Join me today for Episode 2012 of Bitcoin And . . . is LIVE!
Topics for today:
- Happy New Year!
- Justin Steps Out
- MSTR Buys More and More and More
- MARA is Now a BTC Lender
- Ethiopia Makes 18% of Revenue Form Bitcoin Mining
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/michael-saylors-trump-meeting-is-turbo-bullish-for-bitcoin
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/01/06/polymarket-bettors-are-confident-justin-trudeau-will-resign-by-friday
https://cointelegraph.com/news/mining-company-mara-lent-7-377-btc-third-parties-2024
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Good morning. It is 9:53 AM on this, the 6th day of January 2025. This is episode 10 12 of Bitcoin and MicroStrategy's back in the news. What else we got here? We got, oh, Michael Saylor met Trump. We'll probably talk about that. And, if you're wondering, if you're wondering, you'll notice that this is not my normal intro. I'm just figuring I'd shake it out, shake it up for the new year. Let's see how it goes. I've been always wanting to rerecord that, intro stuff for this particular, podcast, and I just don't ever really get around to it. So I figured I'd just start talking, say good morning, do all the things.
We'll do all the things I promised. It was a good it was a good Christmas break. And I have to make an apology, I I took I did take my, mobile recording rig. But, as you might imagine, Southwest Colorado is a bit frigid. It's a bit cold. And while I was able to do some of, some remote episodes of Bitcoin and during last summer when I went up there, that was because the room that I was using, which is uncooled and unheated, was relatively, you know, it was it was kind of kinda warm. It was warm enough. Right? Because I would do it in the morning, it was nice and cool, but it wasn't so frigid that it was, you know, making my teeth chatter.
Now, as opposed to what I what I was met with this winter. And it's not like it took me by surprise. I knew I was gonna have to do something, and what I had planned to do was get one of these little portable heaters, you know, little room heater, oil filled, radiator electric type heater, and it just couldn't cut it. It just couldn't do it, man. I mean, I left that thing on, like, I don't know, man, like the whole night. And I walked in the next morning just to see, you know, hey, are we gonna be able to do this? And the answer was no. No. You're not going to do this. This is going to be a crappy show if you try to do this. Please don't do this. So I just decided to take a break, hang out with the fam, do Christmas. It was wonderful.
It was quite eventful. I won't get into it. But, you know, I mean, you're hanging out with family for a couple of weeks. Events are going to happen. So, I am human, I am not immune to family stuff, during Christmas. Now, is there anything that I need to tell you before we get into the very first show of Bitcoin and's 2025 season? Oh, yes. I ended up number 9 on the fountain charts. If you don't know what fountain is, it is my daily driver podcast app on iOS and I do believe it's on Google Play Store as well. If you are using an old app, like an old podcasting app, like the ancient technology stuff, you really need to stop doing that. You really need to get a podcasting 2.0 enabled podcasting app so that you can support directly your favorite podcasters, and in the case of Fountain, your favorite artists. Because there's lots of music on Fountain as well. And these guys are coming out of essentially what is the American slave trade when it comes to the music industry. So I would hope that you would figure out that at this point, podcasting 2.0 is the way to go. Value for value is part of that entire ecosystem, and they work together beautifully.
Please consider getting a modern podcasting app. I use fountain and I did end up in the top ten for 2024 of best podcasts on fountain, and I am very very appreciative for all of you that did that because as I will always say, I did not do that. I didn't put myself into the top ten. There's no way that I can. Only you can prevent forest fire I mean, only you can put me in the top ten, and I hope I get there again this year. Now, we're gonna do the same format for the for the podcast at least at least for a few, you know, a few weeks. I want to change things, but you never really if it ain't broke, you kinda don't fix it. But that doesn't mean that I can't make it better, and I wanna try to do that. But for now, we're just going to plunge in to the relative news about Bitcoin. And we're gonna start with the block, this one written by James Hunt.
MicroStrategy buys yet another 1,070 Bitcoin for $101,000,000 bringing its holdings to 447,470 Bitcoin. As if there's just going to be Bitcoin for everyone. Not with these guys. These guys are buying all the Bitcoin. If you don't have any Bitcoin at this point, you might consider getting some, you know, in case it takes off. Business intelligence firm and corporate Bitcoin holder, MicroStrategy has acquired an additional 10 70 Bitcoin for approximately $101,000,000 at an average price of $94,004 per Bitcoin between the dates of December 30th December 31st according to a 8 k filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. It follows the sale of a further 319,500 MicroStrategy shares during the same period for the same amount.
As of January 5th, the company said that approximately 6.7 $7,000,000,000 worth of shares remained available for sale as part of its planned $21,000,000,000 equity offering and its $21,000,000,000 in fixed income securities capital raise, targeting targeting a total of $42,000,000,000 for further Bitcoin acquisitions. Last week, the company expanded that 21/21 plan, announcing a potential $2,000,000,000 preferred stock offering. The company now holds almost 500,000 BTC worth over $44,000,000,000 Then MicroStrategy's total holdings were brought to an average price of $62,503 per Bitcoin, a total cost of around 27,970,000,000 including fees and expenses, according to the company's cofounder and executive chairman, Michael Saylor, who celebrated Bitcoin's recent $100,000 milestone at a party in his Miami home on New Year's Eve.
To put that in perspective, MicroStrategy now holds around 2.1 percent of Bitcoin's total 21,000,000 unit supply. MicroStrategy's latest announcement is now the 9th week in a row following news last Monday that it had acquired another 2,138 BTC for roughly 209,000,000 in cash at an average estimated price of $97,837 per coin according or including fees and expenses and $561,000,000 worth of bitcoin the week before. The dude just won't stop buying bitcoin. MicroStrategy has now acquired more than $18,000,000,000 worth of bitcoin over the past 9 weeks alone, with its $83,000,000,000 market cap trading at a significant premium to its bitcoin net asset value.
Many investors have reservations about MicroStrategy's premium to NAV, NAV, valuation, and its equity and debt funded Bitcoin acquisition program in general. Analysts at research and brokerage firm, Bernstein, expect continued growth in corporate treasury adoption in 2025, anticipating inflows of more than $50,000,000,000 compared to $24,000,000,000 last year. Now MicroStrategy, which accounted for around 90% of all corporate purchases in 2024, is again likely to lead demand according to the analyst, followed by bitcoin miners scaling up their capital plans and small to mid cap corporates looking to emulate Michael Saylor's model. Quote, given MicroStrategy's 4 year track record and its rising profile, including its inclusion in the Nasdaq 100, we expect capital markets flywheel to further accelerate, Bernstein digital asset lead Gautam Chugani wrote in a note to clients on Monday.
MicroStrategy uses a key performance indicator it calls the Bitcoin yield to measure the percentage change in its Bitcoin holdings relative to its diluted shares. The firm's 2024 Bitcoin yield was 74.3%, reflecting significant growth in holdings while balancing share dilution amid the company's strategy of acquiring Bitcoin efficiently to benefit shareholders. MicroStrategy shares closed up 13.2% at $339.66 on Friday, having gained more than 431% over the past year according to trading view. The stock is currently up 3.7% in pre market trading today, Monday. Okay. So there's there's the the the inevitable Michael Sailor news, and I understand that everybody's, you know well, not everybody.
It's mixed reactions. Some people love Michael Sailor Sailor. Some people are really starting to hate the guy for various reasons. One of the things that I'm I'm seeing sentiment on Nostr this morning, and if you don't know what Nostr is, if you're on Twitter, get on Nostr. If you're on Instagram, get on Nostr. If you're on YouTube, get on Nostr. We got it all, baby girls and little guys. I mean, we've got it all. We've got a replacement for everything that you have come to know and love in social media and video players and all kinds of stuff. Right? That's what Nostr is. If you haven't gotten on Nostr, it doesn't cost you nothing and you don't have to give up a phone number or email or nothing, but you do need to get on Nostra. You need to get on Nostra today for no other reason than than to claim some more digital namespace.
And just just because you get on Nostra doesn't mean you have to delete your legacy bullshit, and it is bullshit, but you don't have to delete it. I'm just saying join us over on Nostr, and we'll have better discussions with more people about what's going on with things like Michael Saylor. Do we hate him? I don't know. Should we hate him? I don't know. I've never met the man. I have no idea. I mean, I would have had I would have to know Michael Saylor for more than a couple at least a handful of years before I would be able to say, yeah, you should hate him or no, you shouldn't hate him. Right? All I can do is speculate. But one thing that is a fact, the more Bitcoin this dude buys, the less is available for the rest of people.
And some will say, well, we've got to get them to stop buying Bitcoin. Good luck. Bitcoin is for the people that you don't want to have bitcoin. We need to get him to sell his bitcoin. Good luck. Bitcoin can be held by the people that want to hold bitcoin. You, me, all of us, even if we formed a political party around Bitcoin, would literally not be able to say, Jack shoot. I'm gonna try to to clean up my my, language a little bit this year, about it. We don't have anything to say about it, and that's exactly the thing that is what make makes Bitcoin great. I don't get to tell you that you can't buy Bitcoin.
I don't get to tell you that you can't hold Bitcoin. But along with that sentiment comes people like Michael Saylor, who will buy every scrap of Bitcoin they can lay their ever loving hands on, and you have nothing to say about it. The only thing that you can do is to buy your own Bitcoin. So again, if you don't if you haven't bought Bitcoin yet, you might wanna pick up some, you know, in case it takes off. Now, Michael Saylor apparently met with a Trump. Not the Trump well, he's met with the Trump, but I think this is more about his son, Trump's son, than Trump himself. Let's figure it out. Nicholas Hoffman from Bitcoin Magazine writes, Michael Saylor's Trump meeting is turbo bullish for Bitcoin. Oh oh, boy. We're all bulls here. Last night, president-elect Donald Trump's son, Eric, posted a photo of himself at Mar a Lago with Michael Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor with the caption, quote, 2 friends, one passion, Bitcoin, end quote.
This is so unbelievably bullish, and let me explain. For the last 4 years, under the Biden Harris administration with total Democrat control, the United States government did their best to terrorize this industry and attack us. Bloody terrorism. The overwhelming majority of the Democrat party did not support Bitcoin and followed Elizabeth Warren's lead on demonizing the industry and its participants. They weaponized the justice system to arrest Bitcoiners. They tried to tax our unrealized gains. They stopped pro Bitcoin legislation from being signed into law, de banked industry participants via Operation choke point 2.0, refused to support Bitcoin in any meaningful way, and so much more.
They were truly anti Bitcoin. If Kamala Harris had won the presidential election, their reign of terror I'm sorry, guys. It's a little hyperbolic here, but reign of terror on Bitcoin would have continued for at least 4 more years. 4 more years. But now the Democrats' war on Bitcoin in America is finally coming to an end, and the new administration is coming in, and they love Bitcoin. Are you sure about that? They just because somebody says they wanna do a thing doesn't necessarily mean that they actually want or mean or are going to do that thing.
