Join me today for Episode 1008 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Texas' State Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
- BTC Tax Evasion Lands Lettuce Hands in Jail
- Coinbase Lists PNUT Memecoin
- BlackRock Says NO! To Altcoins
- FDIC Has to Redo Redaction Homework
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
The King Ranch Donation Pages:
https://www.ruralamericainaction.com/fundraising/save-king-ranch-and-agriculture-in-washington
https://www.givesendgo.com/Kingranch
Articles:
https://decrypt.co/296264/texas-bill-bitcoin-strategic-reserve
https://cointelegraph.com/news/first-crypto-tax-evasion-prison-sentence
https://coinmerce.io/en/news/solana-etf-rejected-blackrock-prioritizes-bitcoin-ethereum/
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/12/13/miners-are-adopting-the-same-bitcoin-acquisition-strategy-as-micro-strategy-jp-morgan
https://atlas21.com/vancouver-motion-approved-to-study-bitcoin-integration-in-municipal-management/
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://value4value.info/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
- https://geyser.fund/project/thebitcoinandpodcast
https://decrypt.co/296034/peanut-squirrel-meme-coin-jumps-coinbase
https://cointelegraph.com/news/fdic-ordered-amend-redactions-crypto-pause-letters
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/governments-and-large-institutions-can-buy-all-the-bitcoin-they-want-except-yours
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/core-lightning-v24-11/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/ashigaru-v1-1-0/
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find me on nostr
npub1vwymuey3u7mf860ndrkw3r7dz30s0srg6tqmhtjzg7umtm6rn5eq2qzugd (npub)
6389be6491e7b693e9f368ece88fcd145f07c068d2c1bbae4247b9b5ef439d32 (Hex)
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/DavidB84567
StackerNews:
stacker.news/NunyaBidness
Podcasting 2.0:
fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
Apple Podcasts:
tinyurl.com/unm35bjh
Mastodon:
https://noauthority.social/@NunyaBidness
Support Bitcoin And . . . on Patreon:
patreon.com/BitcoinAndPodcast
Find Lightning Network Channel partners here:
https://t.me/+bj-7w_ePsANlOGEx (Nodestrich)
https://t.me/plebnet (Plebnet)
Music by:
Flutey Funk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
[00:00:00]
David Bennett:
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:39 AM Pacific Standard Time. It is the 13th day. God, it's Friday 13th December 2024.
Oh my god. We're all gonna die. And this is episode 1,008 of Bitcoin. And, well, Texas, is in the news, but not like you're you're thinking I'm going to start with. And, I guess I should kinda like, you know, maybe I should just do a little bit of warm up show for you. Last night, I was on the Meme Factory with Greg Zaj and a whole bunch of other people, and it was it's always fun. If you ever, ever, ever get invited onto Meme Factory, you have to go. You just you just have to do it, man. It's it's it's an experience, and I loved every single minute of it. I'm trying to find I gotta I do not have the link right now directly to that show, but if you wanna watch it, you just Google Meme Factory or go to YouTube and search Meme Factory in there. Just look for whatever happened last night.
It was a last minute thing. Greg invited me on, like, about, I don't know, 4 or 5 hours before it started. And we just, you know, we had a really good time. Yellow was there and, like some of the other, you know, some of the other, ostensible people that, you know, get in trouble on Twitter and Oster all the time. So it was it was fun. And I highly recommend that you go watch that because you will actually see my face wearing a Texas Tech ball cap. Now Texas is in the news a couple of times today, but I just got this one. In fact, I'm actually having to read it from my phone because while I was waiting for my computer to boot up for the 3rd freaking time because Windows 7 is so old that it's now dropping drivers and it dropped one of my audio drivers and then it decided up on boot up to drop the driver for my wifi and then on the 3rd boot up well yeah that's where I'm at so while I was waiting for technology to get its little red wagon in order so it could pull little sister down the street I was looking at my phone and got this off of Noster.
In in case you didn't know, there's a bunch of news bots that are available, and I cannot god freaking. I cannot for the life of me remember who designed those, but they're good. Alright? All they do is they give you the news story, the headline, and, like, you know, where like, this one's from Fast Company. So Fast Company is now represented as one of these, news bots, and it just does Fast Company Publications. There's another one for Financial Times. The really honestly, it's a it's a great utility. It really is. And like I said, I got this one while I was waiting for my computer to, boot up.
Texas is seeing a surge in carbon capture permits for its oil fields. Here's why experts are worried. And again, this is from Fast Company. And I'm just gonna give you the give you the first, you know, few paragraphs. I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but I wanna talk about it a little bit because it's an interesting situation. Texas has been surge or seeing interest from companies hoping to bury bury, as in put in a hole in the ground, carbon dioxide, which is a gas, in its oil fields, putting the state at the vanguard of government subsidized program to fight climate change. Oh my god. It's climate change. But pumping c02 into the ground could exacerbate earthquakes. We're all gonna die. And well blowouts. Yep. Gonna die again. And they're already happening in the Permian Basin as Texas struggles to manage its wastewater disposal, potentially undermining public support.
Without legitimate oversight of underground injection in Texas, we expect more geyser like well blowouts, sinkholes, leaks from plugged and unplugged wells, and injection induced earthquakes, said Virginia Palacios, executive director of Commission Shift, a Texas watchdog group, pushing for tougher oversight of the oil and gas industry as if we didn't have enough fucking problems with the Railroad Commission of Texas. I mean, those guys are bad enough. We don't need an outside outside people watch dogging shit. Such consequences have rarely happened as a result of CO 2 injection over the decades that the technology has been deployed. This is where I wanna get to. The unprecedented vast volume of carbon now proposed for burial worries activists and researchers even more.
Okay. Why the hell am I even bringing this shit up? Okay. That a fair question. So that is a fair question to ask me. The reason is because c o two injection has been part of oilfield operations for decades. I remember waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning hearing my dad, you know, having a yell fest with his foreman because some people decided to screw over the well that they were working on. And he would say things like, well, where's the c o two injection crew? And stuff like that. So at from a very early age, I was I was all in on oil and gas industry. I mean, I got a picture of myself with a hard hat, you know, working the break on a drilling rig, which by all, you know, all rights, dad should have never had me on the platform because it is one of the top ten most dangerous places to work. But, hell, I didn't know. I was hanging out with the crew in the dog house and they were teaching me how to heat up Vienna sausages on an oil fired stove while the open lockers had pin ups from Playboy all over it. This is how I grew up. Alright? So that's probably why I'm so damn sick and twisted.
But here's my thing. All these people that are talking about climate change have been going after fracking for years. It's going to kill us all. It's going to destroy the environment. It's going to put us into where, I don't know, we bake to death like a turkey in a Thanksgiving oven. It's all hooey. Right? It's all bullshit. But fracking doesn't exist without CO 2 injection. Hell, vertical wells. Fracking is horizontal wells. Right? Vertical wells where they used to do it the old fashioned way, like my dad, where they just drill a goddamn hole in the ground straight down to, like, you know, anywhere between 3 to 10000 to sometimes my dad drilled 1, 21,000 feet before. I mean, it was like the it was the first deep well in Texas.
That was the way that they did it. And even back in those days, they used c o two injection. They used waste water injection now. They used c02 injection. They used all kinds of shit. And what they're doing is they're trying to pressure up underneath the ground so that it squeezes the oil through the rock and dirt and formation where it gets to the collectors and then streams up the pipe and then we can burn it in our homes and in our cars and do all the neat things that we do with petroleum products. But here, here we're going to see the battle between environmentalists, the fake ass climate change environmentalist, and the actual people who are rightfully concerned about shoving a whole bunch of shit into the ground under pressure. It can cause problems. I'm I'm I mean, I I love oil and gas, but even I'm like, yeah. Well, you put a whole you inject a whole bunch of stuff into the ground, you might have problems.
But what I see on the horizon is a battle between fake environmentalists and real environmentalists. And now we know clearly who the fake environmentalists are. They are the climate change idiots that think they're going to solve mankind's problems by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, pressuring it up, and throwing it into the oil fields in West Texas, which is exactly what we wanna do in the first place to squeeze all the available oil out of the formations. This is going to be it's going to be a blast to watch these people do their thing. Okay. Okay. So enough of that. Enough of that. Let's let's let's stay with Texas, but let's do something else. Y'all have probably heard about it by now, but I'm gonna give you the lowdown from Andrew Hayward and Matt DeSalvo from Decrypt, Texas Legislature or legislator, a guy, a Texas guy who's in the Texas legislature has introduced a bill to establish a Texas Bitcoin strategic reserve.
Not a federal one, a state one. Okay. The Texas legislature will consider adopting a Bitcoin strategic reserve following the introduction of a bill on Thursday to establish such a program amid ongoing efforts to do the same on a national level in the United States. And the proposed bill, HB number 1598, was introduced by Texas state representative Giovanni Capraguilione. Yeah. Again, we're good, baby. It seeks to build up a supply of Bitcoin for the state where the funds held for at least with the funds held for at least 5 years without being sold. Plus, it will allow Texas citizens to make donations to the fund?
What? Weird. Quote, a strategic Bitcoin reserve aligns with Texas' commitment to fostering innovation in digital assets and providing Texans with enhanced financial security, the text of the bill reads. The bill adds that the cryptocurrency held in cold storage that is in a wallet on a device not connected to the Internet will not be used to make transactions outside of the state or abroad. That is interesting. That means that the the Bitcoin has to be contained inside the state no matter what they do with it. That is really interesting. Okay. Quote, this comptroller shall prohibit transactions involving foreign countries, entities or individuals outside of Texas, or entities or individuals known to engage in illegal activities.
Responding to a question from Decrypt, Capri Guillone said on a Spaces Live event on X, god damn it, I said it, formerly known as Twitter, Thursday that the idea had been brewing for some time. Quote, we've slowly planted the seeds and planted the education for members on it, he said, adding that, quote, probably the biggest enemy of our invest investments is in is inflation. Well, nope. Really, really. Well, Bitcoin is a payments network launched in 2009. Really? Are are we you you're really going to describe Bitcoin in article written for decrypt which has been around for years in the crypt no. I absolutely refuse to describe what bitcoin is. President-elect Donald Trump has previously told people not to sell their bitcoin and some politicians are now calling for the government to hold bitcoin in reserves like it already does with gold. And, of course, senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming proposed a bill earlier this year to establish such a program.
Texas has attracted bitcoin miners in recent years due to its very cheap electricity and government incentives aimed at encouraging miners to stabilize the electricity grid. The US government already has a large stash of bitcoin seized from criminals. Blockchain data firm, Arkham Intelligence, which tracks large crypto wallets, puts the current government holdings at over a 198,000 Bitcoin. Capri Leon said on the spaces that he's seen increased interest in Bitcoin and the idea of a strategic reserve since Trump's election win as the Republican candidate ran on a pro crypto campaign. Quote, since November, obviously, the amount of excitement, desire, and knowledge about not just the Bitcoin Reserve, but all of those other things around this technology, god forbid, blockchain and others, is becoming more in the headspace of legislators.
