Join me today for Episode 1086 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
nostr handle: https://primal.net/p/npub172mu27r5yny0nnmvgjqwhx055dmsesrrx7j0p5d3pxagfx6xgxfsv75p3q
Twitter: https://x.com/beisnerds
https://cointelegraph.com/news/metaplanet-to-open-us-subsidiary-plans-to-raise-250-m
https://decrypt.co/317211/publicly-traded-semler-scientific-buys-more-bitcoin
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/05/01/world-liberty-s-stablecoin-will-be-used-to-close-mgx-s-usd2b-binance-investment-eric-trump
https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqs24ujzcm2wfl3864jwd63jjux20hrcstzt5ha4pyu0gc5cv4ux7hqr20nw7
https://www.theblock.co/post/352703/eric-trump-crypto-is-going-to-leave-big-banks-with-regret-and-in-the-dust
https://atlas21.com/cryptocurrencies-dangerous-for-investors-and-financial-stability/
https://following.space/
Folowing: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqsfvath8d6s44vt4p7cyn5skus8k2u4fv4khmk5gkw7ja2muv7pqzg4h5qnt
https://bitcoinnews.com/adoption/ledger-wallet-physical-mail-scam/
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here
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Topics for today:
- Metaplanet to Open in the U.S.
- How USDT Will Extend the Dollar's Lifespan
- Morgan Stanley to Open Bitcoin For Retail
- Following._ Offers Curated "Follow Packs"
Circle P:
Maple Syrup and Soapsnostr handle: https://primal.net/p/npub172mu27r5yny0nnmvgjqwhx055dmsesrrx7j0p5d3pxagfx6xgxfsv75p3q
Twitter: https://x.com/beisnerds
Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/morgan-stanley-plans-to-offer-bitcoin-and-crypto-trading-to-e-trade-clientshttps://cointelegraph.com/news/metaplanet-to-open-us-subsidiary-plans-to-raise-250-m
https://decrypt.co/317211/publicly-traded-semler-scientific-buys-more-bitcoin
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/05/01/world-liberty-s-stablecoin-will-be-used-to-close-mgx-s-usd2b-binance-investment-eric-trump
https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqs24ujzcm2wfl3864jwd63jjux20hrcstzt5ha4pyu0gc5cv4ux7hqr20nw7
https://www.theblock.co/post/352703/eric-trump-crypto-is-going-to-leave-big-banks-with-regret-and-in-the-dust
https://atlas21.com/cryptocurrencies-dangerous-for-investors-and-financial-stability/
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://www.bitcoinandshow.com/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
https://following.space/
Folowing: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqsfvath8d6s44vt4p7cyn5skus8k2u4fv4khmk5gkw7ja2muv7pqzg4h5qnt
https://bitcoinnews.com/adoption/ledger-wallet-physical-mail-scam/
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
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Music by:
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Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 09:04AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is May Day. That would be May 2025. This is episode ten eighty six of Bitcoin. And if you listen to yesterday's show, you will realize that it was quite an older episode. I'm trying to to get the old interviews that I did before I switched my pod, podcast hosting company over because not all of all of my podcast actually got switched over from my last RSS feed. It was just it's just I've got too much material. That that's what actually happened. They transferred, like, 500 episodes, and that was about all that SoundCloud was about to was about to allow for for data, going out.
So I'm having to reupload some of these older episodes, but scarce dot city really it was one of the first places that was that took building the Bitcoin circular economy very seriously. And between that and the fact that I wanted to hang out with my, son yesterday and go take him on a hike, that's why I decided to to go ahead and and do that. So if you'd already heard it, my apologies, but it it is kinda evergreen because we are trying to bootstrap a Bitcoin circular economy, and nowhere is there a larger Bitcoin circular economy than on Noster right now.
And I I just want to keep that moving forward. I mean, what it's like it's like, you know, two steps forward, one step back, it feels like, but we are always making progress. So I hope you guys keep that in mind when we get to the circle p segment of today's show. But before we do any of that, why are you here at the Bitcoin ad podcast? It's because it's the Bitcoin news that you can use. Alright? So I get to tell you what's going on in the day about what's going on with Bitcoin so that you don't have to read the articles. Alright. So I will read you the articles, and that way you know what's going on and you can make your own determination as to what was in a particular piece, what was in a particular article. You that's why I read it word for word instead of just saying this is what I think it says and then boil it all down. That kinda leaves the listener out of the loop, makes the listener depend on my commentary and my analysis. And I honestly don't think that that's the right way to go, which is why I read full length articles on this show, and I do it Monday through Friday so that you can stay informed about what's going on in Bitcoin like this one from Bitcoin magazine written by Vivek Sim.
Morgan Stanley is planning to offer Bitcoin and crypto trading to its e trade clients. Apparently, Bloomberg is reporting that the Wall Street giant is in the early stages of planning. It sounds like an announcement of an announcement. Planning to add spot Bitcoin and crypto trading capabilities to its E Trade brokerage platform. The project aims to allow E Trade's retail clients to buy and sell popular crypto directly through their existing brokerage accounts. Now let's just pause just for a second to remind people in case you did not know. Morgan Stanley's E Trade is one of the largest online trading platforms that there has ever been. It's also one of the oldest.
It was one of the very first, in fact, if not it may have actually been the first online trading platform that its retail clients could just trade directly on. So this is kind of a big, you know, this is kind of a big deal. Anyway, the initiative, which executives expect to launch sometime next year, would represent Morgan Stanley's biggest push yet into providing Bitcoin services to retail investors. So this is Joe Blow on the street, guys. This isn't institutions. It's not pension funds. It's not union. No. This is just Joe and Sally that has their your your regular job. They're your regular people. Okay? The bank is exploring partnerships with established firms to develop the trading infrastructure through specific partners or those specific partners have not yet been finalized.
The move comes as the Trump administration's more favorable regulatory stance towards Bitcoin has encouraged major financial institutions to expand offerings. Morgan Stanley already provides Bitcoin ETFs, Bitcoin futures, Bitcoin options, all to its wealthier clients, but this this would be its first offering targeted at retail investors. And if launched, the service would put Morgan Stanley in direct competition with, quote, crypto native exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken. Other traditional finance firms are making similar moves. Charles Schwab has indicated interest in spot Bitcoin trading, while SoFi is considering expanding its Bitcoin and other services.
The timing aligns with growing institutional adoption of Bitcoin as Bitcoin trades above $96,000 and spot Bitcoin ETFs continue attracting significant inflows. Morgan Stanley's E Trade platform could provide an accessible on ramp for retail investors looking to gain direct Bitcoin exposure. So, yes, Morgan Stanley has already been offering quite a bit of Bitcoin services, but this is that was all for institutional. This is for retail. And one of the things that's been going on, if you look at several different analysts that have been looking at who's buying Bitcoin, it ain't been retail.
The major purchasers of all Bitcoin pretty much for the entirety of this year and the back half of last year has not been retail. It's not been your regular people. It's been massive institutions. So this is gonna allow one more tool to be put out into the pool so that retail investors can get off their ass and start accumulating some Bitcoin before, shit, before it's all gone. The way that the the way that some of these people are moving in the launch of '21 with 42,000 preexisting Bitcoin and their plans to buy a whole bunch more, you got Bitcoin spot ETFs just gobbling stuff up. You got Meta Planet. You got similar scientific. You got clearly strategy.
I mean, the whole is just it's like a ferocious feeding machine. And it's weird because every time I see these massive buys, I go look at the price. I know I shouldn't be looking at the price, but whatever. I do and so do you. I go look at the price and it's like it barely moves. And that always worries me about paper Bitcoin in existence. But I mentioned Meta Planet. Well, they're in the news next. Adrian Zemunsky from Cointelegraph. Meta Planet is planning to open a United States arm and plans to raise $250,000,000 for Bitcoin strategy.
Meta Planet, a Japanese company focused on accumulating Bitcoin yeah. Because they were into hotels and they weren't doing very well, so they pivoted. Right? Anyway, they announced that it will launch a United States based subsidiary. In a May 1 Twitter post, Meta Planet announced that the firm is launching a wholly owned subsidiary in Florida. God's waiting room. Anyway, furthermore, the new subsidiary is expected to raise $250,000,000 of capital to fuel its Bitcoin accumulation strategy and tap US Institutional Investors to do it. In a separate announcement, Meta Planet cites Miami as the city that will host the new subsidiary's headquarters.
The firm points to Florida as a particularly favorable environment, quote, Florida, a rapidly emerging hub for Bitcoin focused companies and financial innovation recognized for its business friendly policies and rising status as a global center of capital and technology, end quote. The company explained that it decided to go to Florida due to its pro Bitcoin environment, which purportedly led to Bitcoin corporate adoption and financial liberalization. The new subsidiary is also expected to expand the company's operations into a new time zone. Meta Planet's commentary follows Florida's progress in becoming one of the most Bitcoin friendly United States states.
In April, Florida's House Insurance and Banking Committee approved a bill that would allow the state treasury to invest in Bitcoin. The bill was proposed in early February. The cryptocurrency industry has a strong foothold in Florida and is also intertwined with its political landscape. And two Republicans who received a combined $1,500,000 from the crypto backed political action committee, Fair Shake, will enter the US house after winning special elections in Florida. Mid February analysis shows that the Florida Retirement Systems State Board of Administration Fund held 160,470 strategy shares worth 46,000,000 at the time.
Strategy, previously known as MicroStrategy, is Meta Planet's bigger brother, company entirely focused on accumulating the corn. Well, that report followed Florida chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, suggesting that the agency that manages the state's retirement funds to consider investing in Bitcoin, he shared his ideas with the Florida State Board of Administration's executive director Chris Spencer in a letter sent in late October of twenty twenty four. According to Meta Planet's website, the firm currently holds exactly 5,000 Bitcoin worth $474,700,000 at the time of writing. While this is a far cry from strategy's holdings, which exceed 2%, all or two percent of all Bitcoin that will ever be mined, it is a 184% increase from the firm's holdings of 1,762 Bitcoin on the first day of twenty twenty five. Yeah. That's actually a hell of an accumulation there.