I don't trust anyone, but Donald Trump is not even officially in office yet. And his family is already inviting Michael Saylor to his estate in Mar a Lago to discuss Bitcoin further. This isn't the first time he's done something like this either. Like in 2024, when Trump invited American Bitcoin mining giants there, I guess, to Mar a Lago, to learn more about the industry and what he needs to do to best support them. It's important to note that just 2 weeks ago, Saylor said on Bloomberg that he would be open to advising Donald Trump on Bitcoin. And now with him being at Mar a Lago, I think it's safe to speculate that something big might be brewing here.
The Trump's understanding, or excuse me. The Trump's understand Bitcoin and continue to show their support for the asset and the industry. Eric Trump recently gave a great speech at the Bitcoin MENA conference in Abu Dhabi explaining the that make Bitcoin an invaluable asset while also sharing his family's personal experience of being debanked and how Bitcoin protects individuals from being canceled. Donald Trump Junior made an appearance at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in, along with his father, and showed lots of support for the industry as well as the asset.
Donald Trump is committed to releasing bitcoiners, Ross Ulbricht, from prison, sign pro bitcoin legislation into law, work with the industry to help us thrive, end operation choke point 2.0, appointed an official crypto czar oh, for god's sakes. I'm so do you remember mister Bennett? I share a name with the world's first American drug czar. What? Why czar? What What the hell is this with this pseudo title royalty crap? I don't understand it. I never have. I never will, but we appointed an official crypto czar and said Bitcoin and crypto will skyrocket like never before under his administration and so much more.
Even if you're not a fan of Trump, you have to acknowledge and give him and his family credit for the good work that they're doing to make a regulatory friendly environment for the industry to thrive in. Imagine all this industry can accomplish over the next 4 years being supported by the president, allowing us the room to innovate and build without fear of being harassed and demonized by our own government. I would say the sky is the limit, but it's even better than that. 4 years is a long time, especially in this industry. And lots can happen during that time, and I am incredibly bullish on the future of Bitcoin in America under this incoming Trump administration.
Okay. That's the end of the articles. Now this is all me. Even though I I do at times interject my feelings while I'm reading these things, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Okay. So, yeah, 4 years is an incredibly long time in this industry. There's no doubting that. Not, I mean, not not for one second. Right? However, what what I think we all have a tendency to take for granted and to forget is that he only has 4 more 4 more years. And, even though there are people that swear up and down that somehow this dude's gonna be able to suspend the constitution and make himself president for life, as ludicrous as that is as ludicrous as that is, it's not I mean, it's it can't happen. There's no mechanism for it to happen. And I I refer to it being ludicrous as to even having the idea that he could. No.
You can't. It you just can't. I mean, it don't matter what president tried to do that shit, it would never happen because of, well, reasons and what I mean is like violence in the streets, cities burning down, stuff like that. Nobody wants to see that, right? And that's that would pretty much happen. Okay, so the next administration, and this is what worries me about Nayib Bukele, even though I'm I'm I'm I'm on the fence about what Nayib Bukele is doing. I might come back to that, maybe not. I'll probably forget. I still only have a couple of brain cells working. What happens with the next president?
What executive orders could come out? What if Trump pisses off so many people for a very long time that there is a guarantee that 20 28 elections will usher in a 100%, not only democrat administration, but a hardcore woke. I mean, you thought it was bad now, I actually could imagine it being worse. What would that do? What could be overturned? What could be scrapped? So I understand that Nicholas Hoffman is bullish. I understand that his bullishness in this particular piece is stemming directly from the fact that Trump seems to be pro bitcoin. He didn't used to be.
He said the dollar the dollar was king. Right? So first of all, I'm not exactly going to sit here and go everything's gonna be fine during this 4 years. That's my first target. Get through this 4 years without somebody saying, you know, I know I said the thing, but I'm not going to do the thing. So please, for the love of God, prepare yourself for being disappointed. Don't just assume that that Trump's going to remain bullish on January 21st or 22nd or 23rd. Right? And second, what happens afterwards? And again, I come back to Nayib Bukele. What happens because, I mean, I don't want dictators for life. So what happens after Bukele?
If somebody comes in after Bukele that is not part of Bukele's party or even if they are and still disagree on the Bitcoin section of Nayib Bukele's administration, just scraps the whole deal and says we're selling it all. Right? We can't continue to think that we have to rely upon administrations of different countries, people like Michael Saylor buying Bitcoin because he's selling debt. We can't rely on that. And we and up until now, we never really have. We've always relied on the fundamentals of Bitcoin itself, both the mechanical, like 21,000,000 and never anymore, the difficulty adjustment, the consensus rules, all of all of these things.
Now plus the economics of what only 21,000,000 actually means. That's the only real defense today, tomorrow, and throughout the rest of the future. That's the only defense. Do not rely on Michael Saylor. Do not rely on Eric and Donald Trump. Do not rely on Nayib Bukele. That's not the way. 21,000,000 only the rest of the consensus rules continued Bitcoin development continued Bitcoin adoption that is the only way it's going to happen. Now, onto the frozen north, where poly market betters are now confident that Justin Trudeau will resign by this Friday. If you hadn't heard, Justin or somebody in his party has been making, well, has been making it evident that we may have to get rid of Justin Trudeau, and he is going to go away. Well, will he stay or will he go?
Asks Sam Reynolds for coindesk.com. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, the latter appears imminent. Now bettors on Polymarket are debating on when exactly he'll announce his resignation. While Trudeau resignation contracts aren't anything new, there are 2 with low 6 figure volumes attached to them asking if he'll be gone by February or April and another from December asking if opposition parties will trigger an election by the spring. The interest in the Canadian prime minister's fate popped up on Monday after scoops from 2 of Canada's largest newspapers put his resignation date to be either Monday or before Wednesday.
The Toronto Star says the resignation is coming as early as Monday, while The Globe and Mail, which had it first, said that the announcement would come before a National Liberal Party Caucus meeting scheduled for Wednesday. Polymarket betters are skeptical on whether the announcement could come earlier. One contract, which is betting on Monday, has just over $45,000 in volume and gives only gives a 24% chance that the week will start off with Trudeau signing off. Another asking if the prime minister will step down by Wednesday gives it a 72% chance, but that specific contract has a much smaller volume at around 10,000.
Finally, a third asking if he'll be gone by Friday puts the chance of that happening at 80%. While the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail both have their sources that say a resignation is imminent, Reuters, which it says spoke to someone different, says Trudeau hasn't made up his mind yet. Angus Reid, a Canadian pollster, gives the prime minister a 22% approval rating. Polling aggregators show that if an election were to be held today, the Trudeau Liberals would be decimated, only winning 46 seats while the conservatives would take 225, giving them a majority of Canada's parliament.
Everywhere on poly market, bettors are giving a 3% chance that Canada joins the United States as its 51st state by July, an idea that started as a joke on president-elect Donald Trump's social media accounts. Yeah. Governor Trudeau. Well, well, I'll I'll save it. Let's just say that I was actually surprised when I woke up yesterday and started hearing word that Trudeau might resign. And the question becomes this, why? Why? He's been able to hold on to that seat. He keeps getting reelected time and time again. Well, well, a couple of times anyway. Not time and time again. I'm just saying he keeps sitting down in the damn chair even though everybody that I hear out of Canada is like, why get rid of him.
So how is it that he keeps sitting in the chair? And if he can keep sitting in the chair for every election ever, then why resign now? What's what's brewing in the background here, ladies and gentlemen? Why is he resigning now? And well, and that's if he'll resign and, we we may hear something about that later. We're not sure yet. Let's just we'll just hold up your britches. Let's do this first. Mining company Mara lent out 7,377 Bitcoin to third parties in 2024 according to Vince Quill writing for Cointelegraph. Mining company Mara, formerly known as Marathon Digital, lent out 7,377 Bitcoin to third parties in 2024 according to a January 3rd announcement.
Vice president of investor relations at Mara, Robert Samuels, provided more information about Mara's bitcoin lending activity but did not cite specific numbers. According to Samuels, Mara's Bitcoin lending program focuses on short term arrangements with well established third parties, generates a modest single digit yield, and has been active throughout 2024. So Mara has turned into a lending house for bitcoin to generate yield. Okay. That's not surprising. That's not surprising. So, one of my questions is, if you wanted to borrow bitcoin, think about that. Let's say you've got bitcoin and you want to lend it out to somebody and that way you generate a yield. Okay.
So you get more Bitcoin if the person doesn't, you know, the person that brought the Bitcoin is doesn't steal it. If everything goes well, you get your Bitcoin back plus a yield, which means and and hopefully more Bitcoin and not not fiat. Okay. That's great. That's understandable. Why would I want to borrow Bitcoin at an interest rate? Would it be because it's a pristine collateral that I can then borrow against somewhere else? There you go. Think about that. Bitcoin is such a pristine collateral, and I I probably shouldn't use the word pristine. Everything has flaws.
Right? Everything in the world has flaws, although some have less flaws than others and Bitcoin is probably the least flaw that there is, but let's just bypass all that and say it's a really clean collateral. It's it's highly liquid liquefiable. It's easily storable. It's and and and and more than one person has to you can make it to where more than one party has to sign off before it can be liquidated. This is a great collateral. Would it be worth having is is the property of Bitcoin being such a clean collateral? Is that worth, I don't know, paying, I don't know, let's say 5% interest.
I want a $100,000 worth of Bitcoin. I'm going to pay you 5% on that Bitcoin for the year. If everything goes well on my side, I give you a $100,000 worth of Bitcoin or that one Bitcoin back plus $5,000 worth of more bitcoin on top of that. Is it worth it? Is that worth what you can use bitcoin for? And I would imagine that the very first thing that you could use that for is to use it as collateral for something else. But what's the agreement? And I don't know if Mara is doing that. I don't know when when Mara lends this out. I don't know if the following is true. Does Mara have some kind of ability to say, look, I'm gonna lend this out to you at 5%, and I don't know if it's 5%, but let's just say it is. I'm gonna lend this to you, mister party x. You're gonna borrow this one this one bitcoin at a 100,000 and just I'm gonna charge you 5% on it, and, you're gonna be able to use it as collateral on something else.
Except you can't use it for collateral to, I don't know, buy a Lamborghini against. Something stupid. And this is what I'm getting at is under under what certain circumstances would somebody who has Bitcoin lend out their Bitcoin to generate yield, but make damn sure that what it is going to be used as collateral on is pretty much not stupid. You see where I'm going with this? Anyway, no matter how this works, Mara is taking the Bitcoin that they are mining and they are starting to lend it out. I would imagine you're going to see a lot more of this.
