Join me today for Episode 938 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Silent Payments Explained
- US "Officials" to Redefine "Money"
- BitVM2 on the Horizen
- Trump Taps Bitcoiner For Transition Team
- Ark Protocol is ALIVE!
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-federal-agencies-redefine-money-cryptocurrency-reporting
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/08/15/bitcoins-programmability-draws-closer-to-reality-as-robin-linus-delivers-bitvm2/
https://decrypt.co/245087/trump-taps-bitcoin-tether-bull-howard-lutnick-transition-team
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https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/trust-announces-q3-2024-grant-recipients/
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[00:00:00]
David Bennett:
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:29 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 19th day of August 2024. And this is episode 938 of Bitcoin. And I'm gonna cover a little bit of silent payments today.
That I I keep hearing about silent payments. And this is it's been kinda weird. Because I I had never heard of silent payments before, I don't know, a couple of months ago. But all of a sudden, the way that people were talking about silent payments was that they were talking about it in a way where everybody knew what silent payments were. And I'm like, I have never heard of silent payments. I don't know what the hell it is. So we're gonna do that. South Korea, there's some, well, some employees that are out earning staff at some major banks. I'm not sure I'm gonna do that one.
We'll we'll we'll I'll think about it. But bit VM 2, Robin Linus. Do you remember that gentleman's name? Well, bitvm2 has been delivered. So we'll get into some of that. And Trump is tapping Bitcoin. And what else do we got on deck? What what is it? B Trust, Builders is going to do some open source development stuff with grants. And ARC is back in the news. Do you remember what ARC was? I remember what ARC was. And it looks like we might actually have a workable client. Not sure yet. But Bisc, is going to support some lightning network stuff. And then there's blue wallet back in the news. And anybody who has been around this space long enough has probably run into blue wallet at one point or another. But before all of that, I'm just gonna do silent payments.
A little moment of silence for silent payments there. Silent payments are coming to better protect Bitcoin users. This is, Bitcoin Magazine. Henry Fisher is writing it. Bitcoin continues to provide a massive breakthrough in the digital age by allowing people to transact between each other without third parties. Bitcoin Magazine covered silent payments over 2 years ago to shed light on one of Bitcoin's shortcomings: privacy. It was a problem then, and it's a problem now. Quote, a push based payment system Bitcoin requires the sender to have the information necessary to define the destination for money that they send.
This requires the receipt the recipient communicating to the sender their Bitcoin address in one way or some other. In the case of trying to raise money from the general public, this has massive consequences in terms of privacy or needing to maintain a consistent and constant interactive presence online. Anyone is totally capable of simply posting a single Bitcoin address somewhere online. And from that point, anyone who wishes to send money to that person can simply do it. But there's no privacy in raising money in this way. Simply take that address and look it up on the blockchain and you cannot only see how much money that person has been sent.
But you can see the footprint on the blockchain of every single person who has sent them money. Both the person attempting to raise funds and everyone who has donated to them have no privacy whatsoever. Everything is completely open and correlated for the whole world to see. Before silent payments, the only alternative was to reuse addresses on a per contract basis. Excuse me. A per contact basis to protect your privacy. Or to run a server that offers a new address every single time someone requests to send you money. Neither of which are usable or scalable options for most users. Reserving privacy for a privileged few who know how to achieve that privacy.
Fortunately, the community has made a massive progress since then with the release of silent payments. BIP 352. That is silent payments. After much discussion on just how to implement the features as efficiently as possible, BIP 352 is now a reality. When somebody wants to receive money privately, let's say an activist organization, they can post their silent payments address on their site instead of a traditional bitcoin address. Now, when a user wants to send that organization money, they use a silent payment address within a supporting wallet. This will automagically use the unique public key attached to the silent payment address, combined with the public keys of the outputs that they want to send to generate a brand new single use address that looks like any other bitcoin address.
Sounds complicated, but all of this functions behind the scenes. All a user needs to do is paste the address and send money to it. Just like, you know, any other address. There's here's the benefits. Number 1. The organization itself only has to post a single address on its site to still receive the benefit of generating new addresses for every transaction. 2, the user sending money to the organization can always reference the same static address, making it easy for them to continually send money without needing to track multiple addresses. 3.
If the same user continuously gives money to the same silent payments address, a new Bitcoin address is generated each and every time. So the sender doesn't need to worry about the receiver knowing it's the same user sending the money. Or the receiver gains massive privacy benefits as users are not able to easily look into the funds of their wallet and see who else is spending them money or sending them money. And 5 the addresses that are generated to transact between both users appear just like any other Bitcoin transaction meaning, use of the meaning that the use of the feature is obfuscated to outside parties. And finally 6 no server required.
Like, at all. It's just not required. Any wallet that supports silent payments handles all of this technology locally within the wallet. To summarize the benefits. With silent payments any person or organization can now opt to use a static, silent payment Bitcoin address in place of their traditional static address to not only have better privacy for themselves but also to protect the people trying to send them money by ensuring not even they, as receivers, can snag information about senders. With silent payments, the sender and receiver gain a massive layer of privacy while still largely benefiting from the power of the underlying Bitcoin protocol to give them the freedom to transact as they please. Well, with that said, there are, you know, okay, here are the drawbacks.
The first is a direct result of the benefit of not needing a dedicated device online to facilitate transactions. The users will need to scan through blockchain transactions to detect payments made to them. This scanning can take time, but it comes with massive privacy benefits for both of the users. And over time, performance of scanning can be improved to make this less of an issue for users. The second issue is one of adoptability. Since silent payments are new with wallet support being fairly limited at the time of writing, Both the sender and the receiver need to use a wallet that offers support for the feature. Silentpayments.xyz is a resource that shares which wallets support silent payments.
The first of which to currently have full support being Cake Wallet. Wow. No shit. If the community hopes to see wider adoption of silent payments, wallets need to integrate the functionality to offer more users the privacy benefits provided by Bitcoin silent payments. Overall, the idea of protecting user privacy through the native Bitcoin protocol is an important one that can offer user privacy without jeopardizing what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin. In fact, the privacy benefits of silent payments strengthens the fundamental beliefs of the Bitcoin community by offering users the freedom to transact with better privacy if they choose to.
Alright. So again, that was Henry Fisher about silent payments. This clears up a lot of questions that I actually had about what the hell silent payments are. I had no idea that Bitcoin Magazine covered this 2 years ago. Was I asleep? I don't know. But I mean, literally I've just only been hearing about silent payments for the last few months. So, go to silentpayments.xyz. That's silentpayments.xyz to find wallets as they come online with this what was it BIP 352? Yeah, BIP352. So we're looking for wallets that have BIP 352 and you can find those over at silentpayments.xyz.
So I hope that clears things up. I'm not excited about the drawback of not being somehow or another I don't know having to scan through the blockchain transactions to see if somebody sent you money. I'm sure that that's going to be rectified at one point or another. Like, I don't know some way to I don't know some way that, you can get DM ed on, like, simplex or something like that that a silent payments come through. I don't know if that's a good idea because we don't really want to attach different identities to this thing we call Bitcoin silent payments. But, yeah, that sounds like a pain in the butt. But also also this, Layer 2 is not like it's not like it's dead.
And it's it's very much the opposite of dead. Not only is it alive and walking around, that that's gaining steam. So is there going to be a fight between on chain transactions via silent payments versus just lightning transactions? Because lightning is I don't care what anybody says. Lightning is working well. I use it every day. People send me hundreds of small payments every single day I get zaps on nostr every single day and none of this shit requires an on chain transaction if I want to buy a car that's a different deal want to buy a house yeah that's a different deal but if somebody just wants to send me $20 do we really need an on chain transaction for that I personally am of the opinion that we kind of don't but we'll need to see how this runs.
Still though, I'm very happy to finally understand exactly how silent payments work, at least on the surface of the situation. Now,
[00:12:01] Unknown:
hold on for a second, because I'm not sure if I wanted
[00:12:05] David Bennett:
I don't know why I've got this story up here. Hold on for a sec. Yeah, this is the story that I wanted. It's written by Arjeet Sarkar, Cointelegraph, the United States, moles applying fiat reporting mandate on crypto transfers. That's kind of a scary situation. Let's see if it means what I think it means. Top federal agencies in the United States are teaming up to revise the meaning of money to tighten up reporting requirements on financial institutions for domestic and cross border cryptocurrency transactions. Okay. That's not a transfer, that's an actual transaction.
The US Department of the Treasury issued a semi annual regulatory agenda on August 16th revealing an upcoming federal attempt to level the regulatory playing field for cryptocurrencies and traditional fiat currencies. Section 183 states, clarification of the requirement to collect, retain and transmit information on transactions involving convertible virtual currencies and digital assets with legal tender status. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network plan to revise the meaning of money used in the Bank Secrecy Act. Because they just can't stand us having any amount of fucking freedom at all.
