shit. In the northern climates where it's cooler, you might be able to get away with it. But dappled shade or full shade in the afternoon, but full sun in the very early morning. That's what you're gonna want and this plant is going to perform magic for you and your garden. Alright. With all of that out of the way oh, by the way, Xi Xi's information will be in the show notes.
Now on to the news, Bitcoin Magazine. Yeah, I know, but they they we give them a lot of shit and I'm not gonna stop giving them shit for being part of the runatics, the ordinal dorkodils, whatever. They're they're all over it, and I don't like that. I I'm I'm sick of watching. This will be the second time that Bitcoin Magazine has gone bullshit coinery. However, sometimes they do have good news, and I will continue to read that good well, good quality news sometimes if it's not about ordinals. I don't bring you that shit. However, Vivek Sin is writing this one: The Swiss Central Bank has been urged to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet.
Let's see where this one goes. A group of Bitcoin advocates in Switzerland have launched a campaign to convince the Swiss National Bank to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet, The non profit organization 2b4ch aims to hold a national referendum to amend Switzerland's constitution to require not just not just nudge, not just wink wink, not just, hey, you might wanna get some. No. No. No. Require the central bank to hold Bitcoin. According to 2 b 4 CH founder and chairman, Yves Bynum, this move would help Switzerland maintain its political neutrality and sovereignty in an uncertain global environment. Quote, we are in the process of completing the organizational preparations for the committee and preparing the documents that must be submitted to the state chancellery in order to start the process, Benham stated.
To achieve a referendum, under Switzerland's system of direct democracy, the advocates have to collect 100,000 signatures from Swiss citizens within 18 months. With Switzerland's population at around 8,700,000 roughly 1.15 percent of the population needs to sign this petition. This signature requirement posed challenges when 2b4ch attempted a similar referendum in 2021. Luzwe Luzwe Luzwe I can't pronounce this name Luzwe Meslier, president of the Bitcoin trading platform Bitcoin Suisse, supports the new campaign, by including bitcoin in its reserves, Switzerland would mark its independence from the European Central Bank. Such a step would strengthen our neutrality, Messier said.
Messier believes adopting Bitcoin could make Switzerland's 1,000,000,000 of dollars. He previously advised the SMB to allocate over $1,000,000,000 monthly. Not just one time, but every month, a $1,000,000,000 to BTC instead of German bonds. However, SNB chair Thomas Jordan has thus far resisted, claiming bitcoin does not meet meet the reserve criteria. The campaign has won support from bitcoin advocates globally, including German politician, Johanna Qatar, quote, now comes the popular initiative that wants to oblige the National Bank to buy bitcoin, she tweeted.
If successful, the move could make Switzerland the first country in the west to hold Bitcoin reserves. This mirrors El Salvador's groundbreaking adoption of BTC as a legal tender in 2021, proponents argue integrating Bitcoin would diversify the SMBs assets and signal Switzerland's commitment to financial innovation. Alright. So this has been done before. And when it came out, I brought it to you. So this is round 2. Ding ding. Ding ding. Get cue the the hot chick in the bathing suit with the cue cards with saying round 2 going around the ring. Right?
Will it work this time? I don't know. I mean, honestly, 1.15% of a population to actually do work and sign their name to a piece of paper, much less do the work to understand what the hell it is that they're advocating for is that seems like that would be harder than you think. 1.15% doesn't sound like a lot, but I think it is. Especially when that 1.15 percent is spread out across a nation the size of Switzerland, which ain't huge, but it ain't a small it's not small, right? When you start thinking about how where all these different people live.
They got to go collect up all these signatures. So what can we do to help? I don't know. Figure out who these people are. Go find their tweets. Bring it to Noster. Retweet it if you're on dead bird's site. Renote it if you're over on Noster. Then send it out to any of your other social media platforms, which hopefully will die now that we have Noster. But I'm not going to get into all that today because we have other fish to fry That this one, you know, Prashant Shaw is writing this one from Cointelegraph talking about how the Bitcoin ETF demand has now turned negative around the BTC having.
Oh, oh, The horror. The humanity. Oh, by the way, UNO, I see you zapping me multiple 121 sat zaps. It is much appreciated, my friend. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Demand for the newest Bitcoin investment products is slowing down as the world's 1st cryptocurrency went through its 4th halving event. Spot bitcoin exchange traded funds became a benchmark for institutional investments in bitcoin after launching in January of this year. The 11 spot bitcoin ETFs approved by the United States regulators in January collectively managed over $13,000,000,000 in inflows within a couple of months of launching.
