Join me today for Episode 902 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Israeli CBDC Incoming
- SEC Embarrassed in Court Again
- Blackrock/GBTC Flippening
- Treasury Bond Auction Flops
- Saylor's BTC Treasury Model Takes Off
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
Circle P:
https://primal.net/p/npub1zaza8djf4usave5w2jc2374ymytcgk63cddju3fwe8t787h395ususgvvm
nostr handle: @Oak Grove
Product: Black Soldier Fly Larvae
Location: DFW area
Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/nyse-to-launch-products-tracking-spot-bitcoin-prices
https://cointelegraph.com/news/israel-accelerates-digital-shekel-development
https://decrypt.co/232809/sec-debt-box-case-dismissed
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/05/29/blackrock-takes-the-crown-for-the-largest-spot-bitcoin-etf-from-grayscale/
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20240528176/treasury-yields-climb-after-relatively-weak-2-year-and-5-year-auctions
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/healthcare-company-semler-scientific-buys-40-million-bitcoin-adopts-as-treasury-reserve-asset
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/metaplanet-to-buy-another-250-million-worth-of-bitcoin
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/riot-acquires-9-25-stake-in-bitfarms-following-rejected-950m-takeover-offer/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/mostro-cli-v0-10-0/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/zeus-v0-9-0-alpha5/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/zap-store-0-1-2/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/lightning-loop-v0-28-2-beta/
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[00:00:00]
Unknown:
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. Uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:15 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 29th day of May 2024, and this is episode 902 of Bitcoin. And the Circle P is open for business. That's right. Oak Grove, also known as Dubravco, has got your black soldier fly larvae ready for you.
He's at the DFW area, and if you if you have if you still don't know after listening to this show what black soldier fly larvae is and can do for you, I cannot recommend putting together an outside black soldier fly bin yourself, and thereby thereby disposing of all of your scrap meat and food and, like, scraped off plates. Instead of throwing it in the trash, you can convert it through black soldier fly larvae into, like, black gold. This stuff is awesome. And the black soldier fly, if you do it correctly, they harvest themselves. Like, they they will literally harvest themselves into a bucket. I can't get into how that actually works right now because we got other fish to fry.
But when you do it correctly they will they will crawl out all by themselves of the muck so you don't have to separate them they will separate themselves. They do all the work for you. All you have to do is set up the system to do it right. They'll harvest themselves into a bucket, feed it to chickens, ducks, fish, whatever, dude. Like, 40% crude fat, 4 like, 35% crude protein, the rest of it's water. I mean, these things are amazing from an animal nutrition side, and that that way you can convert all of your food into crap that you don't wanna eat anymore. Let these guys eat it. You don't wanna eat the black soldier fly because we're humans and we don't eat insects. So you feed them to animals that do eat insects and they act as a conversion mechanism to make food for humans.
Because we're not going to eat the bugs. We're going to let our animals eat the bugs and then we're gonna eat the animals because they are the conversion vector. Alright. So Dubravko's got you covered. He will sell you black soldier fly larvae for Bitcoin, which is why he's in the circle p. Because if you ain't selling it for coin, you're not in the circle p. Right? That's the way that this goes. This is the way that we get the circular economy running. I'm doing my part with the Circle P. Dubravco's doing his part by offering me satoshis for sales that he makes to plebs like you for his black soldier fly in Bitcoin. And he will ship those sons of bitches right to your door. So ask him about it. His in pub will be linked in the show notes. Okay? His handle on Noster is at Oak Grove. Oak like the tree, grove like a lot of them. Alright? So there you go. That's the circle p. Getting into the news, we're gonna start off with Bitcoin Magazine Vivek Sin is writing.
The New York Stock Exchange to launch products tracking. Spot Bitcoin as if we needed yet one more freaking derivative. The New York Stock Exchange has announced plans to launch financial products tied to the spot Bitcoin price. Yay. Joy. The NYSE is collaborating with CoinDesk Indices to develop cash settled index options that will track the CoinDesk Bitcoin price index. Pausing just to say, what does this product do? Well, I'd I'd know, it just explained it. That's not what I'm getting at. What does it produce? How is this not just betting on craps somebody else is playing in Vegas.
What I mean, what why do we need this? This fucking ridiculous. The x b x is a real time spot price index for Bitcoin calculated across major crypto exchanges. It's been operating for over 10 years and is currently the benchmark for $20,000,000,000 worth of b Bitcoin ETF assets. And by developing option contracts based on the xbx, the NYSE aims to provide investors with a new tool to manage risk. Oh, there it is. As interest in Bitcoin continues growing, the products would be subject to regulatory approval. Of course, NYSE chief product officer, John Herrick, said these new options contracts will give investors, quote, access to an important liquid and transparent risk management tool amid surging demand for Bitcoin, whatever the hell that means. The collaboration brings yet another major traditional finance player into Bitcoin.
The NYSE said it shows the wide ranging enthusiasm for the recent spot Bitcoin ETF approvals, drawing institutions into the asset class. But currently, the CME and a handful of other mainstream entities offer Bitcoin derivative products. Growing acceptance of Bitcoin in traditional finance circles. With what woah. With $25,000,000,000,000 in market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange brings extensive reach, distribution, and influence to the table. Its entrance into Bitcoin indexing and derivatives reflects the asset class going increasingly mainstream in 2024.
Tools for risk management is just betting on the other side of something else that you've bet on. And in my opinion, it does nothing. I don't even think it actually handles risk management. Because, honestly, if you're making 2 bets and you lose on 1 and gain on the other, how is this not essentially a zero sum game? Sure, you may get a couple of extra percentage out of winning or you may not lose quite as much if you've hedged both sides. But I I just I'm sorry. But these kind of products to me make no actual sense because I'm always looking at what does it do? What does it produce? How does it make a human existence more worthy of being on this rock that's spinning around this active nuclear furnace.
Right? When you compare it to the grandeur of the universe, this is all bullshit. It's just fucking bullshit. I mean, literally, dude, you you are a thing wrapped in meat. You're a skeleton. Yes. A skeleton that's made out of minerals forged in the hearts of sons, wrapped in meat, on a world that's spinning around an active nuclear furnace, and the whole thing is wrapped around is studded inside of a galaxy that's wrapped around a gigantic black hole, and that whole thing is flying through space at ungodly amounts of speed. And yet, what do we offer the universe? A fucking derivative product that acts as acts as some kind of risk management tool based on the price of something delivered by a company that none of us in the Bitcoin space actually like.
This is where we are. It's fucking ridiculous is what it is. But we've got other shit to do. Israel is launching their bullshit digital shekel CBDC experiment for payments. Oh, joy. No. Seriously, guys, I'm in a good mood. I'm just saying this this is this is what's going on today. Digital shekels. Digital shekels from the Bank of Israel, Cointelegraph, Arjeed Sarkar. Israel intends to expedite the development of its own in house central bank digital currency, the digital shekel. The bank of Israel plans to involve various service providers in codeveloping an advanced digital payment ecosystem centered on the digital shekel. A rough translation of the central bank's announcement reads, quote, as part of the action plan for the possible issuance of a digital shekel, the Bank of Israel is planning the digital shekel challenge, an experiment inspired by the project Rosalind carried out by the BIS Innovation Hub, end quote. What's the BIS?
The Bank of International Settlements. That's head up by Burger Meister Meister Burger. You don't know who I'm talking about, just look up who the head of the Bank of International Settlements is. And what is the BIS? It's the central bank for central banks. It facilitates pretty much all central bank cross payment platforms. It's it's it's a major tool of the of the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and the IMF, and the UN. Just leave it at that. And if you think any of those guys are on your side, you're fooling yourself. Anyway, project Rosalind is a joint experimentation between the Bank of International Settlements and the BOE or Bank of England, which aims to develop prototypes for an application programming interface. As part of the challenge, the BOI will provide a sandbox environment attached to a layer of application programming interfaces.
Participants will compete to build real time CBDC payment systems for the public. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Shali Rajwan, managing partner at Masterkey Venture Capital, a Tel Aviv based venture capital firm, they explained the initiative in detail, quote, the program consists of 3 phases. Application and presentations, access to the new network for selected projects, and a final presentation to judges, some of whom have spoken at recent crypto events. End quote. He believes the initiative could potentially bridge the gap between the web 3 industry and government even though decentralized finance, zero knowledge, and permissionless solutions are not yet being considered. And they never will be, by the way.
Israel invited entities from the private, public, and academic sectors to participate in the experiment. And the central bank added, quote, priority will be given to uses with original and innovative characteristics in the payment world, whether they are new improvements to existing applications or completely new applications. End quote. While CBDCs are built to serve universal use cases, participants in Israel's CBDC experiment are also allowed to build solutions for unique niches and scenarios. On April 16th, the bank of Israel deputy governor Andrew Abir said cbdc competition with banks is good for the nation's economy. Oh, for god's sakes.
Abir believed that the development of a digital shekel would get support from the public. Quote, the digital shekel will not be developed by some anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. Everyone will know who is behind the digital shekel and who is responsible for it. The same Bank of Israel that stands behind the cash we all know and trust, end quote. According to Ober, digital shekel or the digital shekel could benefit the BOI as well. Just the option to hold digital shekels could incentivize banks to pay higher interest, he added. A May 11th public consultation report confirmed Abir's thoughts on the public support for CBDC in development, quote, all of the responses to the public consultation indicates support for continued research regarding the various implications on the payments market, financial and monetary stability, legal and technological issues, and more, end quote.
However, respondents unanimously raised concerns around CBDC's potential for privacy breaches. That's the least of your worries, ladies and gentlemen, because the way I read this, the Bank of Israel is reaching. The entire statement about Satoshi Nakamoto is the most telling part. Let me read that quote to you. This is the deputy governor, Andrew Abir, for the Bank of Israel. He said the digital shekel will not be developed by some anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. Everyone will know who is behind the digital shekel and who is responsible for it. Okay? Right there.
Right there. That's that's them saying, telling you, telegraphing in public, they are fucking terrified. They are losing control. And it's not just the Bank of Israel. Guys, this is like the entire banking sector. The entire central banking sector of the world is scared shitless. And they're calling out Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto by name in their projects to launch some kind of bullshit CBDC that's supposed to be better? No. It's not. There's no reason in the world for me to actually know who the hell is behind Bitcoin at all. All I all I need is the code.
I just need to be able to run the code. That's all I need. I don't need to trust anything but the code. There's no attachment for me to satoshi Nakamoto. I could not give a shit less who this guy is. I don't care if he's dead. I don't care if he's alive. I don't care where he lives. I don't give a shit what he eats for breakfast. In fact, I hope I'd never hear from that guy ever. Seriously. I don't ever wanna hear from him again. I want good money and I want the person that actually gave it or the group of people that gave it to the world to go the fuck away. I don't give a shit.
This entire thing, this that entire statement from the deputy governor of the BOI should tell you everything you need to know about the entire mentality of all the people that are in control of the central banking system in the world. They're all scared shitless because they know we're going to eat their lunch. Now the SEC has had a string of bad court dates. And, apparently, today is no different. The SEC has been ordered to pay $1,800,000 as a judge dismisses the Debtbox case. This is decrypt, Stephen Graves writing the SEC has had its case against crypto mining firm, Debtbox, dismissed without prejudice by a United States federal judge.
The regulator has been ordered to pay legal fees of almost $1,800,000 Utah District Court Judge Robert Shelby ruled in a court order filed on Tuesday that the Securities and Exchange Commission should pay most of the reasonable attorney fees and other legal fees petitioned for by the defendants in the case amounting to just over $1,820,000 In a separate filing, judge Shelby granted the SEC's motion to dismiss the case without prejudice, meaning that the regulator could, in theory, refile charges against Debtbox at a later date.
The SEC previously requested that the case be dismissed without prejudice after the judge threatened to sanction the regulator over, quote, false and misleading statements, end quote, made as it was filing its complaint. The regulators sought the dismissal in order to enable a new team of attorneys to determine whether it is appropriate to recommend the commission proceed with a new complaint, it said in an earlier filing. Detbox hailed the ruling in a dead bird post, calling the dismissal of the case a monumental victory and noting that the SEC, quote, cannot proceed with the case as it stands.
In its August 2023 lawsuit, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Debtbox defrauded investors to the tune of nearly $50,000,000 by selling unregistered securities. The regulator also obtained an ex parte restraining order against the firm to freeze its assets, meaning that the firm couldn't contest the order in court. In a March filing, Judge Shelby found that the SEC had engaged in bad faith conduct by obtaining the restraining order, having made false, mischaracterized, and misleading statements, he ordered the regulator to pay sanctions, including attorney fees incurred by the defendants in the case. Quote, once defendants had notice and an opportunity to respond, each purportedly factual pillar the commission construed or constructed to make the required showing of irreparable harm crumbled under scrutiny, judge Shelby wrote in the order. Holy shit.