These people all need to be drugged out in the street and tarred and feathered and then run out on a rail. Quote, the agencies FRS and FinCend intend that the revised proposal will ensure that rules apply to domestic and cross border transactions involving convertible virtual currency, which is a medium of exchange such as cryptocurrencies that either has an equivalent value as currency or acts as a substitute for currency but lacks legal tender status. End quote. However, the proposal will also extend the reporting requirement to digital assets with legal tender status, including central bank digital currencies.
The final notice of proposed rulemaking is currently slated for September 2025 and subject to clearance. In addition to cryptocurrencies, the US Department of Justice is also actively amending regulations and legal mandates for artificial intelligence. I don't I honestly don't give a shit. And then there's a whole paragraph on AI guidance to fight crime. No. I'm not even gonna get get into that part. Okay, so this is my problem with this, this article. The headline says reporting mandate on crypto transfers, But everything in the body of this, of this article is talking about transactions.
Now, while it is the case that a transaction is, yes, indeed, a transfer, When I read the headline, what I immediately started thinking was that if I have one wallet, like a hardware wallet, and I want a new hardware wallet, and I so I spin up a brand new wallet on a different either a like another cold card or a completely different kind of hardware wallet, and I transfer my Bitcoin holding from one wallet to another that I was going to be subject to a reporting mandate. I am still very, very unclear as to whether or not that's the case. In either event, what can be said is that these people know they're losing, and we're starting to see the wounded animal strike back.
Okay? They always say, you know, first they laugh at you and then they fight you and I don't know. Or then they laugh at you. I don't know. Then you win. Okay. But what we're never really told is what happens when we've got something as large as the central banks of the planet backed into a corner. That's what's happening. The then they fight you phase could be: hey, we're both standing on open ground and we've got, you know, nobody's back is to a wall. But I don't think that that's what the case is here. I think we've got them back not only up against a wall, I think we've accidentally backed this badger into a corner and this son of a bitch is about to come out swinging.
So be prepared for anything. Now, Bitcoin's programmability is drawing closer to a reality as Robin Linus delivers Bit Virtual Machine 2, also known as BitVM 2. And this is, by the way, CoinDesk and Bradley Kyun is writing Robin Linus, the Bitcoin developer who shook up the crypto tech landscape last year with a theoretical method of making the oldest and original blockchain more programmable is out with a second iteration called bitvm2. Boasting dramatic improvements that could bring the concept closer to real world implementation. The basic setup involves using cryptography to compress computer programs into sub programs that can then be executed within Bitcoin transactions themselves according to a white paper published Thursday by Linus along with 5 co authors.
The programs are then verified. Basically making sure nobody is trying to cheat or steal in 3 on chain transactions. In the previous version, the verification could take up upwards of 70 transactions according to one of co authors, Alex Zemaitin, who separately works for a project called BOB, short for build on Bitcoin. A key improvement of the new version is that anyone can call into question a suspicious transaction in a feature known as permissionless challenging. In the original BitVM, which was published last October but never really put into any practical implementation, only a fixed set of operators could initiate a challenge.
Quote, this design gives us 3 major improvements. Zomaton said in a video interview with CoinDesk. Quote, we now have a full and comprehensive write up of the BitVM paradigm. Linus is a core contributor at Xerosync Association, a Swiss non profit organization based in the canton of Zug. The other co authors besides Zmaitin includes Lucas Ayumar, Andrea Pelosi, Zetta there's no way I can pronounce it, and Mateo Mafi. Linus' project has been hailed as a breakthrough partly because it doesn't require any changes to the underlying Bitcoin code itself. And that's crucial since Bitcoin is, more so than most subsequent blockchain projects, fully decentralized in its governance.
There isn't really a guiding foundation or governing body or lead developer as there is with, say, Ethereum or Solana. Even seemingly modest proposals like the much discussed OPCAT have faced serious difficulty getting adopted by the maintainers of the Bitcoin code since nearly total consensus has evolved to be the de facto standard for suggested upgrades. The initial application of BitVM2 would be well, it would enable a roll up. Essentially, a separate auxiliary network atop Bitcoin that could handle faster and cheaper transactions, but with similar security guarantees.
Just the publication of Linus' original design helped to inspire a fervor for building projects on Bitcoin. As of July, CoinDesk counted at least 83 Bitcoin Layer 2 projects in the works with a variety of setups including roll ups as well as side chains. The new paradigm could be used to create a block blockchain bridge that could be used to securely transfer Bitcoin to the roll up and later safely bring it back so the deposits can be withdrawn. While Bitcoin's proof of work consensus mechanism has been criticized for its environmental impact, most blockchain experts agree that it is the most secure blockchain ever.
Such a virtue is underscored by the $1,200,000,000,000 market value of all Bitcoin outstanding, more than all other cryptocurrencies combined. Quote, our new bridge design is simple and more capital efficient, Linus told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. Quote, the previous design caused liquidity issues both in terms of how much and for how long bridge operators had to lock collateral in. Now it requires less capital, which is locked for a shorter duration. And Nicholas Day, writing for CoinDesk, telling us a little bit about bitvm2. And I wasn't I thought we had a couple of examples of bitvm actually functional on, Bitcoin's blockchain.
Maybe not. I I don't know. But I I'm excited about bit VM too, but I kinda wonder. I wonder about bloat. I really do. I I wonder if what we add in these types of Bitcoin projects like ordinals, inscriptions, bit VM 2, you know, with ordinals and inscriptions, there's clearly a lot of bloat. And it's just it's disgusting to watch, but I can't do anything about it, so I I don't cry too hard about it. But it sucks to watch all, like, I don't know, cats being traded with each other on Bitcoin's blockchain. It's not, in my opinion, and it is only my opinion, that's not a real monetary need.
To other people, maybe I'm clearly wrong, which is why you don't want me in charge of the Bitcoin blockchain. This is by consensus. But every time that I see somebody saying we can't change bitcoins code, so what can we do with the available tools that Bitcoin has to do the thing that we want to do without changing the code? And there's a real beauty in that. There's a real beauty of being constrained and you'll hear me talk about this in permaculture all the time is that if you give somebody a blank slate they will not come up with a design in permaculture that is anywhere close to as beautiful and fluid and eloquent, you're eloquent as well as elegant, then if you give them constraints like you could you're designing this but here's your fence lines.
And by the way, you have no water on your property versus you have your property is cut in half by a 10 foot river or, well, a 10 like to say a 10 foot stream. Those are constraints. And you have to work within those constraints because you're not moving the stream. And if you're like one of your constraints is that you're at the foot of a mountain you're not moving the mountain. You have to be able to come up with a design that fits where you're at. And we see the very same thing here in the Bitcoin landscape. It's a design feature, not a bug, that you have to work with Bitcoin the way it is. Because the chances of you saying we need a consensus change to do the shit that I want to do, good luck.
We we see how that has not really worked all that well out, you know, in the past. I'm just saying. Alright. On to Trump. Trump taps Bitcoin and Tether bull Howard Lutnick for his transition team. Matt DeSalvo is writing for Decrypt. Former US President Donald Trump has named Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, as co chair of his transition team ahead of the presidential election in November. And Lutnick, he's a big Bitcoin bull. And I did not know this until now. Trump's campaign made the announcement on Friday also noting that Linda McMahon, the former administrator of the Small Business Administration, will serve as a co chair alongside Lutnick.
Vice president candidate, JD Vance will serve as an honorary chair alongside Trump's sons, Eric and Donald Junior. The transition teams help prepare the candidates to make the move into the White House should they win the election. Now, Lutnick, who leads the investment banking giant Cantor Fitzgerald, has previously said that he is a fan of Bitcoin and of stablecoin Tether. And asked last December by CNBC if he was broadly into cryptocurrency, he replied, I'm a fan of crypto, but let's be very specific. Bitcoin.
Just Bitcoin, end quote. However, he then added that he and Cantor Fitzgerald are also invested into the stable coin giant, Tether. Yeah. Well, they ain't alone. That's for damn sure. Lutnick even spoke at the Bitcoin 2024 conference last month in Nashville where he added his investment bank was, quote, a rock star in the digital asset space and reiterated his enthusiasm for Bitcoin. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate in the upcoming election, also spoke as at the event. Of course, we all all know that. Trump has come out as a crypto friendly candidate ahead of the US November elections.
The former reality television star and real estate mogul even said that he wants all future Bitcoin to be mined on US soil. Silicon Valley bigwigs and tech entrepreneurs, some in the crypto space, have donated generously to the Republican front runners campaign. Oh, that last paragraph. We didn't need it. All we really need to know is that Howard Lutnick has come out, as of July 31st. This is when he wrote this tweet. I am a fan of Bitcoin. Cantor Fitzgerald is a fan of Bitcoin. And our investment bank is a rock star of the digital asset space. We're just getting started. Watch my full speech at the Bitcoin conference Nashville or in Nashville 2024. And then he's got a video of his Bitcoin speech which I'm not going to play.
But I find it amazing that Howard Lutnick, the CEO of something like Cantor Fitzgerald is I'm a fan of crypto, but let's be specific. Bitcoin, just Bitcoin. That sounds a lot like the people that I hang out with in this space. But here's my issue. I don't think Bitcoin's price can take much more good news. Have you noticed that lately?