Gold ETFs took years to accomplish the same feat. At their peak, spot Bitcoin ETFs saw up to $1,000,000,000 daily in net inflows The result of institutional investors reallocating investments from the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust to the new ETFs. That's not right. Why is that not right? Because we're talking about net inflows. And when they say that this was a result of people taking their shit out of GBTC, there that's wrong. Because there's an outflow of GBTC and yes, they may be going back into a different ETF, but it's a with the the net result of just what's coming out of GBTC may just very well be 0. It certainly can't be more.
Right? So those net inflows they're talking about is actually coming from somewhere else. I don't know why that's in there, but that is a glaring error. Please, editors of Cointelegraph, get your collective shit together. The Bitcoin halving is considered an important event in the Bitcoin timeline, which occurs roughly every 4 years and reduces the block reward for miners by half. Thus, the amount of new BTC added to the market daily is reduced by half. The halving has now reduced the block reward from 6.25 bitcoin to 3.125 bitcoin.
Reduced rewards and high demand for BTC via ETFs led many market pundits to predict a supply shock after the April 20th halving. However, after weeks of consecutive net positive inflows would soon dry up as institutions, you know, ran out of GBTC shares to sell, inflows to ETFs have now turned negative. Ahead of the Bitcoin halving, spot ETFs recorded several consecutive days of net outflows ranging in the 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars. However, despite the current downturn, Jag Kuehner, head of derivatives at Bitfinex believes the demand for ETFs will catch up after the halving, quote, the reduction in inflows and significant outflows is not correlated to the halving event, but rather to the current SPX and Nasdaq decline and geopolitical reasons.
Bitcoin ETFs are an alternative investment, or a smaller part of a large traditional finance investment portfolio. The current situation is likely a product of rebalancing risk on those portfolios and reducing reducing exposure to higher risk assets, he said. Kooner added that BTC's impressive rally since January 2024 was thanks not only to the ETF approvals, but also to market participants speculating on the impact of spot ETFs on the Bitcoin price. Thus, we expect a stabilization of inflows to result in a return of speculation on a bullish tipping of flows while we return to bullish trending market conditions, he said.
The 1st 3 months of spot bitcoin ETF inflows ETF inflows ranged from 3 to 10 times the daily mining supply of 900 BTC. The high ETF demand and heavy buying from institutional giants such as Micro strategy led many market analysts to predict a post halving supply shock. A Bybit report predicted that BTC reserves on exchanges could dry up within 9 months of the halving. While other analysts predicted a 6 month timeframe. According to data shared by crypto analytics firm, CryptoQuant, BTC Supply, on centralized exchanges fell to a 3 year low of only 1,900,000 BTC by April 16th.
Kai Yongxue, CEO of CryptoQuant, made a similar prediction saying BTC could face a severe supply shock within 6 months of the halving. But by the 3rd week of April, ETF demand has slowed to consecutive net daily outflows. The demand for ETFs stagnated at the end of March when BTC saw its 1st week of net outflows. Young stated that the demand for ETFs may rebound if if the BTC price approaches critical support levels where New Whales have a $56,000 on chain cost basis. The cost basis of an investment is the total amount initially invested, plus any commission or fees involved in that purchase.
Kooner added that people often ignore the long term hodlers with a significant amount of supply. He said that there could also be a major distribution from long term holders during the later stages of the cycle explaining, quote, the demand for spot Bitcoin ETFs is unprecedented by all accounts, but a single metric cannot measure demand for BTC itself. However, the market decline is evidence enough that the demand doesn't currently outstrip BTC supply on an absolute basis, end quote. While ETF demand has slowed, open interest in BTC options has increased, implying that buy and hold investors are waiting on the sidelines while volatility focused investors are taking their place.
Josef Tetik, Bitcoin ambassador at hardware wallet maker Trezor told Cointelegraph that ETFs don't necessarily signify institutional demand. Under US regulation, ETFs are available to both institutions and retail investors. Thus, it's impossible to speculate on the impact and relative influence of various demand drivers in the short term. Taking a longer term view and turning away from US markets, there is rising demand for Bitcoin in countries across the globe as fiat currencies fail as a reliable store of value, and even in some countries as even a viable medium of exchange.
The post halving supply shock notion was prevalent for most of February March owing to heavy inflows into the spot ETFs despite GBTC outflows and new BTC price highs. However, just days before the halving, the ETF flows turned passive and the BTC price also slid nearly 10% from all time highs, prompting many to reconsider their supply shock theory in the short term. However, some experts are optimistic that BTC ETF demand will reach new highs as market conditions improve after the halving. Okay, so what what are we actually seeing? I think we're seeing that outflows came at since the outflows started coming after a prolonged period of not having a new all time high, people got bored.