And that's a good thing. That's because the constituents care about these things. So Texas will be the 2nd state of the union, not the first, but the 2nd state of the union to introduce at the state level legislation providing for a strategic Bitcoin reserve. And I can't I I wanna say that the other state is Ohio, but I'm not sure. Please don't don't hold my feet to the fire on that. But I do know that there are 2 out of the 48 out of the 50 states, leaving 48 United States states wondering what they're gonna do. Are they actually wondering what they're gonna do? Well, hell, I don't know. I'm not in in any of those states, but we've got 2 states that want their own strategic reserves. Now this is an interesting development because like that very first story I was talking about, where we we're going to see 2 groups of people fighting over the climate and one's going to be fake and the other one is going to be actually genuine about it.
But there's going to be a fight about this c o two injection. Well, here, there's going to be a fight between the federal government and each individual state governments. But the fight's not going to be about, you know, whether this is legal or not. It's going to be who can get the most Bitcoin. Would it be possible for Texas to pick up more Bitcoin in their strategic reserve than the federal government, which would represent all of the 50 states? And furthermore, what would it mean if the majority of the states of the United States had their own state run strategic reserve that was not the property of the federal government?
What does that look like? So fighting over the corn is also going to be coming down the pipe starting in 2025 and continuing for these next 4 years because Texas will probably pass this. They've they are already neck deep in the Bitcoin industry. They actually have enough track record where Texas can say that they know as much about Bitcoin mining and the infrastructure surrounding the electricity as any other place in the in the world much less the United States. Right? And it's the exact same thing with the oil industry, oil and gas. So that said, if Texas ends up with a strategic reserve of bitcoin that either equals or is larger than what the federal government wants to be able to do and that's a 1,000,000 bitcoin what does this look like what does this look like what happens if the united states between the each individual united states like Texas Virginia Wyoming Washington California what have you If their Bitcoin reserves added together and then added to the Federal Reserve ends up being the majority of the Bitcoin in the world, do I have to worry? No. Absolutely not. However, that could be a price issue, a purchasing power issue.
But as for control of the network, no. It doesn't work that way. But we don't know where this is going. And anybody who tells you that they do doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground. The only thing that I'm sure of is that there's no way that anybody can control Bitcoin. They can control the token, but they can only control the token that they have the keys for and even if the majority of bitcoin ends up in the united states and from what I understand that's already the case and has been for a long time does it mean that somebody from Zimbabwe would have to ask permission from the United States government to use Bitcoin?
Maybe on paper, but they can do it no matter if they've got a wallet and they've got an Internet connection in Zimbabwe and they are able to send a transaction, then yes. The answer is yes. They can do it without the permission of the United States or any country that has a majority of the Bitcoin. So please please please stop feeding the FUD and saying, well, what happens if we get on a Bitcoin? I don't think that's gonna happen. But you know what does happen is that people go to jail when they sell $4,000,000 worth of Bitcoin and never tell the federal government. Yep. That happened.
Early Bitcoin investor has been jailed for unreported crypto gains in a $4,000,000 BTC sale. This is out of Cointelegraph Arjeet Sarkar writing, an early Bitcoin investor from Austin, Texas, back in Texas, became the 1st person criminally charged for failing to report crypto capital gains in a case involving about $4,000,000 worth of cryptocurrencies. That's a big number. According to the United States Department of Justice, investor Frank Richard Algren III falsely underreported the realized capital gains earned from selling bitcoin were $3,700,000 between the years 2017 and 2019, the DOJ said in a December 12th report. Quote, all taxpayers are required to report any sale proceeds and gains or losses from the sale of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin on a tax return. That is the law whether we agree with it or not, and I certainly don't agree with it. But Algren had invested in Bitcoin since 2011.
He oh, shit. What a lucky guy. He purchased 1366 Bitcoin on Coinbase in 2015 when Bitcoin was trading for under $500, and he sold 640 of it in October of 2017 at an average market price of $5,800 and reinvested the $3,700,000 in real estate. This guy got fucked. Three different ways. He bought low. He sold low. Right? Because 5,800 was nothing, dude. Nothing. That was him pulling the trigger early. And then he threw that money into real estate and now he's going to jail for 2 years. Anyway, authorities found discrepancy in Algren's 2017 federal income tax return, the report noted. Algren then filed a false this is a quote. Algren then filed a false 2017 federal income tax return that substantially inflated the cost basis of the bitcoin, thereby under reporting his true capital gain from his sale of bitcoin.
Additionally, Algren did not report more than $650,000 worth of bitcoin sales in 20 18/20 18. According to the DOJ, he attempted to conceal the movement of his funds through multiple wallet transfers, crypto mixers, and in person cash transactions. The DOJ added, Indeed, in May of 2014, Algren had blogged about his knowledge of mixers as ways to add anonymity to Bitcoin transactions. In total, the tax loss from Algren's criminal conduct was over $1,000,000. Jesus. Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stewart Goldberg of the Justice Department's Tax Division noted that Algren's decision to under report crypto capital gains in an attempt to conceal the transfer of funds earned him a 2 year sentence.
The 2 year prison sentence became the 1st criminal tax evasion prosecution centered solely on cryptocurrency, said acting special agent in charge Lucy Tan of the IRS's criminal investigation Houston field office. She also said her team has the expertise and tools to track crypto and fiat activity. Yeah. Yeah. And we know who's doing that with you. Algren will serve time because he believed his cryptocurrency transactions were untraceable. I don't know. Maybe he thought that you stealing his fucking money was fucking illegal. I don't know. Let's just give that as a shot. But whatever. In addition to the 2 year prison sentence, Algren has been ordered to serve 1 year of supervised release and pay a $1,100,000 fine in restitution to the United States government because they just don't have enough money.
They just can't print enough money, so they gotta steal it from everybody any which way they can. And if you don't give it to them, at the point of a gun, they're going to put you in a fucking cell. And tell me just how it is that taxes is the price we pay for a civilized economy, a civilized society, a civilized anything. It doesn't. It is the absolute red flag of an uncivilized behemoth, mammoth, bullshit, smoldering creature that needs to have its carcass smoked upon the mountainside, as Gandalf used to say. Okay.
Solana ETF has been rejected. Thank god. Coinmerse. Io writing this one. Solana ETF rejected and BlackRock prioritizes Bitcoin, and God for get forbid Ethereum. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Samra Cohen, the chief investment officer for exchange traded funds at BlackRock, revealed the company's decision not to launch any further crypto ETFs. Yay. Despite the market dominance of Bitcoin and Ethereum, Cohen stated that no other virtual currency, including Solana, meets BlackRock's strict criteria for establishing a new ETF. Bitcoin and Ethereum, major players in the crypto world, have market shares of 55% 17%, respectively.
But on the other hand, other cryptocurrencies such as Solana have law have less than 10% of market share. This inequality in market share raises concerns about possible market manipulation and liquidity issues, making it difficult to launch new crypto ETFs like a Solana ETF. Despite BlackRock's cautious stance, other asset managers show a greater receptiveness to Solana because they're shitcoiners. An example of this is the shitcoin company outfit Van Eck, which is promoting a Solana ETF so that they can take all of your money and give you absolutely nothing but a shitcoin while pointing out the solid demand for the crypto community.
Despite the recent price decline in Solana, they found some confirmation when Solana briefly surpassed BNB and became the 4th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. The divergent opinions on potential Solana ETFs indicate that there's a lively debate, oh, it's lively, going on within the investment community. Some see significant potential, while others, like BlackRock, are cautious due to current market conditions and regulatory issues. Yeah. Well, I don't care what BlackRock is going to say. You're going to end up with shitcoin ETFs. We have already got one with the e with the Ethereum ETF. It's just going to expand, and there's absolutely nothing that we can do about it except to, well, you know, maybe not buy it.
There's there's always that one. Now over to CoinDesk, where I've gotta scroll to the bottom to get the headline first because their website is just jacked up on my machine. But miners are adopting the same Bitcoin acquisition strategy as MicroStrategy according to JPMorgan. And, again, this is out of CoinDesk. Who's writing this one anyway? Will Canney is the author. MicroStrategy, the company founded by Michael Saylor, is not the only large scale corporate buyer of Bitcoin, according to JPMorgan in a Wednesday report. The shift to building up bitcoin holdings is driven by growing pressure on profitability, which stems from the reward having in April and a rising network hash rate, the report said.
And then they, for whatever reason, give a description of hash rate. Whatever. Quote, this likely prompted miners to hoard or seek further investments into Bitcoin or diversify into AI and high performance computing businesses. Analysts led by Nicholas. There's no I cannot pronounce this name. It's, like, very Greek, and there's no worldly way that I can do this. So I'm just gonna say Nicholas. He wrote, referring to artificial intelligence and high performance computing, miners such as Mara Holdings have adopted a similar Bitcoin buying strategy to MicroStrategy called BTC Yield in response to these challenges.
Mara now owns 35,000 tokens and is the 2nd largest publicly listed corporation in terms of Bitcoin holdings. The miners aren't alone. Medical device maker, Similar Scientific, has also been actively buying the world's largest cryptocurrency and now owns $144,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. January's introduction of spot bitcoin exchange traded funds in the US have given institutional investors a more direct way to gain bitcoin exposure, the bank said. Shares of miners which have been treated as a proxy for bitcoin have underperformed as a result.
The bank noted that aside from buying more Bitcoin, miners are increasingly financing their business via debt and equity offerings rather than selling their crypto reserves to cover operational costs. Miners have raised more than 10,000,000,000, that's 1,000,000,000 with a b, dollars worth of equity so far this year, eclipsing the previous high of 9,500,000,000 in 2021, the report added. So what's important about this, and we discussed this a little bit yesterday on, the meme factory, what what's going on here is that the miners have figured out that they are going to have to play the same game as Michael Sailor. And they are doing it, and they're doing so far so good. They're doing it fairly well. But what does it actually mean? And I I think I finally came out up with a way to describe the playbook. And let's just keep it to Michael Sailor selling this these convertible notes and equity, you know, basically debt. There are says debt and equity, but it's essentially debt instruments.
What Michael Saylor is doing is he is selling you nothing, and you're giving him fiat currency, which is a little bit more than nothing, but not much more. But during this time, he's taking the fiat currency that you gave him for nothing, and he's buying a real actual asset with it in the form of Bitcoin. Why do I say that he's selling you nothing? He's selling you debt. He's selling you a convertible note. It's just a piece of paper that says, hey. Our stock price is going to be worth more later, so you give me your actual physical cash now, and then we'll allow you to convert your notes into equity stake in the form of shares or a straight up cash out later on. But for the time being, all he's really doing is selling you a piece of paper. You're giving him actual fiat, and then he's turning that fiat into actual assets in the form of Bitcoin. He's converting nothing into something.