[00:26:45] Unknown:
That the price is like we get good news, price dumps. Get more good news, price dumps. Even more good news, price dumps. Maybe there's some good news on the price dump. Can we get some bad news?
[00:26:58] David Bennett:
Because maybe that'll reverse the trend. I mean, I don't mean to harp on it too much, but I find it odd that we've had such good news over the last, like, this entire summer has been nothing but good news for Bitcoin. And we just keep hitting these weird walls. Now there's some speculation that the United States government is indeed the US Marshals Service is not only transferring lots of coins, of Bitcoin from their wallet, from the US government treasury's wallet, to CoinDesk, which is the US Marshals Service partner in custody, but that they are indeed selling it.
But I have yet to see hard actual proof that the United States government is selling those coins. If anybody has that kind of proof, would you do me a favor? Could you DM me or or just like, you know, light me up on on Noster or something and say, yeah, here's the here's the evidence. And and for or against, by the way, any anything you got on whether or not the US government is actually physically selling those coins, please let me know. And, shit. Oh, yeah. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities Oil Sucking Swamp Water Again. West Texas Intermediate is down 2.75% to 7454.
Brent Norsee likewise down 2 point 25% to 7789. So definitely under 80. Natural gas, however, doing its thing. It goes in reverse. It is almost 5 points to the upside, $2.22 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is down almost 2%. $2.26 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks are relatively green but mixed. Gold is up a quarter of a point. Silver is up 1.74%. Platinum is down in the red, 0.06%. Copper is up 3 quarters of a point in palladium. Gittin' need. 2.71% to the downside. Ag is mostly green too. Lumber is the biggest loser today. 0.38% to the downside. And the biggest winner today is chocolate or coco with 3.17 percent of the upside. Live cattle is up a third. Lean hogs are up 2.63%.
But feeder cattle are basically moving sideways while the Dow is up a half point. The S and P is up a half a point. The NASDAQ is up a third of a point. And the S and P Mini is up 0.65%. On to Clark Moody's dashboard where the price of Bitcoin is 58 ks. The 58 k gang, I'm sorry. I'm tired of you guys. Go away. $58,720, that is a $1,160,000,000,000 market cap. You can only get 23 0.4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your 1 Bitcoin of which there are. 19,701,958.62 of, and average fees per block are still very, very low. 0.06 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis. And there are a 136 blocks floating around waiting with 297,000 unconfirmed transactions to get basically mined at high priority rates of 7 satoshis per vbyte.
Low priorities are gonna get you in at 6. So there has been some increased activity as of late. Now, on to Liminal and Project Alexandria, which was the interview that I Alexandria, which was the interview that I dropped on Friday, very late Friday evening, I might add. Great discussion. I really wish that the first 20 minutes hadn't have been destroyed. But I'm just getting used to the fact that the Bitcoin and podcast will always have technical difficulties. But Pies is helping me out by boosting 2,100 sats says thank you gentlemen. No. Thank you, dude. Bitcoin Boaz with 821 says allsats matter at allsatsmatter.com.
God's death with 237 says thank you sirs. No thank you. Nostra Gang with a 100 says nothing. He literally wrote it down. Nothing. Hey. Thanks. I appreciate it. Because it's slightly better than the 100 sats from user 38644922. That literally put in nothing. Just just gave me the sats, which I appreciate. Don't get me wrong. Oh, and nothing. Oh, here this is great. Okay. So fountain is fountain is changing the way that it's been doing stuff. I I'm trying to get I'm gonna try to schedule a time with, Oscar Mayer to come back on the show. I'm part of the beta that is really starting to integrate Nostr into, fountain.
And Pies, you know, the guy that, you know, basically boosted me 21 100 sats, he sent the link out all on his own. He didn't boost, like, he he wrote a note on Nostar and he dropped the link, the fountain dot fm link to this particular episode, and it's popped up here in my, where I read my boostograms. And Nostar Gang also did the exact same thing except he added the word nothing. But he dropped this episode's URL into a note and I'm seeing the note here. So Oscar, Mary, and the guys over at fountain app are really helping me look and see that Pies and Noster gang helped the show. So now I now that I'm aware I got to go back over and find Pies and find Noster gang on Noster and I've got to give them a zap for doing that for me because if they're gonna take the time to try to help this show grow, then I need to take the sats and deliver them to these 2 people who are helping me grow the show.
That's gonna do it for the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. BTrust Announces Q3 2024 Grant Recipients TO Drive Open Source Bitcoin Development. Jay z and Jack Dorsey funded Bitcoin nonprofit, BTrust focused on nurturing Bitcoin developers from the Global South. Announced the recipients of its Q3 starter grants and new members of its BTrust open source cohort. The BTrust starter grant offers full time funding to qualified Bitcoin software engineers to contribute to open source projects, aiming to help them identify a long term focus.
Each recipient receives 6 months of support, including a monthly stipend payable in Bitcoin, technical guidance, and assistance in developing proposals to join the BTrust open source cohort for long term funding. Through these grants, we can tangibly contribute to decentralizing Bitcoin open source development by introducing these developers with diverse perspectives to strengthen the resilience of the Bitcoin network, said Abu Bakr Nur Khali, BTrust interim CEO and board member in a press release shared with No Bullshit Bitcoin. BTrust grants are available to developers in Africa, the MENA region, Southeast Asia and Latin America with consideration for other Global South developers on a case by case basis based on their proof of work.
The goal is to provide opportunities for talented developers from these diverse backgrounds to contribute to the Bitcoin ecosystem. So here are Q3
[00:35:05] Unknown:
Btruss starter grant recipients. Enigbe
[00:35:09] David Bennett:
I cannot pronounce it. Ochikila? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to butcher it, but that's the way this is gonna be pretty much all these guys. With over 2 years in back end engineering and experience on Bitcoin project like Galloy's StableSats and Ease Pay's PSP, EnigBee will enhance the Lightning Development Kits Rust Lightning and improved onboarding or improved onboarding for new Bitcoin open source contributors through this particular grant. Tobiqi Chukwoletta. That's I can pronounce that. That's okay. Tobiqi, an experienced back end developer, has enhanced BTC pay servers, multisig capabilities, and plugin development.
He is using the starter grant to advance BTC pay store functionality and improve its modularity. Kevin Isavore. I can't I don't know. Oh, no. Not Kevin. Kelvin. Kelvin Isavoir. Kelvin is currently contributing to Bitcoin projects like Polar and LND. Under the starter Grant, he'll focus on optimizing local development environments for Bitcoin applications, streamline testing and development for engineers on the Lightning Network. The starter grants serve as pathways to the BTrust open source cohort, underscoring the importance of continuous development and long term engagement in Bitcoin open source development.
The BTrust open source cohort a little bit about this, recognizing the unique challenges faced by developers in the Global South, BTrust has launched the cohort, the BTrust open source cohort. This is a different program. It offers long term support, mentorship, professional development and peer collaboration for contributors of Bitcoin projects. The intention here is to make grantees Bitcoin open source careers sustainable. And, in addition to the long term financial support that we provide, create a supportive environment for them to thrive and feel a larger sense of community.
So members of the Q3 2024 BTrust open source cohort include there's no way I can say this guy's last name. So Abukar is a Nigerian Bitcoin Core contributor. He's focusing on optimizing the Bitcoin protocol, particularly in fee estimation and transaction analysis. There's Duncan Dean. He is a South African Lightning contributor focused on developing the Rust Lightning Library and participates in projects like LDK Review Club and LNDK. Ogevno is a skilled engineer from Nigeria and has contributed to Bitcoin Core and other projects since completing B Trust Builder's 2023 cohort.
His recent work under the B Trust starter grant focused on advancing silent payments functionality in Bitcoin Core. In the BTrust open source cohort, he will introduce new key formats and descriptors for silent payments, enhancing the Bitcoin protocol scalability and privacy. And if you would like to apply for a B trust starter grant you can go to b trust. Homerun.co. That's b trust. Homerun.coforward/ starter grants or starter hyphen grants. And I would if you have any desire whatsoever to get into this game, it will not hurt you to apply for these grants. It's not like you're gonna get rejected for a grant and they're gonna pin it up on a big wall says, this guy sucks. Never talk to him again.
In fact, the opposite is true. The more times that you put in your name your name in the hat you put your name in the hat the more time you put your name into the hat the more time your name comes up. And then all of a sudden they start recognizing your name. So don't, for us, if you ever thought that applying for a grant and failing to get that grant was somehow gonna kneecap your ass or take your legs out from under you, you are wrong. That's not the way this shit works. That's not the way it works in academia. It's not the way it works out here in the real world.