So Judge Shelby basically handed the SEC their ass, but further characterized them as making false, mischaracterized, and misleading statements in a case against this crypto miner. I don't know who Debtbox is. I've never heard of them before. Okay? But this is this is seems my gut feeling here is that we are now seeing a major rift between the judicial branch of the United States government and the regulatory schemata of the United States government. Because and I honestly don't know where the regulation fits in in the scheme because we we essentially have in the United States, we've got the executive branch, we got the judicial branch, and we've got the legislative branch. So I'm just gonna tuck the regulatory authorities under the legislative branch. So if that's true, then we have a major rift between elements, not all, but elements of the legislative branch of the United States government and the judiciary.
The judiciary, for the last 2 to 3 years, has basically been telling the SEC to go sit and spin. And the SEC is acting like they can just continue to act in the way they've been acting in perpetuity without any kind of ramifications whatsoever. And Shelby just basically said, no. I don't think so. So here's my here's my other gut feeling about this. It brings up a question in my stomach. What does this mean? Does this mean that the SEC is going to either be disbanded or is going to be completely overhauled from top to bottom very soon, sooner than any of us might actually think. And I think it's going to be the latter.
I think Gensler is going to lose his job, or I think all the people at the top of the SEC are going to be either repositioned or lose their jobs. And somebody's gonna come in clean these these asshole's little little clocks. Now I'm actually a fan of the Howey test. There are some instruments that people of earth have built that make sense. The Howey test is one of them. It it it really is. It it a good safeguard. And if you're one of the person people out there, and I don't blame you for saying this, saying, well, David, that means that you're for regulation, which means you're for government. I get that. But there's no reason that a person themselves cannot apply the Howey test for when they decide whether or not to buy something that may or may not be a security. Do you see what I'm saying? I don't need a regulatory agency to tell me not to buy Ethereum.
And I'm certainly not going to listen to them when they tell me it's okay to buy Ethereum because I know Ethereum is a security, And I don't trust any of the people behind it. It's a scam. Everything about Ethereum from top to bottom is a 100% full blown Ponzi scheme. It's a scam from top to bottom. I don't need the SEC to hold my hand and help me make the the decision to not put any money into an obvious scam. But the Howey test is still there. After that, when we go back and we look at the what the SEC has been doing, they don't make any sense.
They they keep saying they're trying to protect us. But I all I really see them is not it it looks to me like they don't know what they're doing anymore. And, again, if we tie this back into the Bank of Israel when they're looking directly or saying directly statements about Satoshi Nakamoto and how their digital shekel is not going to be anonymous and they point directly to Bitcoin saying, we're not like Bitcoin. Bitcoin, bad. Shekel, good. Somehow or another, this is relating to this this activity that's going on at the SEC that seems to be perpetrated by a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing.
They don't know how to interact with the judiciary of the United States judicial system. They seem to be, like, going rogue out of, you know, the the legislative branch of the United States government. And it looks like it just kinda looks like shit's coming apart at the seams. How will this affect anything? There's no way to tell. There's no way anybody knows where this is going. Although, as you'll see when we get to the numbers, some other shit's starting to come apart at the seams. But first, BlackRock and the flippening.
It has happened. BlackRock takes the crown for the largest spot Bitcoin ETF from Grayscale, and this is out of CoinDesk. Who's it written by? Sharra Malwa is writing this one. BlackRock's spot Bitcoin exchange traded fund is now the largest product of its kind. Flipping Grayscale's GBTC after a $102,000,000 inflow on Tuesday. Ibit holds nearly $20,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin as of Wednesday morning. Its product page shows GBTC now holds 19,700,000,000 after seeing a 105,000,000 in outflows on Tuesday, its pay showed shows. So pausing just to say that out of the $105,000,000 that came out of GBTC, 102 went directly to BlackRock.
They just complete it's like a black hole just eating everything around it. I mean, I'm not saying that's good, by the way. Anyway, since going live in January, investors have poured $16,500,000,000 into Ibit and have withdrawn $17,000,000,000 from Grayscale Fund. On Tuesday, BlackRock added the Bitcoin ETF to its income and bond focused funds in the Q1. The firm's strategic income opportunities funds now holds over $3,500,000 worth of Ibit while its strategic global bond fund holds $485,000 worth of Bitcoin. Buying activity for Ibit ramped up recently amid bullish sentiment. For Bitcoin and the broader crypto market, the bulls gained momentum.
After the listing approval for, God forbid, the ether ETF, the scam machine that that fucking thing is, and renewed support for crypto among United States political parties. That helped mark a sudden shift in iBit, which recorded low or even 0 inflows before May 15th and saw its 1st ever day of outflows in April leading to bearish sentiment. Last week, United States listed spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds reached a new record by holdings with more than 800 and 50,000 BTC in custody, surpassing the previous high of 845,000 BTC from early April. So there you go, man. GBTC has conducted a successful flippening or I'm sorry. IBit has conducted a successful flippening of GBTC and now GBTC comes in at number 2. And speaking of number 2, let's run the numbers.
CNBC Futures and Commodities West Texas Intermediate Oil is down 3 quarters of a point to $79 26¢ after rallying pretty hard earlier this morning. Brent Norcia is also down about the same amount, $83.55 a barrel. Natural gas is doing its thing. It's down 5 a half percent, Back down to $2.44 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is down a buck and a half. Don't expect that to last because we're coming into summer driving season. $2.47. Gold is down 3 quarters of a point as well to $2,360 and change. Silver is up a half a point. Platinum is down almost 2 points. Copper is down 1 and a half. Palladium is down 1 and a half. Ag futures are all kinds of red, except for our biggest winner, chocolate.
5.8% to the upside. The biggest loser today is cotton. 2 and a third to the downside. Looks like livestock is down as well. Point 6 9% to the downside for live cattle. Live hogs is up scant and feeder cattle are down 1 and a half points. Indices, gee, everything seems to be in the red. I wonder why. What could it be? Well, we'll get to it. The Dow is down almost a full percentage point. The S and P is down 0.6%, Nasdaq is down 0.44%, and the S and P Mini is down 1.26%. Now what the hell is going on? Every single market in the world is in the red today. Everything is bleeding out.
Bitcoin's bleeding out too. It's okay. I mean, it's $67,574 right now according to one of my one of my monitors. But everything else is in the red. Even Nasdaq, who made record highs yesterday of, like was it, like, 40,000 or something like that? I not 40 1,000. I can't remember what the Nasdaq was that but it hit a record high. Right? They have all because of NVIDIA. And yet today, everything is in the red. What the hell is going on? Could it be linked to the one single thing in the world that drives all financial and economic markets?
I think so. What am I referring to? The treasury bond. That's right. The United States treasury bonds and all kinds of shit happened. And according to Morningstar, Treasury yields climbed after a relatively weak 2 year and 5 year treasury bond auctions. Now before I get into this, and it's not going to be that long, but before I get into this, I want to remind you that even though Cathie Wood has shown some stripes as a shitcoiner, she's essentially a Bitcoiner. And a long time ago, a long time ago, she was on several podcasts talking about treasury bonds.
And one of the things that she said that has always stuck with me, and I see it and now I I've been looking for it ever since she ever said it, was that one of these days, the United States Treasury is going to have a Treasury Bond auction, and it's going to be not only under subscribed, but nobody's gonna buy a thing, a completely failed auction. We are walking towards it. Here it is by Joy Wilmerth and Isabelle Wang, again, out of Morningstar. Traders are focused on comments from Fed's cash carry, and looking ahead to April PCE report, which is due later in the week. Treasury yields were higher on Tuesday after a relatively weak 2 5 year bond auction, as traders weighed comments from Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank president, Neel Kashkari, about him not yet ruling out the potential for further rate hikes.
What's happening? So the yield on the 2 year treasury was up 3 basis points to 4.97%. Yield on the 10 year was up 7 points to 4.54%. And the yield on the 30 year was rising to 8 basis points and putting it at 4.65%. So treasury yields were higher on Tuesday after a pair of relatively weak auctions of the 2 5 year notes totaling almost, check it, a $140,000,000,000. And those 2 auctions came less than 2 hours apart. The bid to cover ratio was weaker than the usual on both auctions of nearly $70,000,000,000 each, said Tom d Goloma, head of global rate trading at BTIG.
Quote, at the end of the day, Wall Street and accounts were not really ready to take down the supply, d Goloma told MarketWatch, pointing to a lack of trading in the run up to the auction given that the US bond market closed an hour early on Friday ahead of the long Memorial Day weekend. Okay. So that's putting a little bit of lipstick on a pig right there saying, oh, well, you know, it's because they closed an hour earlier on Friday, so there wasn't going to be as much interest in this particular bond auction. Oh, bullshit.
You know when the bond auction is going to happen, whether the treasury bond market closes an hour early on Friday because there's gonna be a Memorial Day weekend? Bullshit. You knew. You knew. This is under subscription of the instrument that underpins the entire global economy. If you think I'm wrong, I don't know what to tell you. It is the United States Treasury bond. It took me decades to figure that shit out. Not that I was, you know, when I was 30, I didn't give a shit. But just what I'm saying is that it's become readily apparent to me after being in Bitcoin for years that it's the United States Treasury Bond Market. Not just the market, the actual instrument itself, the bond.
Everybody holds them. That's what makes them liquid. Right? Well, now you've gotten an a complete under subscription on not just this auction. This has happened before. Nobody's talking about it. The weakness in the United States Treasury bond market only goes one way. And it doesn't well, it goes in a couple of different directions. Well, it goes in the same direction, but there's a couple of different pit stops on the way. 1st pit stop is, those fucking Fed rates are never coming down. And Reuters, I put it out this morning on Nasr. They had the the traders are shocked that they're that they're not going to get their fed rate cut.
Dude, not only are you not gonna get a fed fed rate cut, they're probably going to be forced to raise rates to match the yields on the bond market so that they're not too far out of whack because that's probably not going to look very good. Those bond rates are not coming down. Nobody wants these things anymore. China's been getting rid of them for years, but they are really accelerating in 2024. They're to completely getting they're divesting from United States debt who can blame them. And they've got their own problems. Just because they're smart and dumping the United States treasury bond because it's a toxic piece of shit does not mean China's in a good spot. Nobody is.
That's one of the problems of having such an interconnected economy on the global scale that depends on one instrument for its value. And that instrument for the world's economic value is the United States Treasury Bond, and we forced the world to swallow it. And now the chickens are coming home to roost. What to do about it? Buy Bitcoin, of course, at $67,510 a pop. That brings the market cap to $1,330,000,000,000. You can get 29 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19,704,986.74 of.
Average fees per block have risen. Point 2 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. And speaking of blocks, how many blocks are there? I don't know. Find out right now. It looks like there's a 197 blocks carrying 271,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 9 satoshis per v byte. Low priorities, you're gonna get in at 27. And anything under 6 satoshis per v byte, you're gonna get kicked out of mempools around the world. Mining is at 535.6 exahashes per second according to mempool.spaceforward/mining. And from scams and promises, episode 901 of bitcoin and that I did on Monday, but didn't stream it to you live.
I get itsy bitsy huddle, boosted me 5,000 satoshis, and says nothing. Dude. Check it bro. You should say something. Dobrovco, 17/60. 17/60 satoshi says, yo dawg. And he gives me this picture of a rapper. And I I I wanna say it's like a really young iced tea, but I have no idea. Anyway, it says, yo dog, I heard you like shit coins inside your shit coins. So we put an Ethereum inside of an ETF. Yep. I don't totally totally hear you, pal. A natgas immersion, 1,000 satoshi says, confirming BSFL or black soldier fly larvae, made a do it yourself bin too. I'll share some pics. Oh, and thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Wartime boosted me a 1,000.
Said nothing. God's death with 237 satoshis says thank you sir, no thank you, and I'm really missing my friend Pies. I wish you had been in this particular list because you started honestly, between god's death and Pies is the people that started the thank you, no thank you, sir thing. So that's all because of them. Alright. Where are we at? Nope. That's alright. That's gonna do it for the, weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. Bitcoin Magazine starts us out. Healthcare company similar, Scientific, has bought $40,000,000 of Bitcoin and adopts it as a treasury reserve asset.
So you guys, if you've been on Noster and probably over on, Bitcoin dead bird, Probably noticed a whole bunch of things about this similar scientific. I'm hoping that Nick Hoffman will give us a line out on what this company actually does and if they're worth a shit. Because we've seen this before. Right? We we saw this with I can't remember the name of the company. It's a completely it was a complete dog stock. I mean, we're talking, like, garbage, junk stock, penny stock. And they announced that they were gonna do, they're gonna adopt Bitcoin. They were blah blah blah, and they were great. And we find out that their company's shit, and their CEO the very next day quit by saying this is a pump and dump and I wanna have nothing to do with it, which means you're talking about a company that is literally burning in a dumpster. It is a dumpster fire. Alright. So let's find out.