It wasn't new and shiny anymore. They were promised, you know, like this this this huge, you know, massive God candle was going to be immediate and they didn't get it immediately. And because majority of the human population has literally no patience whatsoever, they're now looking for other things that are new and shiny, but there's not any. That's the thing except for the runes and ordinal stuff and that's not don't do that. Please don't do that. That is a terrible place to put your money. However, it's the only new and shiny thing that there is, isn't it?
It's it's sad. It's sad. We all want Bitcoin to become boring because if it becomes boring then that means that it's just firmly planted as the permanent escape valve and escape hatch that we all need to use. But if it's boring and not shiny, well, the low IQ humans are just with with, you know, not a plate, you know, a bowl full of patients between them are just gonna look for anything else because everything is so dire out there. I literally believe that if I needed to put it all into a nice little sack and sew it all up, it's just people didn't get what they want as soon as they wanted it and because of that they just kind of got high and wandered off.
Well, well, I honestly do not give a shit. We don't really need the ETFs. Is it fun to have? Is it fun to watch? Yeah, sure. It generates news. It's kind of fun to watch out how everything's going on, but it is what it is. Now, what happens now we're talking about supply shock in that last bit but what happens when the very last Bitcoin is mined? Well, we got a thought experiment here from, Jose Antonio Lands at a decrypt. Let's figure out what he's trying to say. Imagine a world where the money supply is finite and there's no dollars left to print. Sounds bizarre, right? But in the realm of Bitcoin, this scenario is not only possible, it's inevitable.
The Bitcoin network designed with a finite supply of 21,000,000 coin, just hit a significant milestone. The halving just chopped its inflation rate by half for the 4th time since its inception. As of now, 19,688,016 bitcoin have been mined, leaving less than 2,000,000 to be discovered over the next 120 years. This scarcity coupled with the increasing demand for bitcoin is set to reshape the cryptocurrency's future. The roadmap to the final bitcoin being mined is a gradual process. By 2026, 95 and 1 quarter percent of all bitcoin will have been mined and by 2039 this figure will reach 99.5%.
The mining of the penultimate bitcoin is projected to occur roughly around 2093. Let's fast forward a little more to, you know, 2,140, the year when the very last Bitcoin, or realistically the last satoshi, is expected to be mined. And by this time, Bitcoin's inflation rate will have flattened completely out. The impact of the milestone will be particularly significant for Bitcoin miners. Once all Bitcoin is mined, miners will now no longer receive new Bitcoin as block rewards. Instead, they will solely rely upon transaction fees as their source of income. As block rewards decrease over time, Transaction fees are expected to become the primary revenue source for miners, potentially leading to higher fees in US dollar terms, that is. And just for reference, back in 2011 users paid 0.01btc per transaction with many of them being confirmed for free.
This amount was then reduced to 0.0005btc in version 0.3 oh sorry 0.3.23 and kept going down as the reality of bitcoin evolved, and its price started to go up. Today, the average fee per transaction is 0.00022 BTC, roughly around 104 satoshis per vByte, according to bidinfo charts. In dollars, this means up to $15 in today's prices for a single transaction. In 2017, the average fee was around a buck. And in 2012, fees were around a single United States penny. The cost of mining a Bitcoin block today varies significantly and depends on factors such as energy costs, mining hardware efficiency, and the network cash rate. According to estimates by DataCite Visual Capitalist, back in 2022, each American miner spent over $20,000 per mined block.
UK miners spent almost $50,000 and the highly profitable Kazakhstan mining farms paid over $8,000 per block. These costs are anticipated to rise further after the latest halving event, with block rewards cut in half. However, miners can afford a 50% drop in BTC rewards because there's price appreciation and that makes it more profitable to mine in terms of fiat. Between January of 2020 April of 2024, the price of bitcoin has increased by 9 43% in USD terms. Despite these challenges, the network is designed to maintain its security through the difficulty adjustment algorithm which ensures a consistent rate of block generation even as miner participation fluctuates due to economic incentives or changes in the mining landscape.
As the supply of new bitcoin dwindles, the cryptocurrency is expected to become increasingly scarce and even deflationary due to external factors like lost wallet addresses and burned coins. This means that not all bitcoin in circulation will be available for actual use. Estimates from cryptoforensics firm Chainalysis suggest that up to 20% of the Bitcoin already issued may be permanently lost due to factors such as lost private keys or the passing hodlers without sharing their wallet details. This shift could potentially affect Bitcoin's value and its role as a digital store of wealth because Bitcoin's appeal as peer to peer electronic cash its intended utility gives way to the decentralized store of value thesis every single time that the price goes up.