He's a bit of an alchemist. He's a bit of an alchemist when it comes that way. But now all these other people are doing it. You're going to see convertible note sales until you are just sick to your stomach. And then at one point or another, there's gonna be a major rug pull, and I don't think it's gonna be by sailor or Mara or Riot or somebody like that. I'm looking at similar scientific and and the the and not because similar's creepy and weird or something like that. It's just that they're small. Right? And I think it's the smaller guys that would have more of an aptitude to be able to rug pull the people that they sold essentially nothing to and keep the Bitcoin that they use their fiat to buy. That's what I'm saying. Anyway, Vancouver looks like it may be on deck.
Vancouver, has a motion approved to study a Bitcoin integration into its municipal management. This is Atlas 21. The city council of Vancouver has given the green light to exploring potential uses of bitcoin in municipal administration including tax payments. On December 11th, the Vancouver City Council approved that motion. The motion titled preserving the city's purchasing power through financial reserve diversification paves the way for multiple scenarios from accepting cryptocurrency as a method of payment for taxes and municipal services to potentially converting part of the city's reserves into Bitcoin. So now the city, a city, is considering their own strategic bitcoin reserve.
I'm telling you this shit's gonna get out of control and maybe it doesn't have to be in a bad way. I don't know. Just just don't sell your bitcoin. If you have bitcoin don't sell it. If you don't have bitcoin I don't think that you'd be listening to the show but for whatever reason if you are then get off 0 dude. Anyway, the city will conduct a detailed study to assess the risk benefit and practical considerations of this bitcoin adoption with a report due by the end of Q1 of 2025. They've got, like, 4 months to get this shit done, pal. Mayors oh, I thought it said mayor Slim. No. It's mayor Sim, s I m, who personally led the initiative with backing from ABC Vancouver councilors, shared that he made the decision after observing similar developments in the United States and other countries. And in an interview, he said, quote, I have dedicated over 10000 hours of studying cryptocurrencies, moving from initial skepticism to a deep belief in the potential of this technology.
I like how you use the term 10000 hours because we use that term a lot in Bitcoin. It takes about 10000 hours for you to even grasp enough of the fundamentals of what Bitcoin is for you to go, oh, shit. You gotta get as much as you can. Anyway, as a gesture of this commitment, the mayor pledged a personal donation of $10,000 in bitcoin to his own city regardless of the vote's outcome. The motion received broad support despite opposition from 2 Green Party councilors who raised concerns about, you wanna guess, the potential money laundering risks and the environmental impact of mining. Yes, of course, because they have literally nothing else to stand on anymore. Vancouver, already known for hosting the world's 1st Bitcoin ATM back in 2013, is now aiming to further solidify its position as a crypto friendly hub on Canada's West Coast.
So interesting that the mayor himself made a $10,000 donation in Bitcoin to the city. My question becomes, who's holding it? He's I mean, he can't hold it himself on behalf of the city. Otherwise, it's not really a donation. So who has he set up in the city that even after he's gone for mayor will be able to custody that Bitcoin? That is not said in this Atlas 21 article, and I actually think it's more pivotal than anything else in the actual article. But to move on, let's just say that this isn't going to stop. Cities, counties, states, governments all are going to try to get a Bitcoin strategic reserve.
Those that do will be fine. Those that do not will be made to service the ones that do hold Bitcoin. It's like the fucking borg, and there's no resistance. Resistance is futile. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities and the sidebar and the trending stories. Oh my god, guys. Nancy Pelosi has been hospitalized after an injury in Luxembourg. Oh, no. Oh, well. Oil up 1.61 percent to $71.15. Brent Norsey up 1 and a third to 74.37. Natural gas plummeting down the hole 5.15 percent down to $3.27 per 1,000, and gasoline is up above $2 a barrel again. Gold and all of its cousins are having a bad day. Gold down 1 a quarter, back under 27100 to 26.75.80 pennies.
Silver down 2%. Platinum down 1 3 quarters percent. Copper down over 1%. Palladium taking it on the chin, 3.03% to the out downside. Ag is all in the red on their futures except for chocolate because everyone loves chocolate around Christmas, I guess. 3.83% to the upside. Biggest loser, oh, looks to be wheat. 1.12 percent to the downside, and I got live cattle up a half point and lean hogs are up 1 and a half points, but feeder cattle themselves are down a third. The Dow is down a quarter as is the S and P. The Nasdaq is up a quarter, but the S and P mini leading the way down 0.76% to the downside.
What's Bitcoin do? Oh, look. We're above a $100,000 again. A $100,01580. Did I say that right? A $101,580. That is a $2,010,000,000,000 market cap, And we can now purchase 38.2 ounces of the shiny metal shit with your 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19,795,401.8 of. And average fees per block are low. Wow. 0.08 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis, and there are 106 blocks carrying 276,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 8, count them, 8 satoshis per v byte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 7 satoshis per v byte. Hash rate is 789.2 exahashes per second on a 1 week rolling average. So, we are gaining a little bit of hash rate there. Now, from Moron Manifesto, which is yesterday's episode of Bitcoin, and I got Golf Winch throwing me 6,777 satoshis. Dude, I appreciate it.
He says, giving some of my most precious certificates of appreciation, money in the form of Bitcoin, because you provide a great service to all of us who listen to the show. God bless you and your family this Christmas holiday. Oh, well, thanks, man. Please donate to the show, fellow plebs. I cannot iterate that enough. Donate. You can donate. WiseHodl with 5,001 sat says, I thought the ignorance of no corners was bad last cycle, but this time, with magnitudes more ignorant no corners pouring in with the most powerful narrative forming machine in history programming them, I think it's going to be much much worse.
Because they're not just going to be ignorant, They're going to be anxious, scared, hostile, and immune to reason. I 100% agree, WiseHodl. Well, not only is that well articulated and well said, it is absolutely fucking correct. And I actually think it's gonna be slightly worse than that. And the reason I say that is because this this narrative forming machine that you're talking about is also going to go under be be undergoing seismic shifts. Like I said yesterday, you're going to see Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow rotated out into some obscurity and other people rotated in because the mainstream media section of the narrative forming machine is going to die. It's already on fire.
And some kind of phoenix will rise from its ashes, and that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be a nice pretty good phoenix. It could be an autistic halfway retarded genetically defective drooling featherless looking twitter bird, for all I know. But something's gonna rise from those ashes. Alright? I'm just saying and that could actually lend even like, so he says, they are going to be anxious, scared, hostile, and immune to reason. I'm going to restate that given what I just said and say they are going to be anxious, scared, hostile, confused, and immune to reason. And that's gonna make it even worse. FOMO chronic with a 1,001 says nothing.
Pies with 1,000 sat says V4V, LFG, 100%. Showing the biceps, giving the fist symbol, got a bell and a rocket and a circle. I think it's a circle. Anyway, God's death with 537 says thank you, sir. No, thank you. Ed with 500 sat says nothing. God's death with 537, says thank you, sir. No, thank you. And PIES with 100. Thank you, sir. No, thank you. And Ed finishes us off. Just wait until you see these Bitcoiners honored to be a part of this. I hear you, pal. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. Peanut the squirrel meme coin jumps on Coinbase plans as GigaChad hits all time high. I just really gotta look for the stuff about Peanut the squirrel because it locks in to a story that I brought to you early. Anyway, this earlier, this was a decrypt.
It's written by Logan Hitchcock. Peanut the squirrel, p n u t, a Solana meme coin inspired by a social media famous squirrel, jumped 19% in an hour following the news that Coinbase is going to list it for trading. I'm gonna stop right there just to pause because if you didn't listen to the show kind of a few episodes back where I brought you Peanut the Squirrel and Fred coin, p n u t and f r e d, both coins were spun up by the owner of Peanut the Squirrel and Fred who were euthanized in a major break news story, a few, you know, like last month or whatever, right?
I brought you the news that those coins had crashed in price, completely devastated. Absolutely wrecked. And I started conjecturing because it was at the same day that I was bringing you news about the HAWK TOA coin, h a was it h h a w k? Is the name of the coin, I think. And the the issue with the Hochtoa girl. And yesterday, you heard the idiots on mainstream media talking, let me I'm just gonna give you the example of the Hochtoa girl as to how Bitcoin is bad. Yeah. Exactly. That's what I'm saying is, like, the you're you're you're mixing metaphors. It's like apples and onions. It's ridiculous. It's nothing the same. But now, Coinbase is going to actually fucking list peanut the squirrel coin.
And we wonder we wonder about the sanity of the people over at Coinbase. It's just ridiculous. The token which soared after the squirrel was seized and subsequently murdered. Actually, it says euthanized, but I'm gonna say murdered by New York State authorities in October over fears of rabies is now trading at a buck 27 with a buck $27,000,000,000 market cap according to CoinDeck CoinGecko. It's up 27% on the day. Yeah. They don't remember that this shit crashed and crashed hard. I have no idea what they're thinking at Coinbase at this point. They're putting they're going to list a meme coin. It's I I'm sure it's not their first, but wow, man. I mean, you you think I I really do think that the that Hawkgirl and the owner of Peanut and Fred are going to get in some some degree of of, of trouble over this kind of shit.
We had some disagreement on last night's meme factory. I was taking the position that I think 1, if not both of these people, are going to see jail time. And I may be wrong about that, but I don't think they're gonna get away without at least a slap on the wrist, which is, like, you know, maybe some money, some fines, maybe some, you know, doing some time with an ankle bracelet at the house. Who knows? But it's becoming obvious that this entire pump.fund Solana based meme coin platform is nothing more than a way for people to take other people's money away from them and not have to face them in in public. Alright. Let's move on. CoinTelegraph, Jesse Coughlin, judge is slamming the FDIC's lack of good faith in censoring crypto letters to banks.
Apparently, the redactions were really bad on these letters. A United States federal judge criticized the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for its redactions of crypto pause letters sent to banks amid a Coinbase backed Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Quote, the court is concerned with what appears to be FDIC's lack of good faith effort in making nuanced redactions, Washington DC District Court Judge Anna Reyes wrote in a December 12th text order. The defendant cannot simply blanket redact everything that is not an article or a preposition, end quote.
Judge Reyes ordered the FDIC to make more thoughtful redactions and refile letters by January 3rd, adding that the FDIC, quote, should be prepared to defend each new redaction. It's essentially the teacher making you do the assignment again because you fucked it up so bad. Anyway, the so called pause letters, which in some cases have entire pages censored, show that the FDIC asked 23 financial institutions about their crypto related activities. And in some of the letters, the FDIC told the firms to pause all crypto asset related activity or otherwise refrain from providing or expanding seemingly crypto related products and services.
And they have a page, a screen grab of the redacted one of these redacted pages. And every single thing on the page is blacklisted or black lined or you can't see it except for the words settlement consumer protection. That's it. An entire page is redacted. It's just blacked out. And even in in fact, it says it's like number 6, settlement. Number 7, header is blacked out. Number 8, the header says consumer protection. Oh oh, there is one other thing. Under consumer protection, it does allow you to see that there's a list of a, b, c, d, or e, except the only letter you can see is a. Like it's a like it's an outline.