Semler Scientific Incorporated. Ticker is SMLR. It's known for its healthcare solutions to combat chronic diseases. It's announced a significant shift in its treasury strategy. The company's board of directors has adopted Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset. Not secondary, not tertiary, not quaternary, not quaternary, not sextary. Nope. Primary. That means is it is its first line of treasury reserve. That's important. It's it's primary. Cash is not primary for them. The United States Treasury bond isn't their primary reserve asset. Bitcoin is.
And that's a the entire board of directors saying yes. Anyway, they purchased a made a substantial purchase of 581 Bitcoin for an aggregate amount of $40,000,000 inclusive of fees and expenses, quote, our Bitcoin treasury strategy and purchase of Bitcoin underscores our belief that bitcoin is a reliable store of value and a compelling investment, stated Semler Scientific Chairman, Eric Semler. Quote, Bitcoin is now a major asset class worth more than $1,000,000,000,000. We believe it has unique characteristics as a scarce and finite asset that can serve as a reasonable inflation hedge and safe haven asset amid global instability.
We also believe its digital architectural resilience makes it preferable to gold, which has a market value of approximately 10 times that of Bitcoin. Given the gap in value between gold and Bitcoin, we believe that Bitcoin has the potential to generate outsized returns as its gains increasing acceptance as digital gold. Despite the strategic financial move, Semler Scientific said it remains committed to its core mission in healthcare of delivering innovative technologies as solutions to transform the healthcare management of chronic diseases and offers providers the opportunity to reduce cost and improve long term patient outcomes. The company will also continue to focus on its flagship product, QuantaFlo, a point of care test for peripheral arterial disease while seeking expanded FDA clearance for other cardiovascular conditions. Quote, furthermore, we're energized by the glowing sorry, the growing global acceptance and institutionalization of Bitcoin reflected most recently by the Securities Exchange Commission's January 2024 approval of 11 Bitcoin exchange traded funds.
These funds have reported more than 13,000,000,000 dollars of net inflows with investments from nearly 1,000 institutions, including global banks, pensions, endowments, and registered investment advisers. It is estimated that more than 10% of all Bitcoin are now being held by institutions. Wow. Mister Simler basically said that quote. The the the head dude, the chief, the chief guy. Similar scientific board and senior management shared that they have carefully considered various use cases of excess cash and concluded that holding Bitcoin is the best strategy. For more information on Semler Scientific, visit their web page here. And it's Semler Scientific, semlerscientific.com.
Similar Scientific, all one word. Okay. A lot. I think I got I think I got a second one that goes along with this one. Oh, yes. Let's do this one first and I'll make us make an observation here. Meta planet. Yep. Meta planet to buy another 250,000,000 yen worth of Bitcoin. Nick Hoffman is writing this one for Bitcoin Magazine, Meta Planet Incorporated. A Japanese publicly traded company has announced a significant enhancement to its Bitcoin holdings. In a recent board of directors meeting, the company resolved to purchase an additional 250,000,000 yen currently worth $1,600,000 USD worth of Bitcoin.
Meta Planet has recently outlined its approach to managing their Bitcoin. The company also stated that Bitcoin the Bitcoin acquired for long term purposes will be recorded at cost, ensuring stable accounting treatment over time. Conversely, Bitcoin held for short term purposes will be revalued quarterly at market value. Any unrealized gains or losses from these short term holdings will be recorded in the non operating income section of the income underscoring the growing acceptance of bitcoin as a strategic and valuable underscoring the growing acceptance of Bitcoin as a strategic and valuable asset class.
Meta Planet also acquired an additional 19.8 7 BTC earlier this month for a purchase price of 200,000,000 yen. For further information on MetaPlanet, additional details can be found on its website here. And that is what? What's that gonna be? Meta planet dot jp. Metoplanet.jp, if you wanna go see it. Okay. So what to what to say about this? So similar scientific. At first, I thought maybe it was a Hail Mary. Like like that other company I was telling you about, the dumpster fire company that the CEO quit the day after they announced that they were gonna do Bitcoin and it was gonna save their bacon, and I don't know what I don't I still don't know what happened to them. I don't even know if they actually bought that Bitcoin, to tell you the truth. But when I saw this announcement from Similar Scientific, I was like, heckles hackles on the neck kinda just stood up. Right? It's not not gonna not happen.
So I was looking into it, and they seemed above board. And I had put out you know, a couple of people ask me questions on Noster. And I said, basically, maybe my gut feeling says that maybe it's a hail Mary. You know, maybe it's a shit company and this is the last ditch thing that they can do to save their freaking company. And some other people came out of the woodwork and said, no. They started looking at it too and said that the some of the, you know, parts of the balance sheet look okay. And that the company's been around kind of, like, you know, long enough to, you know, not be a fly bait by night operation and seems to have some pretty good pretty good cash flow.
They seem to have a couple of good products, and now they're using Bitcoin as their primary reserve asset. Now, I was listening to, Michael Sailor, on oh, god. Peter McCormick's podcast. And he said something that I never expected, and I've never heard him say before, and I've never heard anybody nobody really seems to be talking about it. But my impression during this particular segment was that Michael Saylor said of his own company that they had basically reached a plateau. And that plateau being, you know, business intelligence software construction. You know? That that's what they do. That's what they've been known for is business intelligence.
And that there was just no way to go any further. And Michael Saylor said that it was either buy Bitcoin or hang up the company, which I still don't quite understand. Just because you've reached the pinnacle, doesn't mean that you're still not able to sell your product if your products bear its people buying it. I so I still don't understand exactly why he said it, but and it's a little bit more than an impression unless I am hallucinating. What Michael Saylor basically said was this. We've come to the end of the road in MicroStrategy. And if MicroStrategy didn't make a massive pivot that they were just going to basically close down shop or lose everything or somehow or another go out of business.
He said that. That was said. That was Michael Saylor talking about his very own company, that they had reached the end of the road And the only way to go further was to buy Bitcoin as the primary reserve asset. And now we see Meta Planet doing the same thing. And now we see similar scientific doing the same thing. Meta Planet hasn't actually said primary reserve asset, but similar scientific said that in the statement. They didn't have to. They didn't have to they could've just said, as one of our reserve instruments, we choose Bitcoin. That's what they could've said. They didn't say that. They said, this is our primary reserve asset, and I think we should very much listen to that.
I I think there's something about that that we should definitely listen to. They didn't say secondary, they didn't say one of, they didn't say this is our 3rd choice. It's their first choice, and they spent $40,000,000 to put their money where their mouth is. Unless they're lying about it, but I don't think so because that would technically be illegal. They wouldn't really be able to do that. They they've gotta report this shit to the SEC because they are a United States based company as far as I know. Remember the sailor playbook?
And he gave, like, an entire webinar and it was free for all these, you know, business CEOs and CFOs and chief operating officers to come figure out how that they how Michael Sailor and Michael Strategy was using Bitcoin and how to get into it and what it meant and all that. And nobody no nobody made a move. Not another company did anything. That was well over a year ago. Well over a year ago. In fact, I think it was over 2 years ago. In fact, that sounds that sounds more right. I think it was well over 2 years ago that Michael Sailor, free to the world, said, any CFO and COO that wants to come to this webinar, you get in touch with me and I will give you the passcode so that you can see the webinar. We won't charge you shit as far as I remember.
And it was 100 attended, and not a single company actually enacted the Bitcoin plan. But now we're seeing it start to take hold. Bond market auction, basically, undersubscribed. China, getting rid of the United States Treasury Bond. The United States Federal Reserve essentially printing money ad in this case, giving it to Japan so they can defend the yen against the dollar. And so we're taking on all this worthless yen. We're printing worthless dollars. At this point, it's almost like a derivative hedge product that's enabling risk management on one side of the curve. It's all bullshit. The only thing that matters here is Bitcoin.
And one of the miners of Bitcoin is Riot Platforms or Riot Mining. This is called Riot Platforms, but it's the miner, you know, Riot. Well, they acquired a 9.25% stake in Bitfarms following the rejected $950,000,000 takeover offer. Bitcoin miner bit for Bitfarms declined. Riot Platform's almost $1,000,000,000 acquisition offer, but Riot Platforms has acquired a almost 10% stake in Bitfarms, becoming one of its largest shareholders. What do you think is gonna happen? It's a hostile takeover. That's what this shit is. Riot offered $2.30 a share in cash and stock for Bitfarms according to a statement.
The price is about 20% above where bit farms traded before riot's offer in April made privately to the board. Quote, a combination of Bitfarms and Riot would create the premier and largest publicly listed Bitcoin miner globally with geographically diversified operations well positioned for long term growth. We were disappointed to learn that Bitfarms board rejected our compelling proposal without engaging in substantive dialogue with us. While we have long respected Bitfarms' business and management team, we're confident that Bitfarms shareholders will agree that this proposal represents a significantly more attractive alternative for Bitfarms than its stand alone trajectory, said Benjamin Yee, executive chairman of Riot.
Following Bitfarms firing of interim CEO, Jeffrey Morphy, who sued for $27,000,000, Riot cited corporate governance issues and plans to call a vote to add new directors. That's key point right there. They're calling a vote to add new directors to Bitfarms' board. Because they can do that because now they own 10% of the company or damn near close. Quote, we're deeply concerned that the founders on the Bit Farm's board, Nicholas Bonta and Emiliano Gradzky, may not be acting in the best interest of all Bit Farm shareholders. The abrupt termination of the CEO without a transition plan in place at a critical period of execution for Bitfarms and the industry as well as the allegations, if accurate, regarding the actions of certain members of the Bitfarms board set out in a lawsuit filed by that recently terminated CEO, raise serious governance questions, said Jason Less, chief executive officer at Riot. Quote, this is why we intend to call a special meeting to give shareholders a chance to bring needed change to the Bitfarms board and make repairing Bitfarms a broken corporate governance and maximizing value for all Bitfarms shareholders. Their top priorities added Jason Less. Okay.
This is this is how a hostile takeover of 1 company by another company starts. This is the starting the the starting gun has just went off. Right? The starting gun was this. Bitfryot looked at Bitfarms and said, we wanna buy you. Here's a tender offer, $900,000,000, 950,000,000 dollars. And Bitfarms said no. So Riot buys almost 10% of the company like that Without saying I mean, with did literally, with I mean, I don't even think they got loans to do that. We'll have to we'll we'll have to see. They may have, but I haven't heard anything about that. This looks like they just went into their treasury, got almost a $1,000,000,000 and just bought 10% of that company.
Well, now they have the ability to call a special director's meeting. And it looks to me like they're going to start making changes in the in the board of Bitfarms. Which means they're going to put in place people that are going to vote for, well, letting riot buy Bitfarms. Now let's say that doesn't work. What will bit what will Riot do next? They'll buy more of that company. They'll buy more and more and more and more. And they might actually end up getting a bidding war going on because Bipfarms, if they've got any treasury at all, might start buying their own stock back to defend against Riot.
Honestly, get your popcorn out, ladies and gentlemen. This is probably going to be a lot of fun. But, Mostro, m o s t r o, Well, they've got some news here. The Maestro CLI version 0.10.0 range orders fix and rewards boards have been announced. Maestro is a lightning network peer to peer exchange platform on Nostr. A lightning network peer to peer exchange platform on Nostr. Check it. Test Maestro CLI, our command line interface tool. We have a new version. Now users can download compile binaries and verify them, so that's good. In this Maestro client, you can also create range orders, update your ln invoice, open disputes, and much more. You can try out Maestro using a web version.
Let's see if if that's an easy one to say. It's maestro dot oh, yeah. Billthon is it yeah. Billthon.dev.mastro.billthon.dev, if you wanna go check it out. The project also announced a rewards board for developers to incentivize collaborators. Quote, we must clarify that Maestro isn't a company, but an open source project. The amounts offered are a way to think thank you or are a way to thank for collaboration and our thanks to the generous donation of contributors, mostly anonymous, but also to important institutions that have given us grants such as the Human Rights Foundation out of the project. See if there's anything else. So, oh, yeah. Range or so there's range orders fix, draft ideas to fix list orders, showing fiat amount ranges and list orders, added amounts and take sell take buy orders, fixes for range orders in amount and, add cross compiling.
And so but the point is, this this is what I wanna get at. First of all, if you haven't checked this out, might wanna go check it out, especially if you're a lightning note operator. But I'll this sentence speaks to my heart because I've been saying this for a while. We must clarify that isn't a company, but an open source project. I think the guys at have have figured it out. You cannot have a company in this space. Not right now. It doesn't mean forever. It doesn't mean that I don't like companies. I I I do. I think a collection of people that have associated goals working together for an outcome is a good thing.
It's a corpus. Right? It's a it's a core. It's a core of people. It's why they did like the marine corps is CORPS. Well, that's like incorporation. CORP is essentially it means a body. Like, where's the corpse? Right? That's the same thing. Corporate, corpse, marine corps, it's that it's a body acting in unison for some kind of outcome. I it's I don't have a problem with companies. I what I've been saying for the last few weeks is that we, right now, do not live at a time where developers can spin up an idea and wrap company governance around it that has anything to do with the west and, honestly, pretty much anywhere globally right now because nobody wants to see Bitcoin succeed.