While the supply of Bitcoin remains relatively stable, with a maximum increase of around 12% over the next century, demand for bitcoin may continue to grow. Basic economic suggest that a fixed supply coupled with increasing demand could drive up prices as more people seek to gain a share of Bitcoin's total supply. Now as noted, it is anticipated that users will pay fewer satoshis per transaction in the future. However, Bitcoin may still not be ideal for small payments after all. It wouldn't be good for transactions that are equal or less than the fee required to process them, like a cup of coffee thing. Whatever.
This is at the heart of the scalability debate that has been a contentious issue among developers, even leading to the most significant chain split in the Bitcoin network's history and the emergence of Bitcoin trash. Bitcoin trash proponents argue that Bitcoin should have larger blocks. He's not actually saying trash. He's saying cash, but it's trash. It's Bitcoin trash. Whatever. Essentially, larger data records measured in megabytes that could contain the transaction details stored on the network. Larger blocks would allow miners to receive more money per mined block thereby reducing the strain passed on to users The bigger the block, the larger amount of transactions can fit into it, meaning there will be more fees to claim.
Bitcoin developers, however, believe that layer 2 solutions and side chains could tackle this problem without having to alter the core BTC configuration. The lightning network, in particular, has been touted as a potential solution for facilitating daily Bitcoin transactions while keeping or sorry the main blockchain reserved for high value or batch transactions. What happens in the Lightning Network stays on the Lightning Network and transactions are only confirmed on chain when users cash out their Lightning Network Satoshis. It's akin to a bank versus a street cash system.
A bank maintains a record of every single digital transaction. A person can cash out 1 digital dollar to receive 1 physical dollar and all the money exchanges made with that dollar in the streets are immediate, but not registered by the bank until someone decides to deposit that dollar into their account which is then recorded by the bank that stores the bill. This could allow miners to charge higher fees for processing these larger transactions, leaving small change for off chain developments while maintaining the traditional small blocks, relevant.
Excuse me. Pardon me. However, a lot can happen in the century of Bitcoin history. A new fork that changes the chain's configuration, the mass adoption of layer 2 solutions, a new development that increases network efficiency, Sidechains? A better bitcoin? We don't know. What we do know, however, is that as long as there's an internet, Bitcoin will function the way Satoshi intended a strong decentralized network with a lot of weird people hyping it on Twitter. Okay. So I there's actually kind of a there's a lot to be said about about this particular article. However, this is going to have to be something for our children, our children's children, and their children and their children and their children to figure out. It doesn't mean that we stop worrying about it, but what it does mean is that and this is a question that at the very first beef initiative micro summit in I think it was Kerrville, Texas I posited this question to, oh God, oh, it was for Unchained Capitals. Very famous, and I'm completely blanking on his name.
He gave a presentation on why fiat money bad. And I asked him, how do we make sure that we impart to the next generation the importance of running your own Bitcoin node consensus rules. How do we how do we make sure that this thing just doesn't fall apart because we're not Johnny on the spot with education for the not only the people that are alive today, but how do we teach our children to teach their children who aren't even born yet how to keep this shit rolling on? That's an important question. That's a more important question than what the hell happens after there's no more block subsidy. It a k a there's no more inflation rate of Bitcoin because all the Bitcoin has been mined. And everybody if you're a miner and you're securing the network, you're depending on network fees. Right?
I think how do the question of how we educate beyond the person that we educate is the most important problem. It's way more important than what happens after the last satoshi is mined. Let's run the numbers. Alright. I'm gonna throw this up here, for you guys over there in the chat, said that you or, zap dot stream so you can see what confre looks like. I'm just gonna leave this rack of Google images of what confre looks like up in the screen, and we'll get into the numbers. Oh, it looks like everybody's having a good day, except oil, which is getting pounded because Israel and Iran are starting to kiss each other's ass, or at least that's what I'm seeing out of CNBC, news headlines that the tensions are being relaxed.
Meanwhile, West Texas Intermediate is down 0.07% to $83.8 a barrel. Brent Norsee is down a full half point to 86.86. Natural gas is the, of course, doing the reverse. It's actually up a 1 and a quarter points to a buck 77. Gasoline itself is down 0.85 percent to $2.68 Gold is having a bad day and all the other shiny rocks are following suit. Gold is down almost 3 points. Silver is down 5 and a half points. Platinum is down 1.2, copper is down a third and palladium is down 0.72%. So commodities just getting screws put to it. Ag commodities, however, are kind of in the green.