At the April, Meta Planet announced its acquisition of 696 Bitcoin for 10,200,000,000.0 yen or $67,000,000. And then later, that very same month, the firm acquired another 330 Bitcoin for 22,800,000.0 at an average price of $85,605 per corn, bringing its total corn holdings to 4,855. Then toward the end of the month, the firm bought an additional 145 Bitcoin for 1,900,000,000.0 Japanese yen, boosting its total holdings to exactly 5,000 Bitcoin. So Meta Planet is they're they're not some people were accusing them of just like, oh, it's a look alike company. And, you know, pretty much proposed that they were just going to stop accumulating Bitcoin, and then they were just gonna blow away into the dust. That appears not to actually be happening.
They clearly are able to get a shit ton of cash and buy a whole lot of Bitcoin with it. So similar is actually next on the list here because they're buying even millions more in Bitcoin themselves. Publicly traded, Similar Scientific buys millions more in Bitcoin. This is Logan Hitchcock. Decrypt dot c o. Medical device company, Similar Scientific, purchased another 165 Bitcoin for $15,700,000 between the dates of April 25 through April 29, bolstering its Bitcoin treasury to 3,467 BTC. And the purchase marks the firm's second major Bitcoin acquisition in the last week after it announced that it added a hundred and 11 BTC for $10,000,000 on April.
As of Wednesday, similar Bitcoin tragedy treasury is valued at more than $327,000,000. Quote, we bleed orange. Similar scientific chairman Eric Simler posted on Twitter just days after telling shareholders that they could stop or sell if you don't like what we've done with Bitcoin, end quote. Semler's plans with the top cryptocurrency don't appear to be ending anytime soon. The firm recently filed to raise up to $500,000,000 through a brand spanking new securities offering with plans to use a portion of the funds to purchase Bitcoin. The firm has been aggressively purchasing Bitcoin since last year following the playbook created by, well, strategy and its chairman and major Bitcoin proponent, Michael Saylor. He chimed in on similar most recent purchase to complement the firm's impressive BTC yield of 23.8% year to date.
So there you go. There's a little bit more to that article, but it basically just goes through the history of similar scientific, and you kinda don't need that. Nobody's stopping their purchasing of Bitcoin. Not not a single one of these companies are stopping. And no like, and I I the sentiment is is that we shouldn't allow these people to buy Bitcoin. I'm going to say it again so that everybody can hear it plainly and loudly. If you can stop Michael Saylor from buying Bitcoin, then you can stop me from buying Bitcoin and you become my enemy. I'm I'm sorry.
That's the only way this works. If you don't want Michael Saylor to buy all the Bitcoin, then I highly recommend that you buy Bitcoin and not sell it to Michael Saylor. That's the only way this works. You have to put your money where your mouth is, people. Bitching on Twitter about it ain't gonna work. Okay. My friend, Maple Trade, is the featured vendor in today's Circle p. The Circle p is open for business. It is where I bring plebs with goods and services, and they're just like you. And maybe you, as a pleb, might want to actually purchase their goods and services. But with Maple Trade, you better do it this week. Honey, you got, like, till tomorrow.
Maybe possibly Saturday. But let's break this down for you. Maple trade lives in Ohio. He taps his own maple trees. He makes maple syrup, and he does it the old fashioned way. He does it over a wood fired bulk boiler outside, and he makes a lot of maple syrup, and it's almost all gone. Okay? In fact, on April, okay, which is like a month ago, was when he said when he announced that he had all his maple syrup, like, was done, packaged, and ready for sale, he's almost out. And I think it was, like, 250 gallons of this stuff. Let me see. Hold on. Let me see if if I find any numbers at all here. I cannot.
I do I do believe that he built that he, produced about 250 gallons of maple syrup. It's it's all gone. So well, except for what he's what he's allowing for sale this week. If you want to get his maple syrup, you have to DM him or write to him on either Noster or Twitter. I have both of his handles for Noster and Twitter in the show notes under the heading circle p. It's a URL. You can click it. It'll take you right to, like, Twitter or Noster or whatever. Tell him that you heard about it here on Circle p so that he knows that I made yet another sale for him. I'm kinda proud of myself because, apparently, I've been selling the living crap out of his product, and that makes me happy because that's part of the Bitcoin circular economy that I'm trying to take part in. I'm trying to move it forward in just the smallest fashion that I can. Right? And it seems to be working because I can I can sell soap pretty well according to SoapMiner?
And Mapletrade is almost out of his maple syrup, so I guess I'd do okay. But you gotta act fast because after this week, Mapletrade is giving all whatever's left of his stock to a buddy of his, I think, to go sell at a local farmer's market. So he will not be taking orders after this week. This is it, ladies and gentlemen. If you want handmade maple syrup, go talk to my friend, Maple Trade. Again, the URLs on how to get a hold of Maple Trade directly, which is how you have to order from them, are in the show notes under the circle p. Now, moving on, world liberty. Oh, God.
We get to do it. Okay. I'm gonna take a deep breath here. World Liberty stablecoin will be used to close MGX's two billion dollar Binance investment according to Eric Trump. And this is written by Amkar Gadbo and Parichit Mishra, I think is how you pronounce it. Not probably butchered it honestly. This is at a CoinDesk. Eric Trump, son of the president Donald Trump, said that World Liberty Financial's dollar denominated stablecoin USD 1 has officially been selected as the official stable coin to close MGX's two billion dollar investment in Binance. I'm pausing to let you know I'm going to launch into a stable coin explanation.
I I I've been able to boil down some thoughts that I've been having for a while, and and I wanna get to it. But let's let's let's just pause and appreciate the insanity that we're about to experience with the Scambrian explosion of stablecoins that we have yet to see. And I guarantee you're going to see it. Speaking at the token twenty forty nine event in Dubai, Trump also announced that USD 1 will be integrating with the Tron ecosystem, which is backed by billionaire Justin Sun. Eric Trump is a shit coiner. Let's just let's just let's just get it give it its due. Okay?
Yes. And I understand that Tether is mostly on Tron. The you gotta admit the rail you know, their rails are pretty good. People used to use Ethereum all the time for the stable coin stuff in Tether, but now they use basically Tron. And Tron very well may end up being the network of choice for stable coins. Even shit, even Jack Mallers in Strike, They use Tron, and I'm not happy about it. I'm not gonna go hang anybody up by their thumbs and tar and feather them for it either. But just be aware, the stable coin explosion is going to occur. Orange man's son is right at the forefront, and he's shaking hands with the one guy that he you knew he was gonna shake hands with. That's Justin's son. But earlier this year, Abu Dhabi based investment firm, MGX, put $2,000,000,000 to buy a stake in Binance, making or marking one of the first institutional investments in the world's largest exchange.
The Trump family backed World Liberty Financial announced its plans for launching a dollar backed stablecoin with BitGo in March. Quote, USD 1 will become one of the most transparent and regulated stablecoins in the world. It is backed by short term treasury and cash equivalent. Not only do we want to create a product in our stable point USD, 1 that can be sent across borders via a very seamless way, but transparency and, frankly, consumer safety is paramount. Right? Trump added. So, actually, he asked a that entire sentence is a giant question. He actually ends it with a question mark.
Well, whatever. World Liberty's cofounder, Zach Whitcough, speaking at the very same event, teased more future pro partnerships for the DeFi protocol, quote, we have a lot on the way at World Liberty, so stay tuned. We're working on, you know, a lot of different DeFi integrations. Right now, we do aim to establish USD 1 as the preferred stable coin in the DeFi and CeFi ecosystems, working really hard on, you know, getting integrations into traditional retail point of sale systems, Witkoff said. You know? You know? Like, is it cool? Like, you know? It's hard to read stuff like this.
Don't trust this guy. I wouldn't trust Eric Trump as far as I could throw that dude, and if he's anything like his old man, he's a big guy. So just be aware, the stablecoin shit is it's much more insidious than you might think. And I've talked about this a couple of times. But the night before last, I kinda finally wrote it down in a nostril note that I wanna read to you here. And I've titled it balance sheet imperialism. Here's the framework. The United States Government issues debt in the form of treasuries. Tether buys that debt. And if you didn't know, Tether is what is pretty much the largest stablecoin and the longest running stablecoin in existence as of today.
So Tether buys that debt and then mints USDT stablecoins backed by those same securities, the US Treasury bonds. Those stablecoins are distributed globally, especially into regions with unstable currencies or limited access to dollars. The result? A fast, private back channel for exporting dollar liquidity around the world without ever touching a bank, the Federal Reserve, or the SWIFT network. This is not some fringe mutation. Tether now holds more US Treasuries than some major sovereign nations. And at this scale, it's not just a stablecoin issuer.
It's functioning as a kind of offshore shadow dollar syndicate converting US debt production into digital dollars for global consumption. Traders, businesses, and individuals in dollar starved regions are using USDT as a substitute for traditional banking access. Every new issuance reinforces demand for US treasuries, helping finance US deficits while strengthening the dollar's role in international markets with almost no one realizing it's actually US dollars that they are using. It's a synthetic version of the US dollar circulating outside of US jurisdiction but still backed by US debt.
So here's the flowchart. The United States Treasury issues debt in the form of treasuries. Tether purchases those treasuries. Tether mints USDT stablecoins against those treasuries. And then globally distributes that USDT. That causes increased demand for USDT. And then Tether acquires more treasuries, the US Treasury issues more debt, rents, and repeat. Whether this is sustainable or desirable is another conversation. But one thing is clear, Tether is playing a strategic role in extending the lifespan of the US dollar itself, and it's going to work. The real question becomes, what happens when, not if, Tether stops buying treasuries and backs the entirety of already issued Tether with Bitcoin and also possibly gold?