Or at least well, I take that back. We do. Right? But the IMF and anybody that they go to cocktail parties with, they don't. And all those people that go to cocktail parties have something to do with various countries' judiciary system, which means that you can they they have the right to imprison you for whatever reason. All law at this point has gone out the window, but that's a completely different show. What I'm saying is that it looks like to me that the guys at Maestro are being very clear about what's going on here. They are not a company.
They're an open source project, and that's the way we need to do this until all of the teeth of the beast have been pulled and the heart has stopped beating and all neuronal activity in the beast brain has ceased to flow. Then and only then can we rebuild what it is that they've taken from us. The ability to act as groups of people on an open market without fear of being arrested for trying to put a product into the wild. Simply because it competes with your shit, monetary, fiat garbage. So Mostro gets it. They get it. Let's see about Zeus. Zeus version 0.9.0 alpha 5, purchase channels in advance, bolt 12 offers, and lightning network addresses for CLN. Zeus is a mobile Bitcoin and lightning wallet and a remote node manager for LND as well as core lightning. It's available on both Android and iOS.
Quote, more features will be released throughout the closed alpha program. Want to join the test group? Support Zeus and become a community sponsor here. And that is Zeus, z e u s l n. Zeus lnzeusln.comforward/about. So what's new? New purchase channels at advanced LSP service. There's also bolt 12 offers and lightning addresses for core lightning. Numerous layout and navigation improvements, a new camera with significance performance gains, and I guess that's to be able to, you know, read QR codes and do all the things and reach for all the stuff. So, Zeus is out there and I do not know if Zeus operates as a company.
I kinda think that they do, but that immediately means what? 1st, they'll probably if they don't already, if they haven't already, then they'll probably cannot do any business with United States citizenry because, you know, we're toxic and nobody wants to go to jail for the rest of their life for competing with the United States Treasury. It's not the dollar, It's the Treasury. I'm sorry. I'm just there. I'm just there. I'm I'm just there. It's not the dollar. It's the Treasury. That's what underpins all this. So if you make any instrument or any company that allows any instrument to compete directly on the global stage with the United States Treasury Bond, well, you're probably gonna go to jail.
So I hope Zeus gets the message, we cannot have any companies. Not right now. Zap.storeversion0.1.2, categories and latest releases. Zap dot store uses noster to establish identity, linking release artifacts to social profiles validated by the web of trust. Excuse me. This enables secure installs, new app discoverability layer, and developer monetization via Zaps. Let's see here. What's new? Add categories and latest releases to home screen. There's a tablet, landscape support now. Oh, nice. Remove auto focus in search bar, and many small UI fixes.
So, I mean, it's not it's not that it's a release, it's just a reminder that zap.storezap.store exists and it's using Nostr identities to establish who you are. And when you download an app off of that store, the app is somehow or not well, the app and the people that developed it, there's a web of trust about that. This is all very, very new. This is all very new. But I I have this sneaky suspicion that it has to do with the web of trust of each one of the Noster identities of the people that are involved with a particular project represented on Zap dot store and reviews of that particular project and probably a couple of other things that are all added in together to make a great big review of not only the application itself, but the people behind it.
And this is one of the things that Nostra and the Nostra identities are built for. It is purpose built to do exactly this, and we're going to see more of this in ways that we can't even imagine. Noster solves more problems than it causes. And that's one of the frustrating most frustrating things. Is that everybody that is bitching about Noster is really complaining that it's not as fast as Twitter. That's their major complaint. I'm serious. That is when you boil 95% of all the complaints about Noster from people at the, like, literally at the left side of the bell curve all the way to the right side of the bell curve, 95% of those people boil it down to the fact that it's not as fast as Twitter, or it doesn't have this particular thing, and therefore, it will fail.
Even Beaution said that was going to fail, and he said that a year ago. And he's one of the heaviest hitters in the OG Bitcoin space. And he still can't. He's he doesn't get it. He doesn't understand. How hard is this? How difficult is this? Does it cost you any money to experiment with it? No. It doesn't. There's no fee. There's there's no subscription model for Nostra. You just spin up private your private public key pair on any one of the Nostra clients that there is, and you see if it's something that you like. And if you can't get past the fact that it's a little janky right now, and everybody's going to admit that. Of course, it's janky. DMs don't even really work all that well.
That's DMs. But that's part of the protocol, the Nostra protocol itself. It's not fully fleshed out. It's okay. What when did we become so impatient about something? Because, honestly, Nostra isn't about social media at all. It's about identity. And that identity carries with it what do identities do. What do you do? You are a walking, talking, breathing, eating, shitting identity. You put on your clothes, you get out of bed, you put on your clothes, you go outside, you start interacting with somebody. You are an identity in meat space. We need the same thing in digital space. But every time we've come up with something, it gets co opted.
And then people know what we said. And then if they don't like us or what we said, then they can delete us off of their fucking platform. Well, not anymore. And that identity think of all the other things that you do as an identity. You don't just order shit on the Internet. You don't just talk to people. You create. And you want people to enjoy that which you've created and be able to transact. Have people pay you, maybe, for what it is that you've created for them because they appreciate you doing it. Well, if you're a Canadian trucker, you saw how well that worked out. You got your bank accounts frozen.
Now we need people to understand that Nostra is not about social media. It's not about media. It is about having a credible long term identity in digital spaces that are cross platform and can be cross protocol if some people design that way for it so that people can trust us. Say, oh, yeah. I've known that guy for 5 years. And aside from that one day where he accidentally posted a picture of a porn star up, he's actually been pretty cool. I can kinda trust him. And he's got this project. Oh, and look. And he's working with this other guy, and I know him too because of his identity. That's where this makes the most sense.
It just so happens that we use Noster mostly as social media because the world is inundated with social media. We can't get away from it. Of course, it's going to shape the way that this particular protocol went forward. Doesn't mean that it destroyed it. And it doesn't mean that we can't recover from it. And hell, it doesn't even mean that the social media aspect of Noster is in any way, shape, form, or fashion bad. Social media is never going away. We might as well incorporate that into Noster. But zap.store and what they're doing, Now we get entire replacements for app stores.
Do you see where this is going? This is important. This is way more important than somebody like Beaution bitching about the fact that DMs don't work on Nostra very well. I mean, honestly, that's your fucking argument? Dude, go change your diapers. And after you're done changing your diapers, you can join us at lightning loop version 0.28.2 beta, breaking changes in loop d. Lightning loop is a non custodial service offered by Lightning Labs that makes it easy to move Bitcoin into and out of the lightning network. So what's new? Well, the path in loopprpc was renamed to something else and blah blah. This is basically developer stuff. I'm trying to see, is there anything that we can readily understand?
Not really. So we'll we'll go back to here. Loop in and loop out. Alright? This has been around for a while. And what essentially it does is if I've got, like, let's say I've got 10 lightning channels and they're, like, 5 of them are balanced, you know, where I've got most of the balance on my side of the channels, and the other 5, most of the balances on somebody else's side of the channel. And let's say, I like, I let's say that I need to get some some some satoshis out of all my channels. I can use a loop out. How does that work? Because before loop, what you had to do was close a lightning channel and incur the on chain fee associated with closing that channel.
But with loop, you don't have to close the channel. It does magic, and I don't understand it because I'm not a lightning network developer, but some through some magic loop allows you to drain satoshis from or satoshis that are rightfully yours, that are basically not just on your side of the chain, but rightfully yours in your lightning balance across all of your channels, it allows you to drain some of those satoshis and convert those into on chain Bitcoin. That's the loop out. Loop in goes in reverse. So if you need to add some satoshis to some of your channels, you can loop in from main chain. Now you will incur that you will incur that cost but you don't have to close channels to do either one of these things. Whereas before, if you wanted to have a channel get a little bit bigger, yeah, it kinda needed to close that channel and then reopen that channel with your channel partner, and have more satoshis involved in the initial opening transaction. You don't have to do that with loop. So they are continuously working on loop at the at Lightning Network Labs.
Thankful for them, and that's gonna do it for the morning roundup. Dad says jokes. My 6 year old niece has lined up all of her dolls towards the outdoor grill Looks like she's preparing for some kind of barbecue. Get it? It works on 2 different levels. Anyway, so, yeah, this whole issue of Sailor finally his his plan for strategic, sequestering of Bitcoin for corporate treasuries, That whole plan has finally come to light for a lot of the people that are in the business world today. It looks like it really does look like people are starting to they've finally gotten it, and now not only have they gotten it, they're actually starting to act. You got people that are actually using the term primary asset reserve or treasury reserve, either way. But the fact that they use the word primary, take note of that. They didn't have to use that word. And that's an important shift that I see brought about by this whole similar scientific when they made their statement that they were putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And then now we've got, what, meta planet or whatever that's buying yet more bitcoin to put on their balance sheet, and that's a Japanese company, expect more.
Expect more. And this is the time when I'm looking I see all this news, and I see red candles on on Bitcoin price. So somebody desperately wants to get a hold of your Bitcoin. They desperately want your Bitcoin. Because you cannot fly in the face of this kind of news for this long without being somebody who's trying to, in my opinion, manipulate the market. It happens with gold. It happens with any market. Right? Just because it's somebody manipulating Bitcoin market does not mean that Bitcoin itself is bad. If we were to actually say that, then every market that has ever been manipulated, and that's all of them, by the way, would also be bad.
And most markets are. Treasury bond market is probably the worst offender. Probably the worst offender. I would I don't touch treasury bonds because it's toxic assets, but nobody's gonna shut down that that market. But people will say, hey. Look. They're manipulating the Bitcoin market. Well, duh. Of course, they're manipulating the Bitcoin market. Why? Because they understand what the news actually means. These red bar reactions or red candle reactions, they're simply to shake you out of your shit. They're they're designed to knock you out of your tree, land you flat on your back, and blow the breath out of you so that you're sitting there trying to struggle, get get your breath back while they're picking your pockets clean, trying to get as much of your Bitcoin as they possibly can. Don't let them do it.
Don't let them do it. It's just it's not worth it. It's not worth it. Patience is key at this particular point in time. I cannot imagine I cannot imagine that we can be in a world where BlackRock flips within 4 month was it 4 5 months? 5 months. Less than one half of a year, BlackRock flipped one of the oldest Bitcoin quote unquote holding companies. We'll just call it a holding company because they held a lot of crypto. They hold a lot of Bitcoin and held a lot they still hold a lot of shit coins. Right? But it only took 5 months for that company that's been a stalwart company in bitcoin since, what, 2014? Was it 2013 when they actually started doing that shit?
5 months and BlackRock flipped them. I can't we've got similar scientific and and here's another here's another observation that I started making when similar scientific started making this this move and said primary treasury asset. 1 of the first things that I saw on Nostra was somebody saying, yeah. Well, who the hell is similar scientific? Good question. And that's the right question to ask, at least I think so. Who Who is the who are these people? I've never heard of it's not like Boeing came out and said that shit. You know? It's not like Apple came out and said that shit. Who the hell is similar scientific? Well, turns out they seem to be above board, but that's not the point. The point is is that they are a small cap company.
MicroStrategy was a small cap stock, and now they're probably going to be listed in the Russell 1,000 or something like that. I can't remember what it is. Which means that they've turned from small cap to mid cap. They didn't get any extra revenue. Their base their revenue basically is sort of the same. Sometimes it's down, sometimes it's up. But they haven't introduced a major new product or captured a completely different customer class. No. No. No. It's pretty much the same, and yet they've gone from small cap to mid cap simply by adopting Bitcoin as a primary treasury asset.
So what does this look like? This looks like countries of the world. And this is what I this is what has been happening. It was El Salvador who had nothing to lose. They really didn't. They didn't have all that much to lose by adopting Bitcoin as a legal currency and putting some in their treasury, their country's treasury. 1st country to do it and now everybody's looking at them. So, in a representative fashion, in an in an analogy or analogous fashion, El Salvador is like micro strategy. And they basically did this shit at roughly kind of the same time. I mean, within a couple years of each other. That's but the point is is that it's the small guys. And I've been saying this forever. Do not watch the west. And in the same analogy, do not watch Starbucks or Starbucks or Apple or Boeing or Microsoft or any of these assholes to actually take Bitcoin seriously enough to put it on their balance sheet as a primary treasury asset, not tertiary, not kind of on the side there. No. The first line of fucking defense when it comes to defending our treasury against inflation will be Bitcoin.
They will not do it. And the west will not do it. It will be the small countries, like Central American, South American countries, continent of Africa countries, Eastern European countries, Balkan countries, Baltic countries, these are the countries that will move first, And they will win. In the long run. Likewise, it's the small companies that you should be looking at, not the big guys. Lockheed Martin is not putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet as a primary asset reserve, and I keep having to say that over and over and over again. Primary. Their first line of defense.