The biggest winner today is wheat, 3 point 7 1% to the upside. Biggest loser is chocolate. 4.64% to the downside. Live cattle is up almost a point and a half. Lean hogs are up almost a half. Feeder cattle are up 2.12%. The Dow rallying 422 points because, you know, Legacy Financial. Anyway, that represents a 1.11% increase. S and P is up 1 a quarter. NASDAQ up 1 a quarter. S and P Mini up 1 and a third. Now Clark Moody's dashboard price is $66,670 per Bitcoin. That is a one $310,000,000,000,000 market cap. There's 19,688,446.12 BTC in circulation.
Hash rate over the last 2016 blocks hitting 621.4xashes per second. Average fees per block 1.8 BTC. Reading that again, the average fees per block 1.8 BTC. That's a lot of Bitcoin. Having estimate, March 19th 2028. Starting the clock. Let's roll the clock back. We're already looking forward to the next halving. 1.8% of block space is being wasted on ordinals and what I can only assume are ruins. Just getting so sick of these people being stop being stupid. 200 and 57 blocks waiting to clear and it is carried they are carrying how many? 241,000 unconfirmed transactions.
A 100 and satoshis per vbyte or roughly $15 No, actually make that no, it just went up $16 for your average transaction. That's high priority. Low priority is about $12.77 about 137 satoshis per vblock. And anything under 10 satoshis per v block is being purged from mempools around the world. Alright, so let's take a break here and talk just briefly about what happened with the having. This would be a good place to this be as good a place as any to talk about it. So the having comes and all of a sudden, people start realizing that they want to get that first satoshi mind on the first block of the first or well of the first the first block of the 5th epoch.
We are now in the 5th epoch. Right? We just came out of the 4th with having happened on on the on the 19th we turned over to the 5th epic. There's this notion of an epic sat and It's like these like the first sat that was ever mined the first, you know all the satoshis in the first block that was ever mined are probably considered epic satoshis, but nobody's ever gonna be able to get their hands on it because that's locked away forever. I won't get into why now. But the first satoshi mind which and everything that I'm saying is ludicrous. So don't think that I actually believe this crap. It it's all it's all made up and bullshit, but there are people that actually fundamentally believe that there's an order to win satoshis were actually mined.
The first satoshi of the first block, the second satoshi of the first block. Oh, I've got the 151st Satoshi mind in the first block of the 5th epic. No, it doesn't work that way, but people think that. And because they thought that, guess what happened? Everybody wanted to be able to have a transaction that got mined in that first block that that they would have the chance of having that first satoshi or having a just a transaction in the first block. And so, the only thing that happened is that fees went apeshit. Apeshit.
I was seeing 10,000 satoshi per vbyte transactions. If I actually go back, let's see if I can find that block. 840123. See if I can find this son of a bitch. Yep. There it is, right there. What were the fees? What were the fees in block 840,000, the halving block? The total fees, $2,400,000 or 37.6 BTC. That was fees. The subsidy was 3.125 BTC, so it made absolutely no difference almost no difference. 37.6 BTC in fees. And it was they're all Rune chasing and ordinal chasing and epic sat and legendary sat and whatever sat it would it's all in your mind. So now we get think about that.
And and now start thinking about how normal people think about fiat money, their United States dollars versus Bitcoin, and how rabid they are that Bitcoin is backed by nothing, but certainly the US dollar is. It's all made up. It's all made up. We put our faith in the United States dollar because at one point or another, there was at least the notion that it was physically backed by gold, which stopped in 1971. In that summer, 1971, Nixon pulled us off the gold standard never put us back it was supposed to be temporary never put it back. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
But because we started entering into full fiat fiefdom with the notion that at one point it had been backed by gold And people thought it was backed by gold for decades after that even though it wasn't. They just put their faith in it. Well, as long as inflation of that money stayed low or low enough people put up with it. It worked pretty well. But over the last ever since 2001 and then again in 2,008 and here we are again pumping money back into the system. We've got too many dollars fighting for too few goods and that means that houses are out of sight. Cars, very expensive. Everything is expensive.
Right? We put our faith we put our faith in this belief that the United States dollar was going to work Just like these people, these runatics, as I call them, are putting their faith that runes and ordinals and the inscription schemata and brc twenties that they're putting their faith in that like those are going to work. Here's the narrator to tell you the bad news they won't because it's made up bullshit. Now, when somebody says yeah, but outside of energy Bitcoin is backed by nothing. 2 things: 1 energy is enough to back that by because energy is the currency of the universe.