A lot more. In fact, I'll bet you that there's going to be lending houses that say, hey. Bitcoiners retail level Joe Schmo Bitcoiners with half a Bitcoin. Would you like to make yield on your Bitcoin? Give it to us, and then we'll package it together with other Bitcoin, and then we will turn into a lending house, and we will cut you in on the yield that we make. It's not that this is a bad idea, but it will be a terrible idea if it's something like BlockFi where they're basically thieves and grifters and rug pullers. Be extraordinarily careful with your bitcoin coming into 2025 because I'll bet you my bottom dollar that you see a lot more of this lending stuff go on.
Be careful. Let's run the numbers. And it happened. Justin Trudeau has officially announced that he is resigning, and it's Monday, which means those guys that were taking the other side of the the the basically wait. Wait. What was it? There was a contract that said, Trudeau would, step down by Monday, and they only had 24% of the people saying, yes, that was true. All those people won big time big time on Poly Market. So breaking news. Canada's Justin Trudeau today said that he would step down from the helm of the ruling Liberal party. Oh, oh, oh, but he is going to stay on as prime minister until the new leader is selected ahead of a general elections due by late October.
So he's resigning as a party leader. I wonder if anybody had that particular bet, because it doesn't sound to me like he's actually going to resign from being prime minister. Something very weird is going on in Canada, and if I was Canadian right now, I'd be pretty thoroughly pissed. But, hey, it's y'all's politics. You know, don't mind me. This whole thing just seems to be it just smells like a mess. Now oil, speaking of something smelly. And if you haven't ever smelled crude oil at in an oil patch, yeah. To me, it smells wonderful, but to other people, it smells really bad.
However, West Texas Intermediate is down by 0.72%. However, it is well above the $70 barrel mark $70 a barrel mark at 73.43. Brent Norsee is down a half point, but it's at $76.13. Natural gas swinging for the fences, 8.2 percent to the upside, $3.62 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is down by a point and it is just hovering over $2 a gallon on average. Gold is down a quarter of a point to 26.48. Silver is up almost two points. Platinum is down a half. Copper is up 2 and palladium is down a half. A fully mixed, shiny metal rock market there.
Ag is mostly in the green today. Biggest winner is wheat. 2.46% to the upside. The biggest loser is sugar. 1.5 to the downside. I got live cattle up 0.5%. Lean hogs, however, are down a full point. Feeder cattle are up 0.44%. The Dow is up a third to 43,171. S and P is up 0.86%, Nasdaq is up over a point, and the S and P mini is up 0.86%. What's bitcoin doing? Well, look at that. It's a $101,980 and that puts us right at a $2,020,000,000,000 market cap. Bitcoin, you can get or sorry. You can get 38.6 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,806,388.91 of, and average fees per block are hella low.
0.04 BTC taken in fees overall on a per block basis. That's pretty damn low. There are only, god I haven't seen this in a while, there are only 59 blocks. 59 blocks. Usually it's a 100. I've seen it up as much as 200. I've seen I've seen lots of blocks. I haven't seen it this low in mempools across the world in quite a while, ladies and gentlemen. 59 blocks carrying a total of a 194,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority fees or rates of 9 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 7.
What the hell's mining been doing? Holy smokes, we're above 800 hexahashes per second ladies and gentlemen. When I went on Christmas vacation, I've didn't I saw maybe 800 a couple of times, like, literally a couple of times for the entire year of 2024, and now it looks like we are well well well above 800 exahashes per second because it's a 1 week rolling average. So average for the last week is 804 exahashes per second. That is a lot of security behind the Bitcoin network. Now from Grins and Barrett, which was episode 1011 of Bitcoin and Nick_dose gave me 10,000 sats and says, hope you had a great break.
Looking forward to more from you in 2025. Cheers. And he did that a mere 16 hours ago, anticipating that I would not squelch or welch on my promise to come back in 2025 with the Bitcoin and podcast. Thank you, Nick underscore does. Jay with 3333, the magic number says, totally agree with you or that with your take that the FUD surrounding the Bitcoin strategic reserve is overblown. I've seen some people are afraid of the government preventing forks while others are afraid of them creating their own hard fork. I really don't think either will happen. I also agree that Satoshi set the gold standard for the template and the template for OPSEC as a core developer.
No one gave him his privacy. He took it for himself. Agreed, dude. Dark. With 21/21, Satoshi says, well reasoned takes on some complex topics. Great episode. Thank you, dark. God's death with 537. Sat says, thank you, sir. Safe travels. I had safe travels. I did. Everything went smoothly on the way there and on the way back it was it was very very nice. Wartime with 333 says cheers and Hugh Janice Hugh Janice, with 200 sats says, happy Christmas. Happy Christmas to you. Pies with a 100 says, thank you, sir, no thank you. Nick underscore dose with 101 says, cheers. Cheers. Nick underscore dose with another 101 sats with an exclamation point and clear with a 100 sats says looking forward to hear you on once bitten about the whole 6 yards national covert stacking op.
I think we're around the 2nd yard, evidenced in the wider recognition that the protocol works and that the FUD was baseless. 3 yards will be an increased normalization in retail. 4 yards, the move from tolerance to promotion for an economic stimulus policy at a national level, coffee shops, tipping, taxis, you know. The 5th, regional coordination and promotion as a value exchange mechanism, education. 6 yards, the ubiquitous acceptance for all payments, donations, groceries, fines, penalties, and taxes. It'll probably be ridiculed at first a la El Salvador, but do we need to worry about FUD about foreign national progress?
Safe trip. Safe trip. Again, clear. I did have a safe trip, and I thank you and all the rest of the people that wished me well on having safe travels and a happy Christmas. Thank you all. If you want to support the Bitcoin and podcast, the best way to do that is with podcasting 2.0 and the value for value mentality. If you think I'm bringing you value, then get me back on the other side by using a podcasting 2.0 enabled app like fountain dotfm, otherwise known as the fountain app. Yes. You can give me boostograms and you can send me messages and if you do chances are good I'll probably read it on the show. So if you want to make an announcement, if you want to announce your marriage, if you wanna announce a Bitcoin meetup, man, dude, hit me up and give me some satoshis on the bottom end of that. Otherwise, you can stream me satoshis on a minute per minute basis, and you can only do that with podcasting 2.0 and a value for value mentality.
That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use from Atlas 21, the newsroom of Atlas 21. Ethiopia transforms hydroelectric power into Bitcoin. Mining is generating an 18 percentile of national revenue. Holy smokes. That seems quite a bit. Let's find out more. Ethiopia is converting surplus energy from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam or GERD as a source of wealth through Bitcoin mining. According to data reported by the Africa report, this activity is generating 18% of Ethiopia's national revenue. Hawat Eshitu, marketing and business development director at Ethiopian Electric Power stated, quote, Bitcoin miners have a lot of money to invest and we need lots of money to develop our grid, so it's a win win.
Over the past year, mining investments exceeded 1,000,000,000 that's billion with a b dollars and has surpassed or surpassed profits from energy exports to neighboring countries. Ethiopia has already signed agreements with 25 minuteing companies generating over $55,000,000 in revenue in the last 10 months. This success is also attributable, to the country's extremely competitive electricity rates at around 3.2¢ per kilowatt hour, which is amongst the lowest worldwide. Ethiopia's mining landscape underwent a significant transformation after China's 2021 ban on mining. Companies like Bitfufu and Bit Mining found fertile ground for their operations in this African country.
An example of BitMining's acquisition of a 51 megawatt facility with 17,869 mining machines, representing a $14,300,000 investment. Currently, mining operations in Ethiopia consume approximately 600 megawatts of energy with growth prospects that could lead the country to control up to 7% of global hash rate. That's the end of the article and it's probably the beginning of the ire of guess who? The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Who will say in 2025 that bitcoin is destroying Ethiopia. Because they will find some story, they will go out to some freaking village that has electricity, and somehow or another the lights went out, and they will figure out a way to say, on this day, bitcoin mining destroyed this entire village because all the lights went out. And clearly, it was because bitcoin was sucking up all the electrons and there wasn't enough left over for these poor ass dudes out in the middle of nowhere in the sticks, and it will not be true. However, the world will buy it. It will be on CNN. It will be on CNBC.
It will be on Fox. It'll be it'll be everywhere. And then Greenpeace or the Greenpeace USA will get into the fight and say, we're killing poor villagers in Ethiopia. It's going to happen. It will happen this year. I guarantee it. Somebody make a poly market bet on it for me, please, because me, I'm not a gambler. But there's something else in here. I wanna read you this quote from Hiwat Ishitu, the marketing and business development director of Ethiopian Electric Power. That's their their power company. He says, bitcoin miners have a lot of money to invest, and we need lots of money to develop our grid.
What have we been saying for years? That first, the Bitcoin miners find the cheapest, most most inaccessible, generally speaking, hydroelectricity is in places where people don't necessarily live, so you gotta transmit the power. Okay. Well, great. You can build a dam there and you can install the electric generators and all the stuff to generate the electricity, but transmission lines, that's a different investment. And it's very costly. You got a especially in, like, anywhere in the world. You've got a prep ground. You've got a, like, put up huge towers. These lines, these high voltage lines, do you have any idea what kind of tension is on these lines?
I mean the the amount of of substructure that you got to get to these towers, the amount of concrete, the amount of engineering that you have to provide so that these things just don't fall over in the wind is absolutely astounding and it costs a lot of money. So what do you do? You move miners in and they generate revenue because you're going to you're gonna sell them the electricity. You might lease them the facilities. You might do all kinds of stuff, but these guys seem to be making money hand over fist. It said in this article that they're making more money on bitcoin mining than they are selling their excess generated power to other countries, to their neighboring countries.
Okay. So now we've got bitcoin miners not only being invited in, but said being asked, please help us with our power grid infrastructure, and it seems to me that we were right. Again, this is exactly what the conjecture has been for the for years now, and we're seeing it happen again and again and again and again. Ethiopia is gonna get enough money to build out their transmission line and power grid infrastructure, and at one point or another they might say, we don't need you guys, you miners anymore, move on to somewhere else, and they'll be able to pack up and go. Now, Ethiopia might keep them around, but even if they didn't, our job is done.
We helped Ethiopia build out their power grid, and we used Bitcoin to do it. There's not a whole lot more arguments that can be made against Bitcoin at least on this particular facet of what we always conjecture Bitcoin can do, and it's doing it in this new year, the year of our Lord, 2025. But again, watch out for the FUD. I guarantee it's coming from IMF. We're gonna be killing Ethiopia. But in the meantime, we've got Amethyst. That's right. Let's get into a little bit of Nostra news. Amethyst version 0.94.3 encrypted media on direct messages, gifts, and custom emoji inputs, plus fixes for Tor leaks.