That this is just the FDIC thumbing their nose at their at themselves because they're thumbing the nose at the federal government saying we don't have to fall in line with these fucking federal guidelines. No. No. No. We'll do whatever the hell we want. And this judge, Reyes, said no. You're gonna do this shit again. And now you're going to have to explain every single redaction. Quote, what is the FDIC working so hard to to hide? Coinbase legal chief Paul Gruel wrote in a December 12th Twitter post. Earlier in the month, Gruel said that the letters added credence to the long shared crypto rumor that the Biden administration was trying to cut the crypto industry off from all financial services, a policy dubbed Operation Chokepoint 2.0.
This wasn't just some crypto conspiracy theory, gruel posted on Twitter. The FDIC is still hiding behind way overboard redactions, end quote. The same day, the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump's presidential transition team was asking potential banking regulator and point appointees if, as president, he could eliminate or combine such agencies, including the FDIC. Trump's advisers are also considering overhauls of the office of the comptroller of the currency as well as the federal Reserve. Now you just need to get rid of the Federal Reserve. But, you know, Trump's gonna do what orange man's gonna do. Governments and large institutions can buy all the Bitcoin they want except for yours.
Aaron Von Werdum, which I think is going to be a warning, is writing for bitcoin magazine. A Twitter post by Anita Posh warning about the risks of governments and institutions buying up large amounts of bitcoin, I was talking about this earlier, went viral this week even if just because of the trollish community note that appeared underneath it. And I think the main concern here is that these big holders could influence the Bitcoin consensus rules to impose censorship. No. I'm going to say, Aaron, I know that you're smarter than I am, and I know that you are way well respected in the industry, but you are wrong. I'm sorry. You're just wrong. When it comes to censorship specifically, mining centralization is actually a more direct threat. That's why I have a bit ax, Aaron.
But if it's just miner censoring, it would only last for as long as the majority of miners is willing to keep doing it at the expense of forfeiting transaction fees. If and when the censorship stops, transactions would start confirming again as if nothing happened. If economic nodes were to enforce censorship as new protocol rules as well, however, it can indeed be considered a soft fork. And in this scenario, miners cannot revert from the censorship without splitting the blockchain between upgraded censoring and non upgraded nodes. That would constitute what's known as a hard fork.
Buyers and sellers of the 2 versions of bitcoin would then determine which blockchain is more valuable. This is why some bitcoiners are concerned about governments and other large institutions accumulating a significant share of the bitcoin supply. It's a reasonable concern and something to be aware of. But at the same time, and similar to my argument in this take, and he's got a link to a previous take, it's not obvious to me that governments or large institutions would be willing to risk it all by betting on a censorship fork of Bitcoin. But even more importantly, there isn't much we can do to stop governments or other institutions from buying Bitcoin anyway nor should there be. Yes, I agree. As that would itself represent a form of censorship.
Very much ironic. The best countermeasure in this regard was actually already proposed by Nicholas. Don't sell MicroStrategy your bitcoin. And that is actually a link to one of these bit Bitcoin Magazine takes that I read a few episodes back. So, I mean, he's right, but hold on. I wanna make sure about something here. I think the main concern here is that these big holders could influence the Bitcoin consensus rules to impose censorship. Aaron's right about everything else in this particular take, but that sentence, I I no. I don't think that that's a concern.
Sure, they could try. And but like he says further down, they'd end up with a hard fork and nobody alive today. And and we've got many so many more people that are younger than I am that truly truly understand what Bitcoin is none of us are going to run that software. You will see an explosion of nodes come online that will only fucking support the actual original Bitcoin protocol. And you'll say, but David, the government's going to spin up a whole shitload of their own nodes. That's fine. I don't fucking care. I don't I it's not going to matter. They will be on their fork and we will be on our fork and everything is gonna be fine. We've already proven this with SegWit 2x.
We've already been through this at least once. In some cases, some people think we may have been through this twice, but we've been through this once before at minimum at a huge scale. The New York letter or the New York agreement was signed by something like 15 heads of the largest crypto companies ever like Coinbase and Bitmain and a whole bunch of them. Right? And they tried to fork Bitcoin and we were having none of it. And we will defend the exact same way if this shit happens again. I just don't see the governments hoarding Bitcoin as a threat. The only potential threat that there is is purchasing power.
If all the governments of like, let's just say that to the 50 states all have their own strategic reserve and all the major cities and all those 50 states have their own strategic reserve and the federal government has their own strategic reserve and it ends up being 19,000,000 Bitcoin in total, which is the major well over the majority, like 90% of all the bitcoin actually, 95% of all the Bitcoin that is in circulation today. Right? If they they if they all coordinated to sell all of their bitcoin at the same time on all of the major exchanges, no bidding, no over the counter stuff, no auctioning, nothing like that, just straight up signaling to the market that you were selling 19,000,000 bitcoins all in the same hour, the price is going to crash below $10 a Bitcoin.
And there are going to be many of us out there that just buy the living fuck out of it. But that's the only thing that they have any and it's not even really control. It's like, what is, like, so I don't know. Some other word in the thesaurus for control, pick one other than control because they can't control Bitcoin. All they can do is influence its price by doing really stupid shit. So I am not concerned about governments hoarding Bitcoin. Okay. Core Lightning version 24.11, bolt 12, by default, XPay, gossip enhancements, and more has been released.
Core Lightning is a lightweight, highly customizable, and standard compliant implementation of the Lightning Network protocol. And we'll get into these updates here. What's new? X Pay is a new experimental payment plugin built on Askren for advanced routing. It has been completely rewritten on top of Askren, a plugin that provides advanced routing advice for payments. The 2 plugins work in tandem. Xpay communicates the outcomes of payment attempts to ar Askren. That's a hard name. Askren, a s k r e n e. Askren, allowing it to learn and optimize over time. Oh, that's interesting. Additionally, x pay remembers and retires successful payment paths, improving system reliability.
This is nice. The essential development was carried out by Lagrange 3 who, designed and refined the minimum cost flow solver that serves as the core of Askren. I've never heard anything about askreen and this is amazing. For reckless souls, xpay handle pay, which is I guess a variable, can be set to true even at runtime using set config to have xpay take over the simple variance of pay. Okay. Now to bolt 12. Bolt 12 send and receive are now default following their September inclusion in the bolt spec. Nice. Highlights for developers, we're not gonna get into that one because it's well above my pay grade. But highlights for the network, significant improvements to gossiping.
We try to stay connected to 10 nodes, picking random ones if we need to. Every hour we ask 1 peer for all of its gossip and we always send out our own gossip updates to up to 50 peers and this should help everyone stay up to date with what's happening in the network. And Connectd will connect faster on startup, maintaining up to 10 outgoing connection attempts in parallel, thus assuring quicker setup for new nodes and better network scalability. You know, when I first got my start 9, I really wanted to run core lightning instead of lnd because a lot of people were saying you've you've just gotta use c lightning.
And I ended up going with lnd because all the tools that I know how to use are lnd based. But that should not deter anybody listening to my voice who's interested in setting up a a Bitcoin full node, which you have to have before you set up a Bitcoin lightning node. And I highly recommend that you do that so you can learn how the system works so that you're not at the behest of somebody telling you how something works. You need to know it yourself. Please please please run a bitcoin full node and get a lightning node set up. Just just bite the bullet, learn how to do it. But it what I'm suggesting is that don't worry if you want to if if you want to use c the CLN or the core lightning stuff, I've heard that it's really good and honestly this, art screen stuff being for it being able to map out and remember good routes instead of having to try it all over again, it's like reinventing the wheel. It's this is what it sounds like to me.
Every payment I make over the lightning network, I gotta find a route. Now that's always been true. I gotta find a route from between my Lightning node or my Lightning wallet, let's say, and whoever it is that I'm paying because I may not be directly in connection with that third party. So the whole payment routes through the lightning network. And if there's too much routing involved, that payment will fail. But if I find a route and then I wanna pay that guy again, like, 4 weeks from now, that payment route has to be rediscovered. But if nothing changed in the route, why rediscover it? Why not just say, hey, here's a functional route and I'm gonna store this in your lightning wallet or your lightning node and we're gonna remember that so the next time you pay this dude, I'm gonna look at that shit first. And if it doesn't work, then then I'll find another route. See, this makes sense to me. And LND, as far as I know, doesn't do that. I may be wrong. If I am, please give me a boostagram and a 100,000,000 sats and I will, I will, eat crow on this.
Ashigaru version 1.1.0 has removed DNS dependencies and has UI improvements. And I've never heard of Ashiguru until the last couple of days. But it's a self custodial, open source, and secure mobile Bitcoin wallet that is private by design. It's been forked to and built upon the samurai wallet source code, and it's available only on android. The Ashigaru open source product project is pleased to announce the update of Ashiguru mobile to version 1.1.0. Thank you for those who have used the wallet and provided valuable feedback. After the team experienced continuous, did not distributed denial of service tax on this website last month, our focus has shifted to eliminating any need for users to connect to a clear net domain and ensuring that there is widespread redundancy available to for, Tor Onion services, which we can bring back online.
This allows us to operate in the future if necessary with a minimal server footprint and with as little impact to our users as possible. This means that the app can now update the PayNIM and Soroben Tor URLs without requiring an app update ensuring robust services. We have nicknamed this approach our Hanzaki strategy after the Japanese giant salamander who were believed to be able to survive even after being cut in half due to their regenerative powers added the project. So if you are using Ashigaru, they have an update and it's built on the old samurai wallet source code.
So this is going to be interesting to see if they can keep themselves out of hot water. Alright. So that is everything that I have to give you. I hope you have enjoyed the shows this week. I certainly enjoy giving them to you. Remember, this is a value for value supported podcast. It's the only way this is going to work. Please understand that we are watching the death of mainstream media, which means the death of the modern advertising protocols. It doesn't work anymore. And even if it did, even if it did and meant that I would still be able to say whatever the hell it is that I felt I needed to say and not get in trouble or not have my funding pulled because my advertiser got a whole ear load from a whole bunch of weird weirdos, It's still it's in flux. Everything is so in flux. Nobody nobody knows what the hell is going on. Right? Podcasting numbers are a black box. Oh, I've got so many downloads. Really? How do you know?
How does anybody know I could sit here and tell you that you know how well this show is doing by the number of downloads and even I don't believe it I'm like I'm looking at the downloads going fuck you I don't there's no way I can know if this is actually true right I mean besides what even is a download and the reason I bring it up is that that whole thing got axed by Apple Apple podcast decided to pull the plug on a particular feature and that feature was if you were subscribed to a podcast it would automatically download each new episode, even if you didn't ask for it.