If you have any inkling that you might want to go for one of these grants, then get the grant application and fill the son of a bitch out. It ain't gonna kill you. It's gonna do you much better, more good, than you can possibly think of. Now, Arc. Do you remember people talking about arc? About like it was the early part of last year. So 2023 I'm thinking February March of last year. We heard about arc. Well, Ark version 0.2.0 has been released. It's covenantless. There's offline payments, client SDKs, as well as mutiny net support. Ark is a layer 2 protocol designed to scale bitcoin transactions.
And this update includes covenantless Ark implementation, offline payments, client SDKs, Mutiny Net Support, and enhancements to Arc's code base and documentation. We're thrilled to announce the release of Arc's version 0.2, a significant milestone. This update brings new features when we just talked about it, so let's talk about them in detail. What the hell is covenantless arc? The go implementation now supports covenantless arc. This advancement allows users to leverage the arc protocol on the Bitcoin network without requiring a Covenant soft fork.
Client SDKs. We're excited to introduce new SDKs that make integrating Arc into your projects easier than ever. Offline payments. We've introduced them. Offline payments support in the go implementation significantly enhances user flexibility. Leveraging the Rubin shortcut as the default payment protocol, senders can now cosign transactions with the ASP or ARC service provider and deliver payment requests directly to recipients. Mutiny NetSupport is a custom Bitcoin signet created by the Mutiny team and has been added and improved documentation as well as resources.
So if you're interested, in this more, go to arcdev. That's arcarkdev.infodocsforward/quickstartforward/overview. But honestly, just go to arcdev.info and there's a host of information about what arc is. It's a layer 2 like lightning, but it's not lightning. It's different. And the original vision of arc was to make it to where you didn't know how to do anything. You wouldn't have to know how to do anything at all. You didn't have to run a lightning node. You didn't have to run a full node. You don't even know what half this ship means in the first place. And yet, you too would have the ability to trade little tiny bits of satoshis like we do on or not bits of satoshis but tiny amounts of bitcoin known as satoshis on the lightning network with a wallet. But even today some wallets are custodial and make it easy but they're custodial and that's a problem. And the ones that aren't custodial, you have to open up a lightning channel and I and if you want to do a full lightning node, there's that's a whole other issue.
Arc basically sought to have like a 4 tap entry screen to where somebody can look at it the first time and say boom boom boom boom boom and all of a sudden they have spendable bitcoin in a wallet that they may or may not have control over but it acts and looks kinda like the lightning network but it is not the lightning network because there's not a sit there was trying to do, you know, just get away from the situation where you needed a lightning channel with not only incoming liquidity, but outgoing liquidity so that you could not only send payments, but receive them as well. And I can't remember who's I can't remember why is why is the guy's name not up here?
I can't remember his name, but he was trying to get away from that. Then he was like, and I I think we can do it with this thing that I'm building called arc, and now we are at arc 0.2. I kind of thought that arc had just disappeared. I'm thrilled that it has not disappeared. Just like I'm always thrilled to hear about Bisk. Bisk version 2.1.0 supports Lightning Network now as an additional Bitcoin settlement method. So bisque 2 is the successor to bisque version 1 and will support multiple trade protocols, multiple privacy networks, and multiple identities.
Nice. The latest bisque to release version 2.1.0 brings support to the lightning network as an additional Bitcoin settlement method, a q o QR code scanner, upgraded chats, improved tour setup, and more. Quote, if you've been waiting to try BISK 2 and its new BISK Easy Trade Protocol version 2.1 is a great time to do so. With plenty of offers and liquidity across major markets, we hope BISK Easy will become the place that you send your friends and family to start stacking SATs the right way, said the project. BISC 2 application has been renamed from BISC 2 with a space to bisque 2 without a space. So when you install the new version of the old bisque 2 with a space application, it remains in place and should be manually deleted or uninstalled to avoid, being used accidentally which would cause a database corruption. So, yeah. Yeah. You won't do that. And if you're wondering what bisk is, it's a decentralized way to trade Bitcoin. It's an exchange. Okay. So what do we always say? Don't trade this shit.
But it also serves as an on ramp so that you can trade cash for Bitcoin. And if you really are if if you, you know, nobody likes doing it, I've had to do it where you have to sell some Bitcoin for cash to settle something that the Fiat normies just they just refuse to take anything but cash. So it happens. Right? So if you want to go examine what it's like to have non KYC Bitcoin because like if you sign up to Coinbase or Kraken or Bitfinex or whatever, you know, whatever. Well, even BitMex back in the day when it was still open, you had to, like, front back picture of your license. You had to hold it up next to your face and take a photograph with your phone. You had to do all kinds of shit. Bisk 2, the whole purpose of Bisc is to get away from that crap.
But to do so, it has to be decentralized. And because it's decentralized, it can be a pain in the butt. It depends on what you want. Do you really want these people to know that you bought Bitcoin or are you gonna have a small pain in your ass for maybe a couple of hours or you know maybe a day or 2 while you're trying to learn how to use bisk and then once you learn it you know how to you know how to use it and then you can buy bitcoin kyc free you can trade bitcoin you can do all that stuff that you can do with an exchange but you can do it on bisk and with bisk version 2.1.0 lightning network is now finally finally included.
Okay. Last up is bit blue wallet version 7.0.0, BIP 47 payment codes are now available to everyone. Blue Wallet is a Bitcoin and lightning wallet built with React Native and Electrum. It's available on iOS, Android, and macOS. And the latest Blue Wallet release adds a toggle to disable privacy blur, lock screen widgets for iOS, and most importantly, makes BIP 47 payment codes available to everyone. You have to enable it in your wallet settings. It also includes multiple fixes and improvements such as a graceful handling of existing LDK wallets and after depreciate or deprecation and a fixed memo storage as well as a whole bunch of other stuff like toggling to low hold on sorry visible CC check, icons were not visible on menus and now they are this huge state chains are triggering we're triggering random UX errors on Android 13 and 14 and so now that's fixed. There's a whole list of shit that they've done. So, if you have if you're still using blue wallet you might want to consider upgrading your software and that's it. That's that's the that's the news. So, let's let's move on, man.
Alright. Haven't done one of these in a long while. Dad says jokes. My wife asked, she just simply asked, if she could have just a little peace and quiet while she cooked dinner. So I took the battery out of the smoke detector. Get it?
[00:48:44] Unknown:
Yeah. Alright. So, lots of stuff going on this week.
[00:48:52] David Bennett:
Oh oh, yeah that's right. My wife started teaching again. The college is back in session. Now here's the deal. She bought tickets to a Texas Tech game. Because Washington State University is that's this area, right? University of Washington is over in Seattle, but Washington State University pretty much services the inland northwest, not the Pacific Northwest. We're over here in the Palouse region, so we're really close to Idaho. And Washington State University is a huge ag school that services this this entire area. Turns out, we just happened this is funny. We just happened to be looking at, at, or she I can't remember what it was. We're saying something about Texas Tech because both me and my wife met, you know, that's where we met. So we, you know, we both got our degrees there.
I love that school. I'm in love with Texas Tech. I I don't know why, but I just I mean, everybody loves their alma mater, but I've got, like, almost an unhealthy relationship with Texas Tech. I just I adore that school. And I miss being there. I miss being on campus. And somehow, we started talking about it and I just said, hey, well, when's, when's tech's first game? Because I gotta make sure that that I'm, you know, listening to the games on the radio because I that's what I do and I wanted the, you know, the date of the first game. So she's looking up the, schedule for Texas Tech Football and she goes, holy shit. And I go, what? And she goes, they're coming here.
They're coming to to WSU. And we started to look we're like, what the hell? Because I don't know if you know this, but Mike Leach was the head coach of Texas Tech after oh, what old Bubba can't remember his name Spike Dykes. After Spike Dykes we had, Leach. Mike Leach. That dude turned Texas Tech football from a podunk backwards ass, you know, bullshit farm football team into a world class outfit. They produced more NFL quarterbacks in his first, like, what, 5 years at Texas Tech than the entirety of Texas Tech's history in football. I mean, it was it was it they they just generated quarterbacks. It was like a quarterback machine, man.
Well, after he got rousted out of Tech, and he was rusted, don't don't let anybody fool you, that for whatever reason Tech decided that they didn't want to be national champions, so they cut Mike Leach loose and they tried to embarrass him horribly. So he came to where? Washington State University. And he almost was able to pull off the same stunt by taking a really terrible football team and turning them into something very special damn near overnight. So we have these 2 schools have this the same football coach
[00:51:53] Unknown:
in common.
[00:51:55] David Bennett:
So when she found out that Texas Tech was going to have an away game and they were coming to Washington State to play football at Washington State, she immediately bought tickets for both me and her. Smart, you know, it's like an early anniversary present. I cannot wait. I usually don't talk about sportsball because I think most sportsball sucks, but if it's Texas Tech, I will talk about football. I I will absolutely go apeshit and I will talk about 3rd downs and all that kind of stuff. If it's anybody else, I don't fucking care. I just don't. So, it's gonna be real interesting going to this game because they've only met twice.