Amethyst is a free and open source Nostra client for Android in case you did not know Now, the new, release brings encrypted media uploads on direct messages, chats with oh, sorry, to direct message chats. Let's do that again. I screwed that up. The new release brings encrypted media uploads on direct message chats with every upload now encrypted to the recipient's public key following the same specification as o x chat, significantly enhancing privacy compared to the traditional hidden link design. The encrypted blobs are sent to nip96 in blossom servers.
Make sure your server accepts encrypted blobs. Satellite and void.cat do accept quote was stated in the release notes. I think that was a typo because I don't understand that sentence at all and I read it verbatim. Version 0.94.0 also design redesigns the app's upload screens enabling multiple image and videos at the same time on new posts, stories, and chats encryption. Error handling was also improved with the screens now allowing users to try again using a different server. Amethyst 0.94.1 also adds a command to link custom emojis on new posts and chats quote similar to the at symbol for user search, just start typing to find your custom emojis.
When you see the list of emojis click on the emoji to add it as an inline emoji or or click on the right button to add as a regular URL in the post. Oh, that's going to be kind of interesting. Quote, create your gif and reaction libraries on emojito. Meme. Make sure to bookmark yours and other people's emojis packs to add them to amethyst's emoji list. Holy shit. This is cool. Version 0.94.2 fixes a couple of Tor leaks introduced during the migration of 2 APIs back in version 94.0. Quote, the new relay API contained the bug that bypassed the user's Tor preference relays and the migration to coli3 implemented a one time cache for TOR preference preventing it from reflecting subsequent changes for image loading, said the project.
And then 93.4 adds imetatags to gifurls to optimize gif previews. So while I was on vacation, you know, or Christmas break, I saw a lot of people saying that Nostra was going to be destroyed over the fight of the gif button, and I thought that was hilarious. I literally took it as nothing but funny because nothing is going to destroy Nostra. I mean, there might be people that get pissed off because they don't want to see other people haggling over something like a gift button, but come on. You gotta admit, that's kind of funny that we're fighting over a gift button.
I mean, I I like gifts. I I want a gift button too, but I'm not gonna get mad about it. My god almighty. Now, Jan 3, the company. No. Samson Moe and all those guys. Jan 3 has raised $5,000,000 of a seed round for the aqua wallet development. Let's see what this is about. The seed financing will aid the development and the expansion of Jan three's aqua wallet and support Jan three's nation state initiatives. Quote, we're very excited to announce a $5,000,000 seed funding to accelerate the development and expansion of the aqua wallet. This funding marks a pivotal step in our journey to make bitcoin accessible, practical, and transformative for users around the globe, announced the project.
The latest funding round, follows an oversubscribed precede round of 620,000 which was closed in early of 2023. A $1,000,000 of the funds will be allocated to establish a bitcoin treasury for Jan 3 consisting of 12 BTC acquired at an average cost of 83,333.33 per BTC. Quote, Tether is excited to support the work of Jan 3 and what they're doing to advance financial freedom around the world. Jan 3's aqua wallet has found excellent product market fit by offering the perfect balance of saving in Bitcoin with spending in USDT. That's Tether, said Paolo or I never can't pronounce his name. I'm gonna say Paulo Arduino, CEO of Tether, quote, we've seen rapid growth in both user adoption and volumes with the month of November 2024 alone crossing $11,000,000 in swap volume.
By leveraging advanced technologies like the lightning and liquid networks, we've managed to create a bitcoin super app that's able to deliver real utility and is being used in daily life around the world. It just works, and it's only going to get even better, said Samson Moe, chief executive officer of Jan 3. So congratulations to the guys at Jan 3 on their $5,000,000 raise, and congratulations for making the decision to devote a full 20% of that raise to buying 12 Bitcoin at $83,000 with us at $101,991. It sounds like y'all made it good made out like bandits on that one already. Now, Zapstore version 0.2.0.
Zap the devs. Zapstore is a social, permissionless app store built on the Nostra protocol. It's available on Android. Okay. So before I get into this, and it's not long, but I just want to say something about zaps about Zapstore here. It's the unsung hero of the Nostra universe. And I wish I wish I had a better way to articulate why it's important, but we have the Google Play Store, we have the Apple Store or the Apple App Store or whatever you we have all kinds of stores. Yet, the way that Zap Store works, at least on on Android, so it's playing against Google Play, is you can get apps for your Android from the Zap store and it's done.
The store is built on the Nostra protocol. It's resilient. It's redundant. It's almost indestructible, and I'm pretty sure that not a whole lot of people at Zapstore are gonna be really interested in saying you can't have that app. Now, if it's something holy and as far as the world is concerned illegal, like child pornography, yeah, they're probably gonna say no, you you can't do that. But then again, I don't know. Maybe they don't even have the infrastructure to pull down an app. And I think that that I think I may actually be correct in saying that they don't. But you know what I have not really seen in the Nostra Universe?
Bad behavior. Every I mean, at the very 2 years ago, I woke up and every post had a dick pic. Okay. It was actually kind of funny because it was the exact same picture. It wasn't like, you know, somebody, like, went to playboy.com and just, like, scraped a whole bunch of the guys or whatever and and and put them all up all, you know, and and did something like that. Because it was the same pitcher, but it was a full blown dick pic, somehow or another that kind of injected a little bit of light hardness into it. If it had been a whole bunch of different guys, that actually would be kind of like, you know, worse.
So even in in in Noster's worst days, it's actually kind of funny. But if I go to Twitter or if I go to, you know, Instagram, all I see is bad behavior left and right. I don't see it on Noster. I you know what I don't? I don't see a whole lot of racism on Noster. I'm sure you're going, oh, well, I've seen the guy say the n word. Well, I don't give a shit. Yeah. I'm not gonna actually say the word. I I I'm just not going to do it. Is there's just no reason. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Nobody is saying, hey, look at that whore over there. You know? I mean, there's there's all kind there's all kind there's a couple of e girls that's on Noster, and even they, you know what they'll do? It's like they'll they'll they'll instead of being butt ass naked, they'll wear lingerie and if something see through, they'll put little emojis on either the nipple or in the crotch area.
Okay. So you're still saying, hey, this isn't really, you know, that that's not really all that cool. I get it, but at least they understand their audience. If you let people actually make their own decisions about what it is they wanna show and why, instead of putting algorithms in all manner of rules and terms of service and allowing people to snipe each other to death to the point that they get their accounts completely suspended. If you look at it from that standpoint, thank god for Noster Because I'm not seeing this behavior. I'm not seeing just days and days and hours and hours of of just back to back terrible human behavior. But where I do see it is on Twitter.
Where I do see it is on Facebook, I see it on Instagram, I see the most terrible behaviors and it's getting worse. And if you want to extract yourself from that, then you need to come over to Nostr where you have things like Zapstore. And if you've got an Android phone, you can download all kinds of apps using the Nostr protocol. Will some of those apps be about Nostr? Yes, they will. Will some of them not be about noster? Yeah, they will. But they will actually be utilizing the noster network which is damn near indestructible. So consider that and let's get into our last for the day, Blitz Wallet version 0.3.7 beta on chain payments from liquid or lightning and manual channel rebalancing is now available in the Blitz Wallet, which is a self custodial bitcoin lightning liquid and e cash wallet built using the Breeze SDK, green light, the liquid wallet kit, and bolts.
It's available on Ios and Android. The blitz wallet update allows on chain payments from lightning or liquid balances. It removes requirements for a lightning node connection when lightning is disabled. It introduces weekly rotation of liquid addresses for accounts and monthly for contacts, enables automatic recovery of unclaimed e cash transactions, it includes bug fixes for stability, and enables manual channel rebalancing. So on chain payments users can now send on chain payments directly from either lightning or liquid. Users can now manually rebalance channels via the balance info page instead of automatic rebalancing on every wallet load, which I I I would actually like.
I I don't use the blitz wallet, I I haven't used the blitz wallet, but I kinda like rebalancing on every wallet load, unless it costs a lot of money in which case that would suck. But the wall this wallet now no longer requires a connection to the lightning node unless there is a lightning balance or lightning is actually enabled and that reduces dependencies for non lightning users and that's a good thing. E cash claim recovery. Users can now claim missed e cash transactions due to offline periods or failed claims. Unclaimed e cash tokens will be automatically attempted for recovery upon wallet loading, reducing lost funds, and then, of course, the general bug fixes. Okay. So that is it, ladies and gentlemen, for this.
The first episode of 2025 for Bitcoin and which was episode 1,012. And I hope you enjoyed it. A little rusty because I haven't actually done a show in a couple of weeks. So if, I'm flubbing around, please forgive me. It does take me and other people that do podcast and, you know, generally speaking, any public speaker who hasn't spoken for a while, it takes us a little while to get back into the, into this, swim of things. And if you would, help me spread the show. Sure. If you wanna send me giant boostograms and keep me up in the charts throughout the entire year, I'm not gonna say no because that's just flat money. But some of you out there may not wish to part with your satoshis. And if you're one of those, I don't blame you. I don't like parting with my satoshis either.
But I wouldn't mind it if you parted with a bit of your time. Tell your family and friends, hey, do you want to know more about bitcoin? Do you want to know more about what's going on with bitcoin in the news? Do you want to know what what do you want do you want somebody to read you these stories? So while you're on your way to work, well then listen to the bitcoin and podcast. And then after that, after you've given this podcast, if you've shared give after you've shared this podcast with at least one family or friend member for the day, then get your happy butt over to Apple Podcasts and give me a 5 star review to start off the year.
These things work. For those of us that are almost completely 100% in Nostr and literally using damn near nothing else, we've left algorithms behind. We've become our own algorithm. We depend on each other to be algorithms to filter things for us. It's the way the world should work in the first place, but algorithms still help in the normie fiat world for me to get the word out about this show. I want more listeners in 2025. I want more satoshis generated by this podcast in 2025. And if you don't have those Satoshis to do it, you can help me generate issue or interest in the podcast by getting the word that the podcast exists and what it does out of the door, out of the window to somebody else who's like, god, you know, and the whole reason I started this show in the first place is I really wanted.
I really did. I wanted somebody to read me the daily news. So I didn't have to. But nobody was reading on a daily basis actual news stories. We got people that read other things. We got Guy Swan who will read whole white papers or or, like, big long articles, but those aren't necessarily the daily news about Bitcoin. And while and and I appreciate, Guy. I listen to Bitcoin Audible all the time. The one of my favorite podcasts. But it's not the news. I'm the one that's doing the news. So if you have somebody who's interested in unders not understanding what Bitcoin is or what Bitcoin does, but how the world is thinking about Bitcoin or what issues bitcoin is causing, that we get through the news. And if you've got somebody like that in your life, give them the link. Give them the URL.