Okay. That's what I wrote. That was what I what I distributed on Nostra a couple of days ago. And I've I've gotten some some decent feedback about it, and I've also I also put it up on, on Stacker News, and somebody had had commented back and rightly so. They they were like, dude, there's only a hundred and $48,000,000,000 of Tether or a hundred let's call it a hundred and 50. A hundred and $50,000,000,000 worth of Tether out in the world, and that's a drop in the bucket compared to, what, $36,000,000,000,000 of United States debt?
Yes. He's he's not not wrong. But I'm not saying that this is what's I'm not saying that we're at the end game right now. They're just priming the pump. They haven't they haven't even turned the key over on this particular engine yet. This is all just test. And I don't mean I don't mean that it's a test that it was like, oh, we're we've we're gonna do this thing. We've got it all planned out. It's not a conspiracy. This is all happening organically. At least that's what I believe. I don't think the guys behind, you know, like, Paolo Ordano from Tether, I don't think that they actually sat in a room together, rubbing their hands together with the Trump family years and years and years ago planning all this shit out. No.
This is really happening organically. What I mean by test is that Trump and the and the Treasury and the Federal Reserve and and a whole bunch of other people are looking at this going, oh, holy crap. We could totally save the dollar, and we can totally print our way out of the debt that we've accumulated. And what I'm suggesting is that this test has passed with flying colors according to these people even though I can't point to any specific statement any of these people made that would suggest that I'm right. It's a totally a gut feeling. But when they turn the key over on this engine, because this test is now coming to an end, when they turn the key over on this engine, you're going to see The United States print money like you've never seen before.
The United States dollar is going to be more in demand than ever before, and you're gonna go, why won't this thing die? Because of demand. Because of demand. The world is crying out for liquidity, and they want it in the form of something that has some relationship to the United States dollar. Either dollars themselves or stablecoins that are backed by US dollars tethers that thing. And they are going to buy the ever loving shit ton of securities, everything that the treasury prints. They're they'll just buy it because they'll be able to convert it into liquidity, which the world demands. And because that demand is there, they're going to be able to meet that. And The United States will just have a, like, a free card because the treasury can print the debt, and the Federal Reserve does not have to buy it. They have another buyer. The Federal Reserve is no longer the buyer of last resort for United States debt.
Sovereign countries are no longer considered in that group either. You've got private companies. It wouldn't surprise me if my or strategy started buying United States treasuries and convert them into some kind of stablecoin that they might suggest is backed by Bitcoin, but it's really gonna end up being backed by treasuries. Do you see how this starts to propagate? A hundred and $48,000,000,000 worth of Tether today could very well turn into $14,000,000,000,000 of Tether within a few years, and it could get further and further and further out. Do not keep your eyes off of Tether and the United States Treasury and, god forbid, Justin Sun and Tron and whatever the Trump administration is gonna do next.
But we're not done with Eric Trump, not by a long shot. No, sir. From The Block written by Tim Copeland, Eric Trump says, quote, crypto is going to leave big banks with regret and in the dust. Big banks are going to regret going after crypto individuals and political individuals according to Eric Trump, executive VC at the Trump Organization and the son of Donald Trump. Quote, our system is broken. Modern finance is absolutely broken, said Eric Trump in a fireside chat with World Liberty Financial cofounder Zach Whitcough and Tron founder Justin Sun at token twenty forty nine in Dubai.
He pointed to the way big banks went after the Trump family over the previous few years and said that crypto is going to make the big banks regret that move. Quote, I believe the crypto and he's gonna I'm gonna say crypto because that's what he keeps saying. I believe the crypto world is going to take over the big banks. I think it's going to leave them in the dust. Eric Trump said it's hard for banks to innovate as their business model depends on charging fees, which they might struggle to charge in a crypto environment. He repeated his position that if banks don't innovate, they will become redundant, quote, they're just going to be extinct because you're eliminating their function.
It's like old school film and camera. I think that's what's going to happen to financial institutions, he said, adding that crypto was innovating a hundred times faster than the big banks. Quote, nothing would make me so happy than to see them fall to the very people that they came after, end quote. This sounds like a straight up threat to me, brothers and sisters. But Eric Trump said that many people don't have financial freedom and argue that anyone with a phone can access finance through crypto, quote, crypto brings an even playing field to the world. You're no longer at the mercy of a government or currency that you may no longer trust, he said.
Eric Trump also spoke about The UAE and its willingness to work on other projects, yet he criticized Europe for not being open to business, quote, America is 1,000 times better than Europe, he said. So it sounds to me like Eric is kind of, like, ringing the the the death knell on banks. Maybe, you know, maybe a little too early because I could totally see how banks could charge fees on on crypto related stuff. Shit. I I paid a fee earlier today through Strike. I mean, I was like, what like, a measly 1.45%, but it was still a percentage fee of the transaction.
It's not it and it's nowhere close to as bad as Cash App. I I basically have kinda stopped using Cash App for the time being because their fees have just kinda gotten a little high. But fees are there. They exist. Banks aren't stupid. They're not gonna be able to not understand how to charge a fee on a lightning payment if they're, you know, working the lightning network. But in another in another real way, Eric's kinda making a threat also. Whether whether or not they can get, you know, figure out how to use crypto or not is not where the threat lies. It's it was when he said that, that the banks were gonna be that the banks were going to regret coming after, well, his family is what he's saying.
This is going to be a real interesting time. It's gonna be a really, really interesting time, but the banks have a completely different view or at least the Bank of Italy does. Because they're saying, quote, cryptocurrencies are dangerous for investors and financial stability. Ah, the very opposite thing of what Trump was saying. Right? So Atlas21.com is writing this one. On April 29, the Bank of Italy released its financial stability report for April 2025, highlighting how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies represent emerging risk factors both for investors and for the entire financial system.
According to the document, the strong growth of Bitcoin and of other crypto assets with high price volatility means risk not only for investors, but potentially for financial stability given the growing interconnections between the digital asset ecosystem, the traditional financial sector, and the real economy. The Italian Monetary Authority expressed concern over the growing ties between the digital asset world and the traditional economy warning that this could amplify the effects of potential market shocks. One phenomenon the Bank of Italy considers particularly troubling is the acquisition of Bitcoin by non financial companies.
According to the report, this practice exposes such firms to marked price volatility driven by the belief that Bitcoin can support their share prices, end quote. This trend, which began with strategy in August of twenty twenty, has seen several other companies follow suit, including Meta Planet, Similar Scientific, and GameStop. The document also dedicates considerable attention to stablecoins pegged to the US dollar, warning that they could become systemic and introduce new financial vulnerabilities. The Italian central bank pointed out that the growing reliance on US Government bonds to back these assets could create broader issues. Any fluctuations in both the stablecoin and the underlying bonds could have repercussions on other parts of the global financial system, according to the Bank of Italy.
These warnings come just days after comments from Italian minister of economy and finance, Giancarlo Giorgetti, who cautioned that the appeal of US dollar stablecoins should not be underestimated, describing US policies on stablecoins as, quote, more dangerous than the tariffs imposed by president Donald Trump. That's because Tether at this point is a fucking cruise missile, and it's aimed directly at European banks. That's the first target. We talk about target packages when, you know, in nuclear war scenarios, what's the target package?
You know, say, like, what's the if you ever watched, what was it, War Games back in the eighties with Matthew Broderick, Tar they talked about target packages, and there was different scenarios considering, like, if everybody rained down all their nuclear, you know, weapons on on India First instead of Europe. And then there was, like, a European package, a North American package, a Soviet Union package, all that. Everybody's a package. You get a package and you get a package and everybody gets a package. We're not in that world anymore.
We can perform devastation at scales way larger and have much longer lasting effects than vaporizing entire towns and cities by aiming USDT backed by United States debt at places like the European Central Bank, the Italian Central Bank, French's national you know, France's national bank, And it's Europe that they're targeting. They're not targeting Africa. They're not targeting Latin America. They're targeting Europe. And that's why the ECB and this dude, this minister of finance or whatever from Italy, that's why they're freaked out. They know what's coming.
They don't know how to defend against it because they were too busy calling Bitcoin a scam. Wow. I feel really bad for it, but let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities, West Texas Intermediate and Britt Nor'Sea just cannot catch a break. This is gonna be their fourth down day in a row. And these are ugly down days. These are over 2% down days. Right now, not terrible. West Texas Intermediate is down by a third, but it's down to $57.99, and Britton, North Sea is down a third to $60.83, while natural gas is moving the other direction as always 3% to the upside, $3.42 per thousand cubic feet. Gasoline is basically moving sideways, kinda hanging at $2.02 a gallon. So why is oil down? Well, OPEC is making yet another decision or OPEC plus is making another decision as to whether or not they want to actually even produce more oil to come online.
And this was right after that news came right after the yesterday's news that oil inventories in The United States were had plummeted, and it was a surprise. It was a surprise plummet. And here comes OPEC plus to the rescue because oil prices were rising to threaten the oil markets with more production, and that put the kibosh on energy prices. It's a complete this completely manipulated market. Gold is down 3% to $3,219.50. Silver is down 1.14%. Platinum is down point 14%. Copper is down a tenth of a no. Copper is actually up a tenth of a point, and palladium is up 1.13%. Most of ag is in the red today. Biggest loser is coffee, three and a half percent to the downside. Biggest winner, soybean, a quarter of a point to the upside. So nobody doing very well.
Live cattle is up a quarter. Lean hogs up point 2%. Feeder cattle, however, are down over a half point. The Dow is up half a point. The S and P is up a full point. The Nasdaq is up 1.6%, and the S and P Mini is up point 81%. We have a price of $97,400, which brings us to a $1,930,000,000,000 market cap for Bitcoin, and we can now get 30 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,858,407.11 of. And average fees per block are pretty damn low. 0.04 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. We have about 22 blocks carrying 16,700 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 6 Satoshis per v byte low priority, gonna get you in at five.