Both times. In 1963 and then again in 1964 the Washington State University Cougars went to Texas Tech to play. Texas Tech has never played at Washington State. Just so happens, this time they are. This will be the first time in history that Texas Tech Red Raiders will play at WSU. And it's weird because we just happen to be here. They they're they're only gonna after this game, they will have only met 3 times and we just happen to be here? This game is going to be lit as fuck and I can't wait for it. I will see you on the other side of it. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.
Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:29 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 19th day of August 2024. And this is episode 938 of Bitcoin. And I'm gonna cover a little bit of silent payments today.
That I I keep hearing about silent payments. And this is it's been kinda weird. Because I I had never heard of silent payments before, I don't know, a couple of months ago. But all of a sudden, the way that people were talking about silent payments was that they were talking about it in a way where everybody knew what silent payments were. And I'm like, I have never heard of silent payments. I don't know what the hell it is. So we're gonna do that. South Korea, there's some, well, some employees that are out earning staff at some major banks. I'm not sure I'm gonna do that one.
We'll we'll we'll I'll think about it. But bit VM 2, Robin Linus. Do you remember that gentleman's name? Well, bitvm2 has been delivered. So we'll get into some of that. And Trump is tapping Bitcoin. And what else do we got on deck? What what is it? B Trust, Builders is going to do some open source development stuff with grants. And ARC is back in the news. Do you remember what ARC was? I remember what ARC was. And it looks like we might actually have a workable client. Not sure yet. But Bisc, is going to support some lightning network stuff. And then there's blue wallet back in the news. And anybody who has been around this space long enough has probably run into blue wallet at one point or another. But before all of that, I'm just gonna do silent payments.
A little moment of silence for silent payments there. Silent payments are coming to better protect Bitcoin users. This is, Bitcoin Magazine. Henry Fisher is writing it. Bitcoin continues to provide a massive breakthrough in the digital age by allowing people to transact between each other without third parties. Bitcoin Magazine covered silent payments over 2 years ago to shed light on one of Bitcoin's shortcomings: privacy. It was a problem then, and it's a problem now. Quote, a push based payment system Bitcoin requires the sender to have the information necessary to define the destination for money that they send.
This requires the receipt the recipient communicating to the sender their Bitcoin address in one way or some other. In the case of trying to raise money from the general public, this has massive consequences in terms of privacy or needing to maintain a consistent and constant interactive presence online. Anyone is totally capable of simply posting a single Bitcoin address somewhere online. And from that point, anyone who wishes to send money to that person can simply do it. But there's no privacy in raising money in this way. Simply take that address and look it up on the blockchain and you cannot only see how much money that person has been sent.
But you can see the footprint on the blockchain of every single person who has sent them money. Both the person attempting to raise funds and everyone who has donated to them have no privacy whatsoever. Everything is completely open and correlated for the whole world to see. Before silent payments, the only alternative was to reuse addresses on a per contract basis. Excuse me. A per contact basis to protect your privacy. Or to run a server that offers a new address every single time someone requests to send you money. Neither of which are usable or scalable options for most users. Reserving privacy for a privileged few who know how to achieve that privacy.
Fortunately, the community has made a massive progress since then with the release of silent payments. BIP 352. That is silent payments. After much discussion on just how to implement the features as efficiently as possible, BIP 352 is now a reality. When somebody wants to receive money privately, let's say an activist organization, they can post their silent payments address on their site instead of a traditional bitcoin address. Now, when a user wants to send that organization money, they use a silent payment address within a supporting wallet. This will automagically use the unique public key attached to the silent payment address, combined with the public keys of the outputs that they want to send to generate a brand new single use address that looks like any other bitcoin address.
Sounds complicated, but all of this functions behind the scenes. All a user needs to do is paste the address and send money to it. Just like, you know, any other address. There's here's the benefits. Number 1. The organization itself only has to post a single address on its site to still receive the benefit of generating new addresses for every transaction. 2, the user sending money to the organization can always reference the same static address, making it easy for them to continually send money without needing to track multiple addresses. 3.
If the same user continuously gives money to the same silent payments address, a new Bitcoin address is generated each and every time. So the sender doesn't need to worry about the receiver knowing it's the same user sending the money. Or the receiver gains massive privacy benefits as users are not able to easily look into the funds of their wallet and see who else is spending them money or sending them money. And 5 the addresses that are generated to transact between both users appear just like any other Bitcoin transaction meaning, use of the meaning that the use of the feature is obfuscated to outside parties. And finally 6 no server required.
Like, at all. It's just not required. Any wallet that supports silent payments handles all of this technology locally within the wallet. To summarize the benefits. With silent payments any person or organization can now opt to use a static, silent payment Bitcoin address in place of their traditional static address to not only have better privacy for themselves but also to protect the people trying to send them money by ensuring not even they, as receivers, can snag information about senders. With silent payments, the sender and receiver gain a massive layer of privacy while still largely benefiting from the power of the underlying Bitcoin protocol to give them the freedom to transact as they please. Well, with that said, there are, you know, okay, here are the drawbacks.
The first is a direct result of the benefit of not needing a dedicated device online to facilitate transactions. The users will need to scan through blockchain transactions to detect payments made to them. This scanning can take time, but it comes with massive privacy benefits for both of the users. And over time, performance of scanning can be improved to make this less of an issue for users. The second issue is one of adoptability. Since silent payments are new with wallet support being fairly limited at the time of writing, Both the sender and the receiver need to use a wallet that offers support for the feature. Silentpayments.xyz is a resource that shares which wallets support silent payments.
The first of which to currently have full support being Cake Wallet. Wow. No shit. If the community hopes to see wider adoption of silent payments, wallets need to integrate the functionality to offer more users the privacy benefits provided by Bitcoin silent payments. Overall, the idea of protecting user privacy through the native Bitcoin protocol is an important one that can offer user privacy without jeopardizing what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin. In fact, the privacy benefits of silent payments strengthens the fundamental beliefs of the Bitcoin community by offering users the freedom to transact with better privacy if they choose to.
Alright. So again, that was Henry Fisher about silent payments. This clears up a lot of questions that I actually had about what the hell silent payments are. I had no idea that Bitcoin Magazine covered this 2 years ago. Was I asleep? I don't know. But I mean, literally I've just only been hearing about silent payments for the last few months. So, go to silentpayments.xyz. That's silentpayments.xyz to find wallets as they come online with this what was it BIP 352? Yeah, BIP352. So we're looking for wallets that have BIP 352 and you can find those over at silentpayments.xyz.
So I hope that clears things up. I'm not excited about the drawback of not being somehow or another I don't know having to scan through the blockchain transactions to see if somebody sent you money. I'm sure that that's going to be rectified at one point or another. Like, I don't know some way to I don't know some way that, you can get DM ed on, like, simplex or something like that that a silent payments come through. I don't know if that's a good idea because we don't really want to attach different identities to this thing we call Bitcoin silent payments. But, yeah, that sounds like a pain in the butt. But also also this, Layer 2 is not like it's not like it's dead.
And it's it's very much the opposite of dead. Not only is it alive and walking around, that that's gaining steam. So is there going to be a fight between on chain transactions via silent payments versus just lightning transactions? Because lightning is I don't care what anybody says. Lightning is working well. I use it every day. People send me hundreds of small payments every single day I get zaps on nostr every single day and none of this shit requires an on chain transaction if I want to buy a car that's a different deal want to buy a house yeah that's a different deal but if somebody just wants to send me $20 do we really need an on chain transaction for that I personally am of the opinion that we kind of don't but we'll need to see how this runs.
Still though, I'm very happy to finally understand exactly how silent payments work, at least on the surface of the situation. Now,
[00:12:01] Unknown:
hold on for a second, because I'm not sure if I wanted
[00:12:05] David Bennett:
I don't know why I've got this story up here. Hold on for a sec. Yeah, this is the story that I wanted. It's written by Arjeet Sarkar, Cointelegraph, the United States, moles applying fiat reporting mandate on crypto transfers. That's kind of a scary situation. Let's see if it means what I think it means. Top federal agencies in the United States are teaming up to revise the meaning of money to tighten up reporting requirements on financial institutions for domestic and cross border cryptocurrency transactions. Okay. That's not a transfer, that's an actual transaction.
The US Department of the Treasury issued a semi annual regulatory agenda on August 16th revealing an upcoming federal attempt to level the regulatory playing field for cryptocurrencies and traditional fiat currencies. Section 183 states, clarification of the requirement to collect, retain and transmit information on transactions involving convertible virtual currencies and digital assets with legal tender status. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network plan to revise the meaning of money used in the Bank Secrecy Act. Because they just can't stand us having any amount of fucking freedom at all.
These people all need to be drugged out in the street and tarred and feathered and then run out on a rail. Quote, the agencies FRS and FinCend intend that the revised proposal will ensure that rules apply to domestic and cross border transactions involving convertible virtual currency, which is a medium of exchange such as cryptocurrencies that either has an equivalent value as currency or acts as a substitute for currency but lacks legal tender status. End quote. However, the proposal will also extend the reporting requirement to digital assets with legal tender status, including central bank digital currencies.