Which meant, even if you didn't listen to that episode, that the artist or whoever released that that episode got credit for a download well Apple for 3 or 4 months ago decided to shit can that and now you actually have to go through and hit the download button for it to count as a download And that completely destroyed well, it didn't completely destroy. It really messed up the way advertisers were relating to the people that they were sponsoring because at this point they didn't know how much bang for the buck they were getting and all of this all of this really can be circumvented simply by going to the value for value model get a modern podcasting app something that allows you to boost me with satoshis and give me messages directly into the episode you can stream me satoshis you can have chapters I produce chapters there's artwork that changes sometimes on the podcast There's all manner. So I got transcripts, but none of this is available on on Apple Podcasts. None of it. They have like 0 or next to 0 podcasting 2.0 features. So get yourself a podcasting app that's modern up to date and allows you to interact directly with me, the person that's bringing you this because he loves to do it every single day. And instead of relying on some advertiser to give me money so that I can force it down your throat, you can just pay me directly and we can have a conversation amongst ourselves.
We can have the relationship between ourselves without anybody standing in the way. It's value for value. It's the only way that this shit works going forward. Remember that. Have a good weekend, and I'll 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. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:39 AM Pacific Standard Time. It is the 13th day. God, it's Friday 13th December 2024.
Oh my god. We're all gonna die. And this is episode 1,008 of Bitcoin. And, well, Texas, is in the news, but not like you're you're thinking I'm going to start with. And, I guess I should kinda like, you know, maybe I should just do a little bit of warm up show for you. Last night, I was on the Meme Factory with Greg Zaj and a whole bunch of other people, and it was it's always fun. If you ever, ever, ever get invited onto Meme Factory, you have to go. You just you just have to do it, man. It's it's it's an experience, and I loved every single minute of it. I'm trying to find I gotta I do not have the link right now directly to that show, but if you wanna watch it, you just Google Meme Factory or go to YouTube and search Meme Factory in there. Just look for whatever happened last night.
It was a last minute thing. Greg invited me on, like, about, I don't know, 4 or 5 hours before it started. And we just, you know, we had a really good time. Yellow was there and, like some of the other, you know, some of the other, ostensible people that, you know, get in trouble on Twitter and Oster all the time. So it was it was fun. And I highly recommend that you go watch that because you will actually see my face wearing a Texas Tech ball cap. Now Texas is in the news a couple of times today, but I just got this one. In fact, I'm actually having to read it from my phone because while I was waiting for my computer to boot up for the 3rd freaking time because Windows 7 is so old that it's now dropping drivers and it dropped one of my audio drivers and then it decided up on boot up to drop the driver for my wifi and then on the 3rd boot up well yeah that's where I'm at so while I was waiting for technology to get its little red wagon in order so it could pull little sister down the street I was looking at my phone and got this off of Noster.
In in case you didn't know, there's a bunch of news bots that are available, and I cannot god freaking. I cannot for the life of me remember who designed those, but they're good. Alright? All they do is they give you the news story, the headline, and, like, you know, where like, this one's from Fast Company. So Fast Company is now represented as one of these, news bots, and it just does Fast Company Publications. There's another one for Financial Times. The really honestly, it's a it's a great utility. It really is. And like I said, I got this one while I was waiting for my computer to, boot up.
Texas is seeing a surge in carbon capture permits for its oil fields. Here's why experts are worried. And again, this is from Fast Company. And I'm just gonna give you the give you the first, you know, few paragraphs. I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but I wanna talk about it a little bit because it's an interesting situation. Texas has been surge or seeing interest from companies hoping to bury bury, as in put in a hole in the ground, carbon dioxide, which is a gas, in its oil fields, putting the state at the vanguard of government subsidized program to fight climate change. Oh my god. It's climate change. But pumping c02 into the ground could exacerbate earthquakes. We're all gonna die. And well blowouts. Yep. Gonna die again. And they're already happening in the Permian Basin as Texas struggles to manage its wastewater disposal, potentially undermining public support.
Without legitimate oversight of underground injection in Texas, we expect more geyser like well blowouts, sinkholes, leaks from plugged and unplugged wells, and injection induced earthquakes, said Virginia Palacios, executive director of Commission Shift, a Texas watchdog group, pushing for tougher oversight of the oil and gas industry as if we didn't have enough fucking problems with the Railroad Commission of Texas. I mean, those guys are bad enough. We don't need an outside outside people watch dogging shit. Such consequences have rarely happened as a result of CO 2 injection over the decades that the technology has been deployed. This is where I wanna get to. The unprecedented vast volume of carbon now proposed for burial worries activists and researchers even more.
Okay. Why the hell am I even bringing this shit up? Okay. That a fair question. So that is a fair question to ask me. The reason is because c o two injection has been part of oilfield operations for decades. I remember waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning hearing my dad, you know, having a yell fest with his foreman because some people decided to screw over the well that they were working on. And he would say things like, well, where's the c o two injection crew? And stuff like that. So at from a very early age, I was I was all in on oil and gas industry. I mean, I got a picture of myself with a hard hat, you know, working the break on a drilling rig, which by all, you know, all rights, dad should have never had me on the platform because it is one of the top ten most dangerous places to work. But, hell, I didn't know. I was hanging out with the crew in the dog house and they were teaching me how to heat up Vienna sausages on an oil fired stove while the open lockers had pin ups from Playboy all over it. This is how I grew up. Alright? So that's probably why I'm so damn sick and twisted.
But here's my thing. All these people that are talking about climate change have been going after fracking for years. It's going to kill us all. It's going to destroy the environment. It's going to put us into where, I don't know, we bake to death like a turkey in a Thanksgiving oven. It's all hooey. Right? It's all bullshit. But fracking doesn't exist without CO 2 injection. Hell, vertical wells. Fracking is horizontal wells. Right? Vertical wells where they used to do it the old fashioned way, like my dad, where they just drill a goddamn hole in the ground straight down to, like, you know, anywhere between 3 to 10000 to sometimes my dad drilled 1, 21,000 feet before. I mean, it was like the it was the first deep well in Texas.
That was the way that they did it. And even back in those days, they used c o two injection. They used waste water injection now. They used c02 injection. They used all kinds of shit. And what they're doing is they're trying to pressure up underneath the ground so that it squeezes the oil through the rock and dirt and formation where it gets to the collectors and then streams up the pipe and then we can burn it in our homes and in our cars and do all the neat things that we do with petroleum products. But here, here we're going to see the battle between environmentalists, the fake ass climate change environmentalist, and the actual people who are rightfully concerned about shoving a whole bunch of shit into the ground under pressure. It can cause problems. I'm I'm I mean, I I love oil and gas, but even I'm like, yeah. Well, you put a whole you inject a whole bunch of stuff into the ground, you might have problems.
But what I see on the horizon is a battle between fake environmentalists and real environmentalists. And now we know clearly who the fake environmentalists are. They are the climate change idiots that think they're going to solve mankind's problems by taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, pressuring it up, and throwing it into the oil fields in West Texas, which is exactly what we wanna do in the first place to squeeze all the available oil out of the formations. This is going to be it's going to be a blast to watch these people do their thing. Okay. Okay. So enough of that. Enough of that. Let's let's let's stay with Texas, but let's do something else. Y'all have probably heard about it by now, but I'm gonna give you the lowdown from Andrew Hayward and Matt DeSalvo from Decrypt, Texas Legislature or legislator, a guy, a Texas guy who's in the Texas legislature has introduced a bill to establish a Texas Bitcoin strategic reserve.
Not a federal one, a state one. Okay. The Texas legislature will consider adopting a Bitcoin strategic reserve following the introduction of a bill on Thursday to establish such a program amid ongoing efforts to do the same on a national level in the United States. And the proposed bill, HB number 1598, was introduced by Texas state representative Giovanni Capraguilione. Yeah. Again, we're good, baby. It seeks to build up a supply of Bitcoin for the state where the funds held for at least with the funds held for at least 5 years without being sold. Plus, it will allow Texas citizens to make donations to the fund?
What? Weird. Quote, a strategic Bitcoin reserve aligns with Texas' commitment to fostering innovation in digital assets and providing Texans with enhanced financial security, the text of the bill reads. The bill adds that the cryptocurrency held in cold storage that is in a wallet on a device not connected to the Internet will not be used to make transactions outside of the state or abroad. That is interesting. That means that the the Bitcoin has to be contained inside the state no matter what they do with it. That is really interesting. Okay. Quote, this comptroller shall prohibit transactions involving foreign countries, entities or individuals outside of Texas, or entities or individuals known to engage in illegal activities.
Responding to a question from Decrypt, Capri Guillone said on a Spaces Live event on X, god damn it, I said it, formerly known as Twitter, Thursday that the idea had been brewing for some time. Quote, we've slowly planted the seeds and planted the education for members on it, he said, adding that, quote, probably the biggest enemy of our invest investments is in is inflation. Well, nope. Really, really. Well, Bitcoin is a payments network launched in 2009. Really? Are are we you you're really going to describe Bitcoin in article written for decrypt which has been around for years in the crypt no. I absolutely refuse to describe what bitcoin is. President-elect Donald Trump has previously told people not to sell their bitcoin and some politicians are now calling for the government to hold bitcoin in reserves like it already does with gold. And, of course, senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming proposed a bill earlier this year to establish such a program.
Texas has attracted bitcoin miners in recent years due to its very cheap electricity and government incentives aimed at encouraging miners to stabilize the electricity grid. The US government already has a large stash of bitcoin seized from criminals. Blockchain data firm, Arkham Intelligence, which tracks large crypto wallets, puts the current government holdings at over a 198,000 Bitcoin. Capri Leon said on the spaces that he's seen increased interest in Bitcoin and the idea of a strategic reserve since Trump's election win as the Republican candidate ran on a pro crypto campaign. Quote, since November, obviously, the amount of excitement, desire, and knowledge about not just the Bitcoin Reserve, but all of those other things around this technology, god forbid, blockchain and others, is becoming more in the headspace of legislators.
And that's a good thing. That's because the constituents care about these things. So Texas will be the 2nd state of the union, not the first, but the 2nd state of the union to introduce at the state level legislation providing for a strategic Bitcoin reserve. And I can't I I wanna say that the other state is Ohio, but I'm not sure. Please don't don't hold my feet to the fire on that. But I do know that there are 2 out of the 48 out of the 50 states, leaving 48 United States states wondering what they're gonna do. Are they actually wondering what they're gonna do? Well, hell, I don't know. I'm not in in any of those states, but we've got 2 states that want their own strategic reserves. Now this is an interesting development because like that very first story I was talking about, where we we're going to see 2 groups of people fighting over the climate and one's going to be fake and the other one is going to be actually genuine about it.
But there's going to be a fight about this c o two injection. Well, here, there's going to be a fight between the federal government and each individual state governments. But the fight's not going to be about, you know, whether this is legal or not. It's going to be who can get the most Bitcoin. Would it be possible for Texas to pick up more Bitcoin in their strategic reserve than the federal government, which would represent all of the 50 states? And furthermore, what would it mean if the majority of the states of the United States had their own state run strategic reserve that was not the property of the federal government?