Hash rate looks to be stabilizing. 850 exahashes per second, and that is after quite a bit of hash power came offline. We were at, like, 940 exahashes per second sometime earlier, last week. So do with that whatever it is you will. And from the Texas Van Hammer, which was the day before yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and Psyduck with 592 sat says Psyduck. Yodel with $5.00 1. Boost. Turkey with 500 says nothing. And then Perma Nerd with $2.56 says, are you having dirty thoughts? These can be believing the Federal Reserve is federal to wanting to buy ETH. Well, you need to get clean, and Soap Miner Soap is the way to do that. Don't forget to mention The Bitcoin and Show to get a pleasant surprise.
Yeah. Actually, the code for soap miner is Bitcoin and you'll get 10% off there. Wartime with 333 sat says, Novak will cry himself to sleep over the lightning news. I don't know. I never really heard him go off too much about the lightning network, not like other people. I mean and even if he did, Novak's clearly wrong because Lightning works, but I never really heard him just pummel the Lightning Network itself. So I'm gonna give him a break here. A hundred sats from Dot or from I I don't know who this is. It has no name on here. It just says thank you. No. Thank you. And pies with a hundred is back. He says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. That's the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news you can use. Got some Nostr stuff going on that's really interesting today.
Yesterday, I saw this one from Cali, and he had put a note on Noster that says the following. Introducing following, a simple way to create and share follow packs on Noster. Finding interesting people to follow has always been one of the biggest challenges for new users on Nostr. Even experienced users often struggle to discover new communities and voices. Following makes it easy to curate list of users and share them with anyone on the web. Whether you're helping newcomers get started or building a niche community, following allows you to grow connections on Nostr.
You can create your own follow pack in minutes and share it anywhere where here's an example, and then he gives a link. I spent months complaining that someone should build this, and then eventually realized that that someone had to be me. So here we are. I also leaned heavily on AI during the process. It's never been easier or more fun to create apps for open platforms like Nostra. If you have an idea, you really can just build it. No gatekeepers. No permissions needed. Just ship it. Peace. So what is following? Okay. So it's actually following dot underscore, which I think is a terrible name.
Oh, just go to following dot underscore, sir. No. You can go. However, if you if you want to see it live on the web, go to following dot space. That's the URL for it. So following Space, And you will see Nostro packs. Nostro follow packs. What's in a pack? Well, I'm gonna open up the first one, and it's Mostro, m o s t r o, and it's created by Mostro. So what's in it, people? None of which I'm following. How to put this? Because it's like you're not actually seeing what I'm seeing. It's a way for you to if you want to, like like, for instance, let's say you you convince, I don't know, your sister or something like that to get on Noster. So she does so, and she follows the instructions at where am I yeah. Well, hold on. Let me, I got one more.
Oh, I I don't actually have it up. I think it's start.me. I don't actually, let me go over. I'm gonna get a new tab here because I wanna make sure that I've got this. Yes. Nstart.me. N start Me. That's where you send people that have no idea what the hell you're talking about. When you say n sec and n pub and private keys and SHA two fifty, whatever. They're they glaze over. Just send them to nstart.me and it will take them through a guided pathway and by the end of it, they will be set up on Nostr. They will have instructions on what an insect is and where to put it. It's all done with nice pretty pictures. It's a step by step guide. It's it takes about a minute and a half to two minutes to complete. So once they do that and they get on, like, I don't know, ditto dot pub or coracle dot social or primal or whatever, they ain't got nobody to follow.
That's when you send them to following dot space. That's following dot space. And then on the front screen, they can just look at all these different packs. And it's got a pretty little picture, you know, for some and or well, actually, all of them have a picture at this point. Nope. There's one that does not have a cover image. But like Vibe Coders, that's the title of a pack. There's also BitX miners. So people that are known to be running BitX, are are on there. And then there's Bitcoin and Freedom. That was started by, Gladstein from the Human Rights Foundation. So who's on here?
Well, why the hell am I not following Odell? That's bizarre. Maybe I'm not no. I'm I'm logged in. Somehow or another, maybe it's no. There's a lot of people in here that I am following it saying saying that I'm not following. Let me get back to home. But the point is, it's it's broken for me right now apparently because clearly I'm not following anybody on Nostril, which makes me a little little nervous. I'm actually go check something out here. Yeah. Sorry about that. I needed to go check something. Something right as of this point, it seems that for me, at least, there's something wrong with following dot space because it doesn't think I'm following anybody, and I know I am. But let's take that aside because this was this was vibe coded, so there's always gonna be bugs that need to be worked out from people that are using AI to help them code. This is just sort of the way the way that it works.
But yesterday, it was working fine. And I could go to, like, this Maestro pack. Actually, let me go to something else. Let's go back down here to Vibe Coders, considering we were just talking about it. So that was created by Johnny. And there's a there's, like I don't know. There are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven people in this pack that you can follow. Pablo f seven z is one of them. Cali is another. Carnage is another. Rod Bishop is another, and there's a there's a couple of other ones. And there's a little each one has a follow button. And if you're already following, it will say you're it will say you're following. But if you're not following, it'll have a button that says follow. And you can follow as you're logged in with your Nostra insect into following dot space.
It will keep track of that. And as you follow people here, you'll be following them on every other Nostra app. So it's a really nice way to say, if you're interested in vibe coding, go over to Nostra and go to following Space and find vibe coders and then follow all those guys. And if you're I was trying to put together a ranching one yesterday, but I got sidetracked so I never got a chance to actually finish it off. But I want to be able to put all the ranchers that I know that are on Nostra into this one so that if you're interested in ranching, you you can just actually go to, like like, I would have it called ranchingonfollowing.space and, like, let's say I've got 15 people, there's actually a follow all button at the very top of each one of these packs when you get into it. So you don't even have to pick and choose. You can just say follow everybody in ranching and and go and then find farming and follow everybody there because you're interested in ranching and farming.
This thing is beautiful, but it's not as beautiful as what happens next. So that day, Cali released that. That was like, I don't know, when when I saw it. In the same day, though, this is what's important. In the actual same day that Cali released that, j b 55 from Domus, the the creator of Domus, had already put it into his note deck project. He says you can now add follow packs as note deck columns. Follow packs from following dot space had just been released. Hours later, j b fifty five instantiates that into his project note deck that he's been working on within a day. Within a freaking day. I've never seen anything move this fast ever.
I thought lightning was moving fast. No. Not in comparison to what we're looking at right now. These guys are about to light themselves on fire. It's going to be it's already amazing to watch this, but if you think this is like the pinnacle of what they're about to produce, the ability for Cali to completely spin up an application within hours, have it released relatively working relatively well. And then a few hours after that, another major developer just takes the project and just shoves it into his own project and it just fits. I don't think anybody appreciates what we're about to experience.
I don't think anybody really appreciates just how fast this is going to start going. It's going to be amazing. Amazing. And I am so here for it. But first, remember that Ledger wallet leak that leaked everybody's emails and stuff? Well, you'll know if they got your physical address when they send you the scammers of that leak sent you a letter because Ledger leak victims are being hit by physical mail scams. Alex Larry for Bitcoin News is writing this one. A new phishing scam is targeting digital asset holders with ledger hardware wallets, and it's the old school difference but effective method. It's physical mail. You know, snail mail.
Users are reporting receiving letters in the mail that appear to be from Ledger, the popular hardware wallet provider. The letters claim to be from the company's security team and asks users to do a critical security update by scanning a code and entering in their 24 word recovery phase phrase. Jesus. Don't don't do this. Ledger's wallet team and cybersecurity experts say this is obviously a scam and a bad one. Quote, Ledger will never ask for your 24 word recovery phrase. If someone does, it's a scam, the company said in a response to these reports. The letters look like official Ledger wallet correspondence. They have the company's logo, business address, and even a reference number to look legit.
Recipients are told that it's mandatory, and if that they don't comply, access to their wallets will become restricted. Oh, god. The goal is simple. Get users to hand over their seed phrases, an action that gives the attackers full control of the victim's entire digital asset stash. The scam was first reported by tech analyst and trader Jacob Canfield, who shared an image of the letter that he received at his physical address on April 2025, quote, scammers are sending physical letters to the ledger addresses database leak requesting an upgrade due to security risk, Canfield wrote on Twitter. The scam appears to be linked to the 2020 data breach that exposed the personal information of over 270,000 Ledger customers, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses.
Although the breach happened nearly five years ago, the stolen info has continued to fuel phishing attacks. This is not the first time scammers have used physical mail to exploit the breach. In 2021, some Ledger users received tampered hardware wallets in the mail that installed mal malware on their computers. Ledger acknowledged the issue and warned users to be careful, quote, scammers impersonating Ledger and Ledger representatives are unfortunately common. Stay cautious and keep your crypto safe. What's more concerning about this phishing attempt is how how real it feels.
Using real names and addresses likely from the breach, the scammers can send letters that look official and urgent. These letters are especially risky for non tech users, including older people who might trust a physical letter more than an email or a social media message. Seed phrases, also known as recovery phrases, are the most sensitive piece of information tied to a Bitcoin wallet. If someone gets their hands on it, they will take full control of the wallet and they will drain all the funds. Ledger has put out several public notices that it never ask you for seed phrases, not by email, phone call, direct message, or physical mail. Some community members are suggesting that Ledger revised the security or the standard security alerts to specifically mention physical letters as a phishing method.
So this this crap continues even years after that hack. And right and we're real we were really pissed off about how Ledger just nonchalantly seemed to not even really care. They really didn't they really didn't seem like they gave a shit, honestly. And now this is what they've this is what they reap. This is why it's just so awful to have your customers like all this information. If like, for instance, if you sign if you go over to bitcoin and show.com, which is the website for this show, all I want is your email address. And that's just so that you'll get like, when I release a show, you'll be notified.
