Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, Episode 118.
My name is Chris.
Chris, L-A-S dot com, Jupiter Broadcasting dot com.
Bitcoin got tested this week in a kind of a different way.
The markets are looking for more easy money in the AI trade, and they're coming up with a whole new asset class to financialize.
I'll talk about that in a little bit.
But of course, the big story is a small group of Bitcoiners that got main character syndrome, tried to change the rules on all of us, and they failed miserably.
I'll be talking about that.
And of course, through all of it, Bitcoin just kept on producing blocks.
But first, I want to start with macro, just a quick look at macro, because at least temporarily, things are kind of changing in Bitcoin's direction, but not for the reasons you'd really like to see, because it was really the latest jobs report in the U.S., which was real ugly.
Bitcoin did see a bit of a bounce after last episode price-wise.
And that was really due to this bad U.S. jobs report.
23,000 jobs lost.
And what you get from that is the market celebrating bad news
and pricing in a higher chance that there will be either a Fed rate cut
or at least a right punt in September.
You could almost say they're excited about the bad news.
And here we go, Joe.
July employment figures populating.
Buckle up on this one.
Minus, minus 23,000 on non-farm payrolls.
I can hear the bond yields falling right now.
Minus 23,000.
That would be the second worst number of the year
outside of the only other negative number,
minus 156 in February.
Now, if you look at the two-month revision, another whopper, minus 103,000.
Manufacturing payroll is actually a bright spot.
Manufacturing up 5,000.
That would be, what, the best since it was up 15,000 in March,
and that was the high watermark going all the way back to 23.
Okay, average hourly earnings, big miss, up 110.
And that's one third of what we were expecting.
Oh, one tenth would be the lightest reading of the year.
Oh, yep.
So the average folk are feeling it the worst.
They got less increases in payroll than they expected.
Of course, also at the same time, they're spinning the new inflation report as improved, right?
Because, well, yeah, inflation's at 3.4%.
Surprise, surprise.
But that's exactly what we expected it to be.
So it's good.
About four minutes to go to the opening bell, and we've got green. Dow's up 50, S&P up 20,
Nasdaq up 234 points. Look who's here. The bullish Brian Belsky joining us today. Yeah,
that's you. That's you. Don't look like that. Bullish Belsky. Jobs report. 23,000 jobs lost.
You know, the market seems to like it, right? Of course it does, because it looks like bond
yields are going to slip a little bit lower. The market doesn't want higher rates too. And
we've been in this environment of low rates for a long time now. And I think we seem to forget
that the Fed has a dual mandate on one side, inflation and the other side, employment.
Everyone's so focused on inflation and what's going on in the Gulf. And we forget that oil
inflation actually, by the way, is very volatile. So as soon as oil prices start going down,
and they will, inflation is going to go down as well.
Will it? Is that true? I'm not as convinced. I think, you know, we're celebrating 3.4% inflation. I see nothing to celebrate there.
Well, we're just getting the numbers in, and it looks like we're pretty much on spot on.
The Economist forecasts CPI on a month-over-month basis up a tenth.
The core up two-tenths, which puts us at 3.4 percent for year-over-year on the headline.
And for the core, two-and-a-half percent.
Both of those a tick lower than they had been.
Let's take a look at some of the categories here that we have seen move.
Food up a tenth of a percent. That's down from two tenths in June. It is also food at home
decreasing a tenth of a percent. Energy decreased 1.5 percent in July after falling 5.7 percent in
June. The gasoline dead next down 2.9 percent. All these numbers, you know, they fluctuate.
Why do they matter? They only matter because it all feeds into this obsessive Fed cult of reading
the tea leaves, trying to figure out where their money is going to come from next.
But the rates haven't changed.
The situation with Iran significantly hasn't changed.
The strait claims to be open, yet Trump says, yeah, it's got a few mines.
Yeah.
And the problem is, is this continues, especially as the bear market progresses, as the situation
with inflation becomes uncertain, as the AI trade now begins to build another mechanism
to suck liquidity.
The pressure is building on the treasury companies.
And the Apex treasury company, of course, is Strategy.
Strategy this week continued selling Bitcoin to fund their dividends, and no one seems to be batting an eye.
The Bitcoin market apparently is easily absorbing the cells, and it might just be proving Saylor's stated strategy correct.
What we needed to do was demonstrate that if we sold Bitcoin, it wouldn't fail.
So when we sold the Bitcoin, it was $60,000, $59,000, and it traded up.
And so we broke that misconception.
We broke that narrative.
It turns out that the break-even point for us is about 3.2%.
So if Bitcoin appreciates 3.2%, we can pay the dividends forever by just selling the Bitcoin.
But you can imagine if you're a short seller, you say, well, you can't sell the Bitcoin.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, because Bitcoin will fail.
And so they want to say that the credit is worthless because you won't sell the Bitcoin.
So the way to break that cycle is you sell the Bitcoin.
Now you can illustrate that the credit is actually good credit.
We can pay the dividends forever.
And now the credit investors-
Without having to sell more Bitcoin.
Now, the whole point of this was we were selling equity in order to pay the dividend on the credit.
Yeah.
And the short sellers took the position that you're going to sell the equity until the stock goes to zero because you can't sell the Bitcoin.
Yeah.
So how do you actually get, how do you break that?
We have to say, well, we can sell the Bitcoin.
And you sold enough Bitcoin to pay the dividend.
So we sold enough Bitcoin to pay the dividends to prove that we could fund the dividends with
Bitcoin, which means we don't have to sell the equity.
And if we don't have to sell the equity, then the equity trades at a premium to Bitcoin,
trades rationally, and then the credit trades rationally.
So it was a benefit to the equity investors and the credit investors to show that you
can power the company with Bitcoin.
Do you intend to sell more?
It's not our primary strategy. So if the common stock trades at a premium to the underlying
assets, then probably we find with the common stock. But if the common stock ever sells at
a discount or trades at a discount to the Bitcoin assets, then you sell Bitcoin in order to protect
the common stock. And where do you think Bitcoin's going in terms of monetary value,
in terms of one Bitcoin? Currently, what you said is what, 68,000 or something?
I think it appreciates about 30% a year for the next 20 years, right? And then it'll slow down to being appreciated about 20% a year. So...
You think it's the best asset to put your money in really, really respective of who you are?
Another way to say it is I think it outperforms the S&P index by a factor of 1.5 to 2.
Who shouldn't invest in Bitcoin?
All right, let's talk about BIP-110, the fork that wasn't.
Saturday was the moment of truth for BIP-110,
and we watched the fork finally happen at block 961 Felt like we were building to this for a long time Initially Ampoole mined the normal Bitcoin block
while miners using Ocean's infrastructure produced the BIP-110 signaling version.
From that moment, there were two chains.
And almost immediately, the hash power problem became painfully obvious.
I admit, like maybe some of you, I was monitoring the situation.
I had a lot of streams and screens going and monitors going and whatnot.
And I thought it was really fascinating to watch this because probably a lot of you that have come into Bitcoin in the last few years, you've heard stories of like the Bitcoin cashers or Bitcoin Satoshi's vision, or you've heard of the block size war.
And the people that are on the wrong side of history are just kind of the quote unquote villains or whatever of Bitcoin's history now.
And so, you know, by the time you've come, everyone knows that Roger Ver is a scammer.
But that had to be worked out.
And we just witnessed one of those events here in Bitcoin.
And if you were here for it, you're going to be on the other side of this.
And other newbies, the new classes that come along the next few years, this will all be
history to them now.
And so I had to watch it.
I just found this to be absolutely fascinating.
It was pretty obvious the regular chain would continue to pull ahead, but it wasn't immediately obvious because BIP-110 managed to produce block 961-633, giving it its initial two breakaway block run.
And those first two blocks took roughly eight hours combined to produce.
And then I think it was almost five days before the third block, after Roughnecks backed off
and has now gone back and they're just eating the reward, right?
Because their reward is now in BIP110 coin.
It's not in Bitcoin.
And they're continuing to mine on this chain.
So what happened is a tiny fraction of Bitcoin's actual hash power
which was the BIP-110, just a tiny fraction.
The BIP-110 chain was mining against the actual chain now.
They are up against the big machine.
And it was something to watch.
Only about 2.5% of miners signaled for BIP-110.
The proposal had been looking for 55% support,
which is the lowest.
It's crazy.
It's historically low.
It's ridiculously low.
It's recklessly low, and they didn't even get that.