The more listeners that I can get not only to listen to this podcast, but get on value for value in podcasting 2.0, the more potential revenue this show might have to be able to build. And with that said, I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. It is 9:53 AM on this, the 6th day of January 2025. This is episode 10 12 of Bitcoin and MicroStrategy's back in the news. What else we got here? We got, oh, Michael Saylor met Trump. We'll probably talk about that. And, if you're wondering, if you're wondering, you'll notice that this is not my normal intro. I'm just figuring I'd shake it out, shake it up for the new year. Let's see how it goes. I've been always wanting to rerecord that, intro stuff for this particular, podcast, and I just don't ever really get around to it. So I figured I'd just start talking, say good morning, do all the things.
We'll do all the things I promised. It was a good it was a good Christmas break. And I have to make an apology, I I took I did take my, mobile recording rig. But, as you might imagine, Southwest Colorado is a bit frigid. It's a bit cold. And while I was able to do some of, some remote episodes of Bitcoin and during last summer when I went up there, that was because the room that I was using, which is uncooled and unheated, was relatively, you know, it was it was kind of kinda warm. It was warm enough. Right? Because I would do it in the morning, it was nice and cool, but it wasn't so frigid that it was, you know, making my teeth chatter.
Now, as opposed to what I what I was met with this winter. And it's not like it took me by surprise. I knew I was gonna have to do something, and what I had planned to do was get one of these little portable heaters, you know, little room heater, oil filled, radiator electric type heater, and it just couldn't cut it. It just couldn't do it, man. I mean, I left that thing on, like, I don't know, man, like the whole night. And I walked in the next morning just to see, you know, hey, are we gonna be able to do this? And the answer was no. No. You're not going to do this. This is going to be a crappy show if you try to do this. Please don't do this. So I just decided to take a break, hang out with the fam, do Christmas. It was wonderful.
It was quite eventful. I won't get into it. But, you know, I mean, you're hanging out with family for a couple of weeks. Events are going to happen. So, I am human, I am not immune to family stuff, during Christmas. Now, is there anything that I need to tell you before we get into the very first show of Bitcoin and's 2025 season? Oh, yes. I ended up number 9 on the fountain charts. If you don't know what fountain is, it is my daily driver podcast app on iOS and I do believe it's on Google Play Store as well. If you are using an old app, like an old podcasting app, like the ancient technology stuff, you really need to stop doing that. You really need to get a podcasting 2.0 enabled podcasting app so that you can support directly your favorite podcasters, and in the case of Fountain, your favorite artists. Because there's lots of music on Fountain as well. And these guys are coming out of essentially what is the American slave trade when it comes to the music industry. So I would hope that you would figure out that at this point, podcasting 2.0 is the way to go. Value for value is part of that entire ecosystem, and they work together beautifully.
Please consider getting a modern podcasting app. I use fountain and I did end up in the top ten for 2024 of best podcasts on fountain, and I am very very appreciative for all of you that did that because as I will always say, I did not do that. I didn't put myself into the top ten. There's no way that I can. Only you can prevent forest fire I mean, only you can put me in the top ten, and I hope I get there again this year. Now, we're gonna do the same format for the for the podcast at least at least for a few, you know, a few weeks. I want to change things, but you never really if it ain't broke, you kinda don't fix it. But that doesn't mean that I can't make it better, and I wanna try to do that. But for now, we're just going to plunge in to the relative news about Bitcoin. And we're gonna start with the block, this one written by James Hunt.
MicroStrategy buys yet another 1,070 Bitcoin for $101,000,000 bringing its holdings to 447,470 Bitcoin. As if there's just going to be Bitcoin for everyone. Not with these guys. These guys are buying all the Bitcoin. If you don't have any Bitcoin at this point, you might consider getting some, you know, in case it takes off. Business intelligence firm and corporate Bitcoin holder, MicroStrategy has acquired an additional 10 70 Bitcoin for approximately $101,000,000 at an average price of $94,004 per Bitcoin between the dates of December 30th December 31st according to a 8 k filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. It follows the sale of a further 319,500 MicroStrategy shares during the same period for the same amount.
As of January 5th, the company said that approximately 6.7 $7,000,000,000 worth of shares remained available for sale as part of its planned $21,000,000,000 equity offering and its $21,000,000,000 in fixed income securities capital raise, targeting targeting a total of $42,000,000,000 for further Bitcoin acquisitions. Last week, the company expanded that 21/21 plan, announcing a potential $2,000,000,000 preferred stock offering. The company now holds almost 500,000 BTC worth over $44,000,000,000 Then MicroStrategy's total holdings were brought to an average price of $62,503 per Bitcoin, a total cost of around 27,970,000,000 including fees and expenses, according to the company's cofounder and executive chairman, Michael Saylor, who celebrated Bitcoin's recent $100,000 milestone at a party in his Miami home on New Year's Eve.
To put that in perspective, MicroStrategy now holds around 2.1 percent of Bitcoin's total 21,000,000 unit supply. MicroStrategy's latest announcement is now the 9th week in a row following news last Monday that it had acquired another 2,138 BTC for roughly 209,000,000 in cash at an average estimated price of $97,837 per coin according or including fees and expenses and $561,000,000 worth of bitcoin the week before. The dude just won't stop buying bitcoin. MicroStrategy has now acquired more than $18,000,000,000 worth of bitcoin over the past 9 weeks alone, with its $83,000,000,000 market cap trading at a significant premium to its bitcoin net asset value.
Many investors have reservations about MicroStrategy's premium to NAV, NAV, valuation, and its equity and debt funded Bitcoin acquisition program in general. Analysts at research and brokerage firm, Bernstein, expect continued growth in corporate treasury adoption in 2025, anticipating inflows of more than $50,000,000,000 compared to $24,000,000,000 last year. Now MicroStrategy, which accounted for around 90% of all corporate purchases in 2024, is again likely to lead demand according to the analyst, followed by bitcoin miners scaling up their capital plans and small to mid cap corporates looking to emulate Michael Saylor's model. Quote, given MicroStrategy's 4 year track record and its rising profile, including its inclusion in the Nasdaq 100, we expect capital markets flywheel to further accelerate, Bernstein digital asset lead Gautam Chugani wrote in a note to clients on Monday.
MicroStrategy uses a key performance indicator it calls the Bitcoin yield to measure the percentage change in its Bitcoin holdings relative to its diluted shares. The firm's 2024 Bitcoin yield was 74.3%, reflecting significant growth in holdings while balancing share dilution amid the company's strategy of acquiring Bitcoin efficiently to benefit shareholders. MicroStrategy shares closed up 13.2% at $339.66 on Friday, having gained more than 431% over the past year according to trading view. The stock is currently up 3.7% in pre market trading today, Monday. Okay. So there's there's the the the inevitable Michael Sailor news, and I understand that everybody's, you know well, not everybody.
It's mixed reactions. Some people love Michael Sailor Sailor. Some people are really starting to hate the guy for various reasons. One of the things that I'm I'm seeing sentiment on Nostr this morning, and if you don't know what Nostr is, if you're on Twitter, get on Nostr. If you're on Instagram, get on Nostr. If you're on YouTube, get on Nostr. We got it all, baby girls and little guys. I mean, we've got it all. We've got a replacement for everything that you have come to know and love in social media and video players and all kinds of stuff. Right? That's what Nostr is. If you haven't gotten on Nostr, it doesn't cost you nothing and you don't have to give up a phone number or email or nothing, but you do need to get on Nostra. You need to get on Nostra today for no other reason than than to claim some more digital namespace.
And just just because you get on Nostra doesn't mean you have to delete your legacy bullshit, and it is bullshit, but you don't have to delete it. I'm just saying join us over on Nostr, and we'll have better discussions with more people about what's going on with things like Michael Saylor. Do we hate him? I don't know. Should we hate him? I don't know. I've never met the man. I have no idea. I mean, I would have had I would have to know Michael Saylor for more than a couple at least a handful of years before I would be able to say, yeah, you should hate him or no, you shouldn't hate him. Right? All I can do is speculate. But one thing that is a fact, the more Bitcoin this dude buys, the less is available for the rest of people.
And some will say, well, we've got to get them to stop buying Bitcoin. Good luck. Bitcoin is for the people that you don't want to have bitcoin. We need to get him to sell his bitcoin. Good luck. Bitcoin can be held by the people that want to hold bitcoin. You, me, all of us, even if we formed a political party around Bitcoin, would literally not be able to say, Jack shoot. I'm gonna try to to clean up my my, language a little bit this year, about it. We don't have anything to say about it, and that's exactly the thing that is what make makes Bitcoin great. I don't get to tell you that you can't buy Bitcoin.
I don't get to tell you that you can't hold Bitcoin. But along with that sentiment comes people like Michael Saylor, who will buy every scrap of Bitcoin they can lay their ever loving hands on, and you have nothing to say about it. The only thing that you can do is to buy your own Bitcoin. So again, if you don't if you haven't bought Bitcoin yet, you might wanna pick up some, you know, in case it takes off. Now, Michael Saylor apparently met with a Trump. Not the Trump well, he's met with the Trump, but I think this is more about his son, Trump's son, than Trump himself. Let's figure it out. Nicholas Hoffman from Bitcoin Magazine writes, Michael Saylor's Trump meeting is turbo bullish for Bitcoin. Oh oh, boy. We're all bulls here. Last night, president-elect Donald Trump's son, Eric, posted a photo of himself at Mar a Lago with Michael Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor with the caption, quote, 2 friends, one passion, Bitcoin, end quote.
This is so unbelievably bullish, and let me explain. For the last 4 years, under the Biden Harris administration with total Democrat control, the United States government did their best to terrorize this industry and attack us. Bloody terrorism. The overwhelming majority of the Democrat party did not support Bitcoin and followed Elizabeth Warren's lead on demonizing the industry and its participants. They weaponized the justice system to arrest Bitcoiners. They tried to tax our unrealized gains. They stopped pro Bitcoin legislation from being signed into law, de banked industry participants via Operation choke point 2.0, refused to support Bitcoin in any meaningful way, and so much more.
They were truly anti Bitcoin. If Kamala Harris had won the presidential election, their reign of terror I'm sorry, guys. It's a little hyperbolic here, but reign of terror on Bitcoin would have continued for at least 4 more years. 4 more years. But now the Democrats' war on Bitcoin in America is finally coming to an end, and the new administration is coming in, and they love Bitcoin. Are you sure about that? They just because somebody says they wanna do a thing doesn't necessarily mean that they actually want or mean or are going to do that thing.