What does that look like? So fighting over the corn is also going to be coming down the pipe starting in 2025 and continuing for these next 4 years because Texas will probably pass this. They've they are already neck deep in the Bitcoin industry. They actually have enough track record where Texas can say that they know as much about Bitcoin mining and the infrastructure surrounding the electricity as any other place in the in the world much less the United States. Right? And it's the exact same thing with the oil industry, oil and gas. So that said, if Texas ends up with a strategic reserve of bitcoin that either equals or is larger than what the federal government wants to be able to do and that's a 1,000,000 bitcoin what does this look like what does this look like what happens if the united states between the each individual united states like Texas Virginia Wyoming Washington California what have you If their Bitcoin reserves added together and then added to the Federal Reserve ends up being the majority of the Bitcoin in the world, do I have to worry? No. Absolutely not. However, that could be a price issue, a purchasing power issue.
But as for control of the network, no. It doesn't work that way. But we don't know where this is going. And anybody who tells you that they do doesn't know their ass from a hole in the ground. The only thing that I'm sure of is that there's no way that anybody can control Bitcoin. They can control the token, but they can only control the token that they have the keys for and even if the majority of bitcoin ends up in the united states and from what I understand that's already the case and has been for a long time does it mean that somebody from Zimbabwe would have to ask permission from the United States government to use Bitcoin?
Maybe on paper, but they can do it no matter if they've got a wallet and they've got an Internet connection in Zimbabwe and they are able to send a transaction, then yes. The answer is yes. They can do it without the permission of the United States or any country that has a majority of the Bitcoin. So please please please stop feeding the FUD and saying, well, what happens if we get on a Bitcoin? I don't think that's gonna happen. But you know what does happen is that people go to jail when they sell $4,000,000 worth of Bitcoin and never tell the federal government. Yep. That happened.
Early Bitcoin investor has been jailed for unreported crypto gains in a $4,000,000 BTC sale. This is out of Cointelegraph Arjeet Sarkar writing, an early Bitcoin investor from Austin, Texas, back in Texas, became the 1st person criminally charged for failing to report crypto capital gains in a case involving about $4,000,000 worth of cryptocurrencies. That's a big number. According to the United States Department of Justice, investor Frank Richard Algren III falsely underreported the realized capital gains earned from selling bitcoin were $3,700,000 between the years 2017 and 2019, the DOJ said in a December 12th report. Quote, all taxpayers are required to report any sale proceeds and gains or losses from the sale of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin on a tax return. That is the law whether we agree with it or not, and I certainly don't agree with it. But Algren had invested in Bitcoin since 2011.
He oh, shit. What a lucky guy. He purchased 1366 Bitcoin on Coinbase in 2015 when Bitcoin was trading for under $500, and he sold 640 of it in October of 2017 at an average market price of $5,800 and reinvested the $3,700,000 in real estate. This guy got fucked. Three different ways. He bought low. He sold low. Right? Because 5,800 was nothing, dude. Nothing. That was him pulling the trigger early. And then he threw that money into real estate and now he's going to jail for 2 years. Anyway, authorities found discrepancy in Algren's 2017 federal income tax return, the report noted. Algren then filed a false this is a quote. Algren then filed a false 2017 federal income tax return that substantially inflated the cost basis of the bitcoin, thereby under reporting his true capital gain from his sale of bitcoin.
Additionally, Algren did not report more than $650,000 worth of bitcoin sales in 20 18/20 18. According to the DOJ, he attempted to conceal the movement of his funds through multiple wallet transfers, crypto mixers, and in person cash transactions. The DOJ added, Indeed, in May of 2014, Algren had blogged about his knowledge of mixers as ways to add anonymity to Bitcoin transactions. In total, the tax loss from Algren's criminal conduct was over $1,000,000. Jesus. Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stewart Goldberg of the Justice Department's Tax Division noted that Algren's decision to under report crypto capital gains in an attempt to conceal the transfer of funds earned him a 2 year sentence.
The 2 year prison sentence became the 1st criminal tax evasion prosecution centered solely on cryptocurrency, said acting special agent in charge Lucy Tan of the IRS's criminal investigation Houston field office. She also said her team has the expertise and tools to track crypto and fiat activity. Yeah. Yeah. And we know who's doing that with you. Algren will serve time because he believed his cryptocurrency transactions were untraceable. I don't know. Maybe he thought that you stealing his fucking money was fucking illegal. I don't know. Let's just give that as a shot. But whatever. In addition to the 2 year prison sentence, Algren has been ordered to serve 1 year of supervised release and pay a $1,100,000 fine in restitution to the United States government because they just don't have enough money.
They just can't print enough money, so they gotta steal it from everybody any which way they can. And if you don't give it to them, at the point of a gun, they're going to put you in a fucking cell. And tell me just how it is that taxes is the price we pay for a civilized economy, a civilized society, a civilized anything. It doesn't. It is the absolute red flag of an uncivilized behemoth, mammoth, bullshit, smoldering creature that needs to have its carcass smoked upon the mountainside, as Gandalf used to say. Okay.
Solana ETF has been rejected. Thank god. Coinmerse. Io writing this one. Solana ETF rejected and BlackRock prioritizes Bitcoin, and God for get forbid Ethereum. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Samra Cohen, the chief investment officer for exchange traded funds at BlackRock, revealed the company's decision not to launch any further crypto ETFs. Yay. Despite the market dominance of Bitcoin and Ethereum, Cohen stated that no other virtual currency, including Solana, meets BlackRock's strict criteria for establishing a new ETF. Bitcoin and Ethereum, major players in the crypto world, have market shares of 55% 17%, respectively.
But on the other hand, other cryptocurrencies such as Solana have law have less than 10% of market share. This inequality in market share raises concerns about possible market manipulation and liquidity issues, making it difficult to launch new crypto ETFs like a Solana ETF. Despite BlackRock's cautious stance, other asset managers show a greater receptiveness to Solana because they're shitcoiners. An example of this is the shitcoin company outfit Van Eck, which is promoting a Solana ETF so that they can take all of your money and give you absolutely nothing but a shitcoin while pointing out the solid demand for the crypto community.
Despite the recent price decline in Solana, they found some confirmation when Solana briefly surpassed BNB and became the 4th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. The divergent opinions on potential Solana ETFs indicate that there's a lively debate, oh, it's lively, going on within the investment community. Some see significant potential, while others, like BlackRock, are cautious due to current market conditions and regulatory issues. Yeah. Well, I don't care what BlackRock is going to say. You're going to end up with shitcoin ETFs. We have already got one with the e with the Ethereum ETF. It's just going to expand, and there's absolutely nothing that we can do about it except to, well, you know, maybe not buy it.
There's there's always that one. Now over to CoinDesk, where I've gotta scroll to the bottom to get the headline first because their website is just jacked up on my machine. But miners are adopting the same Bitcoin acquisition strategy as MicroStrategy according to JPMorgan. And, again, this is out of CoinDesk. Who's writing this one anyway? Will Canney is the author. MicroStrategy, the company founded by Michael Saylor, is not the only large scale corporate buyer of Bitcoin, according to JPMorgan in a Wednesday report. The shift to building up bitcoin holdings is driven by growing pressure on profitability, which stems from the reward having in April and a rising network hash rate, the report said.
And then they, for whatever reason, give a description of hash rate. Whatever. Quote, this likely prompted miners to hoard or seek further investments into Bitcoin or diversify into AI and high performance computing businesses. Analysts led by Nicholas. There's no I cannot pronounce this name. It's, like, very Greek, and there's no worldly way that I can do this. So I'm just gonna say Nicholas. He wrote, referring to artificial intelligence and high performance computing, miners such as Mara Holdings have adopted a similar Bitcoin buying strategy to MicroStrategy called BTC Yield in response to these challenges.
Mara now owns 35,000 tokens and is the 2nd largest publicly listed corporation in terms of Bitcoin holdings. The miners aren't alone. Medical device maker, Similar Scientific, has also been actively buying the world's largest cryptocurrency and now owns $144,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. January's introduction of spot bitcoin exchange traded funds in the US have given institutional investors a more direct way to gain bitcoin exposure, the bank said. Shares of miners which have been treated as a proxy for bitcoin have underperformed as a result.
The bank noted that aside from buying more Bitcoin, miners are increasingly financing their business via debt and equity offerings rather than selling their crypto reserves to cover operational costs. Miners have raised more than 10,000,000,000, that's 1,000,000,000 with a b, dollars worth of equity so far this year, eclipsing the previous high of 9,500,000,000 in 2021, the report added. So what's important about this, and we discussed this a little bit yesterday on, the meme factory, what what's going on here is that the miners have figured out that they are going to have to play the same game as Michael Sailor. And they are doing it, and they're doing so far so good. They're doing it fairly well. But what does it actually mean? And I I think I finally came out up with a way to describe the playbook. And let's just keep it to Michael Sailor selling this these convertible notes and equity, you know, basically debt. There are says debt and equity, but it's essentially debt instruments.
What Michael Saylor is doing is he is selling you nothing, and you're giving him fiat currency, which is a little bit more than nothing, but not much more. But during this time, he's taking the fiat currency that you gave him for nothing, and he's buying a real actual asset with it in the form of Bitcoin. Why do I say that he's selling you nothing? He's selling you debt. He's selling you a convertible note. It's just a piece of paper that says, hey. Our stock price is going to be worth more later, so you give me your actual physical cash now, and then we'll allow you to convert your notes into equity stake in the form of shares or a straight up cash out later on. But for the time being, all he's really doing is selling you a piece of paper. You're giving him actual fiat, and then he's turning that fiat into actual assets in the form of Bitcoin. He's converting nothing into something.
He's a bit of an alchemist. He's a bit of an alchemist when it comes that way. But now all these other people are doing it. You're going to see convertible note sales until you are just sick to your stomach. And then at one point or another, there's gonna be a major rug pull, and I don't think it's gonna be by sailor or Mara or Riot or somebody like that. I'm looking at similar scientific and and the the and not because similar's creepy and weird or something like that. It's just that they're small. Right? And I think it's the smaller guys that would have more of an aptitude to be able to rug pull the people that they sold essentially nothing to and keep the Bitcoin that they use their fiat to buy. That's what I'm saying. Anyway, Vancouver looks like it may be on deck.
Vancouver, has a motion approved to study a Bitcoin integration into its municipal management. This is Atlas 21. The city council of Vancouver has given the green light to exploring potential uses of bitcoin in municipal administration including tax payments. On December 11th, the Vancouver City Council approved that motion. The motion titled preserving the city's purchasing power through financial reserve diversification paves the way for multiple scenarios from accepting cryptocurrency as a method of payment for taxes and municipal services to potentially converting part of the city's reserves into Bitcoin. So now the city, a city, is considering their own strategic bitcoin reserve.