Mandatory signal arrived with nowhere remotely close
to enough hash power to sustain a competitive chain.
But there was a really interesting Ocean twist
that you'll hear in my clips I'm about to play.
Ironically, Ocean's infrastructure
produced the first BIP-110 block
because Roughnecks was the only hash power.
But an Ocean block on the regular Bitcoin chain
also became part of the sequence
that made it unmistakably clear
which chain had the overwhelming majority
of proof-of-work hash power.
And the irony that it came from Ocean,
given Luke Dasher and Mechanic's connections to Ocean and BIP-110,
it was absurd.
It was an ironic twist of Bitcoin history.
Truly something wild.
And at that point, the BIP-110 chain effectively ground to a halt.
Three blocks right now.
And they say it's fine.
You know, well, you know, Bitcoin's longest downtime was five days between blocks.
So it's fine. It's fine. It's no big deal.
Yeah, okay. Yeah.
So the story has gotten considerably stranger since this fork failed.
Instead of them just settling the argument and supporters saying, OK, all right, we see consensus wasn't reached.
We're moving on.
The core of them are now organizing on Discord and they have coordinated a new proof of work change to Blake 2B, I think it is.
So they're actually changing the proof of work protocol that's been centrally managed inside their little private Discord chat, just as, you know, Satoshi had envisioned it, of course.
So we've gone from BIP110 won't split Bitcoin to an actual chain split to now no hash power following it because none of the miners followed with a chain that barely produces blocks and is now changing the proof of work protocol.
And there's even been discussion about carving out coins for the roughnecks that are losing money mining right now.
That was something Luke just floated that.
You know, like Satoshi liked to do pre-mine for people.
You know how Satoshi was big on that.
So we've all just watched the birth of, excuse me here, a shitcoin.
This is an altcoin.
This is how some of them come to be.
And the hubris of this effort led these guys to live stream the entire thing.
We got to watch them fail live in front of all of us.
And I'll note that Professor Cratter tried to do two live streams on his own.
And he legitimately could not figure out how to live stream on YouTube.
using the built-in live browser stuff,
the simplest way in the world to livestream,
on a platform that the man produces videos for every single day.
He couldn't get livestreaming to work.
My kids can livestream.
So this is the level of technical prowess
which the BIP-110 crowd
and some of the leaders of the BIP-110 movement
and their biggest cheerleaders are dealing with.
So Cratter had to go join the stream with everybody else.
it was really interesting and going into the split things were already not looking good because
you know they were hoping more miners would be signaling ahead of time and so the faces were sad
and the explanations were starting to just get crafted at that moment they've been they've been
flushed out now but the seed the initial seed of the explanations of the failure
were being crafted right there on the live stream in front of all of us
and it all would have just worked out great if not for michael saylor oh michael saylor it's all
his fault. To say these guys are sailor-brained is an understatement. And I did not appreciate
until this moment, until this Saturday, until this live stream, I did not appreciate how much
free rent he occupies in their head and how much sailor paranoia underwrites the BIP-110 nonsense.
I had missed it. I guess I just didn't engage enough. These guys have been social bubbled
so hard, and I'm going to give you Exhibit A. Before even the first block was mined,
Matt Crowder thinks he's got it all figured out.
My operating assumption coming into this this morning was that
the fact that they didn't signal a little bit early at the end of the week, as many of us were
expecting them to, that I just, I assume that Foundry got a call from people like Michael Saylor,
and there may be some sharing of ideas
going on with the Chinese mining pools as well.
This idea that China and the US are geopolitical rivals
and could never collude to hurt Bitcoin.
Well, they sure colluded with COVID to hurt a lot of us.
What's that got to do with this?
And that's very sobering.
And when you see the president cozying up with Xi,
so again we'll see what comes in the chain here
but this is not Bitcoin
this is not Bitcoin
or the mining industry takes its lead from Bitcoin Core
And I think in many ways, I forget who said it.
This is in many ways a lot of people misunderstood the spam angle of this.
Maybe we should have sold it as a...
I want to pause him right here.
He's actually got it reversed.
The Bitcoin miners aren't being led by Core.
Core is being drug around by the Bitcoin miners.
That's what led to the whole operaturn change is they were making a change in Core that just
reflected the realities that the miners had already embraced, that they were just changing
the defaults on their nodes, which make a majority of a lot of these nodes. They were changing those
defaults already. I'm not arguing for it. I don't like it. But I'm just saying he's got it completely
backwards. Core was being drug around by the miners. The miners are not getting drug around by core.
I forget who said it. This is in many ways a lot of people misunderstood the spam angle of this.
maybe we should have sold it as a UASF against Bitcoin Core
because that where the real Bitcoin Core all the spineless creatures there but backed up by by sailor money
and the bitcoin security consortium or council whatever it's called this is all vibes there's
no evidence this is all hey i think sailor uh called up some miners on you know his iphone
he facetimed them he facetimed mara digital and i mean and then like and then like then just the
vague, like probably some China collusion to how that would work. Exactly. Not sure. But, you know,
we've seen the state do that before. So, you know, it seems like a thing. It's all just vibes.
And if he was expecting that going into this, like he says, my operating assumption, then
was he surprised when this failed? Because it seemed like he was surprised. He accidentally
released a video saying BIP one ton failed before Luke yelled at him. And then he had to release
another video saying the fight wasn't over yet. But the entire thing is just an emotional roller
coasters you're watching this because that was just the spin warming up right the first bip 110
block hadn't been mined yet and when it had gotten mined when it did finally land it was game on
maybe arthur grass fed matt cratter luke dasher wow so you just found a bip 110 block holy
yeah you are joking holy fantastic we found a bip 110 block
all right everyone start your engines let's go hey good job roughnecks dude fantastic roughnecks
wow shout out to roughnecks uh yes the we have found now the valid 961632 block
it would turn out that roughnecks was the only hash power behind bit 110 but they didn't know
that at the time. They were helping that other miners would get on board, like Foundry, because
Foundry put out a vote and Ocean had opened up an endpoint and made it the default to signal for
BIP-110. But it turned out no one else wanted a worthless block reward, but they didn't know it
at that point. In fact, there was some speculation that Foundry had shut down mining in preparation
for the switch over to BIP-110 because Foundry hadn't announced the results of their vote.
And there was this just excruciating long block time, like over 20 minutes, painfully slow block times after this happened. So all of us were just quietly waiting and speculating.
speculating. And so Bitcoin Mechanic, one of the absolute main characters of BIP-110,
and now taking a sabbatical from Ocean, used the time to outline his misunderstanding of the
entire situation. And again, this is notable for you as a listener, because we have to learn
from these mistakes. Yeah, that's been a frustrating thing to deal with.
And like any sort of personal defeat, the sports aspect of it, the tribalism and stuff,
that's just bruised ego.
It sucks for five minutes and then you get over it.
But it's so irrelevant.
The bigger picture here is I feel that Bitcoin itself, everyone loses.
If you can't do a UASF with that kind of momentum, if you're going to get denied by a tiny group
of miners, that's insane to me.
That makes Bitcoin itself just a completely different animal.
and everyone loses from that.
All the people on the Remain side
lose from that too.
They need us
and the degree to which we need them
is unclear,
but, you know.
Again, he has most of this backwards
and a bit of tunnel vision here.
He hasn't wrapped his head around the fact
that this wasn't a few miners
that rejected them.
The plebs rejected them.
The plebs rejected the soft fork as well.
BIP-110 was just not signaled by a majority of the pleb nodes.
And the reality is they didn't get a single exchange on board.
So how do you buy and sell BIP-110 coin?
You have to do it peer-to-peer right now, which after a fork is pretty risky, especially
with this particular fork.
So they got Ocean on board, but that's because Mechanic and Luke work there.
And rumor is that's about a 50-50 split in the Ocean company if they actually support
BIP-110.
But they got Ocean on board, and that got them some hash rate.
And they got Start9 on board.
That's it.
Start9, who will always now have a black mark for this,
and ended up having no impact.
The nodes just didn't make a difference.
So Start9 burned their reputation for nothing.
And they got some YouTubers, people on X,
and some podcasters that all participated
in the same social bubble.
That was it.
They didn't get consensus.
In this next clip, you can, again,
you can see the bubble math that's behind all of this.
So for me, it came down to esoteric stats, umbral downloads, start nine sales figures,
word of mouth, discussions in meatspace, discussions on social media.
That's how I ascertained that these are real things.