The final notice of proposed rulemaking is currently slated for September 2025 and subject to clearance. In addition to cryptocurrencies, the US Department of Justice is also actively amending regulations and legal mandates for artificial intelligence. I don't I honestly don't give a shit. And then there's a whole paragraph on AI guidance to fight crime. No. I'm not even gonna get get into that part. Okay, so this is my problem with this, this article. The headline says reporting mandate on crypto transfers, But everything in the body of this, of this article is talking about transactions.
Now, while it is the case that a transaction is, yes, indeed, a transfer, When I read the headline, what I immediately started thinking was that if I have one wallet, like a hardware wallet, and I want a new hardware wallet, and I so I spin up a brand new wallet on a different either a like another cold card or a completely different kind of hardware wallet, and I transfer my Bitcoin holding from one wallet to another that I was going to be subject to a reporting mandate. I am still very, very unclear as to whether or not that's the case. In either event, what can be said is that these people know they're losing, and we're starting to see the wounded animal strike back.
Okay? They always say, you know, first they laugh at you and then they fight you and I don't know. Or then they laugh at you. I don't know. Then you win. Okay. But what we're never really told is what happens when we've got something as large as the central banks of the planet backed into a corner. That's what's happening. The then they fight you phase could be: hey, we're both standing on open ground and we've got, you know, nobody's back is to a wall. But I don't think that that's what the case is here. I think we've got them back not only up against a wall, I think we've accidentally backed this badger into a corner and this son of a bitch is about to come out swinging.
So be prepared for anything. Now, Bitcoin's programmability is drawing closer to a reality as Robin Linus delivers Bit Virtual Machine 2, also known as BitVM 2. And this is, by the way, CoinDesk and Bradley Kyun is writing Robin Linus, the Bitcoin developer who shook up the crypto tech landscape last year with a theoretical method of making the oldest and original blockchain more programmable is out with a second iteration called bitvm2. Boasting dramatic improvements that could bring the concept closer to real world implementation. The basic setup involves using cryptography to compress computer programs into sub programs that can then be executed within Bitcoin transactions themselves according to a white paper published Thursday by Linus along with 5 co authors.
The programs are then verified. Basically making sure nobody is trying to cheat or steal in 3 on chain transactions. In the previous version, the verification could take up upwards of 70 transactions according to one of co authors, Alex Zemaitin, who separately works for a project called BOB, short for build on Bitcoin. A key improvement of the new version is that anyone can call into question a suspicious transaction in a feature known as permissionless challenging. In the original BitVM, which was published last October but never really put into any practical implementation, only a fixed set of operators could initiate a challenge.
Quote, this design gives us 3 major improvements. Zomaton said in a video interview with CoinDesk. Quote, we now have a full and comprehensive write up of the BitVM paradigm. Linus is a core contributor at Xerosync Association, a Swiss non profit organization based in the canton of Zug. The other co authors besides Zmaitin includes Lucas Ayumar, Andrea Pelosi, Zetta there's no way I can pronounce it, and Mateo Mafi. Linus' project has been hailed as a breakthrough partly because it doesn't require any changes to the underlying Bitcoin code itself. And that's crucial since Bitcoin is, more so than most subsequent blockchain projects, fully decentralized in its governance.
There isn't really a guiding foundation or governing body or lead developer as there is with, say, Ethereum or Solana. Even seemingly modest proposals like the much discussed OPCAT have faced serious difficulty getting adopted by the maintainers of the Bitcoin code since nearly total consensus has evolved to be the de facto standard for suggested upgrades. The initial application of BitVM2 would be well, it would enable a roll up. Essentially, a separate auxiliary network atop Bitcoin that could handle faster and cheaper transactions, but with similar security guarantees.
Just the publication of Linus' original design helped to inspire a fervor for building projects on Bitcoin. As of July, CoinDesk counted at least 83 Bitcoin Layer 2 projects in the works with a variety of setups including roll ups as well as side chains. The new paradigm could be used to create a block blockchain bridge that could be used to securely transfer Bitcoin to the roll up and later safely bring it back so the deposits can be withdrawn. While Bitcoin's proof of work consensus mechanism has been criticized for its environmental impact, most blockchain experts agree that it is the most secure blockchain ever.
Such a virtue is underscored by the $1,200,000,000,000 market value of all Bitcoin outstanding, more than all other cryptocurrencies combined. Quote, our new bridge design is simple and more capital efficient, Linus told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. Quote, the previous design caused liquidity issues both in terms of how much and for how long bridge operators had to lock collateral in. Now it requires less capital, which is locked for a shorter duration. And Nicholas Day, writing for CoinDesk, telling us a little bit about bitvm2. And I wasn't I thought we had a couple of examples of bitvm actually functional on, Bitcoin's blockchain.
Maybe not. I I don't know. But I I'm excited about bit VM too, but I kinda wonder. I wonder about bloat. I really do. I I wonder if what we add in these types of Bitcoin projects like ordinals, inscriptions, bit VM 2, you know, with ordinals and inscriptions, there's clearly a lot of bloat. And it's just it's disgusting to watch, but I can't do anything about it, so I I don't cry too hard about it. But it sucks to watch all, like, I don't know, cats being traded with each other on Bitcoin's blockchain. It's not, in my opinion, and it is only my opinion, that's not a real monetary need.
To other people, maybe I'm clearly wrong, which is why you don't want me in charge of the Bitcoin blockchain. This is by consensus. But every time that I see somebody saying we can't change bitcoins code, so what can we do with the available tools that Bitcoin has to do the thing that we want to do without changing the code? And there's a real beauty in that. There's a real beauty of being constrained and you'll hear me talk about this in permaculture all the time is that if you give somebody a blank slate they will not come up with a design in permaculture that is anywhere close to as beautiful and fluid and eloquent, you're eloquent as well as elegant, then if you give them constraints like you could you're designing this but here's your fence lines.
And by the way, you have no water on your property versus you have your property is cut in half by a 10 foot river or, well, a 10 like to say a 10 foot stream. Those are constraints. And you have to work within those constraints because you're not moving the stream. And if you're like one of your constraints is that you're at the foot of a mountain you're not moving the mountain. You have to be able to come up with a design that fits where you're at. And we see the very same thing here in the Bitcoin landscape. It's a design feature, not a bug, that you have to work with Bitcoin the way it is. Because the chances of you saying we need a consensus change to do the shit that I want to do, good luck.
We we see how that has not really worked all that well out, you know, in the past. I'm just saying. Alright. On to Trump. Trump taps Bitcoin and Tether bull Howard Lutnick for his transition team. Matt DeSalvo is writing for Decrypt. Former US President Donald Trump has named Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, as co chair of his transition team ahead of the presidential election in November. And Lutnick, he's a big Bitcoin bull. And I did not know this until now. Trump's campaign made the announcement on Friday also noting that Linda McMahon, the former administrator of the Small Business Administration, will serve as a co chair alongside Lutnick.
Vice president candidate, JD Vance will serve as an honorary chair alongside Trump's sons, Eric and Donald Junior. The transition teams help prepare the candidates to make the move into the White House should they win the election. Now, Lutnick, who leads the investment banking giant Cantor Fitzgerald, has previously said that he is a fan of Bitcoin and of stablecoin Tether. And asked last December by CNBC if he was broadly into cryptocurrency, he replied, I'm a fan of crypto, but let's be very specific. Bitcoin.
Just Bitcoin, end quote. However, he then added that he and Cantor Fitzgerald are also invested into the stable coin giant, Tether. Yeah. Well, they ain't alone. That's for damn sure. Lutnick even spoke at the Bitcoin 2024 conference last month in Nashville where he added his investment bank was, quote, a rock star in the digital asset space and reiterated his enthusiasm for Bitcoin. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate in the upcoming election, also spoke as at the event. Of course, we all all know that. Trump has come out as a crypto friendly candidate ahead of the US November elections.
The former reality television star and real estate mogul even said that he wants all future Bitcoin to be mined on US soil. Silicon Valley bigwigs and tech entrepreneurs, some in the crypto space, have donated generously to the Republican front runners campaign. Oh, that last paragraph. We didn't need it. All we really need to know is that Howard Lutnick has come out, as of July 31st. This is when he wrote this tweet. I am a fan of Bitcoin. Cantor Fitzgerald is a fan of Bitcoin. And our investment bank is a rock star of the digital asset space. We're just getting started. Watch my full speech at the Bitcoin conference Nashville or in Nashville 2024. And then he's got a video of his Bitcoin speech which I'm not going to play.
But I find it amazing that Howard Lutnick, the CEO of something like Cantor Fitzgerald is I'm a fan of crypto, but let's be specific. Bitcoin, just Bitcoin. That sounds a lot like the people that I hang out with in this space. But here's my issue. I don't think Bitcoin's price can take much more good news. Have you noticed that lately?
[00:26:45] Unknown:
That the price is like we get good news, price dumps. Get more good news, price dumps. Even more good news, price dumps. Maybe there's some good news on the price dump. Can we get some bad news?