I'm telling you this shit's gonna get out of control and maybe it doesn't have to be in a bad way. I don't know. Just just don't sell your bitcoin. If you have bitcoin don't sell it. If you don't have bitcoin I don't think that you'd be listening to the show but for whatever reason if you are then get off 0 dude. Anyway, the city will conduct a detailed study to assess the risk benefit and practical considerations of this bitcoin adoption with a report due by the end of Q1 of 2025. They've got, like, 4 months to get this shit done, pal. Mayors oh, I thought it said mayor Slim. No. It's mayor Sim, s I m, who personally led the initiative with backing from ABC Vancouver councilors, shared that he made the decision after observing similar developments in the United States and other countries. And in an interview, he said, quote, I have dedicated over 10000 hours of studying cryptocurrencies, moving from initial skepticism to a deep belief in the potential of this technology.
I like how you use the term 10000 hours because we use that term a lot in Bitcoin. It takes about 10000 hours for you to even grasp enough of the fundamentals of what Bitcoin is for you to go, oh, shit. You gotta get as much as you can. Anyway, as a gesture of this commitment, the mayor pledged a personal donation of $10,000 in bitcoin to his own city regardless of the vote's outcome. The motion received broad support despite opposition from 2 Green Party councilors who raised concerns about, you wanna guess, the potential money laundering risks and the environmental impact of mining. Yes, of course, because they have literally nothing else to stand on anymore. Vancouver, already known for hosting the world's 1st Bitcoin ATM back in 2013, is now aiming to further solidify its position as a crypto friendly hub on Canada's West Coast.
So interesting that the mayor himself made a $10,000 donation in Bitcoin to the city. My question becomes, who's holding it? He's I mean, he can't hold it himself on behalf of the city. Otherwise, it's not really a donation. So who has he set up in the city that even after he's gone for mayor will be able to custody that Bitcoin? That is not said in this Atlas 21 article, and I actually think it's more pivotal than anything else in the actual article. But to move on, let's just say that this isn't going to stop. Cities, counties, states, governments all are going to try to get a Bitcoin strategic reserve.
Those that do will be fine. Those that do not will be made to service the ones that do hold Bitcoin. It's like the fucking borg, and there's no resistance. Resistance is futile. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities and the sidebar and the trending stories. Oh my god, guys. Nancy Pelosi has been hospitalized after an injury in Luxembourg. Oh, no. Oh, well. Oil up 1.61 percent to $71.15. Brent Norsey up 1 and a third to 74.37. Natural gas plummeting down the hole 5.15 percent down to $3.27 per 1,000, and gasoline is up above $2 a barrel again. Gold and all of its cousins are having a bad day. Gold down 1 a quarter, back under 27100 to 26.75.80 pennies.
Silver down 2%. Platinum down 1 3 quarters percent. Copper down over 1%. Palladium taking it on the chin, 3.03% to the out downside. Ag is all in the red on their futures except for chocolate because everyone loves chocolate around Christmas, I guess. 3.83% to the upside. Biggest loser, oh, looks to be wheat. 1.12 percent to the downside, and I got live cattle up a half point and lean hogs are up 1 and a half points, but feeder cattle themselves are down a third. The Dow is down a quarter as is the S and P. The Nasdaq is up a quarter, but the S and P mini leading the way down 0.76% to the downside.
What's Bitcoin do? Oh, look. We're above a $100,000 again. A $100,01580. Did I say that right? A $101,580. That is a $2,010,000,000,000 market cap, And we can now purchase 38.2 ounces of the shiny metal shit with your 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19,795,401.8 of. And average fees per block are low. Wow. 0.08 BTC taken in fees on average on a per block basis, and there are 106 blocks carrying 276,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 8, count them, 8 satoshis per v byte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 7 satoshis per v byte. Hash rate is 789.2 exahashes per second on a 1 week rolling average. So, we are gaining a little bit of hash rate there. Now, from Moron Manifesto, which is yesterday's episode of Bitcoin, and I got Golf Winch throwing me 6,777 satoshis. Dude, I appreciate it.
He says, giving some of my most precious certificates of appreciation, money in the form of Bitcoin, because you provide a great service to all of us who listen to the show. God bless you and your family this Christmas holiday. Oh, well, thanks, man. Please donate to the show, fellow plebs. I cannot iterate that enough. Donate. You can donate. WiseHodl with 5,001 sat says, I thought the ignorance of no corners was bad last cycle, but this time, with magnitudes more ignorant no corners pouring in with the most powerful narrative forming machine in history programming them, I think it's going to be much much worse.
Because they're not just going to be ignorant, They're going to be anxious, scared, hostile, and immune to reason. I 100% agree, WiseHodl. Well, not only is that well articulated and well said, it is absolutely fucking correct. And I actually think it's gonna be slightly worse than that. And the reason I say that is because this this narrative forming machine that you're talking about is also going to go under be be undergoing seismic shifts. Like I said yesterday, you're going to see Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow rotated out into some obscurity and other people rotated in because the mainstream media section of the narrative forming machine is going to die. It's already on fire.
And some kind of phoenix will rise from its ashes, and that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be a nice pretty good phoenix. It could be an autistic halfway retarded genetically defective drooling featherless looking twitter bird, for all I know. But something's gonna rise from those ashes. Alright? I'm just saying and that could actually lend even like, so he says, they are going to be anxious, scared, hostile, and immune to reason. I'm going to restate that given what I just said and say they are going to be anxious, scared, hostile, confused, and immune to reason. And that's gonna make it even worse. FOMO chronic with a 1,001 says nothing.
Pies with 1,000 sat says V4V, LFG, 100%. Showing the biceps, giving the fist symbol, got a bell and a rocket and a circle. I think it's a circle. Anyway, God's death with 537 says thank you, sir. No, thank you. Ed with 500 sat says nothing. God's death with 537, says thank you, sir. No, thank you. And PIES with 100. Thank you, sir. No, thank you. And Ed finishes us off. Just wait until you see these Bitcoiners honored to be a part of this. I hear you, pal. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. Peanut the squirrel meme coin jumps on Coinbase plans as GigaChad hits all time high. I just really gotta look for the stuff about Peanut the squirrel because it locks in to a story that I brought to you early. Anyway, this earlier, this was a decrypt.
It's written by Logan Hitchcock. Peanut the squirrel, p n u t, a Solana meme coin inspired by a social media famous squirrel, jumped 19% in an hour following the news that Coinbase is going to list it for trading. I'm gonna stop right there just to pause because if you didn't listen to the show kind of a few episodes back where I brought you Peanut the Squirrel and Fred coin, p n u t and f r e d, both coins were spun up by the owner of Peanut the Squirrel and Fred who were euthanized in a major break news story, a few, you know, like last month or whatever, right?
I brought you the news that those coins had crashed in price, completely devastated. Absolutely wrecked. And I started conjecturing because it was at the same day that I was bringing you news about the HAWK TOA coin, h a was it h h a w k? Is the name of the coin, I think. And the the issue with the Hochtoa girl. And yesterday, you heard the idiots on mainstream media talking, let me I'm just gonna give you the example of the Hochtoa girl as to how Bitcoin is bad. Yeah. Exactly. That's what I'm saying is, like, the you're you're you're mixing metaphors. It's like apples and onions. It's ridiculous. It's nothing the same. But now, Coinbase is going to actually fucking list peanut the squirrel coin.
And we wonder we wonder about the sanity of the people over at Coinbase. It's just ridiculous. The token which soared after the squirrel was seized and subsequently murdered. Actually, it says euthanized, but I'm gonna say murdered by New York State authorities in October over fears of rabies is now trading at a buck 27 with a buck $27,000,000,000 market cap according to CoinDeck CoinGecko. It's up 27% on the day. Yeah. They don't remember that this shit crashed and crashed hard. I have no idea what they're thinking at Coinbase at this point. They're putting they're going to list a meme coin. It's I I'm sure it's not their first, but wow, man. I mean, you you think I I really do think that the that Hawkgirl and the owner of Peanut and Fred are going to get in some some degree of of, of trouble over this kind of shit.
We had some disagreement on last night's meme factory. I was taking the position that I think 1, if not both of these people, are going to see jail time. And I may be wrong about that, but I don't think they're gonna get away without at least a slap on the wrist, which is, like, you know, maybe some money, some fines, maybe some, you know, doing some time with an ankle bracelet at the house. Who knows? But it's becoming obvious that this entire pump.fund Solana based meme coin platform is nothing more than a way for people to take other people's money away from them and not have to face them in in public. Alright. Let's move on. CoinTelegraph, Jesse Coughlin, judge is slamming the FDIC's lack of good faith in censoring crypto letters to banks.
Apparently, the redactions were really bad on these letters. A United States federal judge criticized the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for its redactions of crypto pause letters sent to banks amid a Coinbase backed Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Quote, the court is concerned with what appears to be FDIC's lack of good faith effort in making nuanced redactions, Washington DC District Court Judge Anna Reyes wrote in a December 12th text order. The defendant cannot simply blanket redact everything that is not an article or a preposition, end quote.
Judge Reyes ordered the FDIC to make more thoughtful redactions and refile letters by January 3rd, adding that the FDIC, quote, should be prepared to defend each new redaction. It's essentially the teacher making you do the assignment again because you fucked it up so bad. Anyway, the so called pause letters, which in some cases have entire pages censored, show that the FDIC asked 23 financial institutions about their crypto related activities. And in some of the letters, the FDIC told the firms to pause all crypto asset related activity or otherwise refrain from providing or expanding seemingly crypto related products and services.
And they have a page, a screen grab of the redacted one of these redacted pages. And every single thing on the page is blacklisted or black lined or you can't see it except for the words settlement consumer protection. That's it. An entire page is redacted. It's just blacked out. And even in in fact, it says it's like number 6, settlement. Number 7, header is blacked out. Number 8, the header says consumer protection. Oh oh, there is one other thing. Under consumer protection, it does allow you to see that there's a list of a, b, c, d, or e, except the only letter you can see is a. Like it's a like it's an outline.
That this is just the FDIC thumbing their nose at their at themselves because they're thumbing the nose at the federal government saying we don't have to fall in line with these fucking federal guidelines. No. No. No. We'll do whatever the hell we want. And this judge, Reyes, said no. You're gonna do this shit again. And now you're going to have to explain every single redaction. Quote, what is the FDIC working so hard to to hide? Coinbase legal chief Paul Gruel wrote in a December 12th Twitter post. Earlier in the month, Gruel said that the letters added credence to the long shared crypto rumor that the Biden administration was trying to cut the crypto industry off from all financial services, a policy dubbed Operation Chokepoint 2.0.
This wasn't just some crypto conspiracy theory, gruel posted on Twitter. The FDIC is still hiding behind way overboard redactions, end quote. The same day, the Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump's presidential transition team was asking potential banking regulator and point appointees if, as president, he could eliminate or combine such agencies, including the FDIC. Trump's advisers are also considering overhauls of the office of the comptroller of the currency as well as the federal Reserve. Now you just need to get rid of the Federal Reserve. But, you know, Trump's gonna do what orange man's gonna do. Governments and large institutions can buy all the Bitcoin they want except for yours.