I don't sell it. Why I I'm I just refuse to sell my customer's data. Yeah. I'm not gonna give it away. That's just that's just stupid. But I'm I'm not gonna share this stuff because it's important to me. It means that you trust me. I'm not going to treat it like the way that Ledger treated not only email addresses, but dude, phone numbers? Shit. And they didn't mention it in this in this, thing, but there was way more more information than just your physical address. They had all kinds of stuff on you, you know, especially as, like, after I stopped buying ledger. Thank God I stopped buying ledgers when I did and moved over to a cold card because they just wanted more and more and more information. And their their service got crappier and crappier and crappier, and they relied more and more on web interfaces to be able to work with your wallet. And I'm like going, I don't like that crap. I don't like my device being specifically and explicitly connected to the Internet when it's holding my seed phrase.
So my advice is just stay as far away from Ledger as you possibly can. Don't even consider don't even consider doing business with these guys. Okay? Alright. Let's see. Was there anything else that I needed to touch on today? I don't think so. That's pretty much it for today's show. It is in the bag. I hope you enjoyed it. Again, if you want to keep up on what's going on in Bitcoin on a Monday through Friday basis, tune in every day to Bitcoin, and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 09:04AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is May Day. That would be May 2025. This is episode ten eighty six of Bitcoin. And if you listen to yesterday's show, you will realize that it was quite an older episode. I'm trying to to get the old interviews that I did before I switched my pod, podcast hosting company over because not all of all of my podcast actually got switched over from my last RSS feed. It was just it's just I've got too much material. That that's what actually happened. They transferred, like, 500 episodes, and that was about all that SoundCloud was about to was about to allow for for data, going out.
So I'm having to reupload some of these older episodes, but scarce dot city really it was one of the first places that was that took building the Bitcoin circular economy very seriously. And between that and the fact that I wanted to hang out with my, son yesterday and go take him on a hike, that's why I decided to to go ahead and and do that. So if you'd already heard it, my apologies, but it it is kinda evergreen because we are trying to bootstrap a Bitcoin circular economy, and nowhere is there a larger Bitcoin circular economy than on Noster right now.
And I I just want to keep that moving forward. I mean, what it's like it's like, you know, two steps forward, one step back, it feels like, but we are always making progress. So I hope you guys keep that in mind when we get to the circle p segment of today's show. But before we do any of that, why are you here at the Bitcoin ad podcast? It's because it's the Bitcoin news that you can use. Alright? So I get to tell you what's going on in the day about what's going on with Bitcoin so that you don't have to read the articles. Alright. So I will read you the articles, and that way you know what's going on and you can make your own determination as to what was in a particular piece, what was in a particular article. You that's why I read it word for word instead of just saying this is what I think it says and then boil it all down. That kinda leaves the listener out of the loop, makes the listener depend on my commentary and my analysis. And I honestly don't think that that's the right way to go, which is why I read full length articles on this show, and I do it Monday through Friday so that you can stay informed about what's going on in Bitcoin like this one from Bitcoin magazine written by Vivek Sim.
Morgan Stanley is planning to offer Bitcoin and crypto trading to its e trade clients. Apparently, Bloomberg is reporting that the Wall Street giant is in the early stages of planning. It sounds like an announcement of an announcement. Planning to add spot Bitcoin and crypto trading capabilities to its E Trade brokerage platform. The project aims to allow E Trade's retail clients to buy and sell popular crypto directly through their existing brokerage accounts. Now let's just pause just for a second to remind people in case you did not know. Morgan Stanley's E Trade is one of the largest online trading platforms that there has ever been. It's also one of the oldest.
It was one of the very first, in fact, if not it may have actually been the first online trading platform that its retail clients could just trade directly on. So this is kind of a big, you know, this is kind of a big deal. Anyway, the initiative, which executives expect to launch sometime next year, would represent Morgan Stanley's biggest push yet into providing Bitcoin services to retail investors. So this is Joe Blow on the street, guys. This isn't institutions. It's not pension funds. It's not union. No. This is just Joe and Sally that has their your your regular job. They're your regular people. Okay? The bank is exploring partnerships with established firms to develop the trading infrastructure through specific partners or those specific partners have not yet been finalized.
The move comes as the Trump administration's more favorable regulatory stance towards Bitcoin has encouraged major financial institutions to expand offerings. Morgan Stanley already provides Bitcoin ETFs, Bitcoin futures, Bitcoin options, all to its wealthier clients, but this this would be its first offering targeted at retail investors. And if launched, the service would put Morgan Stanley in direct competition with, quote, crypto native exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken. Other traditional finance firms are making similar moves. Charles Schwab has indicated interest in spot Bitcoin trading, while SoFi is considering expanding its Bitcoin and other services.
The timing aligns with growing institutional adoption of Bitcoin as Bitcoin trades above $96,000 and spot Bitcoin ETFs continue attracting significant inflows. Morgan Stanley's E Trade platform could provide an accessible on ramp for retail investors looking to gain direct Bitcoin exposure. So, yes, Morgan Stanley has already been offering quite a bit of Bitcoin services, but this is that was all for institutional. This is for retail. And one of the things that's been going on, if you look at several different analysts that have been looking at who's buying Bitcoin, it ain't been retail.
The major purchasers of all Bitcoin pretty much for the entirety of this year and the back half of last year has not been retail. It's not been your regular people. It's been massive institutions. So this is gonna allow one more tool to be put out into the pool so that retail investors can get off their ass and start accumulating some Bitcoin before, shit, before it's all gone. The way that the the way that some of these people are moving in the launch of '21 with 42,000 preexisting Bitcoin and their plans to buy a whole bunch more, you got Bitcoin spot ETFs just gobbling stuff up. You got Meta Planet. You got similar scientific. You got clearly strategy.
I mean, the whole is just it's like a ferocious feeding machine. And it's weird because every time I see these massive buys, I go look at the price. I know I shouldn't be looking at the price, but whatever. I do and so do you. I go look at the price and it's like it barely moves. And that always worries me about paper Bitcoin in existence. But I mentioned Meta Planet. Well, they're in the news next. Adrian Zemunsky from Cointelegraph. Meta Planet is planning to open a United States arm and plans to raise $250,000,000 for Bitcoin strategy.
Meta Planet, a Japanese company focused on accumulating Bitcoin yeah. Because they were into hotels and they weren't doing very well, so they pivoted. Right? Anyway, they announced that it will launch a United States based subsidiary. In a May 1 Twitter post, Meta Planet announced that the firm is launching a wholly owned subsidiary in Florida. God's waiting room. Anyway, furthermore, the new subsidiary is expected to raise $250,000,000 of capital to fuel its Bitcoin accumulation strategy and tap US Institutional Investors to do it. In a separate announcement, Meta Planet cites Miami as the city that will host the new subsidiary's headquarters.
The firm points to Florida as a particularly favorable environment, quote, Florida, a rapidly emerging hub for Bitcoin focused companies and financial innovation recognized for its business friendly policies and rising status as a global center of capital and technology, end quote. The company explained that it decided to go to Florida due to its pro Bitcoin environment, which purportedly led to Bitcoin corporate adoption and financial liberalization. The new subsidiary is also expected to expand the company's operations into a new time zone. Meta Planet's commentary follows Florida's progress in becoming one of the most Bitcoin friendly United States states.
In April, Florida's House Insurance and Banking Committee approved a bill that would allow the state treasury to invest in Bitcoin. The bill was proposed in early February. The cryptocurrency industry has a strong foothold in Florida and is also intertwined with its political landscape. And two Republicans who received a combined $1,500,000 from the crypto backed political action committee, Fair Shake, will enter the US house after winning special elections in Florida. Mid February analysis shows that the Florida Retirement Systems State Board of Administration Fund held 160,470 strategy shares worth 46,000,000 at the time.
Strategy, previously known as MicroStrategy, is Meta Planet's bigger brother, company entirely focused on accumulating the corn. Well, that report followed Florida chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, suggesting that the agency that manages the state's retirement funds to consider investing in Bitcoin, he shared his ideas with the Florida State Board of Administration's executive director Chris Spencer in a letter sent in late October of twenty twenty four. According to Meta Planet's website, the firm currently holds exactly 5,000 Bitcoin worth $474,700,000 at the time of writing. While this is a far cry from strategy's holdings, which exceed 2%, all or two percent of all Bitcoin that will ever be mined, it is a 184% increase from the firm's holdings of 1,762 Bitcoin on the first day of twenty twenty five. Yeah. That's actually a hell of an accumulation there.
At the April, Meta Planet announced its acquisition of 696 Bitcoin for 10,200,000,000.0 yen or $67,000,000. And then later, that very same month, the firm acquired another 330 Bitcoin for 22,800,000.0 at an average price of $85,605 per corn, bringing its total corn holdings to 4,855. Then toward the end of the month, the firm bought an additional 145 Bitcoin for 1,900,000,000.0 Japanese yen, boosting its total holdings to exactly 5,000 Bitcoin. So Meta Planet is they're they're not some people were accusing them of just like, oh, it's a look alike company. And, you know, pretty much proposed that they were just going to stop accumulating Bitcoin, and then they were just gonna blow away into the dust. That appears not to actually be happening.
They clearly are able to get a shit ton of cash and buy a whole lot of Bitcoin with it. So similar is actually next on the list here because they're buying even millions more in Bitcoin themselves. Publicly traded, Similar Scientific buys millions more in Bitcoin. This is Logan Hitchcock. Decrypt dot c o. Medical device company, Similar Scientific, purchased another 165 Bitcoin for $15,700,000 between the dates of April 25 through April 29, bolstering its Bitcoin treasury to 3,467 BTC. And the purchase marks the firm's second major Bitcoin acquisition in the last week after it announced that it added a hundred and 11 BTC for $10,000,000 on April.