This is a real movement.
And that just became something that miners had to go out and look for and say, what is
the sentiment here?
And you have to care enough to do that.
And it looks like they did not.
Listen to what he's saying there.
In his mind, the Bitcoin miners just weren't motivated enough to go find the vibes.
Not that he's off, not that he misread the situation, but that a nebulous group of people,
if they'd gone out and just done the work, they would agree with him.
It's totally unhinged from reality.
It's not how consensus is made.
And it's more main character syndrome thinking that's been driving this.
But how do you explain to the big, how do you explain if you, if you can write off the
miners with some sort of conspiracy or that they just didn't put the work in depending on which one
you subscribe to how do you explain the fact that so many of the plebs didn't signal with their nodes
why didn't they join the bip 110 cause well when in doubt sailor out but then i mean this really
is just a failure of bitcoin education you know which as i can say as a bitcoin educator that to
Actually, and I'm not sure I even understood this stuff 12 months ago, how important nodes were.
I probably viewed it as more, they're just these various consensus.
I think Lynn Alden did something on consensus where her version, if I remember, it was much more balanced, that nodes are just one part of the consensus process.
But if Bitcoiners understood the decentralized peer-to-peer network, we wouldn't have to be educating them about MASFs and everything.
But it's just sailors slop has filled the sphere and filled the ecosystem.
And there's just so many Bitcoiners don't even understand how Bitcoin works.
And even with LLMs available, you know, if you're a Bitcoin educator or influencer, you shouldn't be able to say I'm not technical.
And then, you know, just I don't have to talk about this.
The hubris.
If anybody wants to point their clanker at that live stream and put together a sailor derangement syndrome supercut and send it to the show, I'd love it.
But, you know, the also out of touch self-admission there at the end about technical prowess and then to imply that somebody like me didn't support BIP-110 because I don't understand how Bitcoin works.
How about the exact opposite, buddy?
Like the exact opposite.
And I think the results speak for themselves.
Called it from the very, very beginning.
Soon as the BIP-110 thing went down, it was obvious.
And the people at the very core of BitOneTone and everyone now in their Discord taking part in all the central planning, they're not going to be gone, right?
They're committed.
They now have their own altcoin, and they're going to be passionate about it.
We had a perfect protocol.
Bitcoin had a singular purpose as permissionless money.
and then we fucked it all up
by funneling $100 million
through Brink, Chaincode Labs
Spiral, OpenSats
and HRF
to incompetent developers
developers who don't understand
the first thing about sound money
therefore they can't understand Bitcoin
they don't own any Bitcoin
hell they don't even like Bitcoin
and thus we were sent spiraling
down a path of death by a thousand cuts
and I believe we've suffered
cut number 999 I took a few days off to clear my head and get fresh perspective and see where I was Where I am after years of debating is I done with that I no longer seek approval nor require
consensus from bad actors. And I know I'm not alone. I can't make peace with this whole thing.
can't make peace with Bitcoin Core,
with the Bitcoin Consortium,
a benevolent subsidiary
of the United States Bitcoin Complex.
It's just, it's a religion.
It's equivalent to how religions
splinter off over time.
And you see it in the Linux community as well.
The core problem is really the loss
of an alternative to Bitcoin Core.
That's what Knott's was,
and it no longer is that.
And maybe that's for the best.
I mean, it has a crazy history.
You should go back to the beginning.
It's really quite something people are posting a lot of summaries.
Didn't follow best practices for development.
Luke clearly changed or has always been a basket case.
I'm not sure.
I feel like things change after he lost his over 200 Bitcoin stash in 2024.
But it doesn't mean there are not alternatives to core in development.
In fact, some of them are looking really good, like LibBitcoin.
One of the oldest truly independent Bitcoin implementations started in 2011.
It's written in C++.
Version 4 is in work in 2026.
Adoption remains tiny compared to core, like most of these.
I'm not sure exactly how you say this next one.
Never had to say it out loud, but it's called Floresta.
I think this is interesting.
It's a newer alternative.
It is written in Rust.
It uses Gextro, which is U-T-R-E-E-X-O, to reduce the storage burden overall and can
either run as a standalone validating node or as an embedded library.
and the project is explicitly targeting strong validation
without the operational footprint of a conventional node.
And then, of course, good old BTCD.
Been around since 2013, written in Go,
part of the BTC Suite project,
implements a full validating node
independently of Bitcoin Core.
It's still under active element,
continues to lay itself beta.
Notts was basically a core derivative, right?
It was a fork with Luke's patches.
LibBitcoinD, BTCD, Floresta are generally separate implementations, and that can sometimes
cause consensus differences and stuff.
So I think that's part of why they don't really have the adoption.
That's my speculation, though.
But they do seem promising.
So if you're under the impression that Knott's was the only alternative out there and that
without it, it's all Bitcoin Core, that is not the case.
And in fact, I would argue what I have seen is an uptick in interest in developing these
alternatives since this entire thing has gone down.
So I'm actually feeling more positive about it than I was earlier.
But I want to know how you're doing with all this.
Were you a BIP110 supporter and then flipped?
Are you still supporting team BIP110 even with them creating it, changing it,
essentially managing it?
And if you're still running a not-to-node, and I know some of you are,
what's your plan?
What are you going to do about this?
And how's this leaving you feeling?
Are you feeling better that Bitcoin survived this?
are you feeling worse that Bitcoin didn't go the direction that BIP-110 people wanted?
That's my question to you.
And I would like you to boost in and tell me what you think.
And we'll discuss it in the next episode.
Boost.JupiterBroadcasting.com.
You can also support the show just by doing what you already do.
If you want to stack sats on River, use my link in the show notes.
If you're all about self-custody, the Bitcoin Well is an automatic, amazing, very impressive self-custody platform with top-tier Lightning support.
The Bitcoin company, speaking of Lightning, go from sats to gift card in just seconds.
You can log in with Lightning credentials.
If you want to stack sats while you're just doing the day-to-day stuff like paying bills and whatnot, the Fold Card, like a debit card, bill payment, Visa platform, stack sats.
And then if it's time to borrow against your stack, check out Salt Lending or Strike.
I have links to both of those.
They each have their advantages.
Don't have any official relationship with these companies, but I do use all or have used all of their services.
And it's a great way to support the show just by, you know, doing the thing you're already doing.
It is time for some boosts.
And now it is time for le boost.
And J-Cube is our baller booster this week, coming in with 86,700 saps.
Hey, rich lobster!
Pew, pew, pew!
What a week that was.
I had two cold card Mark fours move my personal stack to river until my jade bit box two and
treasure come in. That's a strong trifecta right there. Uh, taking longer than I had hoped. I also
have an IRA with unchained. They really stepped up. Thank you for your coverage on this. It was
needed and appreciated. Well, thank you for the value back J cube three. And I, I give a plus one.
If, if I was going to pick a online exchange, I think river would be right up there. One or two
on my list and maybe with strike and maybe third or fourth on that list, maybe fold. What is nice
about fold, depending on the size of your stack, is they do offer some insurance. But that's if I
were going to do online. I really like the Jade and Bitbox too. The Trezor I have owned, but I do
not have as much experience with. So I'd love J-Cube if you want to share experience with that setup.
I'm assuming you're probably using Sparrow or maybe Nunchuck as well. Be curious to know what
Your strategy is there, too.
And good luck.
I know it does take longer than you want, right?
But I appreciate the update.
BK2BK2 comes in with 77,707 satoshis.
I hoard that which your kind covers.
This is value for value.
B-O-O-S-T.
Thank you, BK.
I really appreciate that.
Kiwi Bitcoin guides here with 50,567 satoshis.
He's a good guy.
He's a real good guy.
No, he's a great guy.
Add this to the previous boost.
Okay.
If I think back to all of the BS podcasters that spatted about don't trust Verify and all that crap without doing it themselves, it makes me feel sick.
The I4Value pods with zero paid ads is the only way we'll get reliable information.
As they say, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome.
Turns out they were right.
And while I'm at it, did Bitcoin Maxi culture fail?
100% it did.
And BK and his mates personified and look what happened.
That is decisive.
Thank you, Kiwi.
I love it.
Spicy.
Yes, zip code is a better deal.
I'm throwing in an extra random soundboard boost for you, too.
Like hearing from you.
Dash Dummies here with 44,444 Satoshis.
That's a lot of tux.
Oh, my goodness.
This old duck still got it.