[00:26:58] David Bennett:
Because maybe that'll reverse the trend. I mean, I don't mean to harp on it too much, but I find it odd that we've had such good news over the last, like, this entire summer has been nothing but good news for Bitcoin. And we just keep hitting these weird walls. Now there's some speculation that the United States government is indeed the US Marshals Service is not only transferring lots of coins, of Bitcoin from their wallet, from the US government treasury's wallet, to CoinDesk, which is the US Marshals Service partner in custody, but that they are indeed selling it.
But I have yet to see hard actual proof that the United States government is selling those coins. If anybody has that kind of proof, would you do me a favor? Could you DM me or or just like, you know, light me up on on Noster or something and say, yeah, here's the here's the evidence. And and for or against, by the way, any anything you got on whether or not the US government is actually physically selling those coins, please let me know. And, shit. Oh, yeah. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities Oil Sucking Swamp Water Again. West Texas Intermediate is down 2.75% to 7454.
Brent Norsee likewise down 2 point 25% to 7789. So definitely under 80. Natural gas, however, doing its thing. It goes in reverse. It is almost 5 points to the upside, $2.22 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is down almost 2%. $2.26 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks are relatively green but mixed. Gold is up a quarter of a point. Silver is up 1.74%. Platinum is down in the red, 0.06%. Copper is up 3 quarters of a point in palladium. Gittin' need. 2.71% to the downside. Ag is mostly green too. Lumber is the biggest loser today. 0.38% to the downside. And the biggest winner today is chocolate or coco with 3.17 percent of the upside. Live cattle is up a third. Lean hogs are up 2.63%.
But feeder cattle are basically moving sideways while the Dow is up a half point. The S and P is up a half a point. The NASDAQ is up a third of a point. And the S and P Mini is up 0.65%. On to Clark Moody's dashboard where the price of Bitcoin is 58 ks. The 58 k gang, I'm sorry. I'm tired of you guys. Go away. $58,720, that is a $1,160,000,000,000 market cap. You can only get 23 0.4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your 1 Bitcoin of which there are. 19,701,958.62 of, and average fees per block are still very, very low. 0.06 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis. And there are a 136 blocks floating around waiting with 297,000 unconfirmed transactions to get basically mined at high priority rates of 7 satoshis per vbyte.
Low priorities are gonna get you in at 6. So there has been some increased activity as of late. Now, on to Liminal and Project Alexandria, which was the interview that I Alexandria, which was the interview that I dropped on Friday, very late Friday evening, I might add. Great discussion. I really wish that the first 20 minutes hadn't have been destroyed. But I'm just getting used to the fact that the Bitcoin and podcast will always have technical difficulties. But Pies is helping me out by boosting 2,100 sats says thank you gentlemen. No. Thank you, dude. Bitcoin Boaz with 821 says allsats matter at allsatsmatter.com.
God's death with 237 says thank you sirs. No thank you. Nostra Gang with a 100 says nothing. He literally wrote it down. Nothing. Hey. Thanks. I appreciate it. Because it's slightly better than the 100 sats from user 38644922. That literally put in nothing. Just just gave me the sats, which I appreciate. Don't get me wrong. Oh, and nothing. Oh, here this is great. Okay. So fountain is fountain is changing the way that it's been doing stuff. I I'm trying to get I'm gonna try to schedule a time with, Oscar Mayer to come back on the show. I'm part of the beta that is really starting to integrate Nostr into, fountain.
And Pies, you know, the guy that, you know, basically boosted me 21 100 sats, he sent the link out all on his own. He didn't boost, like, he he wrote a note on Nostar and he dropped the link, the fountain dot fm link to this particular episode, and it's popped up here in my, where I read my boostograms. And Nostar Gang also did the exact same thing except he added the word nothing. But he dropped this episode's URL into a note and I'm seeing the note here. So Oscar, Mary, and the guys over at fountain app are really helping me look and see that Pies and Noster gang helped the show. So now I now that I'm aware I got to go back over and find Pies and find Noster gang on Noster and I've got to give them a zap for doing that for me because if they're gonna take the time to try to help this show grow, then I need to take the sats and deliver them to these 2 people who are helping me grow the show.
That's gonna do it for the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. BTrust Announces Q3 2024 Grant Recipients TO Drive Open Source Bitcoin Development. Jay z and Jack Dorsey funded Bitcoin nonprofit, BTrust focused on nurturing Bitcoin developers from the Global South. Announced the recipients of its Q3 starter grants and new members of its BTrust open source cohort. The BTrust starter grant offers full time funding to qualified Bitcoin software engineers to contribute to open source projects, aiming to help them identify a long term focus.
Each recipient receives 6 months of support, including a monthly stipend payable in Bitcoin, technical guidance, and assistance in developing proposals to join the BTrust open source cohort for long term funding. Through these grants, we can tangibly contribute to decentralizing Bitcoin open source development by introducing these developers with diverse perspectives to strengthen the resilience of the Bitcoin network, said Abu Bakr Nur Khali, BTrust interim CEO and board member in a press release shared with No Bullshit Bitcoin. BTrust grants are available to developers in Africa, the MENA region, Southeast Asia and Latin America with consideration for other Global South developers on a case by case basis based on their proof of work.
The goal is to provide opportunities for talented developers from these diverse backgrounds to contribute to the Bitcoin ecosystem. So here are Q3
[00:35:05] Unknown:
Btruss starter grant recipients. Enigbe
[00:35:09] David Bennett:
I cannot pronounce it. Ochikila? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to butcher it, but that's the way this is gonna be pretty much all these guys. With over 2 years in back end engineering and experience on Bitcoin project like Galloy's StableSats and Ease Pay's PSP, EnigBee will enhance the Lightning Development Kits Rust Lightning and improved onboarding or improved onboarding for new Bitcoin open source contributors through this particular grant. Tobiqi Chukwoletta. That's I can pronounce that. That's okay. Tobiqi, an experienced back end developer, has enhanced BTC pay servers, multisig capabilities, and plugin development.
He is using the starter grant to advance BTC pay store functionality and improve its modularity. Kevin Isavore. I can't I don't know. Oh, no. Not Kevin. Kelvin. Kelvin Isavoir. Kelvin is currently contributing to Bitcoin projects like Polar and LND. Under the starter Grant, he'll focus on optimizing local development environments for Bitcoin applications, streamline testing and development for engineers on the Lightning Network. The starter grants serve as pathways to the BTrust open source cohort, underscoring the importance of continuous development and long term engagement in Bitcoin open source development.
The BTrust open source cohort a little bit about this, recognizing the unique challenges faced by developers in the Global South, BTrust has launched the cohort, the BTrust open source cohort. This is a different program. It offers long term support, mentorship, professional development and peer collaboration for contributors of Bitcoin projects. The intention here is to make grantees Bitcoin open source careers sustainable. And, in addition to the long term financial support that we provide, create a supportive environment for them to thrive and feel a larger sense of community.
So members of the Q3 2024 BTrust open source cohort include there's no way I can say this guy's last name. So Abukar is a Nigerian Bitcoin Core contributor. He's focusing on optimizing the Bitcoin protocol, particularly in fee estimation and transaction analysis. There's Duncan Dean. He is a South African Lightning contributor focused on developing the Rust Lightning Library and participates in projects like LDK Review Club and LNDK. Ogevno is a skilled engineer from Nigeria and has contributed to Bitcoin Core and other projects since completing B Trust Builder's 2023 cohort.
His recent work under the B Trust starter grant focused on advancing silent payments functionality in Bitcoin Core. In the BTrust open source cohort, he will introduce new key formats and descriptors for silent payments, enhancing the Bitcoin protocol scalability and privacy. And if you would like to apply for a B trust starter grant you can go to b trust. Homerun.co. That's b trust. Homerun.coforward/ starter grants or starter hyphen grants. And I would if you have any desire whatsoever to get into this game, it will not hurt you to apply for these grants. It's not like you're gonna get rejected for a grant and they're gonna pin it up on a big wall says, this guy sucks. Never talk to him again.
In fact, the opposite is true. The more times that you put in your name your name in the hat you put your name in the hat the more time you put your name into the hat the more time your name comes up. And then all of a sudden they start recognizing your name. So don't, for us, if you ever thought that applying for a grant and failing to get that grant was somehow gonna kneecap your ass or take your legs out from under you, you are wrong. That's not the way this shit works. That's not the way it works in academia. It's not the way it works out here in the real world.
If you have any inkling that you might want to go for one of these grants, then get the grant application and fill the son of a bitch out. It ain't gonna kill you. It's gonna do you much better, more good, than you can possibly think of. Now, Arc. Do you remember people talking about arc? About like it was the early part of last year. So 2023 I'm thinking February March of last year. We heard about arc. Well, Ark version 0.2.0 has been released. It's covenantless. There's offline payments, client SDKs, as well as mutiny net support. Ark is a layer 2 protocol designed to scale bitcoin transactions.
