Join me today for Episode 1060 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- The FAIR Act Can Protect Holders
- Metaplanet/Strategy Buy BTC
- 100% Bitcoin Backed Insurance Arrives
- "Tornado Cash is A-OKAY": U.S. Treasury
- Arizona Leads BTC Race
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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SoapMiner
Product: Rough Cut Tallow Soap
Website: https://soapminer.com/
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Twitter Profile: https://x.com/soapminer1
Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/politics/the-fair-act-would-protect-bitcoin-holders
https://decrypt.co/311328/metaplanet-brings-bitcoin-treasury-to-293-million-with-latest-buy
https://cointelegraph.com/news/microstrategy-surpasses-500k-bitcoin-holdings-sec-filing
- 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://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/03/24/former-bittrex-execs-raise-usd40-million-of-bitcoin-to-back-insurance-firm
https://atlas21.com/us-treasury-removes-tornado-cash-from-ofac-sanctioned-addresses/
https://bitcoinnews.com/adoption/arizona-5-bitcoin-bills-legal-tender/
https://lightning.news/breez-sdk-powering-bitcoin-payments/
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It is 09:29AM Pacific Daylight Time. God, I can't believe we're still doing this thing. It is the March 2025, and this is episode ten sixty of Bitcoin. And, I made somebody mad today when I gave a Toastmasters speech at the Toastmasters Club. Because I decided to do a persuasive speech about why you should buy Bitcoin. Except that I came at it from a different perspective. Instead of saying all the neat stuff about Bitcoin, I told them all the stuff that was wrong in the world that Bitcoin fixes, And I got a pretty severe reaction from one of the members. He was very not happy at all with what I was saying, which means that that was one of the most effective speeches that I've given. And I'm gonna give it to you, but not right now. We've got other things to do. We're gonna talk about the FAIR Act.
Meta Planet is in the news as is Michael Saylor. And then we're gonna go over we're gonna talk about some Bittrex stuff, and the US Treasury is in the news specifically about Tornado Cash, an interesting development. I don't know if it's gonna help the Tornado Cash guys. In my opinion, it should, but maybe there's other reasoning. Arizona Arizona legislature is advancing Bitcoin bills like nobody's business. It's like hand over fist over in Arizona. And then the Breeze SDK, the Breeze people have, released the names of all their cohorts for the first quarter of twenty twenty five, and there's some interesting people that are working with the Breeze software development kit. But first, ladies and gentlemen, Lowell Elites with the FAIR Act would protect Bitcoin holders.
This is out of Bitcoin Magazine. A few weeks ago, we briefly touched on how civil asset forfeiture may apply to Bitcoin, a process in which the government may seize citizens' assets without accusing the person of a crime. With the US government stating that civil asset forfeiture will form a key pillar in building its strategic Bitcoin reserve, the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act of 2023, also known as the FAIR Act, is arguably the most important bill introduced in Congress today to protect Bitcoin holders from extensive government overreach. Without it, many may see their Bitcoin seized and forfeited on behalf of the reserve with little to no recourse.
Civil asset forfeiture has long been argued to be in need of drastic reform. Across the country, states have become known to abuse the process to enrich their own law enforcement agencies, which may appropriate the funds collected. From police seizing a Vietnam Veteran's van for serving as a, quote, container for marijuana or attempting to appropriate a man's life savings over a seat belt violation, civil asset forfeiture is one of the gravest abuses of power in the country today according to the Institute of Justice. Civil asset forfeiture is particularly problematic as the process creates a financial incentive for law enforcement to forfeit citizens' property to the government without due process as stated by the ACLU.
Especially in light of Bitcoin scarcity and its consequent value appreciation over time, this financial incentive is not only exacerbated when civil asset forfeiture is applied, but to build the strategic Bitcoin reserve. To protect citizens from civil asset forfeiture abuse, the FAIR Act of 2023, which was introduced or reintroduced in 2024, cosponsored by Senator Lummis, among others, aims to revise the federal laws that govern the process to ensure that civil asset forfeiture proceedings follow due process as governed by the Fifth Amendment.
First, it does so by raising the evidentiary standard from preponderance of evidence, meaning that a party's claim is rather true than not, to clear and convincing evidence increasing the burden of proof the government must provide to enforce any forfeiture. With the FAIR Act, enforcing agencies have to establish that there was a sustained connection between the property and the offense as well as that the owner of any interest in the seized property used the property with intent to facilitate the offense or knowingly consented or was willfully blind to the use of the property by another in connection with their offense.
This forms the most important aspect of the act as it applies to Bitcoin. At the moment, the government could seize a person's legally acquired Bitcoin if the UTXO itself had, for example, previously been used in sanctions evasion or touched a dark net market, regardless of whether its owner was aware of the coin's history when obtaining it or not. By introducing active consent and willful blindness, the Fair Act prerequisites that the owner of the Bitcoin be forfeited to be forfeited was aware of the acquired BTC's origins for forfeiture to apply. The FAIR Act also requires the government to appoint a counsel to property owners who are financially unable to obtain representation or if the cost of obtaining representation would exceeds exceed the value of seized property, an issue that has arguably kept many from contesting the forfeiture of assets in the first place, as civil asset forfeiture effectively reverses the burden of proof.
