Join me today for Episode 1042 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Chicanery Pre-Bybit Hack
- MSTR Adds 20K BTC to Stack
- Another Hack! Infini Exploit
- Ken Griffin Wants In . . . Badly
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/my-top-3-takeaways-from-fidelity-and-voltages-recent-lightning-report
https://x.com/JacobKinge/status/1893899097645498454
https://x.com/toastpunk/status/1893569851199049875
https://x.com/Brainsofweb3/status/1894079045219828034
https://cointelegraph.com/news/wintermute-withdraws-38-m-sol-binance-ahead-2-b-solana-unlock
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/02/24/strategy-adds-20-4k-bitcoin-bringing-stack-to-499k-tokens
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://value4value.info/
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- https://geyser.fund/project/thebitcoinandpodcast
https://decrypt.co/307513/crypto-neo-bank-infini-50-million-exploit
https://www.theblock.co/post/343075/ken-griffin-says-citadel-could-enter-as-market-maker-on-exchanges-like-coinbase-pushes-trump-for-regulatory-clarity
https://atlas21.com/montana-says-no-to-bitcoin-as-a-state-reserve-bill-rejected/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/vls-v0-13-0/
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 11:52AM Pacific Standard Time. I'm late. It's the February 2025. This is episode ten forty two, I believe. Is it ten forty two of Bitcoin and let's find out. It is. It's ten forty two of Bitcoin and it's a bad day. Woo hoo. Man, it's Monday, bro. And there is no better day or no better way than to greet your Monday with the gnashing of teeth and great big giant claws, and blood in the streets, because man, it's ringing in blood. It's okay though. It's it's okay. Here's the thing, The reason there's so much blood out there is that people are freaking out. Except you guys. You guys don't have to freak out because we've been here before, and we're going to be here again.
Alright? So everybody stay calm. I mean, come on, guys. Stay calm. And let's get into the carnage, but just before we do, let's talk a little bit about lightning. Now Friday, I gave you a very pretty much an in-depth report on the use of lightning, how it's working, who's using it, for what reasons, you know, lightning is being used, and that was delivered by Frank Korva. Well, I guess over the weekend, old Frankie decided to kinda distill down what he thought was going on with that whole Lightning deal, And he's written this one for Bitcoin Magazine to start our day, to start our week, and to start this Monday, the day of moans.
It's a moan day. He says, my top three takeaways from Fidelity and Voltage's recent Lightning report. In a report released on Wednesday, Fidelity Digital Assets, in collaboration with Lightning payment provider, Voltage, released a report on the state of the Lightning Network. The report details the many ways in which Lightning Network has grown since its launch in 2018. It also illustrates how businesses have begun incorporating Lightning in 2024 than any year prior. Oh, begun incorporating Lightning more in 2024 than any year prior that larger channels are forming on the network and more Lightning nodes are coming online.
Some key stats from the piece include the following. The total lightning capacity denominated in United States dollars has increased by 2767% since 2020. Two, its Bitcoin denominated capacity has grown by 384% in the same period. And three, currently, almost all payments over lightning below 1,000,000 sats are processed in less than one point one seconds. While these stats made me optimistic, it was other information in the report that really resonated with me and made me rethink how I view Bitcoin and Lightning. Below were the top three takeaways from the report.
Number one, Lightning payments are gaining traction on Nasr, at this point, the world's largest Bitcoin circular economy, as Nasr users have sent over 3,600,000 individual zaps in just the last six months. Projects like ARC, which is another Bitcoin layer two protocol, illustrate that Lightning has use cases beyond just peer to peer channels. ARC allows users to share virtual UTXOs with a larger group instead of a on a one to one basis and can be built upon in many ways that many other people didn't initially anticipate. Three, the hodl mentality is one of the things still slowing lightning adoption. In other words, if bitcoin enthusiasts don't spend their bitcoin, lightning growth may stagnate, which could hurt bitcoin's value proposition.
So as we're here at the beginning of 2025, a year that many think will be big for lightning, I can't help but be optimistic to see what sort of traction Lightning gains in the next ten months. It's high time Bitcoin is used more as a medium of exchange the way Satoshi intended it for it to be. Okay. So I I like the boil down from Frank. It it's nice. It's it's a nice little way to kinda wrap up that rather lengthy report that I gave you last week, but it's not going to temper the rest of the news that I have for you today. Before we start the gnashing of teeth, let's just remember that we're all adults.
Okay? We can take it. Unless, of course, you're an Ethereum holder. Because according to a Twitter user named Jacob King, Binance is mass dumping Ethereum. Never seen anything like this before. Something big is coming very soon. This doesn't look good. And then he gives a screenshot of, apparently, Binance's hot wallet or several hot wallets, I I should actually say, dumping ether in in in amounts like $11,245. Another dump for 1,000 and, let's see, 1,160 ether has just been sold. And, I mean, the if you wanna get the US dollar numbers, let me give you the US dollar numbers. Here's the dumps in order on this one screenshot, and this is all over the course of one hour from just nothing but Binance except Coinbase did dump a little bit on one just one shot.
3,400,000.0, 3 point 2 million, 2 point 8 million dollars, 2 point 8 million dollars, 2 point 8 million dollars, 2 point 9 million dollars, 2 point 8 million dollars, 1 point 9 million dollars, 5 point 7 million dollars, and then Coinbase's sell is at $1,500,000. And then we finish it off with finance selling $4,250,000 worth of ETH. Those are all dumps that all happen within an hour. It's just Ethereum. But it's not just really Ethereum. There's some other things too, but this guy named Toastpunk, and he's got a dot ETH behind his name on Twitter, so do without what you will. But he's got a thread here that's kinda talking about what's going on with Binance liquidating not just ether, but also a whole bunch of BTC.
Now I have not been able to directly vet this. Okay? So just understand. But something is not adding up, and he actually says the exact same thing to start this thread. Toastpunk.e says, something is not adding up. Just ten days before the biggest hack in crypto history, Binance liquidated nearly all of its holdings of Bitcoin and Ether. Coincidence? Unlikely. Let's break it down. Just pausing for effect here and to to make sure that you heard what I said. This isn't them dumping it right now. This particular thread is talking about how they started dumping a whole bunch of their stuff ten days before the Bybit hack.
You know, the biggest hack in history that we've had so far in this industry? Yeah. That hack. Ten days before that shit, Binance, according to Toastpunk, was liquidating a whole bunch of ether and Bitcoin. Now he says that on February 2025, Binance's internal wallet showed a 94.1% in BTC holdings and a 99.9% drop in ETH holdings. So the numbers are this. Binance was holding 46,896 Bitcoin. That's gone down to 2,747. It had 216,000 ETH. That's gone down to 175 ETH. Not not 175,000. No. 175 ETH. This wasn't some minor rebalance. They dumped nearly everything except for BNB, which only saw a 16.6% reduction.
Compare that to its USDC holdings. In January, they had 805,000,000 USDC. In February of this year, this month, they are holding a 57.5% increase to $1,260,000,000 or I'm sorry. 1,260,000,000.00 USDC. This was a deliberate move. Then on February 2025, Bybit was hacked for $1,460,000,000 in the largest crypto exploit ever. 500,000 ETH was drained. It accounts for 16% of all crypto hacks combined. And guess what? A week before, Binance quietly dumping ETH. Who had this information in advance? Who knew to exit before Bybit got drained? Why was Binance so precise in reducing ETH exposure?
We need blockchain sleuths on this. Zac, xBT, and Arkham, and others, this needs a deep dive. Binance didn't just randomly sell. Bybit didn't just randomly get hacked. Crypto never has coincidences. And to finish us us off on this thread, Toast Punk says, if you think this is too suspicious to ignore, repost this thread. The space needs to pay attention. This is bigger than it looks. Okay. Again, I have not vetted this. I don't know. I I just haven't had the time. I had a a morning that was basically me shuttling some people around my car to go to, you know, a doctor's office, and things took a lot longer than I expected. So I just wasn't able to get in on this and take a look around and rummage and shit like that.
But but it is out there. It it it is somebody and other he's not the only person that's talking about this, by the way. So something's out there. Something's going on. Now what actually did happen, I think, is probably going to take a lot longer for us to figure out so that when we finally start squaring that circle and putting all the bits and pieces together into a coherent timeline, you know, then we'll probably be able to tell exactly what happened. But I still think this Bybit hack, it we haven't had enough time go by for all the people to do all of the things and all of the heavy lifting that it's going to take to be able to figure this out. So don't think that what I just told you is the God's honest truth.
But also don't, you know, sit on your laurels and say, well, because, you know, Dave can't prove it and he doesn't have, like, the evidence to back it up, that it surely, it couldn't have happened. Couldn't have been Binance. They couldn't have, you know, somehow or another done x, y, or z. It's possible. I I mean, I've never really trusted c z or Changpeng Zhao, you know, the old I mean, it's like, you know, he's not even supposed to be affiliated with Binance anymore, and yet somehow or another, he seems to still be calling shots over there. I don't know. But Solana is also being sold off by Binance.
Now this particular tweet is from brains of web three, and it's dated February. So this was this morning. And it says Binance is dumping their Solana. Bag on us until it's over? I don't know. Let's look at what this dump looks like. So I'm looking at the screenshot. This is 100% Binance. Looks like eight it looks like eight cells in this one screenshot. Hot Wallet from Binance, sold $1,250,000 of Solana, and then $1,210,000 of Solana, and then 1,000,000, and then 1,600,000.0, and then 1,000,000, and then 2,100,000.0, and then one for 1,600,000.0, and then 1,900,000.0, let's just call it straight up 2,000,000 of dollars worth of Solana, and then the big one is $3,830,000 worth of Solana.