I don't trust anyone, but Donald Trump is not even officially in office yet. And his family is already inviting Michael Saylor to his estate in Mar a Lago to discuss Bitcoin further. This isn't the first time he's done something like this either. Like in 2024, when Trump invited American Bitcoin mining giants there, I guess, to Mar a Lago, to learn more about the industry and what he needs to do to best support them. It's important to note that just 2 weeks ago, Saylor said on Bloomberg that he would be open to advising Donald Trump on Bitcoin. And now with him being at Mar a Lago, I think it's safe to speculate that something big might be brewing here.
The Trump's understanding, or excuse me. The Trump's understand Bitcoin and continue to show their support for the asset and the industry. Eric Trump recently gave a great speech at the Bitcoin MENA conference in Abu Dhabi explaining the that make Bitcoin an invaluable asset while also sharing his family's personal experience of being debanked and how Bitcoin protects individuals from being canceled. Donald Trump Junior made an appearance at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in, along with his father, and showed lots of support for the industry as well as the asset.
Donald Trump is committed to releasing bitcoiners, Ross Ulbricht, from prison, sign pro bitcoin legislation into law, work with the industry to help us thrive, end operation choke point 2.0, appointed an official crypto czar oh, for god's sakes. I'm so do you remember mister Bennett? I share a name with the world's first American drug czar. What? Why czar? What What the hell is this with this pseudo title royalty crap? I don't understand it. I never have. I never will, but we appointed an official crypto czar and said Bitcoin and crypto will skyrocket like never before under his administration and so much more.
Even if you're not a fan of Trump, you have to acknowledge and give him and his family credit for the good work that they're doing to make a regulatory friendly environment for the industry to thrive in. Imagine all this industry can accomplish over the next 4 years being supported by the president, allowing us the room to innovate and build without fear of being harassed and demonized by our own government. I would say the sky is the limit, but it's even better than that. 4 years is a long time, especially in this industry. And lots can happen during that time, and I am incredibly bullish on the future of Bitcoin in America under this incoming Trump administration.
Okay. That's the end of the articles. Now this is all me. Even though I I do at times interject my feelings while I'm reading these things, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Okay. So, yeah, 4 years is an incredibly long time in this industry. There's no doubting that. Not, I mean, not not for one second. Right? However, what what I think we all have a tendency to take for granted and to forget is that he only has 4 more 4 more years. And, even though there are people that swear up and down that somehow this dude's gonna be able to suspend the constitution and make himself president for life, as ludicrous as that is as ludicrous as that is, it's not I mean, it's it can't happen. There's no mechanism for it to happen. And I I refer to it being ludicrous as to even having the idea that he could. No.
You can't. It you just can't. I mean, it don't matter what president tried to do that shit, it would never happen because of, well, reasons and what I mean is like violence in the streets, cities burning down, stuff like that. Nobody wants to see that, right? And that's that would pretty much happen. Okay, so the next administration, and this is what worries me about Nayib Bukele, even though I'm I'm I'm I'm on the fence about what Nayib Bukele is doing. I might come back to that, maybe not. I'll probably forget. I still only have a couple of brain cells working. What happens with the next president?
What executive orders could come out? What if Trump pisses off so many people for a very long time that there is a guarantee that 20 28 elections will usher in a 100%, not only democrat administration, but a hardcore woke. I mean, you thought it was bad now, I actually could imagine it being worse. What would that do? What could be overturned? What could be scrapped? So I understand that Nicholas Hoffman is bullish. I understand that his bullishness in this particular piece is stemming directly from the fact that Trump seems to be pro bitcoin. He didn't used to be.
He said the dollar the dollar was king. Right? So first of all, I'm not exactly going to sit here and go everything's gonna be fine during this 4 years. That's my first target. Get through this 4 years without somebody saying, you know, I know I said the thing, but I'm not going to do the thing. So please, for the love of God, prepare yourself for being disappointed. Don't just assume that that Trump's going to remain bullish on January 21st or 22nd or 23rd. Right? And second, what happens afterwards? And again, I come back to Nayib Bukele. What happens because, I mean, I don't want dictators for life. So what happens after Bukele?
If somebody comes in after Bukele that is not part of Bukele's party or even if they are and still disagree on the Bitcoin section of Nayib Bukele's administration, just scraps the whole deal and says we're selling it all. Right? We can't continue to think that we have to rely upon administrations of different countries, people like Michael Saylor buying Bitcoin because he's selling debt. We can't rely on that. And we and up until now, we never really have. We've always relied on the fundamentals of Bitcoin itself, both the mechanical, like 21,000,000 and never anymore, the difficulty adjustment, the consensus rules, all of all of these things.
Now plus the economics of what only 21,000,000 actually means. That's the only real defense today, tomorrow, and throughout the rest of the future. That's the only defense. Do not rely on Michael Saylor. Do not rely on Eric and Donald Trump. Do not rely on Nayib Bukele. That's not the way. 21,000,000 only the rest of the consensus rules continued Bitcoin development continued Bitcoin adoption that is the only way it's going to happen. Now, onto the frozen north, where poly market betters are now confident that Justin Trudeau will resign by this Friday. If you hadn't heard, Justin or somebody in his party has been making, well, has been making it evident that we may have to get rid of Justin Trudeau, and he is going to go away. Well, will he stay or will he go?
Asks Sam Reynolds for coindesk.com. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, the latter appears imminent. Now bettors on Polymarket are debating on when exactly he'll announce his resignation. While Trudeau resignation contracts aren't anything new, there are 2 with low 6 figure volumes attached to them asking if he'll be gone by February or April and another from December asking if opposition parties will trigger an election by the spring. The interest in the Canadian prime minister's fate popped up on Monday after scoops from 2 of Canada's largest newspapers put his resignation date to be either Monday or before Wednesday.
The Toronto Star says the resignation is coming as early as Monday, while The Globe and Mail, which had it first, said that the announcement would come before a National Liberal Party Caucus meeting scheduled for Wednesday. Polymarket betters are skeptical on whether the announcement could come earlier. One contract, which is betting on Monday, has just over $45,000 in volume and gives only gives a 24% chance that the week will start off with Trudeau signing off. Another asking if the prime minister will step down by Wednesday gives it a 72% chance, but that specific contract has a much smaller volume at around 10,000.
Finally, a third asking if he'll be gone by Friday puts the chance of that happening at 80%. While the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail both have their sources that say a resignation is imminent, Reuters, which it says spoke to someone different, says Trudeau hasn't made up his mind yet. Angus Reid, a Canadian pollster, gives the prime minister a 22% approval rating. Polling aggregators show that if an election were to be held today, the Trudeau Liberals would be decimated, only winning 46 seats while the conservatives would take 225, giving them a majority of Canada's parliament.
Everywhere on poly market, bettors are giving a 3% chance that Canada joins the United States as its 51st state by July, an idea that started as a joke on president-elect Donald Trump's social media accounts. Yeah. Governor Trudeau. Well, well, I'll I'll save it. Let's just say that I was actually surprised when I woke up yesterday and started hearing word that Trudeau might resign. And the question becomes this, why? Why? He's been able to hold on to that seat. He keeps getting reelected time and time again. Well, well, a couple of times anyway. Not time and time again. I'm just saying he keeps sitting down in the damn chair even though everybody that I hear out of Canada is like, why get rid of him.
So how is it that he keeps sitting in the chair? And if he can keep sitting in the chair for every election ever, then why resign now? What's what's brewing in the background here, ladies and gentlemen? Why is he resigning now? And well, and that's if he'll resign and, we we may hear something about that later. We're not sure yet. Let's just we'll just hold up your britches. Let's do this first. Mining company Mara lent out 7,377 Bitcoin to third parties in 2024 according to Vince Quill writing for Cointelegraph. Mining company Mara, formerly known as Marathon Digital, lent out 7,377 Bitcoin to third parties in 2024 according to a January 3rd announcement.
Vice president of investor relations at Mara, Robert Samuels, provided more information about Mara's bitcoin lending activity but did not cite specific numbers. According to Samuels, Mara's Bitcoin lending program focuses on short term arrangements with well established third parties, generates a modest single digit yield, and has been active throughout 2024. So Mara has turned into a lending house for bitcoin to generate yield. Okay. That's not surprising. That's not surprising. So, one of my questions is, if you wanted to borrow bitcoin, think about that. Let's say you've got bitcoin and you want to lend it out to somebody and that way you generate a yield. Okay.
So you get more Bitcoin if the person doesn't, you know, the person that brought the Bitcoin is doesn't steal it. If everything goes well, you get your Bitcoin back plus a yield, which means and and hopefully more Bitcoin and not not fiat. Okay. That's great. That's understandable. Why would I want to borrow Bitcoin at an interest rate? Would it be because it's a pristine collateral that I can then borrow against somewhere else? There you go. Think about that. Bitcoin is such a pristine collateral, and I I probably shouldn't use the word pristine. Everything has flaws.
Right? Everything in the world has flaws, although some have less flaws than others and Bitcoin is probably the least flaw that there is, but let's just bypass all that and say it's a really clean collateral. It's it's highly liquid liquefiable. It's easily storable. It's and and and and more than one person has to you can make it to where more than one party has to sign off before it can be liquidated. This is a great collateral. Would it be worth having is is the property of Bitcoin being such a clean collateral? Is that worth, I don't know, paying, I don't know, let's say 5% interest.
I want a $100,000 worth of Bitcoin. I'm going to pay you 5% on that Bitcoin for the year. If everything goes well on my side, I give you a $100,000 worth of Bitcoin or that one Bitcoin back plus $5,000 worth of more bitcoin on top of that. Is it worth it? Is that worth what you can use bitcoin for? And I would imagine that the very first thing that you could use that for is to use it as collateral for something else. But what's the agreement? And I don't know if Mara is doing that. I don't know when when Mara lends this out. I don't know if the following is true. Does Mara have some kind of ability to say, look, I'm gonna lend this out to you at 5%, and I don't know if it's 5%, but let's just say it is. I'm gonna lend this to you, mister party x. You're gonna borrow this one this one bitcoin at a 100,000 and just I'm gonna charge you 5% on it, and, you're gonna be able to use it as collateral on something else.
Except you can't use it for collateral to, I don't know, buy a Lamborghini against. Something stupid. And this is what I'm getting at is under under what certain circumstances would somebody who has Bitcoin lend out their Bitcoin to generate yield, but make damn sure that what it is going to be used as collateral on is pretty much not stupid. You see where I'm going with this? Anyway, no matter how this works, Mara is taking the Bitcoin that they are mining and they are starting to lend it out. I would imagine you're going to see a lot more of this.