At the moment, to get your property back, you need to prove the government wrong instead of the government having to make a case against you. Quote, civil asset forfeiture allows federal law enforcement to seize property of Americans who haven't even been charged with or convicted of a crime, said senator Booker, who introduced the bill together with senator Rand Paul. Quote, under this system, police can keep cash, cars, and even homes based on mere suspicion of a crime. These losses often become law enforcement's profit because the burden of the property owner to prove they should get their property back. The government should never have the power to seize a person's property without due process, yet under current civil asset forfeiture laws, Americans are being stripped of their property without ever being charged nor convicted of a crime.
The FAIR Act directly addresses these injustices and is a critical step toward restoring fairness and accountability, protecting property owners' rights, and curbing the weaponization of civil asset forfeiture laws once and for all, Rand Paul added to the statement. If you are rooting for the strategic Bitcoin reserve, the passing of the FAIR Act should be a prerequisite for its establishment to ensure that the government's Bitcoin stack is not built on the abuse of its powers. Alright. So that's that's the end of the article. Yeah. And I wholeheartedly agree with little elites here. We're gonna have but even if it wasn't for the Bitcoin strategic reserve, civil asset forfeiture has been going on for a long time, and it's become worse and worse and worse and worse to the point that you can't if you just got, like, $5,000 in cash and you're driving in your car and you get pulled over out for, like, I don't know, a taillight being out, It's very, very possible that you could lose that $5,000 forever simply because you can't explain why you have it. Why do you have this money, sir? Well, I just carry $5,000 with me all the time. Well, what for? What's its purpose? I don't know. In case I see something I wanna buy. Like, for instance, my stepfather used to carry a couple of thousand dollars on him at all times in cash in his wallet. Well, actually, in his in his billfold, he kept it in his front pocket. But he was a junkyard guy, so he was always figuring out that if he didn't have cash and somehow or another, he was somewhere where, God forbid, an auction on cars was going on, he wasn't going to have cash to actually participate in the auction. He this is how he thought because he would buy cars and he would sell parts off those cars because he had a junkyard. It was a salvage yard. Right? I mean, it was like that I mean, I know it's it's weird, but my stepfather was a salvage guy. But that's the way he operated his business.
And yet yet there were several occasions in which he could have been he could have had that cash lifted from him because saying, well, I'm I need it just in case I go I I find an automobile auction is not exactly something you can prove your intent to. You could very well be wanting to buy a bunch of marijuana and sell it to schoolchildren. Right? And that's the issue with civil asset forfeiture is that that shit's going on. If you've got a wad of cash, you can't expressly prove your intent for that cash, and nor should you have to. This is protected under the fifth amendment, and yet we are just allowing the bill of rights to be sandbagged left and right.
So Lowell Leads is absolutely correct. If any of us think that it's a good idea to have a Bitcoin strategic reserve at the federal level, then we need the Fair Act to actually pass and be signed into law because it fixes a lot of things even without the existence of Bitcoin. It fixes people losing their property for no good reason. Now on to Japan where Meta Planet has brought Bitcoin Treasury to February with their latest buy that they announced sometime this morning. This is Luke Edwards from Decrypt. Japanese Bitcoin Treasury company Meta Planet has just disclosed that it purchased yet more, Bitcoin, a hundred and 50 Bitcoin, in fact. And that brings the company's total Bitcoin holdings to 3,350.
And at the time of publishing, it means that the company holds just over $290,000,000 or in its local currency, that's 42,210,000,000.00 yen. The Bitcoin prices inched past $88,000 having gained 3.5% in the past day. Before this purchase, the company ranked as the tenth largest corporate holder of Bitcoin in the world. The Japanese BTC Treasury company whose motto is now, quote, secure the future with Bitcoin, end quote, also Lee also recently announced Eric Trump, son of the president, joining the board of directors, which I think is a terrible move. It's just not going to work out the way they think it is, but, hey, It is what it is. Is it and then they go way back into Trump. And that's really honestly, that's all we really need to know is that Meta Planet has continued to buy Bitcoin as has Michael Saylor who did his little thing on Twitter yesterday or last night where he said something that and posted a graph that shows all the times that strategy has actually bought Bitcoin, and that always means that he's going to announce on Monday morning that he bought more Bitcoin, and he did Zoltan Vardai, CoinTelegraph.
Michael Saylor's strategy has acquired over $500,000,000 worth of Bitcoin as institutional interest and exchange traded fund inflows make a comeback. Strategy acquired 6,911 Bitcoin for over $584,000,000 between March 17 and March 23 at an average price of $84,529 per coin according to a March 24 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Following the latest acquisition, the company now holds 506,137 Bitcoin, That's well over half a million. And they acquired it at an aggregate purchase price of roughly 33,700,000,000.0, an average purchase price of approximately $66,608 per coin inclusive of fees and expenses.