All of these except for a Kraken deposit and a Coinbase deposit was out of Wintermute. Now Wintermute comes up in this next piece written by Zoltan Vardai, Cointelegraph. Wintermute withdraws 38,000,000 sol from Binance ahead of the $2,000,000,000 Solana unlock. Well, like, if you're wondering wait a minute. Are you talking about the hack? No. No. No. This is different. This is the $2,000,000,000 Solana unlock. We'll get into it right now. Wintermute withdrew nearly $40,000,000 worth of Solana from Binance in the past twenty four hours, over a week ahead of the largest Solana token unlock in the project's history.
Crypto market maker Wintermute withdrew over three no. $38,200,000 worth of Solana from Binance in twenty four hours leading up to the nine 09:02AM UTC on February, ARCIM intelligence data shows. The transfer occurred days ahead of Solana's two billion dollar token unlock, which is set to release over eleven point two million SOL tokens into circulation on March. Solana's price fell by over 7.5% in the past twenty four hours to an over three month low of a hundred and $55 last seen at the November, CoinTelegraph Markets Pro data shows.
So there seem honestly, given what we just talked about here, it seems like there was there's some kind of inside information that was floating around, and a lot of people are acting on that information. But just like in legacy finance land, Us plebs are gonna be the last to know what the hell's going on behind the scenes. And it's it's a sad state of affairs that that this entire industry has had to basically take on the pall of everything that has already come before. The legacy financial system is purpose built to keep the plebs and the rubes and the morons and the Joes on the street completely in the dark from what's going on over there behind the scenes.
This is what happens when people get really rich. They stop giving a shit about what got them into the thing in the first place, and all they care about is just this insane amount of money that they're getting. So I want everybody out there to be really careful. And there's a way there's ways to do that. First of all, keep on DCA ing into Bitcoin. Just daily cost average $25 a week, $50 a week. I don't know. Whatever you got, $500 a week if it's not gonna hurt you. But make sure, number two, that you keep it yourself.
You custody the Bitcoin yourself. Three, sell if you have anything other than Bitcoin that is a shit coin, sell it directly into Bitcoin now and then take that off of exchanges and keep it custody it yourself under your own private key. There is no reason in the world to keep anything, especially if it's your Bitcoin, on an exchange, especially after Bybit got hacked. Even though they didn't get hacked for any Bitcoin, they just got a whole bunch of ether. And there seems to be a all manner of chicanery going on with the ether that came out of that hack. Because I've heard reports everywhere from the guy the the hacker is washing it through some kind of tornado cache kind of, you know, mixer kind of thing.
And then I've also heard that he sent it he he that that there's no way there's no way that that person can spend that money without everybody seeing, you know, where it's going, and they're gonna be able to catch him. And then after that, I saw that the guy or there were reports that the guy was selling the ETH directly for Bitcoin. And then I've seen that the guy, the hacker, or the hackers have sent the entirety of the hack to a burn address. I don't think anybody really knows what the hell is going on. It's too confusing. There's too much fog of war going on.
But this all no matter what all that shit is, we the big elephant in the room is, will Ethereum roll back its chain? Now that's been the discussion ever since this hack. It's it almost happened immediately. And for those of you who are not privy to the history of Ethereum, which is one of the reasons why I hate this chain, I think it's nothing but a scam. And here's one of the main reasons why. That thing cranked out its first Ethereum in 2015 only after cranking out 70,000,000 ETH and distributing it distributing it amongst three or four people.
Those being at least Joseph Lubin and Vitalik Buterin and then a couple of other people. They're the insiders, and they hold the majority of all the ETH that was ever printed. And then they opened up the chain and it started actually through proof of work mechanism mining mechanisms started actually producing ETH. Right? So that's 2015. In 2016, we had the DAO hack on ether or on Ethereum chain. And it was supposed to be that a whole bunch of people were gonna donate a whole bunch of Ethereum that they that they held into this decentralized autonomous organization that was going to vote on, like, I don't know, five I can't remember how many projects were up for it, but there was, like, several different projects that were that the Dow was going to fund.
And the winner was Slockit, s l o c k I t, I believe, is or it may be s l o k I t. But it was an electronic lock, you know, for doors and, you know, stuff like that. And it was gonna be on, you know, the slot. It was gonna be on the the the the Ethereum time chain. You know, the odds are gonna be on the blockchain so that if you rented an Airbnb, once you actually put Ethereum into the the Slocket wallet to unlock that particular that particular lock, then and only then would it actually unlock and you could get into the house. That was the theory. But all of that ETH was stolen.
The entire DAO got hacked, and I can't remember how much ETH ETH was in that thing. It was a lot. So much so that Ethereum, the Ethereum the Ethereum Foundation, all the developers in Ethereum, Joseph Lubin, Vital Buterin, and any of the other people that were involved in that shit decided that they were going to roll back the chain so that they would essentially erase the hack. And the people that, quote, unquote, lost their money would get their money back. You see how this works? So what happened is that immediately a chain split occurred.
One chain became ETH classic, which still had the information in about the involvement of the DAO hack. So the people's wallets that lost their money still reflected the fact that they had been stolen from. The ETH chain that every or the Ethereum chain that everybody's on right now is actually a slightly different chain than it was before. The original chain is ETH classic, and a lot of people don't realize that. The new the the Ethereum that you have today is a new chain from 2016. Sure. You reaches back into 2015 just like the ether classic or Ethereum classic chain, but this chain does not contain the information about the DAO hack.
What does that mean? It means that they could and they did press a button and made every and change the the the balance of of several hundred people's wallets. The the people that held the wallets themselves, they sure, they might have voted to say, yes. I want my money back. I mean, that's human nature. But their them holding their wallet, they didn't have to do anything special to that. They didn't vote, and they didn't, like, somehow or another do some kind of fancy add this little line of code into your wallet so that, I don't know, the the the rollback of the Dow hack would be affected. No. It was was just a very, very few, very few number of people that said we're rolling it back.
And we always Bitcoiners have always looked at that and said, that's how you know Ethereum isn't secure because it's not immutable. The people behind the chain have full control of all the balances of that chain. Every single wallet is under the control of Joseph Lubin, Vitalik Buterin, and a whole bunch of developers and probably a whole whoever else is involved in the in the Ethereum Foundation. But that still means that if you hold ether in your wallet, it does it it doesn't really matter, does it? Because at any given time, these assholes can get into a room and, I don't know, get hammered on a whole bunch of blow and whiskey and watch some girls spin around a pole or something and then decide they're just going to change the balances of your wallet because that's exactly what they did in 2016.
And now here we are again. We got the Bybit hack. And almost immediately, calls for the rollback of the chain were raining like a West Texas thunderstorm. Now all the people that I know, all the people that I respect and love, I saw them all on Twitter begging. The bunch of Bitcoiners begging Vitalik Buterin to roll back the chain. You've got to do it for your hodlers. Of course, it was a troll, and there was a a whole bunch of other people took it completely out of context or just got the context wrong thinking, well, see, now here's a whole bunch of Bitcoiners talking about how they wanna roll back the chain. I was like, you know, they just completely screwed over screwed themselves over on their ethics. And I'm like, you don't understand this crew.
This crew is dying to watch this shit happen again. Why we need a second time for this to happen to prove to idiots that don't believe that it happened the first time is beyond my comprehension. All we should have to do is look at the Dow hack to tell people that think Ethereum is great, that it's not great. It's nowhere close to great. In fact, it is one of the most potentially deadliest things to your future wealth that exist if you are an Eth holder. But no. Nobody but there's so many people who are like, oh, no. That's never gonna happen again, and we want it to happen again.
I was I am one of the people that are like, rah rah. Let's roll back the chain. But not because not really because I want anybody to be made whole, although I don't like the fact that they lost their money. What's more at stake is the fact that this chain's existence is dangerous. It's dangerous to everybody that deals with it. It's dangerous to the entire industry. All the altcoins are, all the shitcoins are, all of the meme coins, all of them are dangers to this industry. There only needs to be one coin for this industry, and the industry will be just fine. And the industry will still be an industry with only Bitcoin. I'd many people won't believe. Well, how can you have an industry with only one cryptocurrency?
You can. And that's exactly what we should have been doing, but we've wasted our freaking time for over a decade on this crap that has done nothing but cause suicide hotline numbers to appear out of the pure thin blue ether every single time somebody gets hacked. And it's just it's amazing to watch. But when you so when you see your favorite Bitcoiner and you see a screenshot of them somewhere screaming that the Ethereum chain should be rolled back, you need to not immediately jump to the conclusion that, oh, well, that's not a real Bitcoiner because they would never want the chain rollback. We do wanna rollback on Ethereum. We I guess we're gonna have to have a second instance of them proving themselves that they can do whatever they want to do with your money if you are an Ethereum bag holder.
Just saying. Now so far, so good when it comes to Michael Saylor only holding Bitcoin. And he holds a little bit more as of this morning. Strategy, Bitcoin stacked just shy of 500,000 tokens after the latest $2,000,000,000 purchase. Steven Alpher from CoinTelegraph strategy bought its Bitcoin brought its Bitcoin holdings up to just a hair shy of half a million with its latest acquisition. The company led by Michael Saylor on Monday morning announced the purchase of 20,356 Bitcoin for just under $2,000,000,000 or an average price of 97,514.
And Michael Sailor just got blown out of the water with the serial red dildos to the downside. Just saying. Just immediately. Immediately. So I think a lot of the down just pausing here to say, I think a lot a lot of the Bitcoin downward pressure that we're seeing today is twofold. Honest fear being experienced by people who don't know any better because what they saw happened with the Bybit hack. But I think at least 50% are people exploiting that fear and wanting to destroy Michael Saylor, they always do this. This is a compounding effect that I'm starting to see here. It's like this is like of the one week that you might have wanted to take off there, Mike. This might have, you know, been the week, but he was already buying Bitcoin before the hack happened, so he really can't just not announce it. We're gonna find out through FCC or SEC filings anyway.