All right, Chris, thanks for keeping me.
I like that he gave me, he broke it up into multiple parts and gave me headings.
Chris, thanks for keeping the signal live while some of us enjoyed the holiday.
Catching from July, but a lot to reflect on over the last few months of activities. BIP-110 and the whole manipulation of it bothers me. Even failing this time, I won't say it'll probably I will say it'll probably be tried again. The cold card situation has certainly flagged a reassessment from me. That's a good way to put it. And I need to educate myself on multisig just shows you should never stop learning in this space. If you're not learning, you increase your risk. I completely agree.
And hypothetically, BIP-110,
if 51% of the hash power sat in one country,
could its government mandate miners
to signal and force a fork
and pressure the network to follow?
Ocean making BIP-110 signaling default
unless miners opted out
feels like a small scale example of this mechanism.
Am I overthinking the risk?
Maybe just because of the actual amount
of hash power required.
Roughnecks turns out to be the only ones mining
and there's a lot of speculation
that some of the people behind BIP-110
are some of the people financing Roughnecks.
Like they're pooling their Bitcoin to buy hash rate on ocean to rent hash rate and then to rent it in signal for BIP 110.
And that's the best they can do.
Even though they switched over to the default, it shows actually how pretty robust it was, I think.
But it, you know, dash dummy.
It's always interesting to think about.
Thank you for the boost.
Anonymous comes in with 31,890 Satoshis.
Four-month listener on Spotify.
Love you taking these Nazis to task over BIP 110.
Hey, thank you very much.
I hoard that with your kind comfort.
Anonymous, I'll warn you that Spotify does pull a few episodes from the library because the clips flag.
or sometimes the value for value track.
If the artist submits it to Spotify
like this week's track,
it'll sometimes flag my episode for copyright
and they'll take it down.
Just as an FYI,
you can get a podcasting 2.0 app
and avoid all of that BS
at podcastapps.com.
Like Fountain or Cast-O-Matic,
just FYI,
but I'm glad you're listening.
Mirror Immortals podcast is back
with a row of McDucks,
22,222 Satoshis.
Things that are looking up for old McDuck.
All right.
Exactly the same reason why I don't take ads or sponsorships.
It's just too risky to trade your reputation for money.
Appreciate your courage and tenacity in sticking with value for value.
I personally got lucky with my security setup and got a gig kick up the arse to reevaluate and harden my security again.
Nice to hear from you mere mortals and hear, hear to that.
A Monday comes in with a row of McDuck's 22,222 satoshis.
Things are looking up for old McDuck.
This old duck still got it.
Washington Bitcoin event coming up.
What?
The Bitcoin Convergence is a free-to-attend regional community mega meetup mini-conference
taking place in Longview, Washington on October 5th.
RSVP at BitcoinConvergence.org.
The intent is to bring together the Portland and Puget Sound area Bitcoin communities.
Camping and stay options are available.
What?
But BitcoinConvergence.org is not loading for me.
It is not loading for me.
Oh, I want to.
Oh, now it did.
I hit reload and it works.
So I take that back.
It is loading for me.
Okay.
This is September 5th though.
That's a big difference.
Is it September 5th or October?
You better let me know because October's, uh, during Texas Linux fest, I think, but September,
I think I'm available, but you say I hear October 5th, but the website says September
5th.
So you should let me know that if I could make it, I I'll come, I'll come camp in my car.
Oh, no big deal at all.
Bring a little recorder with me.
Get some clips for the show.
However, if it's during Texas Linux Fest, I've already made a commitment to Texas Linux Fest.
Thank you, Monday.
Appreciate the heads up on that.
Bitcoinconvergence.org.
Listeners, if you want to check it out.
MDS is here with 21,000 satushers.
Value for value at its absolute peak, peak, peak, peak.
Boost.
Thank you, MDS.
Appreciate it.
Philip is here with 20,000 sats.
Hey, Philippa.
Chris, thank you for your level-headedness.
What a crazy week.
Yes, VIP value all the way.
Screw product-sponsored podcast, actually.
Screw the celebrity hierarchy cult that's crept into the space.
VIP areas, egos, and hero worship.
None of this has a place in the new world.
Massive wake-up resulting in good new direction, I think.
We all just have to keep on asking questions.
That is really well put.
We have weirdly gotten into this weird hero worship, ego.
I mean, look what the BIP-10, 110 stuff happened.
Look at that.
That's really a big part of that was main character syndromes and their followers.
Nailed it, Philip.
Good to hear from you.
Thank you.
Nakamoto6102 is here with 5,000 sats.
You're supposed.
As Fred Rogers said, look for the helpers.
There were so many people that wanted to get the word out and help folks save their hard-earned Bitcoin.
I feel terrible for those that lost their Bitcoin in this attack.
CoinKite's negligence will only make us all more resilient.
I understand why some people may keep part of their stack on an exchange or with an ETF or have self-custody spread over multi-vendors and multi-sync.
Seeing hardworking people coming together to help others, though, gives me hope.
Well said, Nakamoto. Well said.
This is the way.
Yeah, it really has been impressive.
And the Red Team continues their work.
We'll have, oh, I don't know if I put it in the updates, actually.
I'll make it mentioned now.
See, this is why you listen to the boos.
If you run Electrum server, you need to update.
They just pushed out an update today, Wednesday, August 12th, 2026, that has important security updates. They'll be disclosing the nature of those updates. They're giving you a little bit of time because once the nature of the updates is disclosed, the AI tools will backwork that in moments and begin exploiting.
So this is your PSA right here in the middle of the booth.
Update your electron.
All right.
And it's, again, part of that work we're seeing.
Thank you, Nakamoto.
Great point.
OB's here with 6,962 satushers.
I can't swap in bull.
Bolt's problem?
Yes.
They're working on it, but yes.
Besson, honest, respectful question.
What is he supposed to say?
If we don't bail out Japan, they'll sell our Ponzi paper?
I guess he can't say that, can he?
Bitcoin Well was first to try my inbox. Oh, to tell my inbox about ColdCard. Yeah, Bitcoin Well is great. So Bull is a Liquid Federation member. So Bull probably has one of the best cases for solving and replacing the Bulls problem. And then again, here's a little bit of breaking news in the boost section.
And Blockstream has also announced a swap service, much like Boltz.
And Blockstream is the key Liquid Federation member, right?
They're core to the Liquid Federation and Liquid Network.
So I think it's probably good to come from them.
And it seems like perhaps they've built in a way that others may be able to build their
own independent thing on.
So I don't think there's a solution right now.
If you need to swap in and out, you could use sideswap.io.
And that'll probably get you taken care of, Obi.
Thank you for the boost.
love down babylon comes in with 2 000 sets sad for those who lost funds bitcoiners are resilient
and we'll take the lessons forward i thought of multi-sig for inheritance or business and
charities now i see why multi-sig multi-vendor and multiple wallets uh to migrate any one loss
matters multi all the things got it sovereignty over money is personal power and comes with
personal responsibility no shame for those who learn and learned with their stack sets but we
all take the wisdom from the pain. Wisdom cuts when it cuts. Bitcoin learns? I think he got cut
off, but I think I'm totally on the same level with you there, loved. I definitely took a lesson
from it. I've taken multiple lessons and I'm still taking lessons. And actually, those of us
that were here will remember that it was their sacrifice that was the starting shot that taught
us that we need to start using clankers more defensively and proactively find these exploits,
which is why Electrum Server was just updated.
So their sacrifice has been a lesson that I think a majority of the community that is
actually building has internalized.
And it is one that the rest of the industry will learn and Bitcoin will have a start and
be hardened in the fire as a result of it.
That is the silver lining that I see.
Thank you, Love Down Babylon.
Appreciate it.
Moon Knight's here with 2000 Sats.
Coming in hot with the boost.
I've always believed that the air gaps in SD cards and QR codes and all that junk was just marketing hype over everything else.
Who cares if the data is going over a USB port or a camera?
It's still the same data.
IDKY, I ever trusted CoinKite, to be honest.
Spending a lot more time thinking about my self-custody these days.
Yeah, what always bothered me about CoinKite was I never had an idea of the size of the company until all this happened.
I assumed it was somewhere between 5 and 25.
people. Now I'm not even sure it was five people. And I think they were, well, I think it's fair to
say they were intentionally obscure and obligated that because they even did things like made PR
requests and patches under pseudonyms and different names to make it look like other people were
participating in the project from outside the, you know, just stuff like that. It just, the whole
thing is, you wrap your head around it afterwards and you go, okay, well, there's a lot of obvious
warning signs here.