Aaron Von Werdum, which I think is going to be a warning, is writing for bitcoin magazine. A Twitter post by Anita Posh warning about the risks of governments and institutions buying up large amounts of bitcoin, I was talking about this earlier, went viral this week even if just because of the trollish community note that appeared underneath it. And I think the main concern here is that these big holders could influence the Bitcoin consensus rules to impose censorship. No. I'm going to say, Aaron, I know that you're smarter than I am, and I know that you are way well respected in the industry, but you are wrong. I'm sorry. You're just wrong. When it comes to censorship specifically, mining centralization is actually a more direct threat. That's why I have a bit ax, Aaron.
But if it's just miner censoring, it would only last for as long as the majority of miners is willing to keep doing it at the expense of forfeiting transaction fees. If and when the censorship stops, transactions would start confirming again as if nothing happened. If economic nodes were to enforce censorship as new protocol rules as well, however, it can indeed be considered a soft fork. And in this scenario, miners cannot revert from the censorship without splitting the blockchain between upgraded censoring and non upgraded nodes. That would constitute what's known as a hard fork.
Buyers and sellers of the 2 versions of bitcoin would then determine which blockchain is more valuable. This is why some bitcoiners are concerned about governments and other large institutions accumulating a significant share of the bitcoin supply. It's a reasonable concern and something to be aware of. But at the same time, and similar to my argument in this take, and he's got a link to a previous take, it's not obvious to me that governments or large institutions would be willing to risk it all by betting on a censorship fork of Bitcoin. But even more importantly, there isn't much we can do to stop governments or other institutions from buying Bitcoin anyway nor should there be. Yes, I agree. As that would itself represent a form of censorship.
Very much ironic. The best countermeasure in this regard was actually already proposed by Nicholas. Don't sell MicroStrategy your bitcoin. And that is actually a link to one of these bit Bitcoin Magazine takes that I read a few episodes back. So, I mean, he's right, but hold on. I wanna make sure about something here. I think the main concern here is that these big holders could influence the Bitcoin consensus rules to impose censorship. Aaron's right about everything else in this particular take, but that sentence, I I no. I don't think that that's a concern.
Sure, they could try. And but like he says further down, they'd end up with a hard fork and nobody alive today. And and we've got many so many more people that are younger than I am that truly truly understand what Bitcoin is none of us are going to run that software. You will see an explosion of nodes come online that will only fucking support the actual original Bitcoin protocol. And you'll say, but David, the government's going to spin up a whole shitload of their own nodes. That's fine. I don't fucking care. I don't I it's not going to matter. They will be on their fork and we will be on our fork and everything is gonna be fine. We've already proven this with SegWit 2x.
We've already been through this at least once. In some cases, some people think we may have been through this twice, but we've been through this once before at minimum at a huge scale. The New York letter or the New York agreement was signed by something like 15 heads of the largest crypto companies ever like Coinbase and Bitmain and a whole bunch of them. Right? And they tried to fork Bitcoin and we were having none of it. And we will defend the exact same way if this shit happens again. I just don't see the governments hoarding Bitcoin as a threat. The only potential threat that there is is purchasing power.
If all the governments of like, let's just say that to the 50 states all have their own strategic reserve and all the major cities and all those 50 states have their own strategic reserve and the federal government has their own strategic reserve and it ends up being 19,000,000 Bitcoin in total, which is the major well over the majority, like 90% of all the bitcoin actually, 95% of all the Bitcoin that is in circulation today. Right? If they they if they all coordinated to sell all of their bitcoin at the same time on all of the major exchanges, no bidding, no over the counter stuff, no auctioning, nothing like that, just straight up signaling to the market that you were selling 19,000,000 bitcoins all in the same hour, the price is going to crash below $10 a Bitcoin.
And there are going to be many of us out there that just buy the living fuck out of it. But that's the only thing that they have any and it's not even really control. It's like, what is, like, so I don't know. Some other word in the thesaurus for control, pick one other than control because they can't control Bitcoin. All they can do is influence its price by doing really stupid shit. So I am not concerned about governments hoarding Bitcoin. Okay. Core Lightning version 24.11, bolt 12, by default, XPay, gossip enhancements, and more has been released.
Core Lightning is a lightweight, highly customizable, and standard compliant implementation of the Lightning Network protocol. And we'll get into these updates here. What's new? X Pay is a new experimental payment plugin built on Askren for advanced routing. It has been completely rewritten on top of Askren, a plugin that provides advanced routing advice for payments. The 2 plugins work in tandem. Xpay communicates the outcomes of payment attempts to ar Askren. That's a hard name. Askren, a s k r e n e. Askren, allowing it to learn and optimize over time. Oh, that's interesting. Additionally, x pay remembers and retires successful payment paths, improving system reliability.
This is nice. The essential development was carried out by Lagrange 3 who, designed and refined the minimum cost flow solver that serves as the core of Askren. I've never heard anything about askreen and this is amazing. For reckless souls, xpay handle pay, which is I guess a variable, can be set to true even at runtime using set config to have xpay take over the simple variance of pay. Okay. Now to bolt 12. Bolt 12 send and receive are now default following their September inclusion in the bolt spec. Nice. Highlights for developers, we're not gonna get into that one because it's well above my pay grade. But highlights for the network, significant improvements to gossiping.
We try to stay connected to 10 nodes, picking random ones if we need to. Every hour we ask 1 peer for all of its gossip and we always send out our own gossip updates to up to 50 peers and this should help everyone stay up to date with what's happening in the network. And Connectd will connect faster on startup, maintaining up to 10 outgoing connection attempts in parallel, thus assuring quicker setup for new nodes and better network scalability. You know, when I first got my start 9, I really wanted to run core lightning instead of lnd because a lot of people were saying you've you've just gotta use c lightning.
And I ended up going with lnd because all the tools that I know how to use are lnd based. But that should not deter anybody listening to my voice who's interested in setting up a a Bitcoin full node, which you have to have before you set up a Bitcoin lightning node. And I highly recommend that you do that so you can learn how the system works so that you're not at the behest of somebody telling you how something works. You need to know it yourself. Please please please run a bitcoin full node and get a lightning node set up. Just just bite the bullet, learn how to do it. But it what I'm suggesting is that don't worry if you want to if if you want to use c the CLN or the core lightning stuff, I've heard that it's really good and honestly this, art screen stuff being for it being able to map out and remember good routes instead of having to try it all over again, it's like reinventing the wheel. It's this is what it sounds like to me.
Every payment I make over the lightning network, I gotta find a route. Now that's always been true. I gotta find a route from between my Lightning node or my Lightning wallet, let's say, and whoever it is that I'm paying because I may not be directly in connection with that third party. So the whole payment routes through the lightning network. And if there's too much routing involved, that payment will fail. But if I find a route and then I wanna pay that guy again, like, 4 weeks from now, that payment route has to be rediscovered. But if nothing changed in the route, why rediscover it? Why not just say, hey, here's a functional route and I'm gonna store this in your lightning wallet or your lightning node and we're gonna remember that so the next time you pay this dude, I'm gonna look at that shit first. And if it doesn't work, then then I'll find another route. See, this makes sense to me. And LND, as far as I know, doesn't do that. I may be wrong. If I am, please give me a boostagram and a 100,000,000 sats and I will, I will, eat crow on this.
Ashigaru version 1.1.0 has removed DNS dependencies and has UI improvements. And I've never heard of Ashiguru until the last couple of days. But it's a self custodial, open source, and secure mobile Bitcoin wallet that is private by design. It's been forked to and built upon the samurai wallet source code, and it's available only on android. The Ashigaru open source product project is pleased to announce the update of Ashiguru mobile to version 1.1.0. Thank you for those who have used the wallet and provided valuable feedback. After the team experienced continuous, did not distributed denial of service tax on this website last month, our focus has shifted to eliminating any need for users to connect to a clear net domain and ensuring that there is widespread redundancy available to for, Tor Onion services, which we can bring back online.
This allows us to operate in the future if necessary with a minimal server footprint and with as little impact to our users as possible. This means that the app can now update the PayNIM and Soroben Tor URLs without requiring an app update ensuring robust services. We have nicknamed this approach our Hanzaki strategy after the Japanese giant salamander who were believed to be able to survive even after being cut in half due to their regenerative powers added the project. So if you are using Ashigaru, they have an update and it's built on the old samurai wallet source code.
So this is going to be interesting to see if they can keep themselves out of hot water. Alright. So that is everything that I have to give you. I hope you have enjoyed the shows this week. I certainly enjoy giving them to you. Remember, this is a value for value supported podcast. It's the only way this is going to work. Please understand that we are watching the death of mainstream media, which means the death of the modern advertising protocols. It doesn't work anymore. And even if it did, even if it did and meant that I would still be able to say whatever the hell it is that I felt I needed to say and not get in trouble or not have my funding pulled because my advertiser got a whole ear load from a whole bunch of weird weirdos, It's still it's in flux. Everything is so in flux. Nobody nobody knows what the hell is going on. Right? Podcasting numbers are a black box. Oh, I've got so many downloads. Really? How do you know?
How does anybody know I could sit here and tell you that you know how well this show is doing by the number of downloads and even I don't believe it I'm like I'm looking at the downloads going fuck you I don't there's no way I can know if this is actually true right I mean besides what even is a download and the reason I bring it up is that that whole thing got axed by Apple Apple podcast decided to pull the plug on a particular feature and that feature was if you were subscribed to a podcast it would automatically download each new episode, even if you didn't ask for it.
Which meant, even if you didn't listen to that episode, that the artist or whoever released that that episode got credit for a download well Apple for 3 or 4 months ago decided to shit can that and now you actually have to go through and hit the download button for it to count as a download And that completely destroyed well, it didn't completely destroy. It really messed up the way advertisers were relating to the people that they were sponsoring because at this point they didn't know how much bang for the buck they were getting and all of this all of this really can be circumvented simply by going to the value for value model get a modern podcasting app something that allows you to boost me with satoshis and give me messages directly into the episode you can stream me satoshis you can have chapters I produce chapters there's artwork that changes sometimes on the podcast There's all manner. So I got transcripts, but none of this is available on on Apple Podcasts. None of it. They have like 0 or next to 0 podcasting 2.0 features. So get yourself a podcasting app that's modern up to date and allows you to interact directly with me, the person that's bringing you this because he loves to do it every single day. And instead of relying on some advertiser to give me money so that I can force it down your throat, you can just pay me directly and we can have a conversation amongst ourselves.
We can have the relationship between ourselves without anybody standing in the way. It's value for value. It's the only way that this shit works going forward. Remember that. Have a good weekend, and I'll 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.
Texas News and Meme Factory Experience
Carbon Capture Concerns in Texas
Value for Value Model in Podcasting