Not Lockheed Martin. Right? Not Morton Faecal. Not GE, not Apple, not Microsoft, not Tesla. No. None of these guys in the west. Forget about it. And their counterpart countries that they exist in and with will also not do it because that's the west. That's New Zealand, Australia. All most of the Western and Central European countries, the United States, Mexico, and Canada. China and a the Asian countries like Russia and China, that's a kind of a different story because they're not involved in the west either, but they are certainly not third world countries By any stretch of the imagination, they are doing their own thing.
But back over here at the west, big companies and western countries are going to be the losers because they are going to be last. The companies and the countries that are going to be winners are going to be the small companies And the small countries. That's where you need to be paying your attention to. Worrying about what Elizabeth Warren says is not going to do you any good. So forget she exists because, honestly, she ain't worth your time, and I am out of time, so I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I am your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. Uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:15 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 29th day of May 2024, and this is episode 902 of Bitcoin. And the Circle P is open for business. That's right. Oak Grove, also known as Dubravco, has got your black soldier fly larvae ready for you.
He's at the DFW area, and if you if you have if you still don't know after listening to this show what black soldier fly larvae is and can do for you, I cannot recommend putting together an outside black soldier fly bin yourself, and thereby thereby disposing of all of your scrap meat and food and, like, scraped off plates. Instead of throwing it in the trash, you can convert it through black soldier fly larvae into, like, black gold. This stuff is awesome. And the black soldier fly, if you do it correctly, they harvest themselves. Like, they they will literally harvest themselves into a bucket. I can't get into how that actually works right now because we got other fish to fry.
But when you do it correctly they will they will crawl out all by themselves of the muck so you don't have to separate them they will separate themselves. They do all the work for you. All you have to do is set up the system to do it right. They'll harvest themselves into a bucket, feed it to chickens, ducks, fish, whatever, dude. Like, 40% crude fat, 4 like, 35% crude protein, the rest of it's water. I mean, these things are amazing from an animal nutrition side, and that that way you can convert all of your food into crap that you don't wanna eat anymore. Let these guys eat it. You don't wanna eat the black soldier fly because we're humans and we don't eat insects. So you feed them to animals that do eat insects and they act as a conversion mechanism to make food for humans.
Because we're not going to eat the bugs. We're going to let our animals eat the bugs and then we're gonna eat the animals because they are the conversion vector. Alright. So Dubravko's got you covered. He will sell you black soldier fly larvae for Bitcoin, which is why he's in the circle p. Because if you ain't selling it for coin, you're not in the circle p. Right? That's the way that this goes. This is the way that we get the circular economy running. I'm doing my part with the Circle P. Dubravco's doing his part by offering me satoshis for sales that he makes to plebs like you for his black soldier fly in Bitcoin. And he will ship those sons of bitches right to your door. So ask him about it. His in pub will be linked in the show notes. Okay? His handle on Noster is at Oak Grove. Oak like the tree, grove like a lot of them. Alright? So there you go. That's the circle p. Getting into the news, we're gonna start off with Bitcoin Magazine Vivek Sin is writing.
The New York Stock Exchange to launch products tracking. Spot Bitcoin as if we needed yet one more freaking derivative. The New York Stock Exchange has announced plans to launch financial products tied to the spot Bitcoin price. Yay. Joy. The NYSE is collaborating with CoinDesk Indices to develop cash settled index options that will track the CoinDesk Bitcoin price index. Pausing just to say, what does this product do? Well, I'd I'd know, it just explained it. That's not what I'm getting at. What does it produce? How is this not just betting on craps somebody else is playing in Vegas.
What I mean, what why do we need this? This fucking ridiculous. The x b x is a real time spot price index for Bitcoin calculated across major crypto exchanges. It's been operating for over 10 years and is currently the benchmark for $20,000,000,000 worth of b Bitcoin ETF assets. And by developing option contracts based on the xbx, the NYSE aims to provide investors with a new tool to manage risk. Oh, there it is. As interest in Bitcoin continues growing, the products would be subject to regulatory approval. Of course, NYSE chief product officer, John Herrick, said these new options contracts will give investors, quote, access to an important liquid and transparent risk management tool amid surging demand for Bitcoin, whatever the hell that means. The collaboration brings yet another major traditional finance player into Bitcoin.
The NYSE said it shows the wide ranging enthusiasm for the recent spot Bitcoin ETF approvals, drawing institutions into the asset class. But currently, the CME and a handful of other mainstream entities offer Bitcoin derivative products. Growing acceptance of Bitcoin in traditional finance circles. With what woah. With $25,000,000,000,000 in market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange brings extensive reach, distribution, and influence to the table. Its entrance into Bitcoin indexing and derivatives reflects the asset class going increasingly mainstream in 2024.
Tools for risk management is just betting on the other side of something else that you've bet on. And in my opinion, it does nothing. I don't even think it actually handles risk management. Because, honestly, if you're making 2 bets and you lose on 1 and gain on the other, how is this not essentially a zero sum game? Sure, you may get a couple of extra percentage out of winning or you may not lose quite as much if you've hedged both sides. But I I just I'm sorry. But these kind of products to me make no actual sense because I'm always looking at what does it do? What does it produce? How does it make a human existence more worthy of being on this rock that's spinning around this active nuclear furnace.
Right? When you compare it to the grandeur of the universe, this is all bullshit. It's just fucking bullshit. I mean, literally, dude, you you are a thing wrapped in meat. You're a skeleton. Yes. A skeleton that's made out of minerals forged in the hearts of sons, wrapped in meat, on a world that's spinning around an active nuclear furnace, and the whole thing is wrapped around is studded inside of a galaxy that's wrapped around a gigantic black hole, and that whole thing is flying through space at ungodly amounts of speed. And yet, what do we offer the universe? A fucking derivative product that acts as acts as some kind of risk management tool based on the price of something delivered by a company that none of us in the Bitcoin space actually like.
This is where we are. It's fucking ridiculous is what it is. But we've got other shit to do. Israel is launching their bullshit digital shekel CBDC experiment for payments. Oh, joy. No. Seriously, guys, I'm in a good mood. I'm just saying this this is this is what's going on today. Digital shekels. Digital shekels from the Bank of Israel, Cointelegraph, Arjeed Sarkar. Israel intends to expedite the development of its own in house central bank digital currency, the digital shekel. The bank of Israel plans to involve various service providers in codeveloping an advanced digital payment ecosystem centered on the digital shekel. A rough translation of the central bank's announcement reads, quote, as part of the action plan for the possible issuance of a digital shekel, the Bank of Israel is planning the digital shekel challenge, an experiment inspired by the project Rosalind carried out by the BIS Innovation Hub, end quote. What's the BIS?
The Bank of International Settlements. That's head up by Burger Meister Meister Burger. You don't know who I'm talking about, just look up who the head of the Bank of International Settlements is. And what is the BIS? It's the central bank for central banks. It facilitates pretty much all central bank cross payment platforms. It's it's it's a major tool of the of the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, and the IMF, and the UN. Just leave it at that. And if you think any of those guys are on your side, you're fooling yourself. Anyway, project Rosalind is a joint experimentation between the Bank of International Settlements and the BOE or Bank of England, which aims to develop prototypes for an application programming interface. As part of the challenge, the BOI will provide a sandbox environment attached to a layer of application programming interfaces.
Participants will compete to build real time CBDC payment systems for the public. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Shali Rajwan, managing partner at Masterkey Venture Capital, a Tel Aviv based venture capital firm, they explained the initiative in detail, quote, the program consists of 3 phases. Application and presentations, access to the new network for selected projects, and a final presentation to judges, some of whom have spoken at recent crypto events. End quote. He believes the initiative could potentially bridge the gap between the web 3 industry and government even though decentralized finance, zero knowledge, and permissionless solutions are not yet being considered. And they never will be, by the way.
Israel invited entities from the private, public, and academic sectors to participate in the experiment. And the central bank added, quote, priority will be given to uses with original and innovative characteristics in the payment world, whether they are new improvements to existing applications or completely new applications. End quote. While CBDCs are built to serve universal use cases, participants in Israel's CBDC experiment are also allowed to build solutions for unique niches and scenarios. On April 16th, the bank of Israel deputy governor Andrew Abir said cbdc competition with banks is good for the nation's economy. Oh, for god's sakes.
Abir believed that the development of a digital shekel would get support from the public. Quote, the digital shekel will not be developed by some anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. Everyone will know who is behind the digital shekel and who is responsible for it. The same Bank of Israel that stands behind the cash we all know and trust, end quote. According to Ober, digital shekel or the digital shekel could benefit the BOI as well. Just the option to hold digital shekels could incentivize banks to pay higher interest, he added. A May 11th public consultation report confirmed Abir's thoughts on the public support for CBDC in development, quote, all of the responses to the public consultation indicates support for continued research regarding the various implications on the payments market, financial and monetary stability, legal and technological issues, and more, end quote.
However, respondents unanimously raised concerns around CBDC's potential for privacy breaches. That's the least of your worries, ladies and gentlemen, because the way I read this, the Bank of Israel is reaching. The entire statement about Satoshi Nakamoto is the most telling part. Let me read that quote to you. This is the deputy governor, Andrew Abir, for the Bank of Israel. He said the digital shekel will not be developed by some anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. Everyone will know who is behind the digital shekel and who is responsible for it. Okay? Right there.
Right there. That's that's them saying, telling you, telegraphing in public, they are fucking terrified. They are losing control. And it's not just the Bank of Israel. Guys, this is like the entire banking sector. The entire central banking sector of the world is scared shitless. And they're calling out Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto by name in their projects to launch some kind of bullshit CBDC that's supposed to be better? No. It's not. There's no reason in the world for me to actually know who the hell is behind Bitcoin at all. All I all I need is the code.
I just need to be able to run the code. That's all I need. I don't need to trust anything but the code. There's no attachment for me to satoshi Nakamoto. I could not give a shit less who this guy is. I don't care if he's dead. I don't care if he's alive. I don't care where he lives. I don't give a shit what he eats for breakfast. In fact, I hope I'd never hear from that guy ever. Seriously. I don't ever wanna hear from him again. I want good money and I want the person that actually gave it or the group of people that gave it to the world to go the fuck away. I don't give a shit.
This entire thing, this that entire statement from the deputy governor of the BOI should tell you everything you need to know about the entire mentality of all the people that are in control of the central banking system in the world. They're all scared shitless because they know we're going to eat their lunch. Now the SEC has had a string of bad court dates. And, apparently, today is no different. The SEC has been ordered to pay $1,800,000 as a judge dismisses the Debtbox case. This is decrypt, Stephen Graves writing the SEC has had its case against crypto mining firm, Debtbox, dismissed without prejudice by a United States federal judge.
The regulator has been ordered to pay legal fees of almost $1,800,000 Utah District Court Judge Robert Shelby ruled in a court order filed on Tuesday that the Securities and Exchange Commission should pay most of the reasonable attorney fees and other legal fees petitioned for by the defendants in the case amounting to just over $1,820,000 In a separate filing, judge Shelby granted the SEC's motion to dismiss the case without prejudice, meaning that the regulator could, in theory, refile charges against Debtbox at a later date.
The SEC previously requested that the case be dismissed without prejudice after the judge threatened to sanction the regulator over, quote, false and misleading statements, end quote, made as it was filing its complaint. The regulators sought the dismissal in order to enable a new team of attorneys to determine whether it is appropriate to recommend the commission proceed with a new complaint, it said in an earlier filing. Detbox hailed the ruling in a dead bird post, calling the dismissal of the case a monumental victory and noting that the SEC, quote, cannot proceed with the case as it stands.
In its August 2023 lawsuit, the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that Debtbox defrauded investors to the tune of nearly $50,000,000 by selling unregistered securities. The regulator also obtained an ex parte restraining order against the firm to freeze its assets, meaning that the firm couldn't contest the order in court. In a March filing, Judge Shelby found that the SEC had engaged in bad faith conduct by obtaining the restraining order, having made false, mischaracterized, and misleading statements, he ordered the regulator to pay sanctions, including attorney fees incurred by the defendants in the case. Quote, once defendants had notice and an opportunity to respond, each purportedly factual pillar the commission construed or constructed to make the required showing of irreparable harm crumbled under scrutiny, judge Shelby wrote in the order. Holy shit.
So Judge Shelby basically handed the SEC their ass, but further characterized them as making false, mischaracterized, and misleading statements in a case against this crypto miner. I don't know who Debtbox is. I've never heard of them before. Okay? But this is this is seems my gut feeling here is that we are now seeing a major rift between the judicial branch of the United States government and the regulatory schemata of the United States government. Because and I honestly don't know where the regulation fits in in the scheme because we we essentially have in the United States, we've got the executive branch, we got the judicial branch, and we've got the legislative branch. So I'm just gonna tuck the regulatory authorities under the legislative branch. So if that's true, then we have a major rift between elements, not all, but elements of the legislative branch of the United States government and the judiciary.