The milestone comes a day after strategy cofounder Michael Saylor hinted again at an impending Bitcoin investment after the company announced the pricing of its latest tranche of preferred stock on March. The preferred stock was sold at $85 per share and featured a 10% coupon. According to strategy, the offering should bring the company approximately $711,000,000 in revenue scheduled to settle tomorrow, March 2025. Strategy, the world's largest corporate Bitcoin holder, continues buying the dips despite wide spread investor fears of a premature bear market, strategy's latest investment comes amid global trade war fears, which analysts say could weigh on both traditional and digital asset markets at least through early April.
Despite a multitude of positive crypto specific developments, global tariff fears will continue to pressure the markets until at least April, according to Nikolai Sondergaard, a research analyst at Nansen. Quote, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with the tariffs from April 2 onward. Maybe we'll see some of them dropped, but it depends if all countries can agree. That's the biggest driver at this moment, the analyst said during Cointelegraph's chain reaction daily Twitter show on March. Risk assets may lack direction until the tariff related concerns are resolved, which may happen between April 2 and sometime in July, presenting a positive market cap catalyst, he added.
US president Donald Trump's reciprocal tariff rates are set to take effect on April, despite earlier comments from treasury secretary Scott Besant indicating a possible delay in their implementation. So who knows? Who knows what the hell is gonna happen? Nobody and I was tell I was talking to my sister about this the other night. Nobody knows what to do. Nobody knows what to do until we get some kind of, like, you know, real clear landscape ahead of us. It's hard to, you know, put your your automobile in gear and just haul ass across it because you don't know what's out there, And nobody else does either. There's there may be a handful of people in the world right now that actually knows what to do, where to where to to, put their cash, you know, how to convert their cash into some other asset.
Most people don't, and that's why you're seeing a whole bunch of people just fly to cash. You when in doubt, cash up, brother. That that's pretty much what it's always been. So there's only a very few people that actually know how to how to navigate what the hell's going on here, and it's gonna be people like George Soros's son. I'm not sure if George Soros himself actually has the competency anymore because he really is very, very old. But it's people like that, and there's only really a handful of those guys that really know what the hell they're doing. Even if they are evil as AF, doesn't matter, they do know what they're doing.
Okay. And here's somebody else who knows what they're doing, and SoapMiner is in the circle p. The circle p is open for business. If you want soap, if you want it handmade, if you want it made out of tallow, which is beef fat. That's right. Beef fat. You're maybe asking, why the hell would you make soap with fat? Because that's the way you make soap. Any any soap that you've ever used has a fatty acid base. That's the way soap works. But what I like about SoapMiner is that he's got, like, all of four ingredients. He's got fat.
He's got, like, a a you know, like like lye, and, like, I think there's water. And then if if it's a fragrant, like, like this peppermint tallow pack, pack of two five ounces, five two five ounce bars for $21, then it's gonna have, like, the ingredient of fragrance, you know. But this is like just looking at the ingredient list itself. It just looks very, very clean. And I'm looking at the pictures and these are very nice looking bars of soap like you'd find in like a craft store. So if you want to get some soap and support your fellow pleb, please support Soap Miner by buying his soap. Again, like, I'm on the website right now, which is soapminer.com.
That is soapminer.com. We're talking about soap that you clean yourself with, and if you can't spell it after that, I don't know what to do for you. Soapminer.com, you can get, like, peppermint tallow pack of two, five ounce bars for $21. There's rough cut tallow packs of three, which or three, three four to four and four and a half ounce bars for $21. You can get a rustic tallow pack of two five ounce bars for $21. You've got all kinds of soap. There's pine tar soap, there's lavender soap, There's all kind let's see. It was the rustic tallow, and then there's peppermint. And he sold out of he's actually sold out of the, oh, tea tree tallow soap and the lavender tallow soap. Both of those are actually sold out. So if you want to buy for Bitcoin and you're not in the circle p if you don't accept Bitcoin for your goods and services, go over to soapminer.com and just purchase or or or put something in your cart and then go over to your cart where you can check out. That's where you'll see that you can have it generate a Zaprite invoice and you can pay with Bitcoin down at the bottom of the checkout screen. There's a huge button that says or actually it's not the button, it's just a little, you know, it's a it's a big old logo here. It says Bitcoin accepted here.
He does take Bitcoin for his goods and services. Soap miner, I appreciate it. Soap miner said he's gonna send me a couple of samples of bars, and I cannot wait to get those because then I'll be able to say that I've actually used them. But in the order, if you decide to order soap because you heard it here on the circle p, I need you to tell SoapMiner that you heard it here on the circle p. That helps him figure out whether or not the sale was worth cutting me a few Satoshis, and at the very bottom on the left hand side of the checkout screen, you can you can write into notes. There's a the last box is order notes, and it's optional, but if you want to say something to SoapMiner, this is where you would put it. Right? It's right underneath your zip code, which is part of your shipping, information.