How the payment rails work is another matter altogether for different systems in the universe, different natural systems. But generally speaking, energy is the currency of the universe, right? Therefore, energy works as a backing mechanism for something like Bitcoin. 2, the math stays the same. If we can get the next generations to not buy into bigger blocks or whatever it is that screws this whole thing up, then we will only ever have 21,000,000 and over time there's going to be attrition of those coins which makes it very very important that you keep your shit secure and that you don't do stupid shit like make transactions while you're high or drunk.
Right? But be that as it may, there's math. So bitcoin is backed by 2 things actual energy and the philosophy and language of mathematics. If that's not enough for money Then we need to stop having the idea that there is any money and we need to do all of our work for free. We need to do we need to like not give a shit about how much time we spend on the planet. We'd have to have a complete physic almost you'd almost have to have a neurological physiological shift in the way the human mind processes information for that shit to actually occur and be anywhere remotely sustainable.
Again, the narrator to tell you it won't. It's not sustainable. The mind doesn't work that way. You can't change it. We've been brought up this way for 1000 and 1000 and 1000 of years. We have to have something like a money that is backed by energy and math. That works for me. It really does. So that's what happened with the halving block. And it kept going on. It was like, it was almost as if people say, well, I couldn't get into the to the halving block. I'll I'll forget all about that transaction and not try to, like, reverse it or or try to, like, you know, have it where it just doesn't happen. Yeah. You know, make sure that it's got such a low fee that it'll never get in a block and eventually it'll just get kicked out by the system and you get your BTC back.
No, they just left it there. So you had like 45 blocks that had super abnormal high fees. Was it because they forgot about it? I don't know. What were they what what of any significance given the lunacy of these runatix could have been valuable in block 840,043. I don't know, but 840,043, that block had extraordinarily high fees. This is it's lunacy. And don't expect this kind of bullshit to ever ever end. It's sad. I hate having to put up with it, but it is what it is. Okay. From Runatix, that was, Wednesday's episode. I got Nate no, I'm sorry, natgas immersion boosted me 50,000 satoshis, brother. He says, I got a new Circle P idea for you. Hey Nat Gas, I got your phone number.
I sent you a text message. If you and I said, hey, it's it's none of your business. This is David. Get in touch with me about this idea for the circle p that you got. I wanna hear it because 50,000 sats, that's gonna get my attention. It it gets my attention. JC Denton with 3125 says, happy having and thanks for giving us the show multiple days a week. We appreciate you. Not as much as I appreciate you. Hbhgardens with 3,000 says, love the show, sir. Any thoughts on Matt Corallo's FUD about Bitcoin on Noster? I don't know what Matt Corallo is saying exactly.
So I don't feel comfortable talking about it. I'll see if I can dig into it. Dubravko with 16:50 says, take a look at this video and give me a good reason why this tow truck would try to tow that car. Best reason gets 10,000 satoshis. I think he might be referring to the video that was circulating on Twitter about that tow truck dude gets into a tow truck and runs this guy over at full speed. It's horrifying to watch which is why I don't go to Twitter that often because all I see is not only negative stuff but a person getting killed. I don't want to see somebody get killed. Anyway, Dabravko, I don't know. I'll have to take a look at the video.
George, George x mckee with 14:80 says ruins or ruins equals ruins. I agree. Blogging Bitcoin with a 1,000. I think I know why the first epoch was less than 4 years. In the beginning, the difficulty was very low. Here's a quote from Satoshi I read in the book of Satoshi. Quote I made the proof of work difficulty ridiculously easy to start with. So, for a little while in the beginning, a typical PC will be able to generate coins in just a few hours. It'll get a whole lot harder when competition makes the automatic adjustment drive up the difficulty. That makes sense. I think I can agree with adjustment drive up the difficulty.
That makes sense. I think I can agree with that. Ghost of Whitman with a 1,000 gives me a couple of emojis. Axle rod 525 no, actually 525 says nothing. 02ZX boosted, 421 says thanks. No thanks to the legendary sat fat pushers. Yeah. I hear you. Pies with 420. Thank you, sir. No thank you. God's death, 337. Thank you. No. Dank you. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use Bisc version 2.0.3, has been released. Quote, Bisc version 2.0.3 has been released with a number of important improvements and fixes including allowing buyers who make their own offers to decide the trade price and making the process more consistent for sellers to acquire reputation.
Buyers making offers now decide the trade price. If the seller sets a new price when taking your offer because they are still running old software then you can decide whether to proceed or reject cancel the trade with no violation of trade rules in this particular case. If you haven't noticed, you can add the most used markets as favorites. You can do that by clicking on the empty star when hovering over a market. Reputation is now consistent and your stars will only go up as you burn or lock more bsq. More changes in this area to come soon. We have also worked in the overall network stability and connectivity.