As of Wednesday, similar Bitcoin tragedy treasury is valued at more than $327,000,000. Quote, we bleed orange. Similar scientific chairman Eric Simler posted on Twitter just days after telling shareholders that they could stop or sell if you don't like what we've done with Bitcoin, end quote. Semler's plans with the top cryptocurrency don't appear to be ending anytime soon. The firm recently filed to raise up to $500,000,000 through a brand spanking new securities offering with plans to use a portion of the funds to purchase Bitcoin. The firm has been aggressively purchasing Bitcoin since last year following the playbook created by, well, strategy and its chairman and major Bitcoin proponent, Michael Saylor. He chimed in on similar most recent purchase to complement the firm's impressive BTC yield of 23.8% year to date.
So there you go. There's a little bit more to that article, but it basically just goes through the history of similar scientific, and you kinda don't need that. Nobody's stopping their purchasing of Bitcoin. Not not a single one of these companies are stopping. And no like, and I I the sentiment is is that we shouldn't allow these people to buy Bitcoin. I'm going to say it again so that everybody can hear it plainly and loudly. If you can stop Michael Saylor from buying Bitcoin, then you can stop me from buying Bitcoin and you become my enemy. I'm I'm sorry.
That's the only way this works. If you don't want Michael Saylor to buy all the Bitcoin, then I highly recommend that you buy Bitcoin and not sell it to Michael Saylor. That's the only way this works. You have to put your money where your mouth is, people. Bitching on Twitter about it ain't gonna work. Okay. My friend, Maple Trade, is the featured vendor in today's Circle p. The Circle p is open for business. It is where I bring plebs with goods and services, and they're just like you. And maybe you, as a pleb, might want to actually purchase their goods and services. But with Maple Trade, you better do it this week. Honey, you got, like, till tomorrow.
Maybe possibly Saturday. But let's break this down for you. Maple trade lives in Ohio. He taps his own maple trees. He makes maple syrup, and he does it the old fashioned way. He does it over a wood fired bulk boiler outside, and he makes a lot of maple syrup, and it's almost all gone. Okay? In fact, on April, okay, which is like a month ago, was when he said when he announced that he had all his maple syrup, like, was done, packaged, and ready for sale, he's almost out. And I think it was, like, 250 gallons of this stuff. Let me see. Hold on. Let me see if if I find any numbers at all here. I cannot.
I do I do believe that he built that he, produced about 250 gallons of maple syrup. It's it's all gone. So well, except for what he's what he's allowing for sale this week. If you want to get his maple syrup, you have to DM him or write to him on either Noster or Twitter. I have both of his handles for Noster and Twitter in the show notes under the heading circle p. It's a URL. You can click it. It'll take you right to, like, Twitter or Noster or whatever. Tell him that you heard about it here on Circle p so that he knows that I made yet another sale for him. I'm kinda proud of myself because, apparently, I've been selling the living crap out of his product, and that makes me happy because that's part of the Bitcoin circular economy that I'm trying to take part in. I'm trying to move it forward in just the smallest fashion that I can. Right? And it seems to be working because I can I can sell soap pretty well according to SoapMiner?
And Mapletrade is almost out of his maple syrup, so I guess I'd do okay. But you gotta act fast because after this week, Mapletrade is giving all whatever's left of his stock to a buddy of his, I think, to go sell at a local farmer's market. So he will not be taking orders after this week. This is it, ladies and gentlemen. If you want handmade maple syrup, go talk to my friend, Maple Trade. Again, the URLs on how to get a hold of Maple Trade directly, which is how you have to order from them, are in the show notes under the circle p. Now, moving on, world liberty. Oh, God.
We get to do it. Okay. I'm gonna take a deep breath here. World Liberty stablecoin will be used to close MGX's two billion dollar Binance investment according to Eric Trump. And this is written by Amkar Gadbo and Parichit Mishra, I think is how you pronounce it. Not probably butchered it honestly. This is at a CoinDesk. Eric Trump, son of the president Donald Trump, said that World Liberty Financial's dollar denominated stablecoin USD 1 has officially been selected as the official stable coin to close MGX's two billion dollar investment in Binance. I'm pausing to let you know I'm going to launch into a stable coin explanation.
I I I've been able to boil down some thoughts that I've been having for a while, and and I wanna get to it. But let's let's let's just pause and appreciate the insanity that we're about to experience with the Scambrian explosion of stablecoins that we have yet to see. And I guarantee you're going to see it. Speaking at the token twenty forty nine event in Dubai, Trump also announced that USD 1 will be integrating with the Tron ecosystem, which is backed by billionaire Justin Sun. Eric Trump is a shit coiner. Let's just let's just let's just get it give it its due. Okay?
Yes. And I understand that Tether is mostly on Tron. The you gotta admit the rail you know, their rails are pretty good. People used to use Ethereum all the time for the stable coin stuff in Tether, but now they use basically Tron. And Tron very well may end up being the network of choice for stable coins. Even shit, even Jack Mallers in Strike, They use Tron, and I'm not happy about it. I'm not gonna go hang anybody up by their thumbs and tar and feather them for it either. But just be aware, the stable coin explosion is going to occur. Orange man's son is right at the forefront, and he's shaking hands with the one guy that he you knew he was gonna shake hands with. That's Justin's son. But earlier this year, Abu Dhabi based investment firm, MGX, put $2,000,000,000 to buy a stake in Binance, making or marking one of the first institutional investments in the world's largest exchange.
The Trump family backed World Liberty Financial announced its plans for launching a dollar backed stablecoin with BitGo in March. Quote, USD 1 will become one of the most transparent and regulated stablecoins in the world. It is backed by short term treasury and cash equivalent. Not only do we want to create a product in our stable point USD, 1 that can be sent across borders via a very seamless way, but transparency and, frankly, consumer safety is paramount. Right? Trump added. So, actually, he asked a that entire sentence is a giant question. He actually ends it with a question mark.
Well, whatever. World Liberty's cofounder, Zach Whitcough, speaking at the very same event, teased more future pro partnerships for the DeFi protocol, quote, we have a lot on the way at World Liberty, so stay tuned. We're working on, you know, a lot of different DeFi integrations. Right now, we do aim to establish USD 1 as the preferred stable coin in the DeFi and CeFi ecosystems, working really hard on, you know, getting integrations into traditional retail point of sale systems, Witkoff said. You know? You know? Like, is it cool? Like, you know? It's hard to read stuff like this.
Don't trust this guy. I wouldn't trust Eric Trump as far as I could throw that dude, and if he's anything like his old man, he's a big guy. So just be aware, the stablecoin shit is it's much more insidious than you might think. And I've talked about this a couple of times. But the night before last, I kinda finally wrote it down in a nostril note that I wanna read to you here. And I've titled it balance sheet imperialism. Here's the framework. The United States Government issues debt in the form of treasuries. Tether buys that debt. And if you didn't know, Tether is what is pretty much the largest stablecoin and the longest running stablecoin in existence as of today.
So Tether buys that debt and then mints USDT stablecoins backed by those same securities, the US Treasury bonds. Those stablecoins are distributed globally, especially into regions with unstable currencies or limited access to dollars. The result? A fast, private back channel for exporting dollar liquidity around the world without ever touching a bank, the Federal Reserve, or the SWIFT network. This is not some fringe mutation. Tether now holds more US Treasuries than some major sovereign nations. And at this scale, it's not just a stablecoin issuer.
It's functioning as a kind of offshore shadow dollar syndicate converting US debt production into digital dollars for global consumption. Traders, businesses, and individuals in dollar starved regions are using USDT as a substitute for traditional banking access. Every new issuance reinforces demand for US treasuries, helping finance US deficits while strengthening the dollar's role in international markets with almost no one realizing it's actually US dollars that they are using. It's a synthetic version of the US dollar circulating outside of US jurisdiction but still backed by US debt.
So here's the flowchart. The United States Treasury issues debt in the form of treasuries. Tether purchases those treasuries. Tether mints USDT stablecoins against those treasuries. And then globally distributes that USDT. That causes increased demand for USDT. And then Tether acquires more treasuries, the US Treasury issues more debt, rents, and repeat. Whether this is sustainable or desirable is another conversation. But one thing is clear, Tether is playing a strategic role in extending the lifespan of the US dollar itself, and it's going to work. The real question becomes, what happens when, not if, Tether stops buying treasuries and backs the entirety of already issued Tether with Bitcoin and also possibly gold?
Okay. That's what I wrote. That was what I what I distributed on Nostra a couple of days ago. And I've I've gotten some some decent feedback about it, and I've also I also put it up on, on Stacker News, and somebody had had commented back and rightly so. They they were like, dude, there's only a hundred and $48,000,000,000 of Tether or a hundred let's call it a hundred and 50. A hundred and $50,000,000,000 worth of Tether out in the world, and that's a drop in the bucket compared to, what, $36,000,000,000,000 of United States debt?
Yes. He's he's not not wrong. But I'm not saying that this is what's I'm not saying that we're at the end game right now. They're just priming the pump. They haven't they haven't even turned the key over on this particular engine yet. This is all just test. And I don't mean I don't mean that it's a test that it was like, oh, we're we've we're gonna do this thing. We've got it all planned out. It's not a conspiracy. This is all happening organically. At least that's what I believe. I don't think the guys behind, you know, like, Paolo Ordano from Tether, I don't think that they actually sat in a room together, rubbing their hands together with the Trump family years and years and years ago planning all this shit out. No.
This is really happening organically. What I mean by test is that Trump and the and the Treasury and the Federal Reserve and and a whole bunch of other people are looking at this going, oh, holy crap. We could totally save the dollar, and we can totally print our way out of the debt that we've accumulated. And what I'm suggesting is that this test has passed with flying colors according to these people even though I can't point to any specific statement any of these people made that would suggest that I'm right. It's a totally a gut feeling. But when they turn the key over on this engine, because this test is now coming to an end, when they turn the key over on this engine, you're going to see The United States print money like you've never seen before.