A lot more. In fact, I'll bet you that there's going to be lending houses that say, hey. Bitcoiners retail level Joe Schmo Bitcoiners with half a Bitcoin. Would you like to make yield on your Bitcoin? Give it to us, and then we'll package it together with other Bitcoin, and then we will turn into a lending house, and we will cut you in on the yield that we make. It's not that this is a bad idea, but it will be a terrible idea if it's something like BlockFi where they're basically thieves and grifters and rug pullers. Be extraordinarily careful with your bitcoin coming into 2025 because I'll bet you my bottom dollar that you see a lot more of this lending stuff go on.
Be careful. Let's run the numbers. And it happened. Justin Trudeau has officially announced that he is resigning, and it's Monday, which means those guys that were taking the other side of the the the basically wait. Wait. What was it? There was a contract that said, Trudeau would, step down by Monday, and they only had 24% of the people saying, yes, that was true. All those people won big time big time on Poly Market. So breaking news. Canada's Justin Trudeau today said that he would step down from the helm of the ruling Liberal party. Oh, oh, oh, but he is going to stay on as prime minister until the new leader is selected ahead of a general elections due by late October.
So he's resigning as a party leader. I wonder if anybody had that particular bet, because it doesn't sound to me like he's actually going to resign from being prime minister. Something very weird is going on in Canada, and if I was Canadian right now, I'd be pretty thoroughly pissed. But, hey, it's y'all's politics. You know, don't mind me. This whole thing just seems to be it just smells like a mess. Now oil, speaking of something smelly. And if you haven't ever smelled crude oil at in an oil patch, yeah. To me, it smells wonderful, but to other people, it smells really bad.
However, West Texas Intermediate is down by 0.72%. However, it is well above the $70 barrel mark $70 a barrel mark at 73.43. Brent Norsee is down a half point, but it's at $76.13. Natural gas swinging for the fences, 8.2 percent to the upside, $3.62 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is down by a point and it is just hovering over $2 a gallon on average. Gold is down a quarter of a point to 26.48. Silver is up almost two points. Platinum is down a half. Copper is up 2 and palladium is down a half. A fully mixed, shiny metal rock market there.
Ag is mostly in the green today. Biggest winner is wheat. 2.46% to the upside. The biggest loser is sugar. 1.5 to the downside. I got live cattle up 0.5%. Lean hogs, however, are down a full point. Feeder cattle are up 0.44%. The Dow is up a third to 43,171. S and P is up 0.86%, Nasdaq is up over a point, and the S and P mini is up 0.86%. What's bitcoin doing? Well, look at that. It's a $101,980 and that puts us right at a $2,020,000,000,000 market cap. Bitcoin, you can get or sorry. You can get 38.6 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,806,388.91 of, and average fees per block are hella low.
0.04 BTC taken in fees overall on a per block basis. That's pretty damn low. There are only, god I haven't seen this in a while, there are only 59 blocks. 59 blocks. Usually it's a 100. I've seen it up as much as 200. I've seen I've seen lots of blocks. I haven't seen it this low in mempools across the world in quite a while, ladies and gentlemen. 59 blocks carrying a total of a 194,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority fees or rates of 9 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 7.
What the hell's mining been doing? Holy smokes, we're above 800 hexahashes per second ladies and gentlemen. When I went on Christmas vacation, I've didn't I saw maybe 800 a couple of times, like, literally a couple of times for the entire year of 2024, and now it looks like we are well well well above 800 exahashes per second because it's a 1 week rolling average. So average for the last week is 804 exahashes per second. That is a lot of security behind the Bitcoin network. Now from Grins and Barrett, which was episode 1011 of Bitcoin and Nick_dose gave me 10,000 sats and says, hope you had a great break.
Looking forward to more from you in 2025. Cheers. And he did that a mere 16 hours ago, anticipating that I would not squelch or welch on my promise to come back in 2025 with the Bitcoin and podcast. Thank you, Nick underscore does. Jay with 3333, the magic number says, totally agree with you or that with your take that the FUD surrounding the Bitcoin strategic reserve is overblown. I've seen some people are afraid of the government preventing forks while others are afraid of them creating their own hard fork. I really don't think either will happen. I also agree that Satoshi set the gold standard for the template and the template for OPSEC as a core developer.
No one gave him his privacy. He took it for himself. Agreed, dude. Dark. With 21/21, Satoshi says, well reasoned takes on some complex topics. Great episode. Thank you, dark. God's death with 537. Sat says, thank you, sir. Safe travels. I had safe travels. I did. Everything went smoothly on the way there and on the way back it was it was very very nice. Wartime with 333 says cheers and Hugh Janice Hugh Janice, with 200 sats says, happy Christmas. Happy Christmas to you. Pies with a 100 says, thank you, sir, no thank you. Nick underscore dose with 101 says, cheers. Cheers. Nick underscore dose with another 101 sats with an exclamation point and clear with a 100 sats says looking forward to hear you on once bitten about the whole 6 yards national covert stacking op.
I think we're around the 2nd yard, evidenced in the wider recognition that the protocol works and that the FUD was baseless. 3 yards will be an increased normalization in retail. 4 yards, the move from tolerance to promotion for an economic stimulus policy at a national level, coffee shops, tipping, taxis, you know. The 5th, regional coordination and promotion as a value exchange mechanism, education. 6 yards, the ubiquitous acceptance for all payments, donations, groceries, fines, penalties, and taxes. It'll probably be ridiculed at first a la El Salvador, but do we need to worry about FUD about foreign national progress?
Safe trip. Safe trip. Again, clear. I did have a safe trip, and I thank you and all the rest of the people that wished me well on having safe travels and a happy Christmas. Thank you all. If you want to support the Bitcoin and podcast, the best way to do that is with podcasting 2.0 and the value for value mentality. If you think I'm bringing you value, then get me back on the other side by using a podcasting 2.0 enabled app like fountain dotfm, otherwise known as the fountain app. Yes. You can give me boostograms and you can send me messages and if you do chances are good I'll probably read it on the show. So if you want to make an announcement, if you want to announce your marriage, if you wanna announce a Bitcoin meetup, man, dude, hit me up and give me some satoshis on the bottom end of that. Otherwise, you can stream me satoshis on a minute per minute basis, and you can only do that with podcasting 2.0 and a value for value mentality.
That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use from Atlas 21, the newsroom of Atlas 21. Ethiopia transforms hydroelectric power into Bitcoin. Mining is generating an 18 percentile of national revenue. Holy smokes. That seems quite a bit. Let's find out more. Ethiopia is converting surplus energy from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam or GERD as a source of wealth through Bitcoin mining. According to data reported by the Africa report, this activity is generating 18% of Ethiopia's national revenue. Hawat Eshitu, marketing and business development director at Ethiopian Electric Power stated, quote, Bitcoin miners have a lot of money to invest and we need lots of money to develop our grid, so it's a win win.
Over the past year, mining investments exceeded 1,000,000,000 that's billion with a b dollars and has surpassed or surpassed profits from energy exports to neighboring countries. Ethiopia has already signed agreements with 25 minuteing companies generating over $55,000,000 in revenue in the last 10 months. This success is also attributable, to the country's extremely competitive electricity rates at around 3.2¢ per kilowatt hour, which is amongst the lowest worldwide. Ethiopia's mining landscape underwent a significant transformation after China's 2021 ban on mining. Companies like Bitfufu and Bit Mining found fertile ground for their operations in this African country.
An example of BitMining's acquisition of a 51 megawatt facility with 17,869 mining machines, representing a $14,300,000 investment. Currently, mining operations in Ethiopia consume approximately 600 megawatts of energy with growth prospects that could lead the country to control up to 7% of global hash rate. That's the end of the article and it's probably the beginning of the ire of guess who? The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Who will say in 2025 that bitcoin is destroying Ethiopia. Because they will find some story, they will go out to some freaking village that has electricity, and somehow or another the lights went out, and they will figure out a way to say, on this day, bitcoin mining destroyed this entire village because all the lights went out. And clearly, it was because bitcoin was sucking up all the electrons and there wasn't enough left over for these poor ass dudes out in the middle of nowhere in the sticks, and it will not be true. However, the world will buy it. It will be on CNN. It will be on CNBC.
It will be on Fox. It'll be it'll be everywhere. And then Greenpeace or the Greenpeace USA will get into the fight and say, we're killing poor villagers in Ethiopia. It's going to happen. It will happen this year. I guarantee it. Somebody make a poly market bet on it for me, please, because me, I'm not a gambler. But there's something else in here. I wanna read you this quote from Hiwat Ishitu, the marketing and business development director of Ethiopian Electric Power. That's their their power company. He says, bitcoin miners have a lot of money to invest, and we need lots of money to develop our grid.
What have we been saying for years? That first, the Bitcoin miners find the cheapest, most most inaccessible, generally speaking, hydroelectricity is in places where people don't necessarily live, so you gotta transmit the power. Okay. Well, great. You can build a dam there and you can install the electric generators and all the stuff to generate the electricity, but transmission lines, that's a different investment. And it's very costly. You got a especially in, like, anywhere in the world. You've got a prep ground. You've got a, like, put up huge towers. These lines, these high voltage lines, do you have any idea what kind of tension is on these lines?
I mean the the amount of of substructure that you got to get to these towers, the amount of concrete, the amount of engineering that you have to provide so that these things just don't fall over in the wind is absolutely astounding and it costs a lot of money. So what do you do? You move miners in and they generate revenue because you're going to you're gonna sell them the electricity. You might lease them the facilities. You might do all kinds of stuff, but these guys seem to be making money hand over fist. It said in this article that they're making more money on bitcoin mining than they are selling their excess generated power to other countries, to their neighboring countries.
Okay. So now we've got bitcoin miners not only being invited in, but said being asked, please help us with our power grid infrastructure, and it seems to me that we were right. Again, this is exactly what the conjecture has been for the for years now, and we're seeing it happen again and again and again and again. Ethiopia is gonna get enough money to build out their transmission line and power grid infrastructure, and at one point or another they might say, we don't need you guys, you miners anymore, move on to somewhere else, and they'll be able to pack up and go. Now, Ethiopia might keep them around, but even if they didn't, our job is done.
We helped Ethiopia build out their power grid, and we used Bitcoin to do it. There's not a whole lot more arguments that can be made against Bitcoin at least on this particular facet of what we always conjecture Bitcoin can do, and it's doing it in this new year, the year of our Lord, 2025. But again, watch out for the FUD. I guarantee it's coming from IMF. We're gonna be killing Ethiopia. But in the meantime, we've got Amethyst. That's right. Let's get into a little bit of Nostra news. Amethyst version 0.94.3 encrypted media on direct messages, gifts, and custom emoji inputs, plus fixes for Tor leaks.