So BISK, if you're wondering, if you want to get KYC free Bitcoin, BISQ 2, that's they've kind of changed their name. They've full point release is now BISQ 2, b I s q 2, right, has been around forever. Bisq has been around for as long as I've been in Bitcoin. I got in in the summer of 2015. And they're still going strong, they're still working on their on their, on their software. So they're active under active development and you can use BISQ, b I s q, to get KYC free Bitcoin and you're probably gonna have to do that if you're, you know, living in certain countries like, oh, I don't know, Canada.
Right? So again, if you that's what you want, you want KYC free Bitcoin and you want to buy it with fiat, use Bisk 2, b I s q. Brainspool, they've made an announcement that is really kick ass. Brains pool lightning payouts are now available to all users. Lightning payouts are here. Get ready for the halving with instant daily payouts with no minimums or fees announced brains. Enter your lightning address in a financial account and set up a payout rule. Then, get your sats lightning fast. Improve your mining margins just in time for the 4th halving. Recently, lightning based payouts have also been launched by a KYC mining pool named Nicehash.
Back in February, Titan Mining has also announced Titan Lightning to facilitate nearly instant block reward distribution for miners. So Lightning Network is now being fully adopted by the mining side of the Bitcoin ecosystem for paying out the miners who are pointing their hash rate to these various pools. This is awesome. This is great. God only knows if Phil, you know, I mean, I I I presume it's gonna all be fine. However, we should be vigilant and not just assume that everything is going to be just fine. So we'll keep an eye on how this goes.
But this is the way moving forward. It's going to be layer 2 payouts for Bitcoin mining and the last people to install that will have the least amount of hash rate pointed at their pool. I guarantee it. Now, on to Cashew. Cashew nutshell version 0.15.3 has improved mint crash resistance. Casu Nutshell is a Chamian e cash wallet and a mint for Bitcoin lightning. Casu Nutshell is the reference implementation in Python. This update improves the crash resistance of a mint if the mint should fail during an outgoing lightning pay payment. The startup routine will now pick up those payments and invalidate all pending proofs associated with them if the payment succeeded.
Also, note this release includes a database migration for the Mint. Make sure to back up your Mint database before upgrading. If you're gonna upgrade, if you're running a mint, if you're doing this thing, make sure that you, back up your database for your mint before you actually do the upgrade. The wallet can now check pending invoices thanks to work by usebank using the command cashew invoices. Various flags have been added to the command which you can use using things like cashew well, just type in cashew invoicespace hyphen hyphen help and that will give you a list of what commands you can use.
The wallet can now restore e cash from all key sets of a mint with the command cash you restore. Thanks to an improvement by cjberry24. So if you're interested in running a mint cashew nutshell has upgraded, so be aware of all that. Ants pool and Bitmain acting as a pool of pools according to a report. This does not bode well, I don't like this. But amp pool slash bitmain is essentially a pool of mining pools. This is causing mining centralization according to a report. Quote, looking at the Merkle branches that mining pools send to their miners as part of Stratum's jobs, it's clear that the BTC com pool, Binance pool, Poolin, emcd, rawpool and possibly brains have exactly the same template and custom transaction prioritization as Antpool.
Analystoxb10c recently shared in a post. Stratumv1jobsincludepartsofthecoinbasetransactionandthemerclbranchesa minerneeds tocomputethemerclroot. If all branches are equal across all pools, the block template is exactly the same, he explained. I've heard speculation about this all being liked to link to an FPPS partnership with amppool/bitmain. Bitmain insures against bad pool luck, but you have to use bitmain's template or transaction prioritization and pay the mining reward to the insurer for later distribution. Essentially, a pool of pools and a lot of mining centralization added to analyst. I can confirm these findings.
And further note that I've observed both Ultimus pool and brains frequently sending jobs with identical Merkle branches to amp pool. When pools are just acting as proxies for other pools without being upfront about it, Bitcoiners need to take note. The time to demand Stratumv2 is now commented developer Matt Corallo. I agree. And I think that that's exactly what's going to happen. It is most likely the it's most likely probable that under in the days of stratumv1, that the templates were all exactly the same. And they were just mining, you know, the amp pool template. Okay.