And this update includes covenantless Ark implementation, offline payments, client SDKs, Mutiny Net Support, and enhancements to Arc's code base and documentation. We're thrilled to announce the release of Arc's version 0.2, a significant milestone. This update brings new features when we just talked about it, so let's talk about them in detail. What the hell is covenantless arc? The go implementation now supports covenantless arc. This advancement allows users to leverage the arc protocol on the Bitcoin network without requiring a Covenant soft fork.
Client SDKs. We're excited to introduce new SDKs that make integrating Arc into your projects easier than ever. Offline payments. We've introduced them. Offline payments support in the go implementation significantly enhances user flexibility. Leveraging the Rubin shortcut as the default payment protocol, senders can now cosign transactions with the ASP or ARC service provider and deliver payment requests directly to recipients. Mutiny NetSupport is a custom Bitcoin signet created by the Mutiny team and has been added and improved documentation as well as resources.
So if you're interested, in this more, go to arcdev. That's arcarkdev.infodocsforward/quickstartforward/overview. But honestly, just go to arcdev.info and there's a host of information about what arc is. It's a layer 2 like lightning, but it's not lightning. It's different. And the original vision of arc was to make it to where you didn't know how to do anything. You wouldn't have to know how to do anything at all. You didn't have to run a lightning node. You didn't have to run a full node. You don't even know what half this ship means in the first place. And yet, you too would have the ability to trade little tiny bits of satoshis like we do on or not bits of satoshis but tiny amounts of bitcoin known as satoshis on the lightning network with a wallet. But even today some wallets are custodial and make it easy but they're custodial and that's a problem. And the ones that aren't custodial, you have to open up a lightning channel and I and if you want to do a full lightning node, there's that's a whole other issue.
Arc basically sought to have like a 4 tap entry screen to where somebody can look at it the first time and say boom boom boom boom boom and all of a sudden they have spendable bitcoin in a wallet that they may or may not have control over but it acts and looks kinda like the lightning network but it is not the lightning network because there's not a sit there was trying to do, you know, just get away from the situation where you needed a lightning channel with not only incoming liquidity, but outgoing liquidity so that you could not only send payments, but receive them as well. And I can't remember who's I can't remember why is why is the guy's name not up here?
I can't remember his name, but he was trying to get away from that. Then he was like, and I I think we can do it with this thing that I'm building called arc, and now we are at arc 0.2. I kind of thought that arc had just disappeared. I'm thrilled that it has not disappeared. Just like I'm always thrilled to hear about Bisk. Bisk version 2.1.0 supports Lightning Network now as an additional Bitcoin settlement method. So bisque 2 is the successor to bisque version 1 and will support multiple trade protocols, multiple privacy networks, and multiple identities.
Nice. The latest bisque to release version 2.1.0 brings support to the lightning network as an additional Bitcoin settlement method, a q o QR code scanner, upgraded chats, improved tour setup, and more. Quote, if you've been waiting to try BISK 2 and its new BISK Easy Trade Protocol version 2.1 is a great time to do so. With plenty of offers and liquidity across major markets, we hope BISK Easy will become the place that you send your friends and family to start stacking SATs the right way, said the project. BISC 2 application has been renamed from BISC 2 with a space to bisque 2 without a space. So when you install the new version of the old bisque 2 with a space application, it remains in place and should be manually deleted or uninstalled to avoid, being used accidentally which would cause a database corruption. So, yeah. Yeah. You won't do that. And if you're wondering what bisk is, it's a decentralized way to trade Bitcoin. It's an exchange. Okay. So what do we always say? Don't trade this shit.
But it also serves as an on ramp so that you can trade cash for Bitcoin. And if you really are if if you, you know, nobody likes doing it, I've had to do it where you have to sell some Bitcoin for cash to settle something that the Fiat normies just they just refuse to take anything but cash. So it happens. Right? So if you want to go examine what it's like to have non KYC Bitcoin because like if you sign up to Coinbase or Kraken or Bitfinex or whatever, you know, whatever. Well, even BitMex back in the day when it was still open, you had to, like, front back picture of your license. You had to hold it up next to your face and take a photograph with your phone. You had to do all kinds of shit. Bisk 2, the whole purpose of Bisc is to get away from that crap.
But to do so, it has to be decentralized. And because it's decentralized, it can be a pain in the butt. It depends on what you want. Do you really want these people to know that you bought Bitcoin or are you gonna have a small pain in your ass for maybe a couple of hours or you know maybe a day or 2 while you're trying to learn how to use bisk and then once you learn it you know how to you know how to use it and then you can buy bitcoin kyc free you can trade bitcoin you can do all that stuff that you can do with an exchange but you can do it on bisk and with bisk version 2.1.0 lightning network is now finally finally included.
Okay. Last up is bit blue wallet version 7.0.0, BIP 47 payment codes are now available to everyone. Blue Wallet is a Bitcoin and lightning wallet built with React Native and Electrum. It's available on iOS, Android, and macOS. And the latest Blue Wallet release adds a toggle to disable privacy blur, lock screen widgets for iOS, and most importantly, makes BIP 47 payment codes available to everyone. You have to enable it in your wallet settings. It also includes multiple fixes and improvements such as a graceful handling of existing LDK wallets and after depreciate or deprecation and a fixed memo storage as well as a whole bunch of other stuff like toggling to low hold on sorry visible CC check, icons were not visible on menus and now they are this huge state chains are triggering we're triggering random UX errors on Android 13 and 14 and so now that's fixed. There's a whole list of shit that they've done. So, if you have if you're still using blue wallet you might want to consider upgrading your software and that's it. That's that's the that's the news. So, let's let's move on, man.
Alright. Haven't done one of these in a long while. Dad says jokes. My wife asked, she just simply asked, if she could have just a little peace and quiet while she cooked dinner. So I took the battery out of the smoke detector. Get it?
[00:48:44] Unknown:
Yeah. Alright. So, lots of stuff going on this week.
[00:48:52] David Bennett:
Oh oh, yeah that's right. My wife started teaching again. The college is back in session. Now here's the deal. She bought tickets to a Texas Tech game. Because Washington State University is that's this area, right? University of Washington is over in Seattle, but Washington State University pretty much services the inland northwest, not the Pacific Northwest. We're over here in the Palouse region, so we're really close to Idaho. And Washington State University is a huge ag school that services this this entire area. Turns out, we just happened this is funny. We just happened to be looking at, at, or she I can't remember what it was. We're saying something about Texas Tech because both me and my wife met, you know, that's where we met. So we, you know, we both got our degrees there.
I love that school. I'm in love with Texas Tech. I I don't know why, but I just I mean, everybody loves their alma mater, but I've got, like, almost an unhealthy relationship with Texas Tech. I just I adore that school. And I miss being there. I miss being on campus. And somehow, we started talking about it and I just said, hey, well, when's, when's tech's first game? Because I gotta make sure that that I'm, you know, listening to the games on the radio because I that's what I do and I wanted the, you know, the date of the first game. So she's looking up the, schedule for Texas Tech Football and she goes, holy shit. And I go, what? And she goes, they're coming here.
They're coming to to WSU. And we started to look we're like, what the hell? Because I don't know if you know this, but Mike Leach was the head coach of Texas Tech after oh, what old Bubba can't remember his name Spike Dykes. After Spike Dykes we had, Leach. Mike Leach. That dude turned Texas Tech football from a podunk backwards ass, you know, bullshit farm football team into a world class outfit. They produced more NFL quarterbacks in his first, like, what, 5 years at Texas Tech than the entirety of Texas Tech's history in football. I mean, it was it was it they they just generated quarterbacks. It was like a quarterback machine, man.
Well, after he got rousted out of Tech, and he was rusted, don't don't let anybody fool you, that for whatever reason Tech decided that they didn't want to be national champions, so they cut Mike Leach loose and they tried to embarrass him horribly. So he came to where? Washington State University. And he almost was able to pull off the same stunt by taking a really terrible football team and turning them into something very special damn near overnight. So we have these 2 schools have this the same football coach
[00:51:53] Unknown:
in common.
[00:51:55] David Bennett:
So when she found out that Texas Tech was going to have an away game and they were coming to Washington State to play football at Washington State, she immediately bought tickets for both me and her. Smart, you know, it's like an early anniversary present. I cannot wait. I usually don't talk about sportsball because I think most sportsball sucks, but if it's Texas Tech, I will talk about football. I I will absolutely go apeshit and I will talk about 3rd downs and all that kind of stuff. If it's anybody else, I don't fucking care. I just don't. So, it's gonna be real interesting going to this game because they've only met twice.
Both times. In 1963 and then again in 1964 the Washington State University Cougars went to Texas Tech to play. Texas Tech has never played at Washington State. Just so happens, this time they are. This will be the first time in history that Texas Tech Red Raiders will play at WSU. And it's weird because we just happen to be here. They they're they're only gonna after this game, they will have only met 3 times and we just happen to be here? This game is going to be lit as fuck and I can't wait for it. I will see you on the other side of it. 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.
Market Updates and Analysis
Dad Jokes and Personal Updates