And, you know,
four or five people
trying to create
Fort Knox for Bitcoiners.
I think that's just
a version of the internet
and the technology
that just doesn't exist
anymore, unfortunately.
Cyberpunk Dream's
a little dead there,
but it doesn't mean
there isn't really
cool technology
that's super awesome
that we can use now.
So, there's that.
Thank you, Moon.
Ginkgo Salad's here
with 17,000 Satoshis.
You doing very well No message just value Appreciate that Anon here with 6 Satoshis Oh my God this drawer is filled with fruit loops Fighting with Albihub I hope this works
If it did, I won.
Yes, it did.
Bip110 is a distraction.
Give me a break.
I like your economic takes, but your negative tilt to those who need tech to help run a note.
I guess it's against your professional interests with all the developer experience you have to IT dumbed down Bitcoin culture.
It devalues your experience in training, I suppose.
But Bitcoin culture is not big Bitcoin.
And if I'm wrong, well, the only developers like yourself will make money in Bitcoin forward, which is why you're not BIP 110 supporter.
I would not classify myself as a developer at all.
In fact, I am a longtime Bitcoiner, been here since nearly the beginning and then stepped away for a while and came back because I realized it was the best money in the world.
So I initially started with technical interest in blockchain distributed networking and the idea of private keys and public keys being used as a way to cryptographically verify your money.
That all seemed neat, right?
Cool, I love that.
And I can run it on Linux and all that stuff.
But that didn't sustain me.
What has brought me back and sustains me is the fact that it is truly the best engineered money ever.
It is hard money.
So I just don't know where you get this take.
It just seems like kind of like you're picturing somebody else that you're talking to.
Also, it's a very hard message to read, which is notable.
And there is no big Bitcoin.
There is no big Bitcoin.
We have a lot of centralized miners.
We do have that.
But they all work to their own incentives.
And they're checking out.
I'll have updates on that coming up a little bit in the show.
I think it's not quite the reality you're picturing.
And I don't know if this episode helped you at all.
Let me know.
user 72 is here with 2000 sats b-o-o-s-t i was totally surprised i thought multi-sig was so
overdue but from now on i have all the multi-sig with different vendors and the big thing is it
really wasn't difficult oh i'm glad to hear that i'd love to know what you used um i think the
software implementation is the biggest piece how you manage it and all of that and orchestrate i
think is what makes the difference right so i'd love to know what you used buddha is coming in
with a row of ducks, 2,222 satoshis.
At one point in time,
I was really considering
getting myself a cold card.
Then I realized they dropped
their use of a real FOSS license.
That put me off.
I can't help but feel vindicated,
but I'm really sorry
for everyone affected.
Yeah, I think this is maybe
where Linux users
and free software users
saw a bigger warning flag
than Bitcoiners that came here
just for the money aspect,
perhaps, right?
Like we know,
we know that if it's not free software,
that means nobody else
is building on top of it.
And if nobody else is building on top of it, they're not finding this stuff.
You can put something out there as Creative Commons or, you know, public free to view or whatever.
But if nobody builds on it, they don't stress test it.
And you just inherently learn that in the Linux space.
User 54 is, thank you for the boost.
User 54 is here with 17,000 sats.
PIP 110 could go fork itself.
Well, it did indeed.
It did indeed.
Ace Ackerman's here with 3,333 satoshis.
Oh, all right.
Okay.
I don't think Bitcoin maximum will die, but I hope it knocks some of the pretentiousness out of the maxis and the humiliation may do them good.
You know, I used to consider myself a maxi, even during the run of this show at the beginning.
But I think a wise man has to reevaluate.
And if you don't reevaluate from time to time, you get separated with your money, as we're seeing with the Bitcoin tenors.
Sleets is back with 12,345 sats, Spaceballs boost.
So the culmination is one, two, three, four, five.
I'm glad you're getting offers for sponsorship.
This podcast is valuable and the players see it.
My definition of a toxic maxi is a paranoid DIYer
that knows what money is.
Along those lines, it's relatively easy to DOI
your own air-gapped hardware wallet
using a spare 64-bit laptop, netbook,
plus any flavor of Linux,
and one or two BIP39 entropy programs
to generate your secret.
with the second to validate it,
and Sparrow for your wallet.
This would functionally work like a cold card queue
with a real keyboard and passphrase.
Now, I would say not only that, Sleeks,
but like, if you're willing to have, say like,
if you're willing to do this setup, the DIY setup,
like an air-gapped ThinkPad,
just use Bitcoin Core.
I mean, that's bullet tested.
Bitcoin Core is, like I said, it's been built on top of,
it's been hardened, and when you look at what free software
actually really gets poked at, Bitcoin Core.
All right.
So you could,
although I think that's a great setup too,
right?
But I'm just saying like,
if you're going that route,
you don't have to have,
it doesn't have to be,
this is the point I tried to make in Linux
unplugged a couple of weeks ago
is Linux has learned the hard way
how to generate great random numbers.
And so you would have been way better off
generating your seed on a Linux box
than on a cold card.
This is the reality of it.
I like that.
Thanks, Leets.
Code 27 is here with a row of ducks,
2,222 cents.
No messages value. Thank you.
Brewigator's here with 5,000 sats.
Danger zone.
Woke up for an early run and about halfway through turned on Twib cold card episode,
and I had absolutely no idea what's going on.
Danger zone.
I immediately turned around and sprinted home at a fast pace, the fastest I've ever run.
Thanks for keeping me up to date.
And the unexpected interval workout.
That's really good, man.
Thank you for that.
and uh brewgator i think i'm i think i'm glad it worked out for you right like i'm glad i mean i'm
glad you were able to address it imagine imagine that that's great bug-eyed stormtroopers here with
4084 sats but that's not possible nothing can do that uh i never played with all coins
got into bitcoin because of linux unplugged and podcasting to it oh got the cold card after you
mentioned one of your shows but never took the time to set it up sometimes procrastination pays
off. Thanks for sticking your neck out and doing value for value. You know, budget eye, that is
true. It isn't funny. Sometimes doing nothing is the best route. It really is. I am really grateful
that I did not go all in on cold card, that I have bit boxes and jades as well. That, oh my God,
saved me a lot of trouble, you know, because it just always makes sense. It always, always,
always made sense to me to just do multi vendor. I just, you know, it's just a balance of
complexity and all of that gene beans here with 4 444 satoshis this is a tasty burger i think a
flaw of the maxi rhetoric was too much focus on self-custody centered on a cold storage device
instead of a multi-vendor multi-sig cold storage setup that's true i said i found this tool for
watching the bip 110 main chain split via nostr fork.observer yeah there was a couple of really
good ones gene i used fork.observer myself um yeah that was part of the fun is people built
really good tools to watch all this go down.
The Bitcoin community is just so awesome.
Not sure, not, thank you, Gene.
Not sure is here with 5,555 sats.
Here's some non-cold card sats.
Bitcoin toxic maximalism wasn't toxic enough the right way.
Cold cards were targeted at maxis,
but maxis shouldn't use a wallet generated seeds.
I'm not victim blaming though.
Yeah, maybe they didn't maxi hard enough.
Could be it.
Atone's here with a row of ducks.
I was a cold card proponent, and I have been humbled.
Fortunately, Dice Roll saved my bacon.
I still moved off the device until the dust settles.
I'm not sure I can even trust it, just as a signing device after this.
But I think my big takeaway is that I'm a Dice Roll maxi now.
I know, right?
I was impressed to see, I don't know if anybody saw this,
but Jade Wallet Blockstream announced that they are increasing ways
to manually do entropy if you'd like to roll your own dice.
Although I think of the hardware wallets,
the jade device probably is the best at sourcing entropy from multiple sources um but uh you gotta
wonder if coin kite survives which i don't think is likely will the cold cards become now truly the
most hardened card like would a queue still make for a good multi vendor setup my instincts is no
never trust them again but my intellect says it's probably conceivably possible you know i also saw
I cannot remember who it is, but I also saw,
shoot, I wish I remember who it was,
but somebody is starting a CoinKite
open source firmware side project
to try to create an alternative firmware for cold cards that could perhaps persist after CoinKite goes away I try to keep an eye on that and try to track that down Not sure what goes there
Atone, thank you very much.
Appreciate you.
The GW, JW comes in with 3,333 sats.