The United States dollar is going to be more in demand than ever before, and you're gonna go, why won't this thing die? Because of demand. Because of demand. The world is crying out for liquidity, and they want it in the form of something that has some relationship to the United States dollar. Either dollars themselves or stablecoins that are backed by US dollars tethers that thing. And they are going to buy the ever loving shit ton of securities, everything that the treasury prints. They're they'll just buy it because they'll be able to convert it into liquidity, which the world demands. And because that demand is there, they're going to be able to meet that. And The United States will just have a, like, a free card because the treasury can print the debt, and the Federal Reserve does not have to buy it. They have another buyer. The Federal Reserve is no longer the buyer of last resort for United States debt.
Sovereign countries are no longer considered in that group either. You've got private companies. It wouldn't surprise me if my or strategy started buying United States treasuries and convert them into some kind of stablecoin that they might suggest is backed by Bitcoin, but it's really gonna end up being backed by treasuries. Do you see how this starts to propagate? A hundred and $48,000,000,000 worth of Tether today could very well turn into $14,000,000,000,000 of Tether within a few years, and it could get further and further and further out. Do not keep your eyes off of Tether and the United States Treasury and, god forbid, Justin Sun and Tron and whatever the Trump administration is gonna do next.
But we're not done with Eric Trump, not by a long shot. No, sir. From The Block written by Tim Copeland, Eric Trump says, quote, crypto is going to leave big banks with regret and in the dust. Big banks are going to regret going after crypto individuals and political individuals according to Eric Trump, executive VC at the Trump Organization and the son of Donald Trump. Quote, our system is broken. Modern finance is absolutely broken, said Eric Trump in a fireside chat with World Liberty Financial cofounder Zach Whitcough and Tron founder Justin Sun at token twenty forty nine in Dubai.
He pointed to the way big banks went after the Trump family over the previous few years and said that crypto is going to make the big banks regret that move. Quote, I believe the crypto and he's gonna I'm gonna say crypto because that's what he keeps saying. I believe the crypto world is going to take over the big banks. I think it's going to leave them in the dust. Eric Trump said it's hard for banks to innovate as their business model depends on charging fees, which they might struggle to charge in a crypto environment. He repeated his position that if banks don't innovate, they will become redundant, quote, they're just going to be extinct because you're eliminating their function.
It's like old school film and camera. I think that's what's going to happen to financial institutions, he said, adding that crypto was innovating a hundred times faster than the big banks. Quote, nothing would make me so happy than to see them fall to the very people that they came after, end quote. This sounds like a straight up threat to me, brothers and sisters. But Eric Trump said that many people don't have financial freedom and argue that anyone with a phone can access finance through crypto, quote, crypto brings an even playing field to the world. You're no longer at the mercy of a government or currency that you may no longer trust, he said.
Eric Trump also spoke about The UAE and its willingness to work on other projects, yet he criticized Europe for not being open to business, quote, America is 1,000 times better than Europe, he said. So it sounds to me like Eric is kind of, like, ringing the the the death knell on banks. Maybe, you know, maybe a little too early because I could totally see how banks could charge fees on on crypto related stuff. Shit. I I paid a fee earlier today through Strike. I mean, I was like, what like, a measly 1.45%, but it was still a percentage fee of the transaction.
It's not it and it's nowhere close to as bad as Cash App. I I basically have kinda stopped using Cash App for the time being because their fees have just kinda gotten a little high. But fees are there. They exist. Banks aren't stupid. They're not gonna be able to not understand how to charge a fee on a lightning payment if they're, you know, working the lightning network. But in another in another real way, Eric's kinda making a threat also. Whether whether or not they can get, you know, figure out how to use crypto or not is not where the threat lies. It's it was when he said that, that the banks were gonna be that the banks were going to regret coming after, well, his family is what he's saying.
This is going to be a real interesting time. It's gonna be a really, really interesting time, but the banks have a completely different view or at least the Bank of Italy does. Because they're saying, quote, cryptocurrencies are dangerous for investors and financial stability. Ah, the very opposite thing of what Trump was saying. Right? So Atlas21.com is writing this one. On April 29, the Bank of Italy released its financial stability report for April 2025, highlighting how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies represent emerging risk factors both for investors and for the entire financial system.
According to the document, the strong growth of Bitcoin and of other crypto assets with high price volatility means risk not only for investors, but potentially for financial stability given the growing interconnections between the digital asset ecosystem, the traditional financial sector, and the real economy. The Italian Monetary Authority expressed concern over the growing ties between the digital asset world and the traditional economy warning that this could amplify the effects of potential market shocks. One phenomenon the Bank of Italy considers particularly troubling is the acquisition of Bitcoin by non financial companies.
According to the report, this practice exposes such firms to marked price volatility driven by the belief that Bitcoin can support their share prices, end quote. This trend, which began with strategy in August of twenty twenty, has seen several other companies follow suit, including Meta Planet, Similar Scientific, and GameStop. The document also dedicates considerable attention to stablecoins pegged to the US dollar, warning that they could become systemic and introduce new financial vulnerabilities. The Italian central bank pointed out that the growing reliance on US Government bonds to back these assets could create broader issues. Any fluctuations in both the stablecoin and the underlying bonds could have repercussions on other parts of the global financial system, according to the Bank of Italy.
These warnings come just days after comments from Italian minister of economy and finance, Giancarlo Giorgetti, who cautioned that the appeal of US dollar stablecoins should not be underestimated, describing US policies on stablecoins as, quote, more dangerous than the tariffs imposed by president Donald Trump. That's because Tether at this point is a fucking cruise missile, and it's aimed directly at European banks. That's the first target. We talk about target packages when, you know, in nuclear war scenarios, what's the target package?
You know, say, like, what's the if you ever watched, what was it, War Games back in the eighties with Matthew Broderick, Tar they talked about target packages, and there was different scenarios considering, like, if everybody rained down all their nuclear, you know, weapons on on India First instead of Europe. And then there was, like, a European package, a North American package, a Soviet Union package, all that. Everybody's a package. You get a package and you get a package and everybody gets a package. We're not in that world anymore.
We can perform devastation at scales way larger and have much longer lasting effects than vaporizing entire towns and cities by aiming USDT backed by United States debt at places like the European Central Bank, the Italian Central Bank, French's national you know, France's national bank, And it's Europe that they're targeting. They're not targeting Africa. They're not targeting Latin America. They're targeting Europe. And that's why the ECB and this dude, this minister of finance or whatever from Italy, that's why they're freaked out. They know what's coming.
They don't know how to defend against it because they were too busy calling Bitcoin a scam. Wow. I feel really bad for it, but let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities, West Texas Intermediate and Britt Nor'Sea just cannot catch a break. This is gonna be their fourth down day in a row. And these are ugly down days. These are over 2% down days. Right now, not terrible. West Texas Intermediate is down by a third, but it's down to $57.99, and Britton, North Sea is down a third to $60.83, while natural gas is moving the other direction as always 3% to the upside, $3.42 per thousand cubic feet. Gasoline is basically moving sideways, kinda hanging at $2.02 a gallon. So why is oil down? Well, OPEC is making yet another decision or OPEC plus is making another decision as to whether or not they want to actually even produce more oil to come online.
And this was right after that news came right after the yesterday's news that oil inventories in The United States were had plummeted, and it was a surprise. It was a surprise plummet. And here comes OPEC plus to the rescue because oil prices were rising to threaten the oil markets with more production, and that put the kibosh on energy prices. It's a complete this completely manipulated market. Gold is down 3% to $3,219.50. Silver is down 1.14%. Platinum is down point 14%. Copper is down a tenth of a no. Copper is actually up a tenth of a point, and palladium is up 1.13%. Most of ag is in the red today. Biggest loser is coffee, three and a half percent to the downside. Biggest winner, soybean, a quarter of a point to the upside. So nobody doing very well.
Live cattle is up a quarter. Lean hogs up point 2%. Feeder cattle, however, are down over a half point. The Dow is up half a point. The S and P is up a full point. The Nasdaq is up 1.6%, and the S and P Mini is up point 81%. We have a price of $97,400, which brings us to a $1,930,000,000,000 market cap for Bitcoin, and we can now get 30 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,858,407.11 of. And average fees per block are pretty damn low. 0.04 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. We have about 22 blocks carrying 16,700 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 6 Satoshis per v byte low priority, gonna get you in at five.
Hash rate looks to be stabilizing. 850 exahashes per second, and that is after quite a bit of hash power came offline. We were at, like, 940 exahashes per second sometime earlier, last week. So do with that whatever it is you will. And from the Texas Van Hammer, which was the day before yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and Psyduck with 592 sat says Psyduck. Yodel with $5.00 1. Boost. Turkey with 500 says nothing. And then Perma Nerd with $2.56 says, are you having dirty thoughts? These can be believing the Federal Reserve is federal to wanting to buy ETH. Well, you need to get clean, and Soap Miner Soap is the way to do that. Don't forget to mention The Bitcoin and Show to get a pleasant surprise.
Yeah. Actually, the code for soap miner is Bitcoin and you'll get 10% off there. Wartime with 333 sat says, Novak will cry himself to sleep over the lightning news. I don't know. I never really heard him go off too much about the lightning network, not like other people. I mean and even if he did, Novak's clearly wrong because Lightning works, but I never really heard him just pummel the Lightning Network itself. So I'm gonna give him a break here. A hundred sats from Dot or from I I don't know who this is. It has no name on here. It just says thank you. No. Thank you. And pies with a hundred is back. He says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. That's the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news you can use. Got some Nostr stuff going on that's really interesting today.