The judiciary, for the last 2 to 3 years, has basically been telling the SEC to go sit and spin. And the SEC is acting like they can just continue to act in the way they've been acting in perpetuity without any kind of ramifications whatsoever. And Shelby just basically said, no. I don't think so. So here's my here's my other gut feeling about this. It brings up a question in my stomach. What does this mean? Does this mean that the SEC is going to either be disbanded or is going to be completely overhauled from top to bottom very soon, sooner than any of us might actually think. And I think it's going to be the latter.
I think Gensler is going to lose his job, or I think all the people at the top of the SEC are going to be either repositioned or lose their jobs. And somebody's gonna come in clean these these asshole's little little clocks. Now I'm actually a fan of the Howey test. There are some instruments that people of earth have built that make sense. The Howey test is one of them. It it it really is. It it a good safeguard. And if you're one of the person people out there, and I don't blame you for saying this, saying, well, David, that means that you're for regulation, which means you're for government. I get that. But there's no reason that a person themselves cannot apply the Howey test for when they decide whether or not to buy something that may or may not be a security. Do you see what I'm saying? I don't need a regulatory agency to tell me not to buy Ethereum.
And I'm certainly not going to listen to them when they tell me it's okay to buy Ethereum because I know Ethereum is a security, And I don't trust any of the people behind it. It's a scam. Everything about Ethereum from top to bottom is a 100% full blown Ponzi scheme. It's a scam from top to bottom. I don't need the SEC to hold my hand and help me make the the decision to not put any money into an obvious scam. But the Howey test is still there. After that, when we go back and we look at the what the SEC has been doing, they don't make any sense.
They they keep saying they're trying to protect us. But I all I really see them is not it it looks to me like they don't know what they're doing anymore. And, again, if we tie this back into the Bank of Israel when they're looking directly or saying directly statements about Satoshi Nakamoto and how their digital shekel is not going to be anonymous and they point directly to Bitcoin saying, we're not like Bitcoin. Bitcoin, bad. Shekel, good. Somehow or another, this is relating to this this activity that's going on at the SEC that seems to be perpetrated by a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing.
They don't know how to interact with the judiciary of the United States judicial system. They seem to be, like, going rogue out of, you know, the the legislative branch of the United States government. And it looks like it just kinda looks like shit's coming apart at the seams. How will this affect anything? There's no way to tell. There's no way anybody knows where this is going. Although, as you'll see when we get to the numbers, some other shit's starting to come apart at the seams. But first, BlackRock and the flippening.
It has happened. BlackRock takes the crown for the largest spot Bitcoin ETF from Grayscale, and this is out of CoinDesk. Who's it written by? Sharra Malwa is writing this one. BlackRock's spot Bitcoin exchange traded fund is now the largest product of its kind. Flipping Grayscale's GBTC after a $102,000,000 inflow on Tuesday. Ibit holds nearly $20,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin as of Wednesday morning. Its product page shows GBTC now holds 19,700,000,000 after seeing a 105,000,000 in outflows on Tuesday, its pay showed shows. So pausing just to say that out of the $105,000,000 that came out of GBTC, 102 went directly to BlackRock.
They just complete it's like a black hole just eating everything around it. I mean, I'm not saying that's good, by the way. Anyway, since going live in January, investors have poured $16,500,000,000 into Ibit and have withdrawn $17,000,000,000 from Grayscale Fund. On Tuesday, BlackRock added the Bitcoin ETF to its income and bond focused funds in the Q1. The firm's strategic income opportunities funds now holds over $3,500,000 worth of Ibit while its strategic global bond fund holds $485,000 worth of Bitcoin. Buying activity for Ibit ramped up recently amid bullish sentiment. For Bitcoin and the broader crypto market, the bulls gained momentum.
After the listing approval for, God forbid, the ether ETF, the scam machine that that fucking thing is, and renewed support for crypto among United States political parties. That helped mark a sudden shift in iBit, which recorded low or even 0 inflows before May 15th and saw its 1st ever day of outflows in April leading to bearish sentiment. Last week, United States listed spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds reached a new record by holdings with more than 800 and 50,000 BTC in custody, surpassing the previous high of 845,000 BTC from early April. So there you go, man. GBTC has conducted a successful flippening or I'm sorry. IBit has conducted a successful flippening of GBTC and now GBTC comes in at number 2. And speaking of number 2, let's run the numbers.
CNBC Futures and Commodities West Texas Intermediate Oil is down 3 quarters of a point to $79 26¢ after rallying pretty hard earlier this morning. Brent Norcia is also down about the same amount, $83.55 a barrel. Natural gas is doing its thing. It's down 5 a half percent, Back down to $2.44 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is down a buck and a half. Don't expect that to last because we're coming into summer driving season. $2.47. Gold is down 3 quarters of a point as well to $2,360 and change. Silver is up a half a point. Platinum is down almost 2 points. Copper is down 1 and a half. Palladium is down 1 and a half. Ag futures are all kinds of red, except for our biggest winner, chocolate.
5.8% to the upside. The biggest loser today is cotton. 2 and a third to the downside. Looks like livestock is down as well. Point 6 9% to the downside for live cattle. Live hogs is up scant and feeder cattle are down 1 and a half points. Indices, gee, everything seems to be in the red. I wonder why. What could it be? Well, we'll get to it. The Dow is down almost a full percentage point. The S and P is down 0.6%, Nasdaq is down 0.44%, and the S and P Mini is down 1.26%. Now what the hell is going on? Every single market in the world is in the red today. Everything is bleeding out.
Bitcoin's bleeding out too. It's okay. I mean, it's $67,574 right now according to one of my one of my monitors. But everything else is in the red. Even Nasdaq, who made record highs yesterday of, like was it, like, 40,000 or something like that? I not 40 1,000. I can't remember what the Nasdaq was that but it hit a record high. Right? They have all because of NVIDIA. And yet today, everything is in the red. What the hell is going on? Could it be linked to the one single thing in the world that drives all financial and economic markets?
I think so. What am I referring to? The treasury bond. That's right. The United States treasury bonds and all kinds of shit happened. And according to Morningstar, Treasury yields climbed after a relatively weak 2 year and 5 year treasury bond auctions. Now before I get into this, and it's not going to be that long, but before I get into this, I want to remind you that even though Cathie Wood has shown some stripes as a shitcoiner, she's essentially a Bitcoiner. And a long time ago, a long time ago, she was on several podcasts talking about treasury bonds.
And one of the things that she said that has always stuck with me, and I see it and now I I've been looking for it ever since she ever said it, was that one of these days, the United States Treasury is going to have a Treasury Bond auction, and it's going to be not only under subscribed, but nobody's gonna buy a thing, a completely failed auction. We are walking towards it. Here it is by Joy Wilmerth and Isabelle Wang, again, out of Morningstar. Traders are focused on comments from Fed's cash carry, and looking ahead to April PCE report, which is due later in the week. Treasury yields were higher on Tuesday after a relatively weak 2 5 year bond auction, as traders weighed comments from Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank president, Neel Kashkari, about him not yet ruling out the potential for further rate hikes.
What's happening? So the yield on the 2 year treasury was up 3 basis points to 4.97%. Yield on the 10 year was up 7 points to 4.54%. And the yield on the 30 year was rising to 8 basis points and putting it at 4.65%. So treasury yields were higher on Tuesday after a pair of relatively weak auctions of the 2 5 year notes totaling almost, check it, a $140,000,000,000. And those 2 auctions came less than 2 hours apart. The bid to cover ratio was weaker than the usual on both auctions of nearly $70,000,000,000 each, said Tom d Goloma, head of global rate trading at BTIG.
Quote, at the end of the day, Wall Street and accounts were not really ready to take down the supply, d Goloma told MarketWatch, pointing to a lack of trading in the run up to the auction given that the US bond market closed an hour early on Friday ahead of the long Memorial Day weekend. Okay. So that's putting a little bit of lipstick on a pig right there saying, oh, well, you know, it's because they closed an hour earlier on Friday, so there wasn't going to be as much interest in this particular bond auction. Oh, bullshit.
You know when the bond auction is going to happen, whether the treasury bond market closes an hour early on Friday because there's gonna be a Memorial Day weekend? Bullshit. You knew. You knew. This is under subscription of the instrument that underpins the entire global economy. If you think I'm wrong, I don't know what to tell you. It is the United States Treasury bond. It took me decades to figure that shit out. Not that I was, you know, when I was 30, I didn't give a shit. But just what I'm saying is that it's become readily apparent to me after being in Bitcoin for years that it's the United States Treasury Bond Market. Not just the market, the actual instrument itself, the bond.
Everybody holds them. That's what makes them liquid. Right? Well, now you've gotten an a complete under subscription on not just this auction. This has happened before. Nobody's talking about it. The weakness in the United States Treasury bond market only goes one way. And it doesn't well, it goes in a couple of different directions. Well, it goes in the same direction, but there's a couple of different pit stops on the way. 1st pit stop is, those fucking Fed rates are never coming down. And Reuters, I put it out this morning on Nasr. They had the the traders are shocked that they're that they're not going to get their fed rate cut.
Dude, not only are you not gonna get a fed fed rate cut, they're probably going to be forced to raise rates to match the yields on the bond market so that they're not too far out of whack because that's probably not going to look very good. Those bond rates are not coming down. Nobody wants these things anymore. China's been getting rid of them for years, but they are really accelerating in 2024. They're to completely getting they're divesting from United States debt who can blame them. And they've got their own problems. Just because they're smart and dumping the United States treasury bond because it's a toxic piece of shit does not mean China's in a good spot. Nobody is.
That's one of the problems of having such an interconnected economy on the global scale that depends on one instrument for its value. And that instrument for the world's economic value is the United States Treasury Bond, and we forced the world to swallow it. And now the chickens are coming home to roost. What to do about it? Buy Bitcoin, of course, at $67,510 a pop. That brings the market cap to $1,330,000,000,000. You can get 29 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19,704,986.74 of.
Average fees per block have risen. Point 2 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. And speaking of blocks, how many blocks are there? I don't know. Find out right now. It looks like there's a 197 blocks carrying 271,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 9 satoshis per v byte. Low priorities, you're gonna get in at 27. And anything under 6 satoshis per v byte, you're gonna get kicked out of mempools around the world. Mining is at 535.6 exahashes per second according to mempool.spaceforward/mining. And from scams and promises, episode 901 of bitcoin and that I did on Monday, but didn't stream it to you live.
I get itsy bitsy huddle, boosted me 5,000 satoshis, and says nothing. Dude. Check it bro. You should say something. Dobrovco, 17/60. 17/60 satoshi says, yo dawg. And he gives me this picture of a rapper. And I I I wanna say it's like a really young iced tea, but I have no idea. Anyway, it says, yo dog, I heard you like shit coins inside your shit coins. So we put an Ethereum inside of an ETF. Yep. I don't totally totally hear you, pal. A natgas immersion, 1,000 satoshi says, confirming BSFL or black soldier fly larvae, made a do it yourself bin too. I'll share some pics. Oh, and thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Wartime boosted me a 1,000.
Said nothing. God's death with 237 satoshis says thank you sir, no thank you, and I'm really missing my friend Pies. I wish you had been in this particular list because you started honestly, between god's death and Pies is the people that started the thank you, no thank you, sir thing. So that's all because of them. Alright. Where are we at? Nope. That's alright. That's gonna do it for the, weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. Bitcoin Magazine starts us out. Healthcare company similar, Scientific, has bought $40,000,000 of Bitcoin and adopts it as a treasury reserve asset.
So you guys, if you've been on Noster and probably over on, Bitcoin dead bird, Probably noticed a whole bunch of things about this similar scientific. I'm hoping that Nick Hoffman will give us a line out on what this company actually does and if they're worth a shit. Because we've seen this before. Right? We we saw this with I can't remember the name of the company. It's a completely it was a complete dog stock. I mean, we're talking, like, garbage, junk stock, penny stock. And they announced that they were gonna do, they're gonna adopt Bitcoin. They were blah blah blah, and they were great. And we find out that their company's shit, and their CEO the very next day quit by saying this is a pump and dump and I wanna have nothing to do with it, which means you're talking about a company that is literally burning in a dumpster. It is a dumpster fire. Alright. So let's find out.
Semler Scientific Incorporated. Ticker is SMLR. It's known for its healthcare solutions to combat chronic diseases. It's announced a significant shift in its treasury strategy. The company's board of directors has adopted Bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset. Not secondary, not tertiary, not quaternary, not quaternary, not sextary. Nope. Primary. That means is it is its first line of treasury reserve. That's important. It's it's primary. Cash is not primary for them. The United States Treasury bond isn't their primary reserve asset. Bitcoin is.
And that's a the entire board of directors saying yes. Anyway, they purchased a made a substantial purchase of 581 Bitcoin for an aggregate amount of $40,000,000 inclusive of fees and expenses, quote, our Bitcoin treasury strategy and purchase of Bitcoin underscores our belief that bitcoin is a reliable store of value and a compelling investment, stated Semler Scientific Chairman, Eric Semler. Quote, Bitcoin is now a major asset class worth more than $1,000,000,000,000. We believe it has unique characteristics as a scarce and finite asset that can serve as a reasonable inflation hedge and safe haven asset amid global instability.