Let's continue. This comes after last week's $2,000,000,000.00 percentage convertible note offering, which raised $1,990,000,000 after expenses. MicroStrategy or Strategy's Bitcoin stack now sits at just under half a million tokens acquired for $33,100,000,000 or an average price of $66,357 each At Bitcoin's current price of 95,500, the holdings are worth about $47,700,000,000. Strategy shares are up marginally in premarket action after a Friday tumble that took the stock price below $300 a share. Yeah. They got smoked.
They got smoked. The Bybit hack is affecting everybody. Like I said, not a single Bitcoin, as far as I know, was taken out of Bybit. It's all Ethereum, and it's you know, half of that's because Ethereum has just broke technology. And the other part is the fact that Bybit apparently wasn't able to secure properly their shit. In either event, it scared the living bejesus out of everybody, including people who held Bitcoin who no longer hold Bitcoin because they don't understand the difference. So as I wrap up the first part of the show, it is a bad day.
There's no denying that. People are scared. People don't know what the hell is going on. And honestly, here's what's really freaking me out about the whole thing is that I'm watch people I'm watching people sell the one thing, and in this case, their Bitcoin, because they're scared of something that happened last week to a completely different chain, a shit chain. And yet my question is this, they're running around hair on fire, clothes on fire, selling the one thing that will save them. What are they selling it into? I it's almost as it's almost like watching my favorite Pepe the Frog meme guy with his hair on fire selling all his Bitcoin and running smack dab into a chain link fence and can't go any farther. But the only thing he witnesses on the other side of that is the fiat world, which is melting down.
There's nowhere to go. There's nothing you can put your cash into. No one can afford houses. Food prices are through the roof. I'd met like, medical costs are through the roof. Ev like, it is it is a complete clown show out there. I thought Germany would it like they look like that to me over the weekend, they had their elections and everything was gonna be fine with Germany. This morning, I find out that, hey, meet this new boss, same as the old boss. It is nothing it it is either a it's either shit you can't afford out there, and most of these people selling their Bitcoin don't have enough Bitcoin to want a freaking shotgun. It's just a whole bunch of people screaming and running away.
And the only thing out there is is a clown world that's on fire itself. It's like everything is burning down. There's only one remedy. Ladies and gentlemen, the only thing that you can do to escape this freaking nonsense. Don't sell your bitcoin. Buy more bitcoin. Hold your own bitcoin with your own private keys. Let's run the numbers. CNBC futures and commodities. West Texas Intermediate Oil is up a quarter of a point to $70.60. It got hammered on Friday. It was pretty ugly, man. Brent North Sea is up a third to $74.66 a barrel. Natural gas is getting hammered this morning, taking it between the legs 5.6% in the red to $3.99 per thousand cubic feet. Gasoline is down almost a point to just right at $2 a gallon.
Gold is up a third, but everything else is sucking swamp water. Silver down a point, platinum down a point and a quarter, copper down a point, palladium in between the legs, 5% to the downside. Ag, all in the red except for cotton and lumber, and cotton is our winner today, point 76% to the upside. Everything else is really not looking good, especially chocolate, our biggest loser today at six and a quarter to the downside. Live cattle having a better time of it, point 61% to the upside. Lean hogs down a quarter, but feeder cattle are up 1.79. The Dow is up almost a half point, so I guess everything is okay in fiat land.
But the S and P is unchanged. Nasdaq is down a half a point. S and P Mini is up point four six of a percent. $94,170 brings us yet one more freaking time down below a hundred $1,900,000,000,000 to $1,870,000,000,000 of market cap, we can only purchase 31.7 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,828,382.32 of. And average fees per block are relatively high for the first time in a long time. We are looking at high priority rates of 12 Satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at eight. BIM pools around the world are are filling up.
It looks like there's 78 blocks containing a 4,000 unconfirmed transactions. So things are nature is healing in one direction while it's being burnt to the ground in another direction. Hash rate has come off of its highs. It is well off of its 850 exahash high down to 749.3 exahashes per second, and I expected this. I expected at one point or another, there was gonna be some miners who were like, we, we're just gonna not, you know, crank up our miners until you idiots figure out what you wanna do. So I am not surprised at all by that number. Now from Friday's episode Hack Attack, where I first brought you the news about the Bybit hack, but I had not yet seen the carnage that would ensue afterwards.
I've got Psyduck with five twenty says, Psyduck. Okay. Paul sir nine with 500 says, thanks again, my friend. Have a great weekend and recharge those batteries. Vector with 500 says nothing. Turkey with 500 says nothing. God's death with two thirty seven says thank you, sir. No thank you. Yodel with two forty says, just saw I don't have to share with all of Nostra when I boost. That is correct. Justin with a hundred sat says, rest in peace, Bill. Thank you. My friend Bill died last Thursday. It's not good way not a good way because I found out Friday morning that he had passed away, and we're still dealing with the aftermath of that bullshit. So keep your family members informed as to how much you love them, your friends as well, because you never will know when you lose them.
Pies with a hundred says, hashtag 40 HPW. And that is what, hours of podcast per week. That's the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Let's start this one off with, well, another exploit. A Neo bank named Infini was hit by a $50,000,000 exploit. Let's hear about it from Vismaya v out of Decrypt. Crypto Neo bank Infini lost $49,500,000 in a hack allegedly carried out by a former developer abusing his administrative privileges. The attacker, who had worked on Infini's contract, leveraged their privileges after the project was completed to drain funds from the platform according to blockchain analytics platform, Cybers.
In a report shared with Decrypt, smart contract audit firm Quill Audits confirmed that the exploit resulted from, quote, compromised access and privilege escalation with the attacker exploiting a private key breach that granted them access to a compromised account. Quote, the hacker gained access to a private key associated with the account 0431, the report notes. Quote, this account had been granted a special role that allowed it to withdraw funds from the vault. The hacker reportedly initiated two transactions, $11,450,000 in the first and 38,060,000.00 in the second, leading to the total stolen amount of 49,500,000.0 from the Morpho MEV Capital USDC vault that's CoinCenter's stablecoin USDC.
Is it coins not CoinCenter. Oh, god. What's the name of that freaking company? I can't remember right now. Anyway, USDC is like Tether, but a much less, much less of a market share. The funds were then quickly swapped from USDC coin into Dai and converted into 17,696 ETH. Then the funds were transferred to a secondary address. Following the breach, Kristen Lee, Infini's founder, took to Twitter to acknowledge the incident and offer reassurance. He said the team had been negligent when transferring the authority before. Quote, it is ultimately my responsibility. This has sounded the alarm.
There is no problem with liquidity. Full compensation can be paid, and the funds are being traced, Lee said. Despite the breach, Infini continued to allow withdrawals. Lee reassured users that, quote, full compensation can be paid in the worst case scenario. Lee expressed hope for recovering the stolen funds and offered the hacker twenty percent of the stolen amount assuming that no legal action would be taken if the funds were returned. The lack of further obfuscation techniques means the stolen assets might still be traceable. Cybers provided an analysis stating that the hacker retained the admin rights, went undetected for over one hundred days, later funneling the stolen funds through the Ethereum based coin mixer, Tornado Cash.
Quote, this incident highlights the critical risks of retained administrative privileges and smart contracts, Hakan Unal, senior blockchain scientist at Cybers AI, told Decrypt. Quote, in the meantime, this serves as a strong reminder for projects to thoroughly audit and revoke unnecessary permissions post deployment, end quote. Infini shared its official statement hours after the hack saying all transactions including transfers, deposits, and withdrawals remained unaffected. Quote, we are deeply sorry. I'm so sorry for the concern this causes.
Our team is working around the clock to investigate and secure all systems at the moment, Infini tweeted on Monday. Quote, it's frustrating because these aren't new problems, Quill audits research team told the crypt, quote, we've seen this play out repeatedly, yet projects still underestimate how critical it is to lock down access, end quote. The team shared that until teams start treating access control as a core security priority and not an afterthought, these hacks will keep happening. It's not just about better tech, it's about better habits, the research team said. The breach at Infini follows a major exploit at crypto exchange Bybit, which suffered a massive loss of $1,400,000,000 in Ethereum and related tokens last Friday, making it one of the biggest hacks in the industry's history.
On chain analysis revealed Lazarus Group, a North Korean state sponsored hacking group, to be behind the attack. Bybit Bybit's response was similar to Infinize in some ways as the exchange opted to keep withdrawals open and vowed to cover the loss if the funds were not covered. The hack comes amid growing concerns about security in the defi space with over $2,200,000,000 in crypto stolen last year and 50% of the stolen funds linked to North Korean hacking groups, as per blockchain analysis firm, Chainalysis report.
Quote, the number of individual hacking incidents went up from 382 incidents in 2023 to 303 in 2024, the report said. How is it that it's even a question that you're not serious about revoking access to your contractors when they've completed a mission or your employees after they've either quit or you've let them go or flat ass fired them or even if they, I don't know, died outside your doors. You should be revoking access immediately. The one of the last places that I worked for, even I, as the person who said, hey. Look. This isn't working out for me. I wish you all the best. I gotta go. And then I said, oh, PS. As a reminder, make sure that you revoke my access to all of these accounts, and then I listed them.
And I felt stupid for doing it because I was thinking as I was writing, I was like, well, of course they know to do this. Well, maybe I wasn't being so stupid after all. So if you wanna be ethical about it, next time you leave a job, please remind your ex your new found ex boss to revoke your privileged access, please. Because this kind of crap, this is ridiculous. They left the door wide open to a guy that they trusted to actually build a thing, and the guy that built the thing ripped the thing off. How dumb do we have to be?
How juvenile do we have to act, especially in the face of all these people that hate us anyway? I'm not a fan of USDC or Infini or CryptoNeo banks. Just buy Bitcoin and hold Bitcoin. But outside of that, the entire world is looking at it as like it's this one thing. And we all know that Bitcoin should be kept separate out of all the rest of this stuff. But when we're making mistakes like this, how is it that they don't think we're stupid and juvenile and not worth their time. They just had Bybit happen, and now we've got another $50,000,000 hack because these idiots decided that we'll get around to revoking that dude's access later on.