Yesterday, I saw this one from Cali, and he had put a note on Noster that says the following. Introducing following, a simple way to create and share follow packs on Noster. Finding interesting people to follow has always been one of the biggest challenges for new users on Nostr. Even experienced users often struggle to discover new communities and voices. Following makes it easy to curate list of users and share them with anyone on the web. Whether you're helping newcomers get started or building a niche community, following allows you to grow connections on Nostr.
You can create your own follow pack in minutes and share it anywhere where here's an example, and then he gives a link. I spent months complaining that someone should build this, and then eventually realized that that someone had to be me. So here we are. I also leaned heavily on AI during the process. It's never been easier or more fun to create apps for open platforms like Nostra. If you have an idea, you really can just build it. No gatekeepers. No permissions needed. Just ship it. Peace. So what is following? Okay. So it's actually following dot underscore, which I think is a terrible name.
Oh, just go to following dot underscore, sir. No. You can go. However, if you if you want to see it live on the web, go to following dot space. That's the URL for it. So following Space, And you will see Nostro packs. Nostro follow packs. What's in a pack? Well, I'm gonna open up the first one, and it's Mostro, m o s t r o, and it's created by Mostro. So what's in it, people? None of which I'm following. How to put this? Because it's like you're not actually seeing what I'm seeing. It's a way for you to if you want to, like like, for instance, let's say you you convince, I don't know, your sister or something like that to get on Noster. So she does so, and she follows the instructions at where am I yeah. Well, hold on. Let me, I got one more.
Oh, I I don't actually have it up. I think it's start.me. I don't actually, let me go over. I'm gonna get a new tab here because I wanna make sure that I've got this. Yes. Nstart.me. N start Me. That's where you send people that have no idea what the hell you're talking about. When you say n sec and n pub and private keys and SHA two fifty, whatever. They're they glaze over. Just send them to nstart.me and it will take them through a guided pathway and by the end of it, they will be set up on Nostr. They will have instructions on what an insect is and where to put it. It's all done with nice pretty pictures. It's a step by step guide. It's it takes about a minute and a half to two minutes to complete. So once they do that and they get on, like, I don't know, ditto dot pub or coracle dot social or primal or whatever, they ain't got nobody to follow.
That's when you send them to following dot space. That's following dot space. And then on the front screen, they can just look at all these different packs. And it's got a pretty little picture, you know, for some and or well, actually, all of them have a picture at this point. Nope. There's one that does not have a cover image. But like Vibe Coders, that's the title of a pack. There's also BitX miners. So people that are known to be running BitX, are are on there. And then there's Bitcoin and Freedom. That was started by, Gladstein from the Human Rights Foundation. So who's on here?
Well, why the hell am I not following Odell? That's bizarre. Maybe I'm not no. I'm I'm logged in. Somehow or another, maybe it's no. There's a lot of people in here that I am following it saying saying that I'm not following. Let me get back to home. But the point is, it's it's broken for me right now apparently because clearly I'm not following anybody on Nostril, which makes me a little little nervous. I'm actually go check something out here. Yeah. Sorry about that. I needed to go check something. Something right as of this point, it seems that for me, at least, there's something wrong with following dot space because it doesn't think I'm following anybody, and I know I am. But let's take that aside because this was this was vibe coded, so there's always gonna be bugs that need to be worked out from people that are using AI to help them code. This is just sort of the way the way that it works.
But yesterday, it was working fine. And I could go to, like, this Maestro pack. Actually, let me go to something else. Let's go back down here to Vibe Coders, considering we were just talking about it. So that was created by Johnny. And there's a there's, like I don't know. There are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven people in this pack that you can follow. Pablo f seven z is one of them. Cali is another. Carnage is another. Rod Bishop is another, and there's a there's a couple of other ones. And there's a little each one has a follow button. And if you're already following, it will say you're it will say you're following. But if you're not following, it'll have a button that says follow. And you can follow as you're logged in with your Nostra insect into following dot space.
It will keep track of that. And as you follow people here, you'll be following them on every other Nostra app. So it's a really nice way to say, if you're interested in vibe coding, go over to Nostra and go to following Space and find vibe coders and then follow all those guys. And if you're I was trying to put together a ranching one yesterday, but I got sidetracked so I never got a chance to actually finish it off. But I want to be able to put all the ranchers that I know that are on Nostra into this one so that if you're interested in ranching, you you can just actually go to, like like, I would have it called ranchingonfollowing.space and, like, let's say I've got 15 people, there's actually a follow all button at the very top of each one of these packs when you get into it. So you don't even have to pick and choose. You can just say follow everybody in ranching and and go and then find farming and follow everybody there because you're interested in ranching and farming.
This thing is beautiful, but it's not as beautiful as what happens next. So that day, Cali released that. That was like, I don't know, when when I saw it. In the same day, though, this is what's important. In the actual same day that Cali released that, j b 55 from Domus, the the creator of Domus, had already put it into his note deck project. He says you can now add follow packs as note deck columns. Follow packs from following dot space had just been released. Hours later, j b fifty five instantiates that into his project note deck that he's been working on within a day. Within a freaking day. I've never seen anything move this fast ever.
I thought lightning was moving fast. No. Not in comparison to what we're looking at right now. These guys are about to light themselves on fire. It's going to be it's already amazing to watch this, but if you think this is like the pinnacle of what they're about to produce, the ability for Cali to completely spin up an application within hours, have it released relatively working relatively well. And then a few hours after that, another major developer just takes the project and just shoves it into his own project and it just fits. I don't think anybody appreciates what we're about to experience.
I don't think anybody really appreciates just how fast this is going to start going. It's going to be amazing. Amazing. And I am so here for it. But first, remember that Ledger wallet leak that leaked everybody's emails and stuff? Well, you'll know if they got your physical address when they send you the scammers of that leak sent you a letter because Ledger leak victims are being hit by physical mail scams. Alex Larry for Bitcoin News is writing this one. A new phishing scam is targeting digital asset holders with ledger hardware wallets, and it's the old school difference but effective method. It's physical mail. You know, snail mail.
Users are reporting receiving letters in the mail that appear to be from Ledger, the popular hardware wallet provider. The letters claim to be from the company's security team and asks users to do a critical security update by scanning a code and entering in their 24 word recovery phase phrase. Jesus. Don't don't do this. Ledger's wallet team and cybersecurity experts say this is obviously a scam and a bad one. Quote, Ledger will never ask for your 24 word recovery phrase. If someone does, it's a scam, the company said in a response to these reports. The letters look like official Ledger wallet correspondence. They have the company's logo, business address, and even a reference number to look legit.
Recipients are told that it's mandatory, and if that they don't comply, access to their wallets will become restricted. Oh, god. The goal is simple. Get users to hand over their seed phrases, an action that gives the attackers full control of the victim's entire digital asset stash. The scam was first reported by tech analyst and trader Jacob Canfield, who shared an image of the letter that he received at his physical address on April 2025, quote, scammers are sending physical letters to the ledger addresses database leak requesting an upgrade due to security risk, Canfield wrote on Twitter. The scam appears to be linked to the 2020 data breach that exposed the personal information of over 270,000 Ledger customers, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses.
Although the breach happened nearly five years ago, the stolen info has continued to fuel phishing attacks. This is not the first time scammers have used physical mail to exploit the breach. In 2021, some Ledger users received tampered hardware wallets in the mail that installed mal malware on their computers. Ledger acknowledged the issue and warned users to be careful, quote, scammers impersonating Ledger and Ledger representatives are unfortunately common. Stay cautious and keep your crypto safe. What's more concerning about this phishing attempt is how how real it feels.
Using real names and addresses likely from the breach, the scammers can send letters that look official and urgent. These letters are especially risky for non tech users, including older people who might trust a physical letter more than an email or a social media message. Seed phrases, also known as recovery phrases, are the most sensitive piece of information tied to a Bitcoin wallet. If someone gets their hands on it, they will take full control of the wallet and they will drain all the funds. Ledger has put out several public notices that it never ask you for seed phrases, not by email, phone call, direct message, or physical mail. Some community members are suggesting that Ledger revised the security or the standard security alerts to specifically mention physical letters as a phishing method.
So this this crap continues even years after that hack. And right and we're real we were really pissed off about how Ledger just nonchalantly seemed to not even really care. They really didn't they really didn't seem like they gave a shit, honestly. And now this is what they've this is what they reap. This is why it's just so awful to have your customers like all this information. If like, for instance, if you sign if you go over to bitcoin and show.com, which is the website for this show, all I want is your email address. And that's just so that you'll get like, when I release a show, you'll be notified.
I don't sell it. Why I I'm I just refuse to sell my customer's data. Yeah. I'm not gonna give it away. That's just that's just stupid. But I'm I'm not gonna share this stuff because it's important to me. It means that you trust me. I'm not going to treat it like the way that Ledger treated not only email addresses, but dude, phone numbers? Shit. And they didn't mention it in this in this, thing, but there was way more more information than just your physical address. They had all kinds of stuff on you, you know, especially as, like, after I stopped buying ledger. Thank God I stopped buying ledgers when I did and moved over to a cold card because they just wanted more and more and more information. And their their service got crappier and crappier and crappier, and they relied more and more on web interfaces to be able to work with your wallet. And I'm like going, I don't like that crap. I don't like my device being specifically and explicitly connected to the Internet when it's holding my seed phrase.
So my advice is just stay as far away from Ledger as you possibly can. Don't even consider don't even consider doing business with these guys. Okay? Alright. Let's see. Was there anything else that I needed to touch on today? I don't think so. That's pretty much it for today's show. It is in the bag. I hope you enjoyed it. Again, if you want to keep up on what's going on in Bitcoin on a Monday through Friday basis, tune in every day to Bitcoin, and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Podcast Update
Bitcoin News Overview
Circle P Segment: Maple Trade
Market Analysis and Updates