So in that, that's where you tell SoapMiner that you heard it here on the circle p. Please do so. Give a pleb a hand up. Now I pissed that dude straight off today when I was given a five to seven minute speech about Bitcoin and why buy Bitcoin. Now we talk about this all the time clearly, and it's been sort of back in, vogue to talk about how we kinda stop trying to orange pill regular people because it's just so it's so very, very difficult. And so I wanted to give this persuasive speech that comes at why you should buy Bitcoin from a different angle. So here's here's essentially what it was that I said today.
I'm gonna give you the top five reasons to buy Bitcoin. Now I could tell you all about Bitcoin's decentralization, but, honestly, most people, especially regular people, they don't really know what that means, and that's a problem. I could tell somebody about the self custodial aspects of Bitcoin where you hold it yourself, and nobody is an intermediary for you. And guess what? Most normie people don't care. They don't it's not even that they don't know what that means. They they don't even want to examine what self custody actually means because they don't care. They're they're busy putting food on their table. They're busy going to the fiat mines, and they're busy trying to figure out what the hell they're gonna do with the rest of their life.
I could tell them all about the 21,000,000 Bitcoin cap. Most people have no idea that 1 Bitcoin is composed of a hundred thousand or a hundred million Satoshis. So they're not really going to understand what a 21,000,000 cap means. And if you try to do all these things, you're going to set in a massive amount of confusion and then their eyes glaze over. Hell, I could even tell them something interesting like the history of great Americans that have talked about what money should actually be backed by. Should it be backed by gold, silver? Should it be backed by oil? There were three people, Henry Ford, Buckminster Fuller, and Nikola Tesla, and all of them were contemporaries of each other, which meant that they were roughly all alive at pretty much the same time.
And they all said pretty much the same thing about what they thought money should be at roughly the very early part of the nineteen hundreds, like nineteen o one, '19 '10, things like that. They said all three of them said that the only money that is going to be worth anything should be backed by energy. Ford said it. Buckminster Fuller said it. Tesla said it. And these aren't exactly slouches. Each one of these three people changed the face of industry, the face of architecture, the face of invention. And all of them separately said the exact same thing about what should actually back money, but guess what? Telling a normie that, they're not gonna care.
They don't give a shit. They've never met Nikola Tesla. And they sure probably haven't even heard of Buckminster Fuller except in passing. They know who the hell Henry Ford is, but he's been dead a long time. They don't care. Or or or I I I could, if you wanted to, we could talk about how the code of Bitcoin is protected free speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution. Where did that happen? Well, that was a little court case for called Bernstein versus the United States, and it was settled in the ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Northern California is essentially where that court case happened. And that's where the RSA encryption software was deemed protected free speech by the United States government ninth circuit court of appeals. It's never been taken to the Supreme Court, not yet anyway.
One of these days, it might. But for right now, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the highest authority in the land that has told us that writing software is protected under the First Amendment. I could tell them that. They don't even know what the First Amendment is. They say they do. They say it's free speech, but they'll be the first one to say, oh, but you you hurt my little my little ears with with saying something about orange man that was, like, some somehow kind of nice. And therefore, I hate you and I hate the first amendment because you shouldn't be allowed to say that. See where I'm going with all this? This is in my opinion, this is not the way to get people to buy Bitcoin because first and foremost, after all of that, what they don't really understand is how bad the economy structure is, how bad the money is, how we've eviscerated it, and then taken its empty shell and broken what's left of its back upon the rocks of indignity.
So here are the top five real reasons to buy Bitcoin. 19 70 1, the gold window was closed by Richard Milhouse Nixon. So in very early August of nineteen seventy one, a French warship floated into New York Harbor and set anchor. And they were there for one reason and one reason only. They were concerned about the gold that The United States held that was owned by France that was sent over at the early days of World War two to get it away from Hitler in case he decided to empty out all the gold, they sent it to New York to be held in a bank.
Well, they just kept it there because of various reasons, but then we started mucking around in Vietnam, and we had already had a pretty bad showing in Korea. And at this point, the French get nervous. They want their gold back. So they send a military ship, not a cruise liner for, you know, passengers, a military ship. That was a statement. We want our gold. We want it now. They were nervous as nervous can be. It took them a long time to get their gold, but three days or four or somewhere around there, let's just call it a handful of days later, is when Nixon sat down in front of the television cameras and told the United States citizenry that he was temporarily closing the gold window.
And the gold window was the the facility, though, that allowed nation states to be able to take their US dollars and remit them and get gold in the hard metal back. And that was done. Temporarily has now lasted fifty four years. Does that make you feel good? How about number four on my list of the top five reasons to buy Bitcoin, which is fractional reserve banking? There was a time when you took cold hard cash to the bank and you handed it over and put it in your savings account and they kept that cash, and there was a time when they actually made loans against the cash that they actually kept. But that's not the way it's done anymore.