Amethyst is a free and open source Nostra client for Android in case you did not know Now, the new, release brings encrypted media uploads on direct messages, chats with oh, sorry, to direct message chats. Let's do that again. I screwed that up. The new release brings encrypted media uploads on direct message chats with every upload now encrypted to the recipient's public key following the same specification as o x chat, significantly enhancing privacy compared to the traditional hidden link design. The encrypted blobs are sent to nip96 in blossom servers.
Make sure your server accepts encrypted blobs. Satellite and void.cat do accept quote was stated in the release notes. I think that was a typo because I don't understand that sentence at all and I read it verbatim. Version 0.94.0 also design redesigns the app's upload screens enabling multiple image and videos at the same time on new posts, stories, and chats encryption. Error handling was also improved with the screens now allowing users to try again using a different server. Amethyst 0.94.1 also adds a command to link custom emojis on new posts and chats quote similar to the at symbol for user search, just start typing to find your custom emojis.
When you see the list of emojis click on the emoji to add it as an inline emoji or or click on the right button to add as a regular URL in the post. Oh, that's going to be kind of interesting. Quote, create your gif and reaction libraries on emojito. Meme. Make sure to bookmark yours and other people's emojis packs to add them to amethyst's emoji list. Holy shit. This is cool. Version 0.94.2 fixes a couple of Tor leaks introduced during the migration of 2 APIs back in version 94.0. Quote, the new relay API contained the bug that bypassed the user's Tor preference relays and the migration to coli3 implemented a one time cache for TOR preference preventing it from reflecting subsequent changes for image loading, said the project.
And then 93.4 adds imetatags to gifurls to optimize gif previews. So while I was on vacation, you know, or Christmas break, I saw a lot of people saying that Nostra was going to be destroyed over the fight of the gif button, and I thought that was hilarious. I literally took it as nothing but funny because nothing is going to destroy Nostra. I mean, there might be people that get pissed off because they don't want to see other people haggling over something like a gift button, but come on. You gotta admit, that's kind of funny that we're fighting over a gift button.
I mean, I I like gifts. I I want a gift button too, but I'm not gonna get mad about it. My god almighty. Now, Jan 3, the company. No. Samson Moe and all those guys. Jan 3 has raised $5,000,000 of a seed round for the aqua wallet development. Let's see what this is about. The seed financing will aid the development and the expansion of Jan three's aqua wallet and support Jan three's nation state initiatives. Quote, we're very excited to announce a $5,000,000 seed funding to accelerate the development and expansion of the aqua wallet. This funding marks a pivotal step in our journey to make bitcoin accessible, practical, and transformative for users around the globe, announced the project.
The latest funding round, follows an oversubscribed precede round of 620,000 which was closed in early of 2023. A $1,000,000 of the funds will be allocated to establish a bitcoin treasury for Jan 3 consisting of 12 BTC acquired at an average cost of 83,333.33 per BTC. Quote, Tether is excited to support the work of Jan 3 and what they're doing to advance financial freedom around the world. Jan 3's aqua wallet has found excellent product market fit by offering the perfect balance of saving in Bitcoin with spending in USDT. That's Tether, said Paolo or I never can't pronounce his name. I'm gonna say Paulo Arduino, CEO of Tether, quote, we've seen rapid growth in both user adoption and volumes with the month of November 2024 alone crossing $11,000,000 in swap volume.
By leveraging advanced technologies like the lightning and liquid networks, we've managed to create a bitcoin super app that's able to deliver real utility and is being used in daily life around the world. It just works, and it's only going to get even better, said Samson Moe, chief executive officer of Jan 3. So congratulations to the guys at Jan 3 on their $5,000,000 raise, and congratulations for making the decision to devote a full 20% of that raise to buying 12 Bitcoin at $83,000 with us at $101,991. It sounds like y'all made it good made out like bandits on that one already. Now, Zapstore version 0.2.0.
Zap the devs. Zapstore is a social, permissionless app store built on the Nostra protocol. It's available on Android. Okay. So before I get into this, and it's not long, but I just want to say something about zaps about Zapstore here. It's the unsung hero of the Nostra universe. And I wish I wish I had a better way to articulate why it's important, but we have the Google Play Store, we have the Apple Store or the Apple App Store or whatever you we have all kinds of stores. Yet, the way that Zap Store works, at least on on Android, so it's playing against Google Play, is you can get apps for your Android from the Zap store and it's done.
The store is built on the Nostra protocol. It's resilient. It's redundant. It's almost indestructible, and I'm pretty sure that not a whole lot of people at Zapstore are gonna be really interested in saying you can't have that app. Now, if it's something holy and as far as the world is concerned illegal, like child pornography, yeah, they're probably gonna say no, you you can't do that. But then again, I don't know. Maybe they don't even have the infrastructure to pull down an app. And I think that that I think I may actually be correct in saying that they don't. But you know what I have not really seen in the Nostra Universe?
Bad behavior. Every I mean, at the very 2 years ago, I woke up and every post had a dick pic. Okay. It was actually kind of funny because it was the exact same picture. It wasn't like, you know, somebody, like, went to playboy.com and just, like, scraped a whole bunch of the guys or whatever and and and put them all up all, you know, and and did something like that. Because it was the same pitcher, but it was a full blown dick pic, somehow or another that kind of injected a little bit of light hardness into it. If it had been a whole bunch of different guys, that actually would be kind of like, you know, worse.
So even in in in Noster's worst days, it's actually kind of funny. But if I go to Twitter or if I go to, you know, Instagram, all I see is bad behavior left and right. I don't see it on Noster. I you know what I don't? I don't see a whole lot of racism on Noster. I'm sure you're going, oh, well, I've seen the guy say the n word. Well, I don't give a shit. Yeah. I'm not gonna actually say the word. I I I'm just not going to do it. Is there's just no reason. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Nobody is saying, hey, look at that whore over there. You know? I mean, there's there's all kind there's all kind there's a couple of e girls that's on Noster, and even they, you know what they'll do? It's like they'll they'll they'll instead of being butt ass naked, they'll wear lingerie and if something see through, they'll put little emojis on either the nipple or in the crotch area.
Okay. So you're still saying, hey, this isn't really, you know, that that's not really all that cool. I get it, but at least they understand their audience. If you let people actually make their own decisions about what it is they wanna show and why, instead of putting algorithms in all manner of rules and terms of service and allowing people to snipe each other to death to the point that they get their accounts completely suspended. If you look at it from that standpoint, thank god for Noster Because I'm not seeing this behavior. I'm not seeing just days and days and hours and hours of of just back to back terrible human behavior. But where I do see it is on Twitter.
Where I do see it is on Facebook, I see it on Instagram, I see the most terrible behaviors and it's getting worse. And if you want to extract yourself from that, then you need to come over to Nostr where you have things like Zapstore. And if you've got an Android phone, you can download all kinds of apps using the Nostr protocol. Will some of those apps be about Nostr? Yes, they will. Will some of them not be about noster? Yeah, they will. But they will actually be utilizing the noster network which is damn near indestructible. So consider that and let's get into our last for the day, Blitz Wallet version 0.3.7 beta on chain payments from liquid or lightning and manual channel rebalancing is now available in the Blitz Wallet, which is a self custodial bitcoin lightning liquid and e cash wallet built using the Breeze SDK, green light, the liquid wallet kit, and bolts.
It's available on Ios and Android. The blitz wallet update allows on chain payments from lightning or liquid balances. It removes requirements for a lightning node connection when lightning is disabled. It introduces weekly rotation of liquid addresses for accounts and monthly for contacts, enables automatic recovery of unclaimed e cash transactions, it includes bug fixes for stability, and enables manual channel rebalancing. So on chain payments users can now send on chain payments directly from either lightning or liquid. Users can now manually rebalance channels via the balance info page instead of automatic rebalancing on every wallet load, which I I I would actually like.
I I don't use the blitz wallet, I I haven't used the blitz wallet, but I kinda like rebalancing on every wallet load, unless it costs a lot of money in which case that would suck. But the wall this wallet now no longer requires a connection to the lightning node unless there is a lightning balance or lightning is actually enabled and that reduces dependencies for non lightning users and that's a good thing. E cash claim recovery. Users can now claim missed e cash transactions due to offline periods or failed claims. Unclaimed e cash tokens will be automatically attempted for recovery upon wallet loading, reducing lost funds, and then, of course, the general bug fixes. Okay. So that is it, ladies and gentlemen, for this.
The first episode of 2025 for Bitcoin and which was episode 1,012. And I hope you enjoyed it. A little rusty because I haven't actually done a show in a couple of weeks. So if, I'm flubbing around, please forgive me. It does take me and other people that do podcast and, you know, generally speaking, any public speaker who hasn't spoken for a while, it takes us a little while to get back into the, into this, swim of things. And if you would, help me spread the show. Sure. If you wanna send me giant boostograms and keep me up in the charts throughout the entire year, I'm not gonna say no because that's just flat money. But some of you out there may not wish to part with your satoshis. And if you're one of those, I don't blame you. I don't like parting with my satoshis either.
But I wouldn't mind it if you parted with a bit of your time. Tell your family and friends, hey, do you want to know more about bitcoin? Do you want to know more about what's going on with bitcoin in the news? Do you want to know what what do you want do you want somebody to read you these stories? So while you're on your way to work, well then listen to the bitcoin and podcast. And then after that, after you've given this podcast, if you've shared give after you've shared this podcast with at least one family or friend member for the day, then get your happy butt over to Apple Podcasts and give me a 5 star review to start off the year.
These things work. For those of us that are almost completely 100% in Nostr and literally using damn near nothing else, we've left algorithms behind. We've become our own algorithm. We depend on each other to be algorithms to filter things for us. It's the way the world should work in the first place, but algorithms still help in the normie fiat world for me to get the word out about this show. I want more listeners in 2025. I want more satoshis generated by this podcast in 2025. And if you don't have those Satoshis to do it, you can help me generate issue or interest in the podcast by getting the word that the podcast exists and what it does out of the door, out of the window to somebody else who's like, god, you know, and the whole reason I started this show in the first place is I really wanted.
I really did. I wanted somebody to read me the daily news. So I didn't have to. But nobody was reading on a daily basis actual news stories. We got people that read other things. We got Guy Swan who will read whole white papers or or, like, big long articles, but those aren't necessarily the daily news about Bitcoin. And while and and I appreciate, Guy. I listen to Bitcoin Audible all the time. The one of my favorite podcasts. But it's not the news. I'm the one that's doing the news. So if you have somebody who's interested in unders not understanding what Bitcoin is or what Bitcoin does, but how the world is thinking about Bitcoin or what issues bitcoin is causing, that we get through the news. And if you've got somebody like that in your life, give them the link. Give them the URL.
The more listeners that I can get not only to listen to this podcast, but get on value for value in podcasting 2.0, the more potential revenue this show might have to be able to build. And with that said, I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and New Year Reflections