Everything is in early days. We seek decentralization. But what are what's the what's the negative pressure on decentralization? Gravity. Gravity is everywhere. It's between physical objects in the universe such as suns and planets. It's in dust clouds. It can be like, you know, gas just even not even dust gas, just hydrogen will coalesce because of the forces of gravity to centralize and then it heats up and then it ignites in a fusion reaction and then boom you got a sun. Okay, our sun is the result of centralization. I don't want decentralization in the universe.
I also don't want complete centralization as in there's only one sun. Do you have any idea how big that sun would be if all the suns in the universe just coalesced and formed one sun? That doesn't make any sense either. However, just because the forces of gravity we're taught act on physical mass does not mean that the idea has not been ingrained in the human hairless treeless ape brain. It has. Things tend towards centralization for efficiency. That doesn't make it good. In fact, it makes it very bad. However, for some reason, humans just cannot get away from trying to make everything efficient.
I don't know why. There's a beauty in inefficiency. But, apparently, I'm the only one that sees it. Everybody else looks at it and says, oh, that's bad. Well, here we are in Bitcoin and centralization is occurring, but we're constantly trying to blow apart that centralization by things like writing code that results in stratumv2. There's always going to be a push and pull. There's never going to be complete decentralization. But because we hate centralization, there's never going to be complete centralization either. It's going to be it's going to kind of exist in in the the in between space forever.
Get used to it. That's gonna do it for the morning roundup. Dad says jokes. We started a band and called it books so no one can judge us by our covers. If you've ever been in a band that played cover music, you know exactly what that means. Alright. Central centralization and decentralization are going to coexist just like stupid runes and ordinals are going to coexist with real actual money. And what's also going to coexist with those two systems are people that just refuse to understand that fiat currency doesn't work. It looks like it works, it gets them what they need on the day that they need it, but it's inevitable that it will fail.
And if you're left holding a fiat bag when this inevitably fails, probably within our well within our lifetimes, you you really need the escape hatch that is Bitcoin. I'm glad to see Jason Rick. I'm glad to see K&C Cattle Company coming over to Noster. Because, like, they've already been orange peeled on Bitcoin. They understand. As ranchers, they understand. You're talking about some of the most conservative people in the world and they get it as far as the fact that their fiat money is failing them. It fails them day in day out and it just gets worse and worse. So they got orange pilled. Now, they're over on Noster.
They're starting to get purple pilled. But the only way that they're going to remain here is if you throw them a little bit of attention. Nobody wants to throw up something and get, you know, no, you know, re notes or no somebody saying, hi. Thanks for coming. I'm glad to see you here. Welcome to Nostra. How can I help you stay more, you know, more pleasant? Like, to be the Walmart greeter like Jack used to be for Nostra all the time. He was like, welcome. He'd welcome everybody. I still try to do it. Right? But I've pushed out Jason Rick's Noster in pub over on Noster. I've pushed out K and C cattle over on Noster and they've got they've, you know, I've got beef initiatives Noster account to acknowledge that they're here and push their stuff out on the beef initiative stuff. I go back to my account and I push out the stuff that beef initiative pushed out that pushed out, you know, the Jason, Rick and K and C cattle company stuff. It's the fabulous web that I'm weaving here, but it's not enough.
I need your help to get some eyeballs on Jason Rick and K&C Cattle Company. Alright, so go look for them on Noster. I'll try to get their impubs in the show notes. Also, if you value what I do, boostograms. Set your streaming high. If you're if you're unable to understand what I mean by streaming me satoshis while you're listening to this, it's because you're not using a modern pod casting application like fountain or pod verse or I don't there's like 15 of them. You get chapters, you get chapter art, you get all you get clips, you get transcripts, you get all kinds of stuff that your legacy podcast apps won't do. But the best part about it of all is that podcasting 2.0 and the modern podcasting apps are one of the only ways that you can instantly show me that you value what I do. That you value the show. That I'm bringing you news.
That way you don't have to read it while you can just listen to me read it to you in the car while you're going to work, man. It's gotta be worth something. And if you think that I'm giving you some kind of value then please donate to this show. It's the only way it works. I have no advertisers. I don't have a producer. I don't have a director. I'm a one man show and I've been doing it for over 5 years. This is episode 8 187. Donate. Donate to the show and help me make the show even better because without those donations, I can't do things like up my game by buying, you know, like a whole mobile podcasting studio.
That came from donations. Now I got to figure out who to go get, right? But I've upped the game. You helped me do that through those donations. I'm always going to be asking you for donations to the show. If you think that I'm bringing you value, then show me that value. Throw me boostograms. Do boost me on Nostr, whatever it is that you want to do, but make sure that you're saying I love the show. So that I know that you're giving me value, your value, for the value that I gave you when I do the production of the Bitcoin and podcast. And I will see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.