We have something called fractional reserve banking, which means that the bank only has to keep a fraction a fraction of the cash on hand in case all the depositors come back and want their their money. They figure in 1980, they figured it was only gonna be, you know, one out of 10 people are gonna want all their cash. So they only kept 10% of what it is that they had on their books as far as they called deposits. And for a long time, that worked. But in February, in the year February, that was dropped to 3%. No longer was it 10 was it one in 10, it was now three people in a hundred would be able to be made whole on their deposits because the bank was now only having to hold 3 pennies on every dollar deposited in their account in case they needed to, you know depositors came in and said, hey, man. I want my money.
In 2025, that number has dropped to zero. The banks and financial institutions in The United States are no longer required to have any reserve cash on hand as a fraction of what their deposits they say is on their books. Does that does that does that help you? Is that good? Well, what what about money creation? Number three on my top five reasons to buy Bitcoin is the fact that home, business, and auto loans all create brand spanking new money. It's not the not the fed that we're we're not even talking about the Federal Reserve yet. No. This is just retail. At the retail level, if you get a home loan, you create cash or the bank actually creates it in, you know, for you, and and that's, you know, how they do it. And same with an auto loan.
Right? Now, technically, when you pay off the mortgage on your house, the new money, quote, unquote, the new money no longer exists. It's technically extinguished. However, that money hangs out for thirty years because most people get a thirty year mortgage in The United States. So that means that you're dealing with the effects of the inflation produced by the new money that was produced when you decided to buy a house for thirty years. How about a car loan? That's five and a half years on average, sixty four months or something like that. And so that's new money, and it hangs around for five and a half years. How about a business loan? Well, on average, your business loan lasts about ten years.
So for ten years, you're you know, people are dealing with the effects of the inflation caused by the creation of the money for that business loan because the bank just pressed a button. That's how easy it is to make money in The United States. But then we do finally get to the Federal Reserve themselves in cahoots with the Treasury market or not Treasury. Well, actually, the Treasury market, but the Treasury Department. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department in cahoots to print money and make money printer go brrr. So first, the Treasury does not print money.
What they do print are debt instruments like Treasury bonds and Treasury bills. Now on the open market, people will decide that they want to purchase that debt. It is a debt instrument. People are just banking on the fact that The United States is gonna be able to service the debt, and what they're actually doing is they're kind of loaning the The United States money when they purchase bonds. When you purchase a t bill or a a treasury bond, you're actually saying, yeah, I mean, I trust you. I'll back you. And but I want my percentage rate, and that's the coupon rate that you get with the treasury bond. Right now, it's between 4.254.5%. However, there's a lot of times when the auction or the sale of said treasury bonds and treasury bills don't don't actually sell all the, debt instrumentation that The United States really wanted. They wanted to be able to get more money. So what happens then?
Well, say hello to your friends at the Federal Reserve, which is about as federal as Federal Express. They turn the money printer on, money printer go brrr. They take the money that they printed, and they buy the debt from the United States Treasury, effectively producing brand new money that goes into the economy. And all of this has the effect on something called the m two money supply. That is number one on my top five reasons to buy Bitcoin. In August of nineteen seventy one, the very same month and the very same year that Nixon took us off the gold standard, the amount of money in circulation of US dollars and this savings account, that's your checking account, that is anything that is easily convertible into US dollars, which would be like treasury bonds and treasury bills.
It doesn't really include stuff like housing because housing is not really all that liquefiable or at least not easily. So we're m two is concerned with either straight up liquid cash or something that is so close to being liquid cash like treasury bonds and bills that it might as well be cash. That's that's the m two money supply. And in US dollar terms, we had $685,000,000,000 in the same month, in the same year that Nixon closed the gold window. And fifty three years later in August of twenty twenty four, the amount of dollars is now $21,000,000,000,000 according to the Fred, which is like, the was it a St. Louis Federal Reserve keeps that that's the Fred.
They keep these numbers. They're the ones that that that put together how much money is actually in circulation. That's that's one of the jobs that they do. That's a 30 x increase. From 1971 to 2024, '50 '3 years, they increased the amount of money 30 times. 30 times, not 30%. No. 30 times. When we get to the number of anywhere between 3040%, now that number I reserve for the amount of money in the m two that was increased from the time COVID started. So we're talking three or four years. In three or four years, they added anywhere between 3040% of the amount of money that's ever been in circulation in the short span of three years, or we'll say four.
It it it they have no guardrails. There's no guidelines. There's no stopping this train. It's it's like an 18 wheeler that's screaming down a hill, and they've lost their brakes. This is why you buy Bitcoin. Not to mention, and we did just talk about civil asset forfeiture, did you know that the European Union is going to redirect, quote, unquote, redirect €10,000,000,000,000 of, quote, unused savings. That's the savings of their citizens. They're not not talking about the citizens of the or the, bank accounts and savings of businesses. They're talking about the citizenry. Although I'm sure small businesses are included in this. There's not gonna be any way that the citizens can just say, no. You can't have my money. They're just going to take it. They're going to redirect it into strategic investments.