That feeling when you're casually chilling with Twib
and you hear your handle get a shout out after a forgotten boost.
Talk about value for value.
Hey, thanks, the G.
Appreciate you.
12,345 sats from Just T.
Yes.
That's amazing.
I've got the same combination on my luggage.
No message, just value.
Appreciate you very much.
And Oppie1984 is back with 4,000 sats.
The traders love the vol.
Bernie Meme, if you're holding, I'm once again recommending paper wallets.
No, I don't know about that.
I don't know about that.
I like you, Oppie, though.
Thank you very much.
You make me want to be a better man.
Ah, your inner child comes in with 2,117 satoshis.
I am programmed in multiple techniques.
Ah, 2-1-1-7 for the 117th episode.
plus 2000. Heard the cold card issue first from Twib, but also diversify and don't trust Canadian
companies. The key of the American song, American theme song is litigation against Kite in the works.
It is, although the people doing it don't have the best reputation, I would say, from what I've
heard. But I mean, they're just they're trial lawyers, but that's probably good or bad. But
it does look like there's going to be at least some sort of legal action taking place in Canada.
I don't know if that will spread to the US, but that has begun. You're in. Thank you.
Sloppy Joe's here with 2,800 sats.
Tough little ship.
Little.
Chris, the cold card issue has really shaken my trust in out-of-the-box hardware security.
If top-tier vendors can ship critical entry bugs for five years undetected,
is a single-sig custody still viable for the average Joe with significant holdings?
Does this mandate a shift to multi-sig?
Maybe an easy DIY bit key?
Or use a custodian like Unchained?
I'm not sure how to do dice rolls.
Please advise.
um so i did a technical deep dive sloppy joe into bitkey and i think a lot of the criticism about
bitkey is a bit off right now and the main criticism is that block generates all three
keys and that's not actually true that's not how it works there are three keys the app holds one
on your device your physical hardware wallet the bitkey holds one and then block servers hold one
each one is generated differently and in the case of the one held on the block server they're using
the amazon secure enclave system and they technically as far as i can tell don't know
what that key is and cannot prevent you from using it with their technical setup which is what a lot
of the criticism is uh to be frank where the vulnerabilities with bitkey are is that it does
rely on a third-party infrastructure to to operate normally they have a break glass protocol
and that infrastructure all relies on cryptography that is significantly less quantum ready than say
bitcoin so if people are worried about bitcoin and quantum well the stuff that's protecting some
of the big key communication protocols between servers and signing and all of that
that's also just as vulnerable so you know there's that risk profile i suppose the other risk profile
is it stores a backup key, BitKey,
it stores a backup key on a cloud server,
be it either Google Drive or iCloud.
And then it does encrypt at first.
But in the case of iCloud,
if all your devices are up to date,
you can turn on advanced data protection,
which gives you another layer of protection.
But you do need to be careful about that.
And you'll want to set up some recovery steps.
And they have more information about that
in the iCloud settings on your iPhone.
And then I think for folks like yourself,
BitKey's a pretty solid option.
I really do think it is a solid option.
I think every six months or so, you should plug it in.
It is designed to operate after the battery fails.
You just have to leave it plugged into USB-C,
but it does have power pass-through if the battery fails.
The newer versions have a screen,
which was one of the number one complaints
of the original BitKey.
I'd say the biggest downside to the BitKey
is it is limited to the BitKey app.
And the BitKey app doesn't have a lot of functionality
besides storing your Bitcoin,
which if that's what you're looking for, that's fine.
If you're looking for something
that integrates with Lightning or Liquid, that ain't it.
It does integrate with Cash App for DCA stacking,
but for me, that's just not how I'm stacking sats.
And I think there may be some speculation in a year,
within a year, there may be some sort of
bit key integration with Strike.
I don't know what it would look like
or what the shape of that would be.
But for somebody like yourself,
you get a comfortably easy to manage
multi-sig setup, quote unquote,
that is probably the most user-friendly cold Bitcoin storage.
I hesitate to fully call it cold.
It's more like warm storage.
But I would say it's probably safer than leaving it on an exchange.
I hope that helps, Sloppy Joe.
Oh, whoa, Satsquatch coming in with a big old fiat boost.
$200.
Greetings from the secret Thousand Oaks meetup.
We just met tonight and some of the boys ponied up for this donation.
They do like to remain anonymous.
Anyhow, we all dodged the cold card bullet and I was sweating bullets getting my balances off my single Sig Mark II.
Wow.
So thanks for always bringing home the bacon.
Satsquatch, thank you so much.
And hello, everybody in the secret Thousand Oaks meetup.
I'd love to make it there one day.
I got to make it there one day and buy you guys a beer.
That is fantastic.
Thank you very, very much.
I do appreciate you.
Department of Lols comes in with $25.
Coming in hot with the booze.
No message, just value.
I love that name.
Thank you.
Sickander comes in with $10.
I was right about BIP-110, he says.
So let's see if I'll be right about BIP-300 eCash.
The last update is that they will fork three times
so people can get a chance to test it out
before it goes live in October.
The Alpha Fork happens August 23rd at Blockheight 963648.
For software and more info, go to eCash.com.
That's a great boost.
Thank you for keeping me updated on that.
That is a topic I want to stay current on,
but with all this stuff going on,
it has slipped through the cracks.
I also need to do more homework on ARK.
I really am excited about eCash, so I really appreciate that.
I need to learn more.
Thank you.
J-Cube comes in with a free member boost.
Chris, can you talk about BitKey, or if you already covered it, could you call out which episode?
I'm reading about it.
It feels an awful lot like I'm trusting others, which I suppose is part of the lesson that we should be learning from this tobacco.
I had the same feelings.
I dug into it quite a bit.
I was pretty comfortable with the technology stack.
And I'm also comfortable with the staff at Block
and the research team they have.
And I imagine they're going to keep this thing
pretty current and aggressive.
But I hope some of my coverage earlier, JQ,
answered your question.
Gene being sent in a free member boost,
I want to share that I decided to give my umbrella
a wee bit of an upgrade.
I moved from a Pi 4 to a trashcan Mac Pro
with 64 gigs of RAM.
Nice, Gene.
Oh, isn't it a beautiful machine, Gene?
Oh, it's a classic.
It's a classic.
I'm still running Umbral OS.
The blockchain is still on the same external too.
Not surprising.
Things seem a bit snappier.
Very nice, Gene Bean.
Very nice.
Anonymous boosts in from the members.
Any recommendation for alternatives to Bolts.exchange?
Check out the new swap service launched by Blockstream.
And I'll try to put a link in the show notes for that.
But I have a lot of show notes this week.
And then also, if you need to get in and out,
you can always use sideswap.io.
They are a full Liquid Federation member.
so they have their own separate things outside of Bolts.
But it is nice to see the community coming together
to build alternatives,
and the loss of Bolts, man.
That one, I think, hurt a lot,
and it's going to continue to hurt for a while.
That's a lot of boost,
and there's more below the 2,000 sat cutoff.
Thank you, everyone.
The last couple of weeks have been some hard work for this show,
and you returned the value my direction.
Thank you, everyone, who streamed sats as they listened.
21 of you, how perfect is that,
streamed 77,292 Satoshis.
I love that.
Thank you very much.
When you bring it all together,
because we had a baller Sats booster
and a baller Fiat booster,
I think we did really good this week.
And I really do appreciate you guys reflecting the value
and the hard work here All together when you just take the Fiat boosts and you convert them to Sats at our current value and just count everything as sats even if some of it was fiat the grand total for this week
is 962,715 satoshis. That is real value right there and payoff for a couple of weeks of really
hard work. Thank you, everybody.
boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com
or use something like Fountain or Cast-O-Matic,
any of the new podcasting 2.0 apps that support Boost.
I really do appreciate it.
You know, it charges me up, really does.
There are weeks where it's just, you know,
it's hard to even find time to shave.
This is one of those weeks where I've been even just so down to the wire,
but the focus remains, the passion remains,
and then when you guys return the value,
It's this is the this, you know, sailor talks about a flywheel.
This is the flywheel.
This is the flywheel for content right here.
We've cracked it together.
And I really appreciate everybody's support.
And I do have more stories for you.
So let's get into the rest of the news.
Let's start with a cold card update for you.
I am still very closely following this story.
There are a lot of theories right now.
I'm trying to just stick to grounded facts.
I'd also like to take some lead from you on this.
What would you like to know around the story?