Yeah. That's not how this happens. So onto legacy fiat land where Ken Griffin says that Citadel could enter as a market maker on exchanges like Coinbase and pushes Trump for regulatory clarity. Daniel Kuhn is writing this one for the block. Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder and CEO of Citadel LLC, is planning to steer his firm into crypto trading according to comments made at the twenty twenty five UBS Financial Services conferences in Key Biscayne, Florida. Oh, so they're out in The Keys, sunning themselves, probably with a bunch of prostitutes and sex cocaine, but the move, reportedly inspired by president Trump's embrace of the industry, is not the first time Griffin has indicated Citadel would embrace crypto, but it is the clearest sign that the firm will actually make an entrance.
At the conference, Ken Griffin, a former crypto skeptic who once called Bitcoin a jihadist call against the dollar, said that Trump that the Trump administration should push for regular or regulatory guidelines to keep fraud at bay and enable banks and asset managers to enter. Bloomberg reported on Monday that Citadel, the largest market maker on the New York Stock Exchange, could enter in such a capacity on exchanges like Coinbase. A market maker is a company or person who buys and sells securities to keep markets liquid and stable. Quote, we've seen time and time again in markets where your tier one players are allowed to participate and they are actually markets that clean themselves up, he said. So I'd like to see that happen in the cryptocurrency space, and that would be great regulatory guidance to give, end quote.
Griffin also criticized the Biden administration's evil approach to regulation by enforcement and praised efforts like Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, which is reportedly considering using blockchain tech to improve government productivity. It's bananas on the blockchain. Yet one more time. Oh well, they'll never learn. In recent months, Griffin has spoken more frankly about the mistake of avoiding crypto. On the same day that Bitcoin surpassed a hundred thousand dollars for the first time, for instance, Griffin told the times that crypto is part of American people reclaiming agency in their lives after electing Donald Trump.
This is not the first time Griffin said Citadel may have missed out by not trading crypto sooner. In 2022, weeks before the blowout of Do Kwon's Terra blockchain that kick started a market wide meltdown, Griffin said it was fair to assume Citadel would begin to engage with the industry over the months to come. Quote, I still have my skepticism, but there are hundreds and millions of people in the world today who disagree with that to the extent that we're trying to help institutions and investors solve their portfolio allocation problems, we have to give serious consideration to being a market maker in cryptocurrencies.
That, of course, did not transpire, and the event likely shaped Griffin's opinion about the industry for the past several years. While Griffin appears to see an opportunity in crypto once again, he remains critical of its utility. Quote, what I don't care for about crypto is, what problem does it solve for our economy? He said that in December. What problem does it solve? And that's everything you need to know about where Ken Griffin's mind is when it comes to this industry. This is a guy who's breaking the first rule of investing. You do not invest in, and that's your money, your time, your effort, your ideas.
You don't invest anything into something you do not fully understand. And this last statement and it's not crypto. It's Bitcoin. Let's be freaking clear about this. Everything outside of Bitcoin is a scam, an unregistered security, or just designed to lift all of the money out of your wallet and put it into somebody else's pants. It's Bitcoin. Everything else is shitcoin. So his what his question really is what it should be this. What I don't care for about Bitcoin is what problem does it solve for our economy? Well, Ken, then you clearly don't understand possibly two things.
I know you don't understand Bitcoin. But if you actually are sitting there looking at the world's economy and not seeing a problem, then that means one of only two things. You're so rich that you don't give a shit and that no matter what happens, you're gonna be fine, and that's probably true. Two, you literally don't understand what's going on. You don't understand that printing money is a recipe for disaster at the nation state level. You don't understand that as more and more nation states become larger and larger percentages of nations of the world that do continue to print money that you put the entire global economy at risk.
These are the things that Ken don't Ken doesn't seem to understand. I feel bad for Ken that he doesn't understand them, but I have a sneaky suspicion that he damn well does. But he doesn't care about your wealth. This Bitcoin is an affront to him being able to call the shots as he has been calling. And you will say, but he's getting into crypto. Yeah. He wants to gather intelligence. He doesn't give a shit about making a market. That's gonna make him a lot of money anyway, and he already knows that. But he is gonna have his hooks into a lot more intelligence, a lot more data.
He's gonna be able to determine a lot more factors and functions about what's going on here than he can without being a market maker directly in crypto. But I guarantee you the money that he makes being a market maker is secondary to his concern. His primary concern is what can he learn to help destroy Bitcoin. I guarantee you that's why he's there. And it's too bad. And you know what else is too bad? My friends in Montana screwed up. They have said no to Bitcoin as a state reserve. The bill has been rejected. Atlas twenty one is writing this one, and it's Atlas21.com, if you wanna know. On February, the Montana House of Representatives shit the bed.
41 to 59 to reject the bill that would have allowed Bitcoin to be included among the state's assets. The proposal, known as we're stupid number four twenty nine sorry. It's actually house bill number four twenty nine, aimed to create a special fund for investments in precious metals and stablecoins as well as digital assets with an average market capitalization exceeding $750,000,000,000 over the past year, a criterion currently met only by Bitcoin. This rejection was primarily due to concerns over the management of public funds. And during the session, representative Stephen Kelly stated, quote, it's still taxpayer money, and we're responsible for it, and we need to protect it.
These types of investments are way too risky, end quote. Representative Bill Mercer also voiced his opposition spouting, quote, I did not come here to give the board of investment discretion to invest in nonfungible tokens and cryptocurrencies, end quote. However, some lawmakers supported the measure. Well, duh. Otherwise, it wouldn't be on the floor for voting. Representative Lee Deming argued that the state should seek to maximize returns for taxpayers, while Curtis Schomer, the bill's sponsor, warned that, the only real risk is not passing this bill, highlighting that the investment board will continue to lose purchasing power by sticking to bonds. Yes. Because let's have a bunch of toxic assets on our books, please, for the love of god.
Representative Steve Fitzpatrick added that the state's investment board has a lot of money sitting in the bank that could be put to better use by investing in precious metals and digital assets. The rejection comes just days after Montana's Commerce and Labor Committee approved the bill with a 12 to eight vote. With this decision, the initiative is effectively shelved, And any future proposal regarding Bitcoin as a state reserve will need to be reintroduced in the legislature, which means they gotta start from scratch. It would have to go through it would have to be drafted.
The draft would have to go through several revisions, and then it would have to go to committees, and then it would have to be passed out of committees, or it can go back down to the same cell full of jackals who not only voted against digital currency. That one, if it was just about digital currency, I could kinda see. But they also voted against precious metal. Now up here, it says that 750,000,000,000 thing makes it Bitcoin only. I'm not sure that I'm not I don't know. I think gold would have been included in that number too. So I'm just of the opinion that there whoever's writing this is wrong, that gold would be also available for these types of bills alongside of Bitcoin, but only Bitcoin being the digital asset class because everything else doesn't have the $750,000,000,000 cap thing.
That said, I'm actually surprised that Montana's doing this, that Montana didn't pass this. But, hey, we can't win every single time. And this you know, last week has been a bad week. This week is starting out not to be a good week. That's okay. What strength to resolve do you have? That should be the question for all of us. Finally, validating Lightning signer. We are I'm only gonna do one software update, and this is just because this one is really interesting. Validating Lightning signer version 0.13. Enhanced configuration, better testing and security.
You may ask, what the hell is a VLS? Well, the validating Lightning Signer is a library and reference implementation for a signer module to secure Lightning nodes. It separates your Lightning private keys and security rule validation from your Lightning node into a completely separate signing device, enhancing security by reducing the attack surface. Quote, we're thrilled to announce Celestial Citadel. This upgrade to VLS. This release brings a fresh wave of improvements designed to enhance configuration, boost security, and streamline core functionalities. So the highlights of this release include enhanced configuration, robust core improvements, better testing and security, streamlined architecture. Quote, while we address common lightning network attack vectors, this upgrade isn't a full production release yet.
We recommend using it on test net or with limited funds until you're comfortable that it covers your use case. So having a signing device for your lightning node is kind of an intriguing idea. I personally like the idea. I'm not I'm pretty sure that my my pathetic ass lightning node with its, like, you know, a hand couple of handfuls of channels is not really up for somebody trying to attack it. But, hey, you never know. Maybe if somebody opens up a thousand channels to my node and all of a sudden I start having to look at some extreme security in that particular manner, well, then, yeah, I would want something where I would be able to keep all my security offline and just sign with a completely different advice, you know, device. Because essentially, your lightning wallet and any funds in your lightning network nodes Bitcoin wallet, because they all have one, they have to, those are hot wallets.
They're on all the time. They're always exposed to the Internet. And if you keep any funds in in in your lightning node or the Bitcoin wallet on your lightning node, they they they can get hacked. I mean, it's it's like if somehow or another somebody gets your private keys, well, that's the fact that it's a hot wallet, those those keys are kind of inside the device. So being able to take that information and move it to I like, I'm just thinking a USB stick. And if I need to actually open a channel or do something with my lightning note at that scale, then I've gotta plug in this USB device to say I have signing functionality here, but not when it's removed.
So I think it's a great idea. So there it is. That's the show for the day. I wish that I was, you know, have been able to put many more smiles on your faces as we enter into this shit storm of a clown circus that is the post Bybit hack attack world that we live in. I've never seen such weak hands before. This is amazing watching this happen. But like I said, it should surprise nobody who's been listening to this show for more than a few months. And if you wanna support the show, please do. I've got all manner of stuff that I would like to be able to do, and I could do it if I had a little bit more support. And that can mean as, you know, as as cheap for you as giving me a five star review on Apple or as expensive as giving me a million satoshis on the lightning network. Well, actually, don't don't do it that way. You just if you really wanna give me a million sats, ask me ask me for my Bitcoin address.