And by calling it unused savings, they're basically putting a label on it that says, this is this is terrible money. You're a bad steward of your money. You're a bad steward, and we're going to take over, but we're doing it in your name. Bitcoin fixes not only that, but everything above that. From five through four, three, two, down to one, it fixes all of the problems. It fixes m two money supply. It fixes money printer go brrr. It fixes home business and auto loans creating money out of thin air. It fixes fractional reserve banking, and it basically gives the finger to 08/15/1971 when Nixon closed the gold window.
If you wanna learn more about Bitcoin, go to learnmeabitcoin.com. That's learnmeabitcoin.com. And if you don't know what Bitcoin is, that's the place to actually start if and only if what I've told you here today scares the piss out of you. It should. Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities and breaking. A Tesla showroom in Texas has been targeted with an incendiary device according to police. I have no idea about the rest of the news on that. That's just a a breaking, a little red banner across CNBC.com's website where we're getting the price of oil as being up in the green 1.19% to $69.09 a barrel. Brent Norsey is up 1.14% to $72.98.
Natural gas swing in the other direction as usual, point 78% to the downside at $3.94 per thousand cubic feet. Gasoline is up a quarter of a point to $2.20 a gallon. All of your shiny metal rocks are not making Peter Schiff very happy today. Gold is down one fifth of a point to $3,015, so it's still over $3,000. I guess Peter should still be happy, man. Silver is down point 05%. Platinum is down one and a third. Copper's down a half as is palladium. Ag, what do we got? Biggest winner looks to be chocolate, 3.94% to the upside. Biggest loser is sugar, two and a quarter to the downside. I got live cattle moving sideways, however, but lean hogs are down point six. Feeder cattle moving sideways as well.
Indices seem to be very, very happy today, so I guess it means that Trump did not say the word tariff and somebody may have said tariff delay. That may have been Scott Bessen. Who knows? Because the Dow is up 1.12. S and P is up one and a half. Nasdaq, wow, 1.8, and holy shit, the S and P Mini is up over 2%. Bitchin', dude. And we've got a bump on Bitcoin. 80 8 thousand 1 hundred 50 bucks per coin gives us a $1,750,000,000,000 market cap. We can buy 29.3 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,841,188.44 of.
And average fees per block are low, 0.04 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. It looks that there's about 36 blocks carrying 35,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 6 satoshis per vbyte, low priority is gonna get you in at four satoshis per vbyte. Hash rate has exploded yet one more time. We are well above 800, 827.7 exahashes per second at this time gives us plenty of security on the Bitcoin network and from women in Bitcoin, which was Friday's show. I got Psyduck with a thousand sats says Axelrod.
Psyduck with a 570 says Psyduck. Pies with four twenty says thank you sir. Hashtag forty h p w. Yodel with 300 says Psyduck. Perma nerd with two thirty four says, much love back, David. I appreciate that, brother. Let's see. Is there anything else? Nope. That's it. That's the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news. You can use former Bittrex executives raise $40,000,000 in Bitcoin to back a Barbados licensed insurance firm. I've talked to you before about insurance and Bitcoin and how it's gonna be a much bigger deal than people give it credit for. I like to say that I am correct. This is from CoinDesk, and it's written by Ian Allison.
Tabit Insurance, a Barbados regulated insurance company established by former executives from the now shuttered cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex, said that it raised $40,000,000 of a reserve composed entirely of Bitcoin with which to write traditional insurance and reinsurance business. The insurance company, which emerged in January of this year with plans to offer Bitcoin backed liability policies for company directors and officers, claims to be the first regulated risk carrier to rely on Bitcoin only reserve to write traditional policies priced in United States dollars. The firm has a class two insurance license from the bar Barbados Financial Services Commission.
The crossover between crypto and insurance usually involves shoehorning existing risk categories for loss and theft into converging hot and cold versions of digital asset custody. Tabat's approach is interesting because it explores ways that firms and individuals can capitalize on their Bitcoin holdings without getting involved in trading or incurring significant counterparty risk. Tabat cofounder and CEO Stephen Stonberg said Bitcoin holders are invited to contribute assets to the firm's system of segregated reserve cells, which is managed using non custodial tech from Fireblocks to earn yields of around, oh, God, 10%.
A good analogy from the world of insurance is the way accredited investors known as names, and it actually says names in quotes, deploy assets into insurance syndicates at the Lloyd's of London insurance market. Quote, for a technology like crypto, you may need a new underwriter, but the way the insurance is done is fundamentally the same as before, Stoneberg said in an interview. We are holding our regulatory capital in Bitcoin and I think bringing in a new capital source to the insurance industry and innovating with the balance sheet is an opportunity that other people weren't really looking at.