What questions do you have still?
But here's a little small update for you.
Alex Thorne was on Natalie Brunel's Coin Stories podcast.
He's from Galaxy Digital, and Galaxy Digital has been nosed down on the blockchain watching
where these stolen coins are going, the behaviors all around that.
And he gives us an update on what he's been seeing in the last few days.
What do you expect the hackers to do?
Do you think that they're going to use coin mixing, coin join technology, which for those of you who aren't familiar, it's essentially kind of like throwing your coins into a jar and then shaking it and pulling it out.
You don't know where it originally came from.
You basically get kind of a fresh address.
But don't we have certain systems in place already to track people who have done that or coins that have come from coin join so that they can't be put back on an exchange for sale?
Yeah, a lot of the exchanges and like the coin brokerages, they flag if there's CoinJoin in the history of coins and may freeze them.
I mean, I know ideologically that I don't necessarily agree with that because you can legitimately use a CoinJoin for privacy reasons.
But many do. So there's that.
And then I should also say, like, there's really not a lot of liquidity in CoinJoin right now.
So I've seen some go in and been able to pretty confidently say that, you know, a chunk came out.
It does complicate, in some cases, break the ability to directly trace the origin to destination when it goes through a coin join.
but again like you know if 100 BTC go into a coin join transaction and I see that 50 of them are
from the attacker from attacker addresses and then 100 come out and you have like
49 one BTC transactions at 150 like it's 150 BTC transaction like that's I saw a pattern like that
where it's like okay you tried to coin join them but like we can probably assume that you know by
timing and by like fund amount, like it's, it's possibly still the attacker. Very few of the coins
have gone through that type of laundering attempt so far. I think, uh, 1500 or more of the 1700 that
I'm tracking are sitting inert. 92% of the ones that have been taken, confirmed taken with high
confidence. So it's mostly not being, um, sophisticated laundered in sophisticated ways.
some of the smaller ones we've seen, like bridging to other networks and depositing into
offshore casinos. And we've seen some of that activity, but not the bulk of it.
But you have seen some of that, like some of the coins that were stolen already going on to
foreign crypto exchanges or casinos? Yeah, we have. I mean, would you expect that tactic that
maybe they're starting off with just a few coins or smaller amounts and then they'll eventually
move the larger amount?
It's honestly like the big chunks aren't doing anything right now.
It's like most of that activity we're seeing are these like very much smaller.
Like, I mean, for example, like if I just look here, like the top.
So I'm just looking at my phone here where I have this dashboard and, you know, like
the top like 20 footprints or 15 footprints, like the first one has 150 Bitcoin stolen.
And it's obviously the biggest.
The next one is 41, then 23, and it gets down to eight.
And by the time you get to like footprint 12, it's like one Bitcoin.
So some of these are very small.
Like they're clearly stolen because the victims have told us they're stolen.
And most of that, like, because see, it's risky for an attacker to try things like exfiltrate from Bitcoin into fiat through a crypto exchange offshore or otherwise.
Right. Because that leaves a footprint in the on the crypto exchange, in the banking system.
I think it's not clear what the big bulk,
you know, again, if we say like waves one, two, and three,
which is the majority of these coins,
we don't know what they may do.
They may do nothing for a very long time.
Like the Bitfinex hacker sat on billions of dollars
of Bitcoin for like five years before they screwed up
and spent a bit of it, I believe on Walmart gift cards
and ultimately got caught.
So you could see them do literally nothing for a long time.
That's totally possible.
We and others are widely propagating these addresses, the attackers' addresses, basically all over the known Bitcoin and crypto-verse, like crypto exchanges, the forensic and compliance firms, the SEAL team, the federal law enforcement.
So we're sharing these widely so that if they do show up at a centralized intermediary, they could hopefully be frozen.
Yeah, the most watched addresses in Bitcoin, no doubt about it.
But, okay, sticking with the cold card theme for a moment, I shared my story last week, and I was impressed that Ben from BTC Sessions was willing to share his.
And I want to play this for you because I want you to still keep in mind that you need to adjust your filters.
This is still fresh.
We still need to learn.
And this is something that I want you to be aware of.
I want you to think back on this clip when you're consuming future Bitcoin content.
That's throughout here.
Let's move forward.
Are you guys a little bit hyped to try out?
I mean, Ben, just cover your ears because this doesn't really apply to you.
You're trying out new wallets all the time.
But I got to be honest with you.
I'm kind of hyped to try out some of the new wallets.
I haven't thought about wallets in five years.
Dude, I'm going to mention something here as well.
Obviously, previously sponsored by Cold Card.
and
um
NDK was always
so adversarial to every
other wallet
and
I always
no matter what obviously education channel
gotta cover everything
but I was definitely asked
not to
and the answer
by default was no
but
you know i've gotta i've gotta step back and think like you know knowing that he they would
be pissy about oh he covered this you covered that um obviously i still did but it does make
me wonder like wait a minute hey hang on he got pissy did i hear that right yeah like like if if
if I was covering like different hardware,
there was times where of course it was like,
oh, like, you know, can you,
I think it was put delicately,
but of course there were times like,
oh, like can you just cover the cold card stuff?
Like we're sponsoring you.
Well, no, it's a fucking education channel.
Like you gotta cover,
the whole point is to teach people the different options.
That's crazy.
You know, like, and so,
but I had to step back and think, like,
knowing there was tension there,
like, did that subconsciously put me off of
covering things to not have to deal with the stripe?
And, like, yeah, like, obviously,
I've got to cover new things when they come out
and everything, but, like, I, you know,
to your question, Joey,
am I stoked to be working on covering all these different things?
Yeah, 100%.
Totally.
I'm impressed with Ben's self-honesty there.
I think that's the exact kind of reflection the community needs right now.
And he has been putting out great content since that clip.
This next update is in a series I've been following for a while.
And that would be this bear market has really been unlike any other
because not only have we watched things pump
when Bitcoin typically pumps alongside them,
and it hasn't been.
But we've seen a notable downturn in Bitcoin's hash rate.
It's normalizing a bit now,
but when you zoom out over a year,
we're about back down to where we were in August of 2025.
We sort of lost all of the gains
in the last year in hash rate.
And a large part of that
has been Bitcoin mining companies pivoting to AI compute.
And this week, Riot signed a $9.1 billion
20-year compute deal with Anthropic.
Iren, Terawolf, Cypher, Hut8, all part of a massive crypto to AI pivot we've seen this
year, going from a Bitcoin miner to a data center operator.
As Riot Platform's stock is moving higher, this session on news of a major AI partnership.
Let's bring in CNBC markets and investing reporter Tanea McKeel for today's Tech Check.
Tanea, this tells us two things.
One, the demand for AI continues to be insatiable.
But two, what does it tell us about Bitcoin and crypto?
Yeah, Kelly, so this is a trend that we saw come, sort of start to take shape in the last crypto bear market.
So 2022. And this was really like a like a survival option for these Bitcoin miners that you saw were underwater because the cost of mining a Bitcoin, like it was just too much for them with the drop in the price of Bitcoin.
So now, today, with the current AI boom, we're seeing this as a much bigger opportunity for Bitcoin miners and for investors of that cohort.
So it is a deal between Riot and Anthropic.
It's about $9 billion over 20 years.
I love that Riot shares are up like 1% on this, but they're up 54% year to date.
And what are their other options?
I mean, of course they're going to have to get into this.
Well, and it's also interesting because Riot specifically is among three different miners that have to date or until this year, because Riot did have a deal with AMD earlier this year.
But until this year, Riot was really one of three miners that we started to be calling the pure play miners, whereas all of these other miners in 2022 started to look at the AI opportunity and those became the hybrid miners.
And so it was in a lot of smaller names that would be underwater when we're in a prolonged Bitcoin price lump like we are today.
Because we only have a few seconds.
Is there any, because the Bitcoin people say crypto winter, get used to it.
What's the big deal?
Do you get any sense that this time is different?
There's a lot more institutional buy-in this time.
And there is a lot of sign off from Washington.
That said, the price of Bitcoin is still stuck.
The Clarity Act is not really going anywhere.
And that was kind of the one catalyst that it was holding on to.
But it is very cyclical.
We have, you know, if you're going by the four year cycle of Bitcoin, then that would mean if you were following it exactly that a bull market will come at the end of this year.
Bitcoiners famously call October, Uptober.
But there is, of course, a lot of demand from the institutional side that might help keep it afloat.