Still a little still a little hefty to go over lightning for a million sats. But you can support me through podcasting two point o apps, and you can boost me, and you can stream me Satoshis. You can do all that kind of stuff. If you do boost, please write a note. Ask me a question or just, like, make an announcement of your Bitcoin meetup or whatever or that you're getting married or or, you know, if you wanna tell if one of your friends has passed away and you wanna say something nice about your friend, I will say it. There's no reason not to send our prayers and well wishes out into the ether via podcast. I'll see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 11:52AM Pacific Standard Time. I'm late. It's the February 2025. This is episode ten forty two, I believe. Is it ten forty two of Bitcoin and let's find out. It is. It's ten forty two of Bitcoin and it's a bad day. Woo hoo. Man, it's Monday, bro. And there is no better day or no better way than to greet your Monday with the gnashing of teeth and great big giant claws, and blood in the streets, because man, it's ringing in blood. It's okay though. It's it's okay. Here's the thing, The reason there's so much blood out there is that people are freaking out. Except you guys. You guys don't have to freak out because we've been here before, and we're going to be here again.
Alright? So everybody stay calm. I mean, come on, guys. Stay calm. And let's get into the carnage, but just before we do, let's talk a little bit about lightning. Now Friday, I gave you a very pretty much an in-depth report on the use of lightning, how it's working, who's using it, for what reasons, you know, lightning is being used, and that was delivered by Frank Korva. Well, I guess over the weekend, old Frankie decided to kinda distill down what he thought was going on with that whole Lightning deal, And he's written this one for Bitcoin Magazine to start our day, to start our week, and to start this Monday, the day of moans.
It's a moan day. He says, my top three takeaways from Fidelity and Voltage's recent Lightning report. In a report released on Wednesday, Fidelity Digital Assets, in collaboration with Lightning payment provider, Voltage, released a report on the state of the Lightning Network. The report details the many ways in which Lightning Network has grown since its launch in 2018. It also illustrates how businesses have begun incorporating Lightning in 2024 than any year prior. Oh, begun incorporating Lightning more in 2024 than any year prior that larger channels are forming on the network and more Lightning nodes are coming online.
Some key stats from the piece include the following. The total lightning capacity denominated in United States dollars has increased by 2767% since 2020. Two, its Bitcoin denominated capacity has grown by 384% in the same period. And three, currently, almost all payments over lightning below 1,000,000 sats are processed in less than one point one seconds. While these stats made me optimistic, it was other information in the report that really resonated with me and made me rethink how I view Bitcoin and Lightning. Below were the top three takeaways from the report.
Number one, Lightning payments are gaining traction on Nasr, at this point, the world's largest Bitcoin circular economy, as Nasr users have sent over 3,600,000 individual zaps in just the last six months. Projects like ARC, which is another Bitcoin layer two protocol, illustrate that Lightning has use cases beyond just peer to peer channels. ARC allows users to share virtual UTXOs with a larger group instead of a on a one to one basis and can be built upon in many ways that many other people didn't initially anticipate. Three, the hodl mentality is one of the things still slowing lightning adoption. In other words, if bitcoin enthusiasts don't spend their bitcoin, lightning growth may stagnate, which could hurt bitcoin's value proposition.
So as we're here at the beginning of 2025, a year that many think will be big for lightning, I can't help but be optimistic to see what sort of traction Lightning gains in the next ten months. It's high time Bitcoin is used more as a medium of exchange the way Satoshi intended it for it to be. Okay. So I I like the boil down from Frank. It it's nice. It's it's a nice little way to kinda wrap up that rather lengthy report that I gave you last week, but it's not going to temper the rest of the news that I have for you today. Before we start the gnashing of teeth, let's just remember that we're all adults.
Okay? We can take it. Unless, of course, you're an Ethereum holder. Because according to a Twitter user named Jacob King, Binance is mass dumping Ethereum. Never seen anything like this before. Something big is coming very soon. This doesn't look good. And then he gives a screenshot of, apparently, Binance's hot wallet or several hot wallets, I I should actually say, dumping ether in in in amounts like $11,245. Another dump for 1,000 and, let's see, 1,160 ether has just been sold. And, I mean, the if you wanna get the US dollar numbers, let me give you the US dollar numbers. Here's the dumps in order on this one screenshot, and this is all over the course of one hour from just nothing but Binance except Coinbase did dump a little bit on one just one shot.
3,400,000.0, 3 point 2 million, 2 point 8 million dollars, 2 point 8 million dollars, 2 point 8 million dollars, 2 point 9 million dollars, 2 point 8 million dollars, 1 point 9 million dollars, 5 point 7 million dollars, and then Coinbase's sell is at $1,500,000. And then we finish it off with finance selling $4,250,000 worth of ETH. Those are all dumps that all happen within an hour. It's just Ethereum. But it's not just really Ethereum. There's some other things too, but this guy named Toastpunk, and he's got a dot ETH behind his name on Twitter, so do without what you will. But he's got a thread here that's kinda talking about what's going on with Binance liquidating not just ether, but also a whole bunch of BTC.
Now I have not been able to directly vet this. Okay? So just understand. But something is not adding up, and he actually says the exact same thing to start this thread. Toastpunk.e says, something is not adding up. Just ten days before the biggest hack in crypto history, Binance liquidated nearly all of its holdings of Bitcoin and Ether. Coincidence? Unlikely. Let's break it down. Just pausing for effect here and to to make sure that you heard what I said. This isn't them dumping it right now. This particular thread is talking about how they started dumping a whole bunch of their stuff ten days before the Bybit hack.
You know, the biggest hack in history that we've had so far in this industry? Yeah. That hack. Ten days before that shit, Binance, according to Toastpunk, was liquidating a whole bunch of ether and Bitcoin. Now he says that on February 2025, Binance's internal wallet showed a 94.1% in BTC holdings and a 99.9% drop in ETH holdings. So the numbers are this. Binance was holding 46,896 Bitcoin. That's gone down to 2,747. It had 216,000 ETH. That's gone down to 175 ETH. Not not 175,000. No. 175 ETH. This wasn't some minor rebalance. They dumped nearly everything except for BNB, which only saw a 16.6% reduction.
Compare that to its USDC holdings. In January, they had 805,000,000 USDC. In February of this year, this month, they are holding a 57.5% increase to $1,260,000,000 or I'm sorry. 1,260,000,000.00 USDC. This was a deliberate move. Then on February 2025, Bybit was hacked for $1,460,000,000 in the largest crypto exploit ever. 500,000 ETH was drained. It accounts for 16% of all crypto hacks combined. And guess what? A week before, Binance quietly dumping ETH. Who had this information in advance? Who knew to exit before Bybit got drained? Why was Binance so precise in reducing ETH exposure?
We need blockchain sleuths on this. Zac, xBT, and Arkham, and others, this needs a deep dive. Binance didn't just randomly sell. Bybit didn't just randomly get hacked. Crypto never has coincidences. And to finish us us off on this thread, Toast Punk says, if you think this is too suspicious to ignore, repost this thread. The space needs to pay attention. This is bigger than it looks. Okay. Again, I have not vetted this. I don't know. I I just haven't had the time. I had a a morning that was basically me shuttling some people around my car to go to, you know, a doctor's office, and things took a lot longer than I expected. So I just wasn't able to get in on this and take a look around and rummage and shit like that.
But but it is out there. It it it is somebody and other he's not the only person that's talking about this, by the way. So something's out there. Something's going on. Now what actually did happen, I think, is probably going to take a lot longer for us to figure out so that when we finally start squaring that circle and putting all the bits and pieces together into a coherent timeline, you know, then we'll probably be able to tell exactly what happened. But I still think this Bybit hack, it we haven't had enough time go by for all the people to do all of the things and all of the heavy lifting that it's going to take to be able to figure this out. So don't think that what I just told you is the God's honest truth.
But also don't, you know, sit on your laurels and say, well, because, you know, Dave can't prove it and he doesn't have, like, the evidence to back it up, that it surely, it couldn't have happened. Couldn't have been Binance. They couldn't have, you know, somehow or another done x, y, or z. It's possible. I I mean, I've never really trusted c z or Changpeng Zhao, you know, the old I mean, it's like, you know, he's not even supposed to be affiliated with Binance anymore, and yet somehow or another, he seems to still be calling shots over there. I don't know. But Solana is also being sold off by Binance.
Now this particular tweet is from brains of web three, and it's dated February. So this was this morning. And it says Binance is dumping their Solana. Bag on us until it's over? I don't know. Let's look at what this dump looks like. So I'm looking at the screenshot. This is 100% Binance. Looks like eight it looks like eight cells in this one screenshot. Hot Wallet from Binance, sold $1,250,000 of Solana, and then $1,210,000 of Solana, and then 1,000,000, and then 1,600,000.0, and then 1,000,000, and then 2,100,000.0, and then one for 1,600,000.0, and then 1,900,000.0, let's just call it straight up 2,000,000 of dollars worth of Solana, and then the big one is $3,830,000 worth of Solana.
All of these except for a Kraken deposit and a Coinbase deposit was out of Wintermute. Now Wintermute comes up in this next piece written by Zoltan Vardai, Cointelegraph. Wintermute withdraws 38,000,000 sol from Binance ahead of the $2,000,000,000 Solana unlock. Well, like, if you're wondering wait a minute. Are you talking about the hack? No. No. No. This is different. This is the $2,000,000,000 Solana unlock. We'll get into it right now. Wintermute withdrew nearly $40,000,000 worth of Solana from Binance in the past twenty four hours, over a week ahead of the largest Solana token unlock in the project's history.
Crypto market maker Wintermute withdrew over three no. $38,200,000 worth of Solana from Binance in twenty four hours leading up to the nine 09:02AM UTC on February, ARCIM intelligence data shows. The transfer occurred days ahead of Solana's two billion dollar token unlock, which is set to release over eleven point two million SOL tokens into circulation on March. Solana's price fell by over 7.5% in the past twenty four hours to an over three month low of a hundred and $55 last seen at the November, CoinTelegraph Markets Pro data shows.
So there seem honestly, given what we just talked about here, it seems like there was there's some kind of inside information that was floating around, and a lot of people are acting on that information. But just like in legacy finance land, Us plebs are gonna be the last to know what the hell's going on behind the scenes. And it's it's a sad state of affairs that that this entire industry has had to basically take on the pall of everything that has already come before. The legacy financial system is purpose built to keep the plebs and the rubes and the morons and the Joes on the street completely in the dark from what's going on over there behind the scenes.
This is what happens when people get really rich. They stop giving a shit about what got them into the thing in the first place, and all they care about is just this insane amount of money that they're getting. So I want everybody out there to be really careful. And there's a way there's ways to do that. First of all, keep on DCA ing into Bitcoin. Just daily cost average $25 a week, $50 a week. I don't know. Whatever you got, $500 a week if it's not gonna hurt you. But make sure, number two, that you keep it yourself.
You custody the Bitcoin yourself. Three, sell if you have anything other than Bitcoin that is a shit coin, sell it directly into Bitcoin now and then take that off of exchanges and keep it custody it yourself under your own private key. There is no reason in the world to keep anything, especially if it's your Bitcoin, on an exchange, especially after Bybit got hacked. Even though they didn't get hacked for any Bitcoin, they just got a whole bunch of ether. And there seems to be a all manner of chicanery going on with the ether that came out of that hack. Because I've heard reports everywhere from the guy the the hacker is washing it through some kind of tornado cache kind of, you know, mixer kind of thing.
And then I've also heard that he sent it he he that that there's no way there's no way that that person can spend that money without everybody seeing, you know, where it's going, and they're gonna be able to catch him. And then after that, I saw that the guy or there were reports that the guy was selling the ETH directly for Bitcoin. And then I've seen that the guy, the hacker, or the hackers have sent the entirety of the hack to a burn address. I don't think anybody really knows what the hell is going on. It's too confusing. There's too much fog of war going on.
But this all no matter what all that shit is, we the big elephant in the room is, will Ethereum roll back its chain? Now that's been the discussion ever since this hack. It's it almost happened immediately. And for those of you who are not privy to the history of Ethereum, which is one of the reasons why I hate this chain, I think it's nothing but a scam. And here's one of the main reasons why. That thing cranked out its first Ethereum in 2015 only after cranking out 70,000,000 ETH and distributing it distributing it amongst three or four people.
Those being at least Joseph Lubin and Vitalik Buterin and then a couple of other people. They're the insiders, and they hold the majority of all the ETH that was ever printed. And then they opened up the chain and it started actually through proof of work mechanism mining mechanisms started actually producing ETH. Right? So that's 2015. In 2016, we had the DAO hack on ether or on Ethereum chain. And it was supposed to be that a whole bunch of people were gonna donate a whole bunch of Ethereum that they that they held into this decentralized autonomous organization that was going to vote on, like, I don't know, five I can't remember how many projects were up for it, but there was, like, several different projects that were that the Dow was going to fund.
And the winner was Slockit, s l o c k I t, I believe, is or it may be s l o k I t. But it was an electronic lock, you know, for doors and, you know, stuff like that. And it was gonna be on, you know, the slot. It was gonna be on the the the the Ethereum time chain. You know, the odds are gonna be on the blockchain so that if you rented an Airbnb, once you actually put Ethereum into the the Slocket wallet to unlock that particular that particular lock, then and only then would it actually unlock and you could get into the house. That was the theory. But all of that ETH was stolen.
The entire DAO got hacked, and I can't remember how much ETH ETH was in that thing. It was a lot. So much so that Ethereum, the Ethereum the Ethereum Foundation, all the developers in Ethereum, Joseph Lubin, Vital Buterin, and any of the other people that were involved in that shit decided that they were going to roll back the chain so that they would essentially erase the hack. And the people that, quote, unquote, lost their money would get their money back. You see how this works? So what happened is that immediately a chain split occurred.
One chain became ETH classic, which still had the information in about the involvement of the DAO hack. So the people's wallets that lost their money still reflected the fact that they had been stolen from. The ETH chain that every or the Ethereum chain that everybody's on right now is actually a slightly different chain than it was before. The original chain is ETH classic, and a lot of people don't realize that. The new the the Ethereum that you have today is a new chain from 2016. Sure. You reaches back into 2015 just like the ether classic or Ethereum classic chain, but this chain does not contain the information about the DAO hack.
What does that mean? It means that they could and they did press a button and made every and change the the the balance of of several hundred people's wallets. The the people that held the wallets themselves, they sure, they might have voted to say, yes. I want my money back. I mean, that's human nature. But their them holding their wallet, they didn't have to do anything special to that. They didn't vote, and they didn't, like, somehow or another do some kind of fancy add this little line of code into your wallet so that, I don't know, the the the rollback of the Dow hack would be affected. No. It was was just a very, very few, very few number of people that said we're rolling it back.
And we always Bitcoiners have always looked at that and said, that's how you know Ethereum isn't secure because it's not immutable. The people behind the chain have full control of all the balances of that chain. Every single wallet is under the control of Joseph Lubin, Vitalik Buterin, and a whole bunch of developers and probably a whole whoever else is involved in the in the Ethereum Foundation. But that still means that if you hold ether in your wallet, it does it it doesn't really matter, does it? Because at any given time, these assholes can get into a room and, I don't know, get hammered on a whole bunch of blow and whiskey and watch some girls spin around a pole or something and then decide they're just going to change the balances of your wallet because that's exactly what they did in 2016.
And now here we are again. We got the Bybit hack. And almost immediately, calls for the rollback of the chain were raining like a West Texas thunderstorm. Now all the people that I know, all the people that I respect and love, I saw them all on Twitter begging. The bunch of Bitcoiners begging Vitalik Buterin to roll back the chain. You've got to do it for your hodlers. Of course, it was a troll, and there was a a whole bunch of other people took it completely out of context or just got the context wrong thinking, well, see, now here's a whole bunch of Bitcoiners talking about how they wanna roll back the chain. I was like, you know, they just completely screwed over screwed themselves over on their ethics. And I'm like, you don't understand this crew.
This crew is dying to watch this shit happen again. Why we need a second time for this to happen to prove to idiots that don't believe that it happened the first time is beyond my comprehension. All we should have to do is look at the Dow hack to tell people that think Ethereum is great, that it's not great. It's nowhere close to great. In fact, it is one of the most potentially deadliest things to your future wealth that exist if you are an Eth holder. But no. Nobody but there's so many people who are like, oh, no. That's never gonna happen again, and we want it to happen again.
I was I am one of the people that are like, rah rah. Let's roll back the chain. But not because not really because I want anybody to be made whole, although I don't like the fact that they lost their money. What's more at stake is the fact that this chain's existence is dangerous. It's dangerous to everybody that deals with it. It's dangerous to the entire industry. All the altcoins are, all the shitcoins are, all of the meme coins, all of them are dangers to this industry. There only needs to be one coin for this industry, and the industry will be just fine. And the industry will still be an industry with only Bitcoin. I'd many people won't believe. Well, how can you have an industry with only one cryptocurrency?
You can. And that's exactly what we should have been doing, but we've wasted our freaking time for over a decade on this crap that has done nothing but cause suicide hotline numbers to appear out of the pure thin blue ether every single time somebody gets hacked. And it's just it's amazing to watch. But when you so when you see your favorite Bitcoiner and you see a screenshot of them somewhere screaming that the Ethereum chain should be rolled back, you need to not immediately jump to the conclusion that, oh, well, that's not a real Bitcoiner because they would never want the chain rollback. We do wanna rollback on Ethereum. We I guess we're gonna have to have a second instance of them proving themselves that they can do whatever they want to do with your money if you are an Ethereum bag holder.
Just saying. Now so far, so good when it comes to Michael Saylor only holding Bitcoin. And he holds a little bit more as of this morning. Strategy, Bitcoin stacked just shy of 500,000 tokens after the latest $2,000,000,000 purchase. Steven Alpher from CoinTelegraph strategy bought its Bitcoin brought its Bitcoin holdings up to just a hair shy of half a million with its latest acquisition. The company led by Michael Saylor on Monday morning announced the purchase of 20,356 Bitcoin for just under $2,000,000,000 or an average price of 97,514.
And Michael Sailor just got blown out of the water with the serial red dildos to the downside. Just saying. Just immediately. Immediately. So I think a lot of the down just pausing here to say, I think a lot a lot of the Bitcoin downward pressure that we're seeing today is twofold. Honest fear being experienced by people who don't know any better because what they saw happened with the Bybit hack. But I think at least 50% are people exploiting that fear and wanting to destroy Michael Saylor, they always do this. This is a compounding effect that I'm starting to see here. It's like this is like of the one week that you might have wanted to take off there, Mike. This might have, you know, been the week, but he was already buying Bitcoin before the hack happened, so he really can't just not announce it. We're gonna find out through FCC or SEC filings anyway.
Let's continue. This comes after last week's $2,000,000,000.00 percentage convertible note offering, which raised $1,990,000,000 after expenses. MicroStrategy or Strategy's Bitcoin stack now sits at just under half a million tokens acquired for $33,100,000,000 or an average price of $66,357 each At Bitcoin's current price of 95,500, the holdings are worth about $47,700,000,000. Strategy shares are up marginally in premarket action after a Friday tumble that took the stock price below $300 a share. Yeah. They got smoked.
They got smoked. The Bybit hack is affecting everybody. Like I said, not a single Bitcoin, as far as I know, was taken out of Bybit. It's all Ethereum, and it's you know, half of that's because Ethereum has just broke technology. And the other part is the fact that Bybit apparently wasn't able to secure properly their shit. In either event, it scared the living bejesus out of everybody, including people who held Bitcoin who no longer hold Bitcoin because they don't understand the difference. So as I wrap up the first part of the show, it is a bad day.
There's no denying that. People are scared. People don't know what the hell is going on. And honestly, here's what's really freaking me out about the whole thing is that I'm watch people I'm watching people sell the one thing, and in this case, their Bitcoin, because they're scared of something that happened last week to a completely different chain, a shit chain. And yet my question is this, they're running around hair on fire, clothes on fire, selling the one thing that will save them. What are they selling it into? I it's almost as it's almost like watching my favorite Pepe the Frog meme guy with his hair on fire selling all his Bitcoin and running smack dab into a chain link fence and can't go any farther. But the only thing he witnesses on the other side of that is the fiat world, which is melting down.
There's nowhere to go. There's nothing you can put your cash into. No one can afford houses. Food prices are through the roof. I'd met like, medical costs are through the roof. Ev like, it is it is a complete clown show out there. I thought Germany would it like they look like that to me over the weekend, they had their elections and everything was gonna be fine with Germany. This morning, I find out that, hey, meet this new boss, same as the old boss. It is nothing it it is either a it's either shit you can't afford out there, and most of these people selling their Bitcoin don't have enough Bitcoin to want a freaking shotgun. It's just a whole bunch of people screaming and running away.
And the only thing out there is is a clown world that's on fire itself. It's like everything is burning down. There's only one remedy. Ladies and gentlemen, the only thing that you can do to escape this freaking nonsense. Don't sell your bitcoin. Buy more bitcoin. Hold your own bitcoin with your own private keys. Let's run the numbers. CNBC futures and commodities. West Texas Intermediate Oil is up a quarter of a point to $70.60. It got hammered on Friday. It was pretty ugly, man. Brent North Sea is up a third to $74.66 a barrel. Natural gas is getting hammered this morning, taking it between the legs 5.6% in the red to $3.99 per thousand cubic feet. Gasoline is down almost a point to just right at $2 a gallon.
Gold is up a third, but everything else is sucking swamp water. Silver down a point, platinum down a point and a quarter, copper down a point, palladium in between the legs, 5% to the downside. Ag, all in the red except for cotton and lumber, and cotton is our winner today, point 76% to the upside. Everything else is really not looking good, especially chocolate, our biggest loser today at six and a quarter to the downside. Live cattle having a better time of it, point 61% to the upside. Lean hogs down a quarter, but feeder cattle are up 1.79. The Dow is up almost a half point, so I guess everything is okay in fiat land.
But the S and P is unchanged. Nasdaq is down a half a point. S and P Mini is up point four six of a percent. $94,170 brings us yet one more freaking time down below a hundred $1,900,000,000,000 to $1,870,000,000,000 of market cap, we can only purchase 31.7 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,828,382.32 of. And average fees per block are relatively high for the first time in a long time. We are looking at high priority rates of 12 Satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at eight. BIM pools around the world are are filling up.
It looks like there's 78 blocks containing a 4,000 unconfirmed transactions. So things are nature is healing in one direction while it's being burnt to the ground in another direction. Hash rate has come off of its highs. It is well off of its 850 exahash high down to 749.3 exahashes per second, and I expected this. I expected at one point or another, there was gonna be some miners who were like, we, we're just gonna not, you know, crank up our miners until you idiots figure out what you wanna do. So I am not surprised at all by that number. Now from Friday's episode Hack Attack, where I first brought you the news about the Bybit hack, but I had not yet seen the carnage that would ensue afterwards.
I've got Psyduck with five twenty says, Psyduck. Okay. Paul sir nine with 500 says, thanks again, my friend. Have a great weekend and recharge those batteries. Vector with 500 says nothing. Turkey with 500 says nothing. God's death with two thirty seven says thank you, sir. No thank you. Yodel with two forty says, just saw I don't have to share with all of Nostra when I boost. That is correct. Justin with a hundred sat says, rest in peace, Bill. Thank you. My friend Bill died last Thursday. It's not good way not a good way because I found out Friday morning that he had passed away, and we're still dealing with the aftermath of that bullshit. So keep your family members informed as to how much you love them, your friends as well, because you never will know when you lose them.
Pies with a hundred says, hashtag 40 HPW. And that is what, hours of podcast per week. That's the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Let's start this one off with, well, another exploit. A Neo bank named Infini was hit by a $50,000,000 exploit. Let's hear about it from Vismaya v out of Decrypt. Crypto Neo bank Infini lost $49,500,000 in a hack allegedly carried out by a former developer abusing his administrative privileges. The attacker, who had worked on Infini's contract, leveraged their privileges after the project was completed to drain funds from the platform according to blockchain analytics platform, Cybers.
In a report shared with Decrypt, smart contract audit firm Quill Audits confirmed that the exploit resulted from, quote, compromised access and privilege escalation with the attacker exploiting a private key breach that granted them access to a compromised account. Quote, the hacker gained access to a private key associated with the account 0431, the report notes. Quote, this account had been granted a special role that allowed it to withdraw funds from the vault. The hacker reportedly initiated two transactions, $11,450,000 in the first and 38,060,000.00 in the second, leading to the total stolen amount of 49,500,000.0 from the Morpho MEV Capital USDC vault that's CoinCenter's stablecoin USDC.
Is it coins not CoinCenter. Oh, god. What's the name of that freaking company? I can't remember right now. Anyway, USDC is like Tether, but a much less, much less of a market share. The funds were then quickly swapped from USDC coin into Dai and converted into 17,696 ETH. Then the funds were transferred to a secondary address. Following the breach, Kristen Lee, Infini's founder, took to Twitter to acknowledge the incident and offer reassurance. He said the team had been negligent when transferring the authority before. Quote, it is ultimately my responsibility. This has sounded the alarm.
There is no problem with liquidity. Full compensation can be paid, and the funds are being traced, Lee said. Despite the breach, Infini continued to allow withdrawals. Lee reassured users that, quote, full compensation can be paid in the worst case scenario. Lee expressed hope for recovering the stolen funds and offered the hacker twenty percent of the stolen amount assuming that no legal action would be taken if the funds were returned. The lack of further obfuscation techniques means the stolen assets might still be traceable. Cybers provided an analysis stating that the hacker retained the admin rights, went undetected for over one hundred days, later funneling the stolen funds through the Ethereum based coin mixer, Tornado Cash.
Quote, this incident highlights the critical risks of retained administrative privileges and smart contracts, Hakan Unal, senior blockchain scientist at Cybers AI, told Decrypt. Quote, in the meantime, this serves as a strong reminder for projects to thoroughly audit and revoke unnecessary permissions post deployment, end quote. Infini shared its official statement hours after the hack saying all transactions including transfers, deposits, and withdrawals remained unaffected. Quote, we are deeply sorry. I'm so sorry for the concern this causes.
Our team is working around the clock to investigate and secure all systems at the moment, Infini tweeted on Monday. Quote, it's frustrating because these aren't new problems, Quill audits research team told the crypt, quote, we've seen this play out repeatedly, yet projects still underestimate how critical it is to lock down access, end quote. The team shared that until teams start treating access control as a core security priority and not an afterthought, these hacks will keep happening. It's not just about better tech, it's about better habits, the research team said. The breach at Infini follows a major exploit at crypto exchange Bybit, which suffered a massive loss of $1,400,000,000 in Ethereum and related tokens last Friday, making it one of the biggest hacks in the industry's history.
On chain analysis revealed Lazarus Group, a North Korean state sponsored hacking group, to be behind the attack. Bybit Bybit's response was similar to Infinize in some ways as the exchange opted to keep withdrawals open and vowed to cover the loss if the funds were not covered. The hack comes amid growing concerns about security in the defi space with over $2,200,000,000 in crypto stolen last year and 50% of the stolen funds linked to North Korean hacking groups, as per blockchain analysis firm, Chainalysis report.
Quote, the number of individual hacking incidents went up from 382 incidents in 2023 to 303 in 2024, the report said. How is it that it's even a question that you're not serious about revoking access to your contractors when they've completed a mission or your employees after they've either quit or you've let them go or flat ass fired them or even if they, I don't know, died outside your doors. You should be revoking access immediately. The one of the last places that I worked for, even I, as the person who said, hey. Look. This isn't working out for me. I wish you all the best. I gotta go. And then I said, oh, PS. As a reminder, make sure that you revoke my access to all of these accounts, and then I listed them.
And I felt stupid for doing it because I was thinking as I was writing, I was like, well, of course they know to do this. Well, maybe I wasn't being so stupid after all. So if you wanna be ethical about it, next time you leave a job, please remind your ex your new found ex boss to revoke your privileged access, please. Because this kind of crap, this is ridiculous. They left the door wide open to a guy that they trusted to actually build a thing, and the guy that built the thing ripped the thing off. How dumb do we have to be?
How juvenile do we have to act, especially in the face of all these people that hate us anyway? I'm not a fan of USDC or Infini or CryptoNeo banks. Just buy Bitcoin and hold Bitcoin. But outside of that, the entire world is looking at it as like it's this one thing. And we all know that Bitcoin should be kept separate out of all the rest of this stuff. But when we're making mistakes like this, how is it that they don't think we're stupid and juvenile and not worth their time. They just had Bybit happen, and now we've got another $50,000,000 hack because these idiots decided that we'll get around to revoking that dude's access later on.
Yeah. That's not how this happens. So onto legacy fiat land where Ken Griffin says that Citadel could enter as a market maker on exchanges like Coinbase and pushes Trump for regulatory clarity. Daniel Kuhn is writing this one for the block. Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder and CEO of Citadel LLC, is planning to steer his firm into crypto trading according to comments made at the twenty twenty five UBS Financial Services conferences in Key Biscayne, Florida. Oh, so they're out in The Keys, sunning themselves, probably with a bunch of prostitutes and sex cocaine, but the move, reportedly inspired by president Trump's embrace of the industry, is not the first time Griffin has indicated Citadel would embrace crypto, but it is the clearest sign that the firm will actually make an entrance.