Now that's the end of the article, and even I I mean, I'm kinda still confused about how Bitcoin gets used in insurance. I mean I get it but I'm pretty sure that there's an entire section about this and the logic behind it that I'm missing and shit that's okay you can't keep up with everything. You can't pretend like you know it all. That's just that's just bad form. But there's you know what it is that's bugging me about this, don't you? Yep. Yields. Earn yields of around 10%. First question to ask is, where does the yield come from?
And I'm I'm not saying that because I'm automatically calling bullshit on tablet. They may be completely above board. It may be a great idea, and maybe it's going to not go down in flames like BlockFi and and and FTX and Alameda Research and like all the the gang of thieves that we saw go down in 2021, '20 '20 '2. Maybe. Hopefully. I mean, I I hope I wish them all the best. And I also think it's important for us to understand that insurance and reinsurance is going to be massive when it comes to using Bitcoin, and this is a section or a sector that I really want to learn about more. I just got to find the time to dig through it. So if any of you guys out there that know a hell of a lot more about insurance and reinsurance and why Bitcoin should be part of that and why yields are okay to talk about when it comes to this, please, please, please let me know.
Get a hold of me on Noster, and get a hold of me on Twitter. It's David Bennett n b for David Bennett none you bidness. And, I mean, if you wanna get over, you know, hold of me over there on Twitter, you're that's more than welcome. I prefer it on Nasr. Somebody out there knows a shit ton more about insurance and reinsurance than I do. I guarantee it, but we are moving on to the United States Treasury removing tornado cash from the OFAC sanctions address list. Interesting. Atlas twenty one, the United States Department of Treasury has officially removed economic sanctions against tornado cash as communicated on March 21 in a statement.
The decision represents a change in direction in the American government's position towards the cryptocurrency mixing service originally sanctioned for alleged links to illicit activities. But despite lifting the sanctions, American authorities have emphasized continued concern regarding state sponsored hacking activities, particularly those originating from your friends in North Korea. According to the statement, the Treasury remains determined to use its powers to counter malicious cyber actors who exploit digital assets and their ecosystems for illicit profits, with particular attention to the regime's ability to fund its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. Yeah. They're always two weeks away from having a, you know, nuclear bomb, aren't they?
Well, Treasury secretary Scott Bessent stated, quote, digital assets offer enormous opportunities for innovation and value creation for the American people. Protecting the digital asset industry from abuse by North Korea and other illicit actors is essential to establishing The United States leadership and ensure that American citizens can benefit from financial innovation and inclusion. Put a tie on that suit speed, brother. The removal from the blacklist follows a 11/06/2024 ruling by the United States fifth circuit court of appeals, which determined that OFAC exceeded its authority in sanctioning Tornado Cash's immutable smart contracts.
According to the court, such smart contracts cannot be considered property under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. And here it is. Despite the platform's removal from the blacklist, Tornado Cash founders Roman Storm and Roman Semenov continue to face legal issues. When's the case gonna be dropped? There's clearly not a problem with Tornado Cash. United States Department of Treasury basically just said it's okay. Yet the judge hasn't said, you know what? We're there's no basis for this case anymore. It looks to me like unless we raise a huge fuss, and hopefully the Bitcoin Policy Institute guys might, you know, jump in on this, Roman Storm and Roman Seminar are gonna go ahead and and be charged under the original charges and and face face the, how do I face prison, face having their lives taken away from them or at least a good number of years of their lives taken away from them, and yet it's okay.
The the very thing that they're being accused of, you know, the the the tornado cash thing, it it's fine. It it's not sanctioned anymore. United States Treasury basically just said okay, and we're still here. We gotta ask ourselves why. Well, let's fly on over to the Sunshine State, Arizona, where the Arizona legislature has advanced not one, not two, not three, not four, but five Bitcoin bills, including one about legal tender. This is out of Bitcoin news written by Guy Malone. With varying Bitcoin reserve bills being introduced in '24 US states according to BNN Bloomberg, such measures were approved in both the Arizona House and Senate this week along with three more bitcoin and cryptocurrency related bills.
The state of Arizona passed senate bill ten twenty five on a five to two vote as previously reported by Bitcoin News, permitting up to 10% of government and public funds capital to be invested in Bitcoin and other digital assets. The Arizona House of Representatives also voted 17 to 12 to move forward senate bill thirteen seventy three, which doesn't make sense because it should be a house bill, but maybe it's a typo, maybe not. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Whatever it was was sponsored by senator Mark Finchem, which similarly proposed both purchases of digital assets and also limit the amount which can be invested. The Digital Watch reported on Thursday, quote, SB thirteen seventy three includes risk management provisions such as limiting the treasurer's ability to invest more than 10% of the fund in any single year.
Most proposed bills this session across The United States were specific to strategic reserve bills such as moved ahead recently in Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah failing in more states than passing, including Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming as my However, Arizona lawmakers seem to be leading the states with their bitcoin approach by moving forward with more nuanced proactive cryptocurrency adoption bills. Senate bill eleven twenty eight, the cryptocurrency payment authorization bill, according to the Duane Morris governor or government strategies, quote, aims to modernize the state's payment system by allowing state agencies to accept cryptocurrencies for various obligations such as fines, taxes, fees, and penalties.