But that's a good reminder in the next six weeks, really, to see if that can get the price unstuck, perhaps.
Taneya, thanks. Appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks.
It's crazy they're talking about the four-year cycle on CNBC.
The AI trade has just been a giant money sucker in general.
So I generally would call Bitcoin a money black hole that sucks up liquidity.
Well, then the AI super black hole of historical sizes and proportions came along,
and it has been sucking up liquidity.
And NVIDIA seems to have cooked up a way to keep things rolling here.
NVIDIA is trying to turn AI compute into an investable infrastructure asset class.
NVIDIA announced a partnership this week with BlackRock, Apollo, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR
to build financing platforms intended to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure.
So from what I can understand, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around this to be honest with you,
is the basic idea is instead of an AI company needing billions up front to buy GPUs and then go build the data center,
wall street financers are going to put money into this thing they're going to call the ai factory
and investors will own claims on the revenue it produces somewhat like financing a power plant a
pipeline aircraft fleet production is or commercial real estate is also another analogy that's being
made nvidia pitch is essentially compute produces cash flow so therefore compute can be financed as productive infrastructure kind of like a business that produces cash flow The problem is there a lot of underlying assumptions on those cash flows and those
projections, but I digress.
The underlying way to think about it for a Bitcoiner would be like, think of it as hash
rate financing, but for AI.
The underlying machines turn electricity and hardware into a computational compute tokens.
The difference is that Bitcoin mining produces a globally fungible monetary asset, the hardest money in the world, while AI produces compute rented processing capacity on these entire structures where value depends heavily on a video hardware, the CUDA economy.
And, of course, always growing demand, which is probably partially likely.
But this asset class is being assembled right now with these five big backers and NVIDIA's name.
And they're saying, hey, it's like you're investing in a manufacturing AI factory.
And the question is, does it make sense?
Now, is AI data centers an asset class?
Absolutely.
Is there a lot of money being spent?
100%.
Does this make it easier to get financing for these companies?
Because you're bundling all of these guys together,
much like you do with auto loans or home mortgages, which has been done for a long time.
You bundle them together, and then you can sell them to investors that are looking for a better
yield than what you can get from treasuries, but with more risk. And so you're turning this into
an asset class. It's not surprising. Does this mean that you're going to have more money to fund
all these investments? Absolutely. What I find interesting is the fact that NVIDIA's stock is
basically flat. And so investors aren't necessarily looking at this and saying, this is all good,
even though the purpose was to get away from this notion that it's all circular financing,
because these are third parties that are going to be financing these buildouts, not NVIDIA,
but NVIDIA stocks actually not up that much. So it's kind of interesting to see.
Yeah, there may be real interest in this asset class if AI catches another bit. I've been
concerned and focused on the XAI, Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs and the liquidity vacuums,
those would be for Bitcoin and how it would hit Bitcoin.
And we did see that with SpaceX, right?
When XAI and SpaceX, when they IPO'd, we saw money drain from Bitcoin.
But the IPO talk seems to have slowed for Anthropic and definitely seems to have slowed
for OpenAI.
I think Anthropic maybe would still like to try to land it this year if they could.
but it does seem like the talks are fading the numbers are fading the economics are changing
the pricing structures are adjusting and so that risk felt like it was fading a bit
the liquidity risk to bitcoin but i could see this new asset class sort of supercharging the
ai liquidity vacuum if they catch another bid if there's another strong use case that comes along
Maybe it's cybersecurity.
Maybe it's another use of agentic, something like that.
I could see this AI asset class they've created all of a sudden becoming like this great investment idea.
You can see the narrative shifting on that pretty quick and just sucking liquidity up for quite a while.
For the rest of the year, maybe?
I don't know.
I mean, we're halfway through the year at this point, so that seems conceivable.
Back to Dan Niles here.
He thinks it could go for even longer.
Always hype involved, because if you realize that this is a big thing that's going to change the worldwide economy, and we're talking canals in the 1800s or railroads in the 1900s or fracking or the internet back in the 1990s or today, AI infrastructure, if you realize it's going to be huge, then everybody wants in.
So by definition, a big revolution is going to lead to overinvestment.
Now, the question is, where are you in that?
So if you go back to 1999, NASDAQ was up 86%.
It was the best year by almost 2x the next prior year.
But that was right before the bubble burst.
And by the way, in the early part of 2000, the NASDAQ went up another, I think it was
26% or 24% before it actually blew up.
So I think we've got at least another year in this bubble building out.
And I think the returns are going to be very, very good.
And because Agentic is a brand new thing, and you and I have talked about this before,
that just kind of showed up with ClaudeBot on January 30th.
So I doubt in six months we've seen all of the benefits from Agentic.
So I think we got about another year in this build out.
And then at some point, you're going to get a bust and all these new and innovative financing schemes, they're going to have issues.
But for right now, I think, you know, you still got a lot more room to go.
Yeah, come on.
I love how matter of fact he is about it being a bubble.
You know, make your money while you can and then get out when the getting's good.
Just make sure you get the timing right.
That's great advice there, huh?
Could the AI pump like this last another year through a new asset class?
Yeah, I think it could.
However the unknown headwind that seems to be developing the dynamic is that the AI pushback that we seeing in communities is bubbling into the political class and is resulting in political action This is Bernie Sanders yesterday Thank you very much for joining me I wanted to take a moment to share with you a letter that I just sent to the three
major leaders of the AI industry.
And here's what the letter says.
I'm going to read it verbatim.
Dear Mr. Altman, Mr. Amodai, and Mr. Zuckerberg, almost every day there is a new story about
how your companies are losing control of the AI technology you are developing with potentially
cataclysmic results. This week, we learned frighteningly that AI has been used for the
first time ever to create new viruses. As you know, this type of development in the wrong hands
could lead to new bioweapons that result in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
Going right to 11 on that one. But I wouldn't assume the AI backlash is just one political party and in just one country. People across the political spectrum and across the West seem to have issue.
Next night, the backlash against AI data centers is growing with protests from coast to coast in dozens of states today. The issue uniting many Americans across the political divide. Here's ABC's Alex Preshay.
Tonight, a growing debate over data centers as a number of demonstrations play out across the country, from Atlanta to Berkeley, California.
We want to slow down AI data center development.
We want to slow down AI in general and stop big tech from infringing on our local communities.
The explosion of data center construction projects, the byproduct of the AI and cloud computing boom.
That skyrocketing growth also prompting new scrutiny as communities housing these centers say they are bearing new burdens of heightened water and power usage.
This week, New York became the first state to halt construction of new large data centers, the governor imposing a one-year moratorium.
In Granbury, Texas, just outside of Fort Worth, residents have filed petitions to recall their mayor and several city council members after the city annexed property for a new data center site.
Yeah, even in Texas, the pro data center state, the governor is changing his tune and saying they're going to have to pay for their water.
They're going to pay for electricity.
And he's talking tough.
The politics are forcing his hand.
Now, it's not that I don't think that the token economy or whatever you want to call it will continue for a long time.
I mean, just look at my personal use case.
I'm using more tokens than ever, and I don't see that slowing down.
AI has been very useful, and I think a lot of people feel that way, especially people out there red teaming right now.
But it does have a lot of risks as well.
and I do think this data center backlash is a growing one.
And I also think it gives us a peek into like a parallel universe
where imagine the AI trade hadn't come along,
and for some reason the market got fixated on Bitcoin.
And this is, again, a parallel universe, right?
And a market bubble like this AI bubble formed around Bitcoin,
like we're seeing right now.
The massive and expansive growth in mining
would have driven this exact backlash.
all of this would be coming for bitcoin right now if we'd gotten like our go to the moon million
dollar bitcoin uh after trump got elected or whatever all of this would be coming for bitcoin
when you're doing something like this slow and steady is the way people need time to adjust to
new ideas and honestly the idea of using more power for growth and prosperity it just goes
against everything people have learned about trying to protect the environment and that really matters
to them. It takes time for people to come around to new understandings, to take what they thought
was a simple topic and then learn that it's actually much more complex and be humble enough
to understand that they have a lot more to learn, that it's more nuanced than they realized. That
just doesn't happen overnight. I guess, you know, if I wanted to be rich in two years, I could have
played the AI trade back when we were still all calling it fancy autocorrect. That would have been
a great time to jump in. But I got into Bitcoin because I don't want to play in the casino.
I don't want to gamble around with stocks and all of the third-party risk there