At the conference, Ken Griffin, a former crypto skeptic who once called Bitcoin a jihadist call against the dollar, said that Trump that the Trump administration should push for regular or regulatory guidelines to keep fraud at bay and enable banks and asset managers to enter. Bloomberg reported on Monday that Citadel, the largest market maker on the New York Stock Exchange, could enter in such a capacity on exchanges like Coinbase. A market maker is a company or person who buys and sells securities to keep markets liquid and stable. Quote, we've seen time and time again in markets where your tier one players are allowed to participate and they are actually markets that clean themselves up, he said. So I'd like to see that happen in the cryptocurrency space, and that would be great regulatory guidance to give, end quote.
Griffin also criticized the Biden administration's evil approach to regulation by enforcement and praised efforts like Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, which is reportedly considering using blockchain tech to improve government productivity. It's bananas on the blockchain. Yet one more time. Oh well, they'll never learn. In recent months, Griffin has spoken more frankly about the mistake of avoiding crypto. On the same day that Bitcoin surpassed a hundred thousand dollars for the first time, for instance, Griffin told the times that crypto is part of American people reclaiming agency in their lives after electing Donald Trump.
This is not the first time Griffin said Citadel may have missed out by not trading crypto sooner. In 2022, weeks before the blowout of Do Kwon's Terra blockchain that kick started a market wide meltdown, Griffin said it was fair to assume Citadel would begin to engage with the industry over the months to come. Quote, I still have my skepticism, but there are hundreds and millions of people in the world today who disagree with that to the extent that we're trying to help institutions and investors solve their portfolio allocation problems, we have to give serious consideration to being a market maker in cryptocurrencies.
That, of course, did not transpire, and the event likely shaped Griffin's opinion about the industry for the past several years. While Griffin appears to see an opportunity in crypto once again, he remains critical of its utility. Quote, what I don't care for about crypto is, what problem does it solve for our economy? He said that in December. What problem does it solve? And that's everything you need to know about where Ken Griffin's mind is when it comes to this industry. This is a guy who's breaking the first rule of investing. You do not invest in, and that's your money, your time, your effort, your ideas.
You don't invest anything into something you do not fully understand. And this last statement and it's not crypto. It's Bitcoin. Let's be freaking clear about this. Everything outside of Bitcoin is a scam, an unregistered security, or just designed to lift all of the money out of your wallet and put it into somebody else's pants. It's Bitcoin. Everything else is shitcoin. So his what his question really is what it should be this. What I don't care for about Bitcoin is what problem does it solve for our economy? Well, Ken, then you clearly don't understand possibly two things.
I know you don't understand Bitcoin. But if you actually are sitting there looking at the world's economy and not seeing a problem, then that means one of only two things. You're so rich that you don't give a shit and that no matter what happens, you're gonna be fine, and that's probably true. Two, you literally don't understand what's going on. You don't understand that printing money is a recipe for disaster at the nation state level. You don't understand that as more and more nation states become larger and larger percentages of nations of the world that do continue to print money that you put the entire global economy at risk.
These are the things that Ken don't Ken doesn't seem to understand. I feel bad for Ken that he doesn't understand them, but I have a sneaky suspicion that he damn well does. But he doesn't care about your wealth. This Bitcoin is an affront to him being able to call the shots as he has been calling. And you will say, but he's getting into crypto. Yeah. He wants to gather intelligence. He doesn't give a shit about making a market. That's gonna make him a lot of money anyway, and he already knows that. But he is gonna have his hooks into a lot more intelligence, a lot more data.
He's gonna be able to determine a lot more factors and functions about what's going on here than he can without being a market maker directly in crypto. But I guarantee you the money that he makes being a market maker is secondary to his concern. His primary concern is what can he learn to help destroy Bitcoin. I guarantee you that's why he's there. And it's too bad. And you know what else is too bad? My friends in Montana screwed up. They have said no to Bitcoin as a state reserve. The bill has been rejected. Atlas twenty one is writing this one, and it's Atlas21.com, if you wanna know. On February, the Montana House of Representatives shit the bed.
41 to 59 to reject the bill that would have allowed Bitcoin to be included among the state's assets. The proposal, known as we're stupid number four twenty nine sorry. It's actually house bill number four twenty nine, aimed to create a special fund for investments in precious metals and stablecoins as well as digital assets with an average market capitalization exceeding $750,000,000,000 over the past year, a criterion currently met only by Bitcoin. This rejection was primarily due to concerns over the management of public funds. And during the session, representative Stephen Kelly stated, quote, it's still taxpayer money, and we're responsible for it, and we need to protect it.
These types of investments are way too risky, end quote. Representative Bill Mercer also voiced his opposition spouting, quote, I did not come here to give the board of investment discretion to invest in nonfungible tokens and cryptocurrencies, end quote. However, some lawmakers supported the measure. Well, duh. Otherwise, it wouldn't be on the floor for voting. Representative Lee Deming argued that the state should seek to maximize returns for taxpayers, while Curtis Schomer, the bill's sponsor, warned that, the only real risk is not passing this bill, highlighting that the investment board will continue to lose purchasing power by sticking to bonds. Yes. Because let's have a bunch of toxic assets on our books, please, for the love of god.
Representative Steve Fitzpatrick added that the state's investment board has a lot of money sitting in the bank that could be put to better use by investing in precious metals and digital assets. The rejection comes just days after Montana's Commerce and Labor Committee approved the bill with a 12 to eight vote. With this decision, the initiative is effectively shelved, And any future proposal regarding Bitcoin as a state reserve will need to be reintroduced in the legislature, which means they gotta start from scratch. It would have to go through it would have to be drafted.
The draft would have to go through several revisions, and then it would have to go to committees, and then it would have to be passed out of committees, or it can go back down to the same cell full of jackals who not only voted against digital currency. That one, if it was just about digital currency, I could kinda see. But they also voted against precious metal. Now up here, it says that 750,000,000,000 thing makes it Bitcoin only. I'm not sure that I'm not I don't know. I think gold would have been included in that number too. So I'm just of the opinion that there whoever's writing this is wrong, that gold would be also available for these types of bills alongside of Bitcoin, but only Bitcoin being the digital asset class because everything else doesn't have the $750,000,000,000 cap thing.
That said, I'm actually surprised that Montana's doing this, that Montana didn't pass this. But, hey, we can't win every single time. And this you know, last week has been a bad week. This week is starting out not to be a good week. That's okay. What strength to resolve do you have? That should be the question for all of us. Finally, validating Lightning signer. We are I'm only gonna do one software update, and this is just because this one is really interesting. Validating Lightning signer version 0.13. Enhanced configuration, better testing and security.
You may ask, what the hell is a VLS? Well, the validating Lightning Signer is a library and reference implementation for a signer module to secure Lightning nodes. It separates your Lightning private keys and security rule validation from your Lightning node into a completely separate signing device, enhancing security by reducing the attack surface. Quote, we're thrilled to announce Celestial Citadel. This upgrade to VLS. This release brings a fresh wave of improvements designed to enhance configuration, boost security, and streamline core functionalities. So the highlights of this release include enhanced configuration, robust core improvements, better testing and security, streamlined architecture. Quote, while we address common lightning network attack vectors, this upgrade isn't a full production release yet.
We recommend using it on test net or with limited funds until you're comfortable that it covers your use case. So having a signing device for your lightning node is kind of an intriguing idea. I personally like the idea. I'm not I'm pretty sure that my my pathetic ass lightning node with its, like, you know, a hand couple of handfuls of channels is not really up for somebody trying to attack it. But, hey, you never know. Maybe if somebody opens up a thousand channels to my node and all of a sudden I start having to look at some extreme security in that particular manner, well, then, yeah, I would want something where I would be able to keep all my security offline and just sign with a completely different advice, you know, device. Because essentially, your lightning wallet and any funds in your lightning network nodes Bitcoin wallet, because they all have one, they have to, those are hot wallets.
They're on all the time. They're always exposed to the Internet. And if you keep any funds in in in your lightning node or the Bitcoin wallet on your lightning node, they they they can get hacked. I mean, it's it's like if somehow or another somebody gets your private keys, well, that's the fact that it's a hot wallet, those those keys are kind of inside the device. So being able to take that information and move it to I like, I'm just thinking a USB stick. And if I need to actually open a channel or do something with my lightning note at that scale, then I've gotta plug in this USB device to say I have signing functionality here, but not when it's removed.
So I think it's a great idea. So there it is. That's the show for the day. I wish that I was, you know, have been able to put many more smiles on your faces as we enter into this shit storm of a clown circus that is the post Bybit hack attack world that we live in. I've never seen such weak hands before. This is amazing watching this happen. But like I said, it should surprise nobody who's been listening to this show for more than a few months. And if you wanna support the show, please do. I've got all manner of stuff that I would like to be able to do, and I could do it if I had a little bit more support. And that can mean as, you know, as as cheap for you as giving me a five star review on Apple or as expensive as giving me a million satoshis on the lightning network. Well, actually, don't don't do it that way. You just if you really wanna give me a million sats, ask me ask me for my Bitcoin address.
Still a little still a little hefty to go over lightning for a million sats. But you can support me through podcasting two point o apps, and you can boost me, and you can stream me Satoshis. You can do all that kind of stuff. If you do boost, please write a note. Ask me a question or just, like, make an announcement of your Bitcoin meetup or whatever or that you're getting married or or, you know, if you wanna tell if one of your friends has passed away and you wanna say something nice about your friend, I will say it. There's no reason not to send our prayers and well wishes out into the ether via podcast. I'll see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Episode Overview