SB ten sixty two, the Bitcoin as legal tender bill, states that it will define legal tender to include cryptocurrency and applies the definition to all Arizona revised statutes. Statutes defines legal tender as a medium of exchange, including specie, that is authorized by the United States Constitution or US Congress to pay debts, public charges, taxes, and dues, the bill's text continued. While the topic of whether capital gains tax liabilities on Bitcoin will ever be removed at the federal level remains moot for now, the proposed Arizona legislation states, quote, any gains or losses derived from the exchange of one kind of legal tender for another is exempt from individual and corporate state income tax. So they were they're wanting to remove capital gains from the state version of income tax. There's only, like, three or four states that do not have income tax. Washington state and Texas, I know for a fact don't have, state income tax.
There's at least a couple more. But the vast majority of the states in The United States, you pay both federal tax as well as state tax. I never wanna live in one of those states. Anyway, the last bill, this is house bill twenty three eighty seven, brings Bitcoin ATMs into the spotlight. The regulation of Bitcoin ATMs bill is targeted to protect Arizona residents from cryptocurrency related scams, law enforcement agencies, and AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons, have both been supportive of this bill reporting that many elderly people in the state have lost money to criminal activity. House bill twenty three eighty seven seeks a $2,000 limit on how much cash an individual can place into a Bitcoin ATM per day.
And I think no. No. We said a little bit more. One Arizona victim lost $28,000, which she had put into the machines and sent the Bitcoin away. Originally targeting a $1,000 cap, the bill also requires operators to make sure users specifically acknowledge the fees they're being charged, some of which are up to 20%. That's, dude, that's usury territory. If you wanna know what usury is, read the old testament. The Jews had it defined pretty clearly. The state of New Jersey has, in fact, introduced two identical bills, s three six nine four and a four eight eight zero to ban all Bitcoin ATMs in that state, and that's again is in New Jersey, not Arizona. They're just giving some other context.
While none of the bills Arizona is considering have been fully enacted into law yet, all of them have cleared their committees, their floor votes, and all five Bitcoin related bills have moved forward successfully that they're now awaiting final house or senate votes or straight up governor approval. So Arizona coming from behind of all these states Right now, it looks to me like Arizona's taken the lead in the race to be the first to not woodshed themselves. And finally, the Breeze SDK powering Bitcoin payments across industries Meet the first quarter twenty twenty five cohort.
This is out of lightning.news written by KuBye. Breeze, the leading provider of Bitcoin Lightning Network Infrastructure Software Development Kit, today announced its partner cohort showcasing 10 innovative companies leveraging its infrastructure to redefine payments in artificial intelligence, decentralized finance, social media, and beyond. These integrations underscore lightning's rapid expansion from niche technology to global financial backbone, enabling instant, low cost Bitcoin transactions for millions of users. First one on the list is something called AssetFi.
The innovation? It enables peer to peer loans using Bitcoin as collateral bypassing traditional banks. Number two. CalBolt They combine encrypted team messaging with lightning payments for seamless cost sharing and rewards. Dex trade is number three. They facilitate trustless atomic swaps across blockchains using lightning for instant settlements. Flash offers self custodial bitcoin slash USDT payment tools for merchants with offline lightning support launching in the second quarter of this year. Lightning Pay is a New Zealand based wallet driving bitcoin adoption in Oceania processing 1,000,000,000 sats monthly.
Open Agents is a decentralized AI service with a voice driven assistant called Onyx and Bitcoin powered payment marketplace. Satoshi App bridges fiat and Bitcoin with custodial USD accounts and self custodial lightning slash liquid wallets. Shakesco is a multifunctional platform for recurring payments, team payouts, and private Bitcoin slash shitcoin number one transactions. Tidebinder, provides scalable Bitcoin wallets for SMBs, banks, and fintechs tailored to diverse business needs. Then finally, number 10, Zap Zap. The tipping app on Twitter where 69 of the tips are humor driven, 69 or four twenty sats. Not exactly sure what the hell that means, but hey, Zap Zap, you go on. So why the Breeze software development kit? Plug and play API, multi chain flexibility, regulatory tools, you know, it it it they and and Breeze has been around for a long time. In fact, they're one of the first ones on the scene that had a lightning software development kit. I I mean, it's they've been around for a long long time. This SDK is pretty much used all over the place.
It's been tested and tested and revamped and tested and bugs have been worked out for years at this point. So if you're a developer and you're wanting to find something that you can just plug and play with, go look at the Breeze SDK. Breeze is spelled b r e e z. That's b r e e z. And that's the last thing on the list for today's show. Do hope you enjoyed being here with me today. I always enjoy being here with you, and I'll see you on the other side.
[00:57:51] Unknown:
This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Toastmasters Speech
Top 5 Reasons to Buy Bitcoin
Market Updates and Economic Commentary