We also believe its digital architectural resilience makes it preferable to gold, which has a market value of approximately 10 times that of Bitcoin. Given the gap in value between gold and Bitcoin, we believe that Bitcoin has the potential to generate outsized returns as its gains increasing acceptance as digital gold. Despite the strategic financial move, Semler Scientific said it remains committed to its core mission in healthcare of delivering innovative technologies as solutions to transform the healthcare management of chronic diseases and offers providers the opportunity to reduce cost and improve long term patient outcomes. The company will also continue to focus on its flagship product, QuantaFlo, a point of care test for peripheral arterial disease while seeking expanded FDA clearance for other cardiovascular conditions. Quote, furthermore, we're energized by the glowing sorry, the growing global acceptance and institutionalization of Bitcoin reflected most recently by the Securities Exchange Commission's January 2024 approval of 11 Bitcoin exchange traded funds.
These funds have reported more than 13,000,000,000 dollars of net inflows with investments from nearly 1,000 institutions, including global banks, pensions, endowments, and registered investment advisers. It is estimated that more than 10% of all Bitcoin are now being held by institutions. Wow. Mister Simler basically said that quote. The the the head dude, the chief, the chief guy. Similar scientific board and senior management shared that they have carefully considered various use cases of excess cash and concluded that holding Bitcoin is the best strategy. For more information on Semler Scientific, visit their web page here. And it's Semler Scientific, semlerscientific.com.
Similar Scientific, all one word. Okay. A lot. I think I got I think I got a second one that goes along with this one. Oh, yes. Let's do this one first and I'll make us make an observation here. Meta planet. Yep. Meta planet to buy another 250,000,000 yen worth of Bitcoin. Nick Hoffman is writing this one for Bitcoin Magazine, Meta Planet Incorporated. A Japanese publicly traded company has announced a significant enhancement to its Bitcoin holdings. In a recent board of directors meeting, the company resolved to purchase an additional 250,000,000 yen currently worth $1,600,000 USD worth of Bitcoin.
Meta Planet has recently outlined its approach to managing their Bitcoin. The company also stated that Bitcoin the Bitcoin acquired for long term purposes will be recorded at cost, ensuring stable accounting treatment over time. Conversely, Bitcoin held for short term purposes will be revalued quarterly at market value. Any unrealized gains or losses from these short term holdings will be recorded in the non operating income section of the income underscoring the growing acceptance of bitcoin as a strategic and valuable underscoring the growing acceptance of Bitcoin as a strategic and valuable asset class.
Meta Planet also acquired an additional 19.8 7 BTC earlier this month for a purchase price of 200,000,000 yen. For further information on MetaPlanet, additional details can be found on its website here. And that is what? What's that gonna be? Meta planet dot jp. Metoplanet.jp, if you wanna go see it. Okay. So what to what to say about this? So similar scientific. At first, I thought maybe it was a Hail Mary. Like like that other company I was telling you about, the dumpster fire company that the CEO quit the day after they announced that they were gonna do Bitcoin and it was gonna save their bacon, and I don't know what I don't I still don't know what happened to them. I don't even know if they actually bought that Bitcoin, to tell you the truth. But when I saw this announcement from Similar Scientific, I was like, heckles hackles on the neck kinda just stood up. Right? It's not not gonna not happen.
So I was looking into it, and they seemed above board. And I had put out you know, a couple of people ask me questions on Noster. And I said, basically, maybe my gut feeling says that maybe it's a hail Mary. You know, maybe it's a shit company and this is the last ditch thing that they can do to save their freaking company. And some other people came out of the woodwork and said, no. They started looking at it too and said that the some of the, you know, parts of the balance sheet look okay. And that the company's been around kind of, like, you know, long enough to, you know, not be a fly bait by night operation and seems to have some pretty good pretty good cash flow.
They seem to have a couple of good products, and now they're using Bitcoin as their primary reserve asset. Now, I was listening to, Michael Sailor, on oh, god. Peter McCormick's podcast. And he said something that I never expected, and I've never heard him say before, and I've never heard anybody nobody really seems to be talking about it. But my impression during this particular segment was that Michael Saylor said of his own company that they had basically reached a plateau. And that plateau being, you know, business intelligence software construction. You know? That that's what they do. That's what they've been known for is business intelligence.
And that there was just no way to go any further. And Michael Saylor said that it was either buy Bitcoin or hang up the company, which I still don't quite understand. Just because you've reached the pinnacle, doesn't mean that you're still not able to sell your product if your products bear its people buying it. I so I still don't understand exactly why he said it, but and it's a little bit more than an impression unless I am hallucinating. What Michael Saylor basically said was this. We've come to the end of the road in MicroStrategy. And if MicroStrategy didn't make a massive pivot that they were just going to basically close down shop or lose everything or somehow or another go out of business.
He said that. That was said. That was Michael Saylor talking about his very own company, that they had reached the end of the road And the only way to go further was to buy Bitcoin as the primary reserve asset. And now we see Meta Planet doing the same thing. And now we see similar scientific doing the same thing. Meta Planet hasn't actually said primary reserve asset, but similar scientific said that in the statement. They didn't have to. They didn't have to they could've just said, as one of our reserve instruments, we choose Bitcoin. That's what they could've said. They didn't say that. They said, this is our primary reserve asset, and I think we should very much listen to that.
I I think there's something about that that we should definitely listen to. They didn't say secondary, they didn't say one of, they didn't say this is our 3rd choice. It's their first choice, and they spent $40,000,000 to put their money where their mouth is. Unless they're lying about it, but I don't think so because that would technically be illegal. They wouldn't really be able to do that. They they've gotta report this shit to the SEC because they are a United States based company as far as I know. Remember the sailor playbook?
And he gave, like, an entire webinar and it was free for all these, you know, business CEOs and CFOs and chief operating officers to come figure out how that they how Michael Sailor and Michael Strategy was using Bitcoin and how to get into it and what it meant and all that. And nobody no nobody made a move. Not another company did anything. That was well over a year ago. Well over a year ago. In fact, I think it was over 2 years ago. In fact, that sounds that sounds more right. I think it was well over 2 years ago that Michael Sailor, free to the world, said, any CFO and COO that wants to come to this webinar, you get in touch with me and I will give you the passcode so that you can see the webinar. We won't charge you shit as far as I remember.
And it was 100 attended, and not a single company actually enacted the Bitcoin plan. But now we're seeing it start to take hold. Bond market auction, basically, undersubscribed. China, getting rid of the United States Treasury Bond. The United States Federal Reserve essentially printing money ad in this case, giving it to Japan so they can defend the yen against the dollar. And so we're taking on all this worthless yen. We're printing worthless dollars. At this point, it's almost like a derivative hedge product that's enabling risk management on one side of the curve. It's all bullshit. The only thing that matters here is Bitcoin.
And one of the miners of Bitcoin is Riot Platforms or Riot Mining. This is called Riot Platforms, but it's the miner, you know, Riot. Well, they acquired a 9.25% stake in Bitfarms following the rejected $950,000,000 takeover offer. Bitcoin miner bit for Bitfarms declined. Riot Platform's almost $1,000,000,000 acquisition offer, but Riot Platforms has acquired a almost 10% stake in Bitfarms, becoming one of its largest shareholders. What do you think is gonna happen? It's a hostile takeover. That's what this shit is. Riot offered $2.30 a share in cash and stock for Bitfarms according to a statement.
The price is about 20% above where bit farms traded before riot's offer in April made privately to the board. Quote, a combination of Bitfarms and Riot would create the premier and largest publicly listed Bitcoin miner globally with geographically diversified operations well positioned for long term growth. We were disappointed to learn that Bitfarms board rejected our compelling proposal without engaging in substantive dialogue with us. While we have long respected Bitfarms' business and management team, we're confident that Bitfarms shareholders will agree that this proposal represents a significantly more attractive alternative for Bitfarms than its stand alone trajectory, said Benjamin Yee, executive chairman of Riot.
Following Bitfarms firing of interim CEO, Jeffrey Morphy, who sued for $27,000,000, Riot cited corporate governance issues and plans to call a vote to add new directors. That's key point right there. They're calling a vote to add new directors to Bitfarms' board. Because they can do that because now they own 10% of the company or damn near close. Quote, we're deeply concerned that the founders on the Bit Farm's board, Nicholas Bonta and Emiliano Gradzky, may not be acting in the best interest of all Bit Farm shareholders. The abrupt termination of the CEO without a transition plan in place at a critical period of execution for Bitfarms and the industry as well as the allegations, if accurate, regarding the actions of certain members of the Bitfarms board set out in a lawsuit filed by that recently terminated CEO, raise serious governance questions, said Jason Less, chief executive officer at Riot. Quote, this is why we intend to call a special meeting to give shareholders a chance to bring needed change to the Bitfarms board and make repairing Bitfarms a broken corporate governance and maximizing value for all Bitfarms shareholders. Their top priorities added Jason Less. Okay.
This is this is how a hostile takeover of 1 company by another company starts. This is the starting the the starting gun has just went off. Right? The starting gun was this. Bitfryot looked at Bitfarms and said, we wanna buy you. Here's a tender offer, $900,000,000, 950,000,000 dollars. And Bitfarms said no. So Riot buys almost 10% of the company like that Without saying I mean, with did literally, with I mean, I don't even think they got loans to do that. We'll have to we'll we'll have to see. They may have, but I haven't heard anything about that. This looks like they just went into their treasury, got almost a $1,000,000,000 and just bought 10% of that company.
Well, now they have the ability to call a special director's meeting. And it looks to me like they're going to start making changes in the in the board of Bitfarms. Which means they're going to put in place people that are going to vote for, well, letting riot buy Bitfarms. Now let's say that doesn't work. What will bit what will Riot do next? They'll buy more of that company. They'll buy more and more and more and more. And they might actually end up getting a bidding war going on because Bipfarms, if they've got any treasury at all, might start buying their own stock back to defend against Riot.
Honestly, get your popcorn out, ladies and gentlemen. This is probably going to be a lot of fun. But, Mostro, m o s t r o, Well, they've got some news here. The Maestro CLI version 0.10.0 range orders fix and rewards boards have been announced. Maestro is a lightning network peer to peer exchange platform on Nostr. A lightning network peer to peer exchange platform on Nostr. Check it. Test Maestro CLI, our command line interface tool. We have a new version. Now users can download compile binaries and verify them, so that's good. In this Maestro client, you can also create range orders, update your ln invoice, open disputes, and much more. You can try out Maestro using a web version.
Let's see if if that's an easy one to say. It's maestro dot oh, yeah. Billthon is it yeah. Billthon.dev.mastro.billthon.dev, if you wanna go check it out. The project also announced a rewards board for developers to incentivize collaborators. Quote, we must clarify that Maestro isn't a company, but an open source project. The amounts offered are a way to think thank you or are a way to thank for collaboration and our thanks to the generous donation of contributors, mostly anonymous, but also to important institutions that have given us grants such as the Human Rights Foundation out of the project. See if there's anything else. So, oh, yeah. Range or so there's range orders fix, draft ideas to fix list orders, showing fiat amount ranges and list orders, added amounts and take sell take buy orders, fixes for range orders in amount and, add cross compiling.
And so but the point is, this this is what I wanna get at. First of all, if you haven't checked this out, might wanna go check it out, especially if you're a lightning note operator. But I'll this sentence speaks to my heart because I've been saying this for a while. We must clarify that isn't a company, but an open source project. I think the guys at have have figured it out. You cannot have a company in this space. Not right now. It doesn't mean forever. It doesn't mean that I don't like companies. I I I do. I think a collection of people that have associated goals working together for an outcome is a good thing.
It's a corpus. Right? It's a it's a core. It's a core of people. It's why they did like the marine corps is CORPS. Well, that's like incorporation. CORP is essentially it means a body. Like, where's the corpse? Right? That's the same thing. Corporate, corpse, marine corps, it's that it's a body acting in unison for some kind of outcome. I it's I don't have a problem with companies. I what I've been saying for the last few weeks is that we, right now, do not live at a time where developers can spin up an idea and wrap company governance around it that has anything to do with the west and, honestly, pretty much anywhere globally right now because nobody wants to see Bitcoin succeed.
Or at least well, I take that back. We do. Right? But the IMF and anybody that they go to cocktail parties with, they don't. And all those people that go to cocktail parties have something to do with various countries' judiciary system, which means that you can they they have the right to imprison you for whatever reason. All law at this point has gone out the window, but that's a completely different show. What I'm saying is that it looks like to me that the guys at Maestro are being very clear about what's going on here. They are not a company.
They're an open source project, and that's the way we need to do this until all of the teeth of the beast have been pulled and the heart has stopped beating and all neuronal activity in the beast brain has ceased to flow. Then and only then can we rebuild what it is that they've taken from us. The ability to act as groups of people on an open market without fear of being arrested for trying to put a product into the wild. Simply because it competes with your shit, monetary, fiat garbage. So Mostro gets it. They get it. Let's see about Zeus. Zeus version 0.9.0 alpha 5, purchase channels in advance, bolt 12 offers, and lightning network addresses for CLN. Zeus is a mobile Bitcoin and lightning wallet and a remote node manager for LND as well as core lightning. It's available on both Android and iOS.
Quote, more features will be released throughout the closed alpha program. Want to join the test group? Support Zeus and become a community sponsor here. And that is Zeus, z e u s l n. Zeus lnzeusln.comforward/about. So what's new? New purchase channels at advanced LSP service. There's also bolt 12 offers and lightning addresses for core lightning. Numerous layout and navigation improvements, a new camera with significance performance gains, and I guess that's to be able to, you know, read QR codes and do all the things and reach for all the stuff. So, Zeus is out there and I do not know if Zeus operates as a company.
I kinda think that they do, but that immediately means what? 1st, they'll probably if they don't already, if they haven't already, then they'll probably cannot do any business with United States citizenry because, you know, we're toxic and nobody wants to go to jail for the rest of their life for competing with the United States Treasury. It's not the dollar, It's the Treasury. I'm sorry. I'm just there. I'm just there. I'm I'm just there. It's not the dollar. It's the Treasury. That's what underpins all this. So if you make any instrument or any company that allows any instrument to compete directly on the global stage with the United States Treasury Bond, well, you're probably gonna go to jail.
So I hope Zeus gets the message, we cannot have any companies. Not right now. Zap.storeversion0.1.2, categories and latest releases. Zap dot store uses noster to establish identity, linking release artifacts to social profiles validated by the web of trust. Excuse me. This enables secure installs, new app discoverability layer, and developer monetization via Zaps. Let's see here. What's new? Add categories and latest releases to home screen. There's a tablet, landscape support now. Oh, nice. Remove auto focus in search bar, and many small UI fixes.
So, I mean, it's not it's not that it's a release, it's just a reminder that zap.storezap.store exists and it's using Nostr identities to establish who you are. And when you download an app off of that store, the app is somehow or not well, the app and the people that developed it, there's a web of trust about that. This is all very, very new. This is all very new. But I I have this sneaky suspicion that it has to do with the web of trust of each one of the Noster identities of the people that are involved with a particular project represented on Zap dot store and reviews of that particular project and probably a couple of other things that are all added in together to make a great big review of not only the application itself, but the people behind it.
And this is one of the things that Nostra and the Nostra identities are built for. It is purpose built to do exactly this, and we're going to see more of this in ways that we can't even imagine. Noster solves more problems than it causes. And that's one of the frustrating most frustrating things. Is that everybody that is bitching about Noster is really complaining that it's not as fast as Twitter. That's their major complaint. I'm serious. That is when you boil 95% of all the complaints about Noster from people at the, like, literally at the left side of the bell curve all the way to the right side of the bell curve, 95% of those people boil it down to the fact that it's not as fast as Twitter, or it doesn't have this particular thing, and therefore, it will fail.
Even Beaution said that was going to fail, and he said that a year ago. And he's one of the heaviest hitters in the OG Bitcoin space. And he still can't. He's he doesn't get it. He doesn't understand. How hard is this? How difficult is this? Does it cost you any money to experiment with it? No. It doesn't. There's no fee. There's there's no subscription model for Nostra. You just spin up private your private public key pair on any one of the Nostra clients that there is, and you see if it's something that you like. And if you can't get past the fact that it's a little janky right now, and everybody's going to admit that. Of course, it's janky. DMs don't even really work all that well.
That's DMs. But that's part of the protocol, the Nostra protocol itself. It's not fully fleshed out. It's okay. What when did we become so impatient about something? Because, honestly, Nostra isn't about social media at all. It's about identity. And that identity carries with it what do identities do. What do you do? You are a walking, talking, breathing, eating, shitting identity. You put on your clothes, you get out of bed, you put on your clothes, you go outside, you start interacting with somebody. You are an identity in meat space. We need the same thing in digital space. But every time we've come up with something, it gets co opted.
And then people know what we said. And then if they don't like us or what we said, then they can delete us off of their fucking platform. Well, not anymore. And that identity think of all the other things that you do as an identity. You don't just order shit on the Internet. You don't just talk to people. You create. And you want people to enjoy that which you've created and be able to transact. Have people pay you, maybe, for what it is that you've created for them because they appreciate you doing it. Well, if you're a Canadian trucker, you saw how well that worked out. You got your bank accounts frozen.
Now we need people to understand that Nostra is not about social media. It's not about media. It is about having a credible long term identity in digital spaces that are cross platform and can be cross protocol if some people design that way for it so that people can trust us. Say, oh, yeah. I've known that guy for 5 years. And aside from that one day where he accidentally posted a picture of a porn star up, he's actually been pretty cool. I can kinda trust him. And he's got this project. Oh, and look. And he's working with this other guy, and I know him too because of his identity. That's where this makes the most sense.
It just so happens that we use Noster mostly as social media because the world is inundated with social media. We can't get away from it. Of course, it's going to shape the way that this particular protocol went forward. Doesn't mean that it destroyed it. And it doesn't mean that we can't recover from it. And hell, it doesn't even mean that the social media aspect of Noster is in any way, shape, form, or fashion bad. Social media is never going away. We might as well incorporate that into Noster. But zap.store and what they're doing, Now we get entire replacements for app stores.
Do you see where this is going? This is important. This is way more important than somebody like Beaution bitching about the fact that DMs don't work on Nostra very well. I mean, honestly, that's your fucking argument? Dude, go change your diapers. And after you're done changing your diapers, you can join us at lightning loop version 0.28.2 beta, breaking changes in loop d. Lightning loop is a non custodial service offered by Lightning Labs that makes it easy to move Bitcoin into and out of the lightning network. So what's new? Well, the path in loopprpc was renamed to something else and blah blah. This is basically developer stuff. I'm trying to see, is there anything that we can readily understand?
Not really. So we'll we'll go back to here. Loop in and loop out. Alright? This has been around for a while. And what essentially it does is if I've got, like, let's say I've got 10 lightning channels and they're, like, 5 of them are balanced, you know, where I've got most of the balance on my side of the channels, and the other 5, most of the balances on somebody else's side of the channel. And let's say, I like, I let's say that I need to get some some some satoshis out of all my channels. I can use a loop out. How does that work? Because before loop, what you had to do was close a lightning channel and incur the on chain fee associated with closing that channel.
But with loop, you don't have to close the channel. It does magic, and I don't understand it because I'm not a lightning network developer, but some through some magic loop allows you to drain satoshis from or satoshis that are rightfully yours, that are basically not just on your side of the chain, but rightfully yours in your lightning balance across all of your channels, it allows you to drain some of those satoshis and convert those into on chain Bitcoin. That's the loop out. Loop in goes in reverse. So if you need to add some satoshis to some of your channels, you can loop in from main chain. Now you will incur that you will incur that cost but you don't have to close channels to do either one of these things. Whereas before, if you wanted to have a channel get a little bit bigger, yeah, it kinda needed to close that channel and then reopen that channel with your channel partner, and have more satoshis involved in the initial opening transaction. You don't have to do that with loop. So they are continuously working on loop at the at Lightning Network Labs.
Thankful for them, and that's gonna do it for the morning roundup. Dad says jokes. My 6 year old niece has lined up all of her dolls towards the outdoor grill Looks like she's preparing for some kind of barbecue. Get it? It works on 2 different levels. Anyway, so, yeah, this whole issue of Sailor finally his his plan for strategic, sequestering of Bitcoin for corporate treasuries, That whole plan has finally come to light for a lot of the people that are in the business world today. It looks like it really does look like people are starting to they've finally gotten it, and now not only have they gotten it, they're actually starting to act. You got people that are actually using the term primary asset reserve or treasury reserve, either way. But the fact that they use the word primary, take note of that. They didn't have to use that word. And that's an important shift that I see brought about by this whole similar scientific when they made their statement that they were putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And then now we've got, what, meta planet or whatever that's buying yet more bitcoin to put on their balance sheet, and that's a Japanese company, expect more.
Expect more. And this is the time when I'm looking I see all this news, and I see red candles on on Bitcoin price. So somebody desperately wants to get a hold of your Bitcoin. They desperately want your Bitcoin. Because you cannot fly in the face of this kind of news for this long without being somebody who's trying to, in my opinion, manipulate the market. It happens with gold. It happens with any market. Right? Just because it's somebody manipulating Bitcoin market does not mean that Bitcoin itself is bad. If we were to actually say that, then every market that has ever been manipulated, and that's all of them, by the way, would also be bad.
And most markets are. Treasury bond market is probably the worst offender. Probably the worst offender. I would I don't touch treasury bonds because it's toxic assets, but nobody's gonna shut down that that market. But people will say, hey. Look. They're manipulating the Bitcoin market. Well, duh. Of course, they're manipulating the Bitcoin market. Why? Because they understand what the news actually means. These red bar reactions or red candle reactions, they're simply to shake you out of your shit. They're they're designed to knock you out of your tree, land you flat on your back, and blow the breath out of you so that you're sitting there trying to struggle, get get your breath back while they're picking your pockets clean, trying to get as much of your Bitcoin as they possibly can. Don't let them do it.
Don't let them do it. It's just it's not worth it. It's not worth it. Patience is key at this particular point in time. I cannot imagine I cannot imagine that we can be in a world where BlackRock flips within 4 month was it 4 5 months? 5 months. Less than one half of a year, BlackRock flipped one of the oldest Bitcoin quote unquote holding companies. We'll just call it a holding company because they held a lot of crypto. They hold a lot of Bitcoin and held a lot they still hold a lot of shit coins. Right? But it only took 5 months for that company that's been a stalwart company in bitcoin since, what, 2014? Was it 2013 when they actually started doing that shit?
5 months and BlackRock flipped them. I can't we've got similar scientific and and here's another here's another observation that I started making when similar scientific started making this this move and said primary treasury asset. 1 of the first things that I saw on Nostra was somebody saying, yeah. Well, who the hell is similar scientific? Good question. And that's the right question to ask, at least I think so. Who Who is the who are these people? I've never heard of it's not like Boeing came out and said that shit. You know? It's not like Apple came out and said that shit. Who the hell is similar scientific? Well, turns out they seem to be above board, but that's not the point. The point is is that they are a small cap company.
MicroStrategy was a small cap stock, and now they're probably going to be listed in the Russell 1,000 or something like that. I can't remember what it is. Which means that they've turned from small cap to mid cap. They didn't get any extra revenue. Their base their revenue basically is sort of the same. Sometimes it's down, sometimes it's up. But they haven't introduced a major new product or captured a completely different customer class. No. No. No. It's pretty much the same, and yet they've gone from small cap to mid cap simply by adopting Bitcoin as a primary treasury asset.
So what does this look like? This looks like countries of the world. And this is what I this is what has been happening. It was El Salvador who had nothing to lose. They really didn't. They didn't have all that much to lose by adopting Bitcoin as a legal currency and putting some in their treasury, their country's treasury. 1st country to do it and now everybody's looking at them. So, in a representative fashion, in an in an analogy or analogous fashion, El Salvador is like micro strategy. And they basically did this shit at roughly kind of the same time. I mean, within a couple years of each other. That's but the point is is that it's the small guys. And I've been saying this forever. Do not watch the west. And in the same analogy, do not watch Starbucks or Starbucks or Apple or Boeing or Microsoft or any of these assholes to actually take Bitcoin seriously enough to put it on their balance sheet as a primary treasury asset, not tertiary, not kind of on the side there. No. The first line of fucking defense when it comes to defending our treasury against inflation will be Bitcoin.
They will not do it. And the west will not do it. It will be the small countries, like Central American, South American countries, continent of Africa countries, Eastern European countries, Balkan countries, Baltic countries, these are the countries that will move first, And they will win. In the long run. Likewise, it's the small companies that you should be looking at, not the big guys. Lockheed Martin is not putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet as a primary asset reserve, and I keep having to say that over and over and over again. Primary. Their first line of defense.
Not Lockheed Martin. Right? Not Morton Faecal. Not GE, not Apple, not Microsoft, not Tesla. No. None of these guys in the west. Forget about it. And their counterpart countries that they exist in and with will also not do it because that's the west. That's New Zealand, Australia. All most of the Western and Central European countries, the United States, Mexico, and Canada. China and a the Asian countries like Russia and China, that's a kind of a different story because they're not involved in the west either, but they are certainly not third world countries By any stretch of the imagination, they are doing their own thing.
But back over here at the west, big companies and western countries are going to be the losers because they are going to be last. The companies and the countries that are going to be winners are going to be the small companies And the small countries. That's where you need to be paying your attention to. Worrying about what Elizabeth Warren says is not going to do you any good. So forget she exists because, honestly, she ain't worth your time, and I am out of time, so I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I am your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Challenges for developers in creating company governance structures in the current environment
Overview of Zap.store version 0.1.2 and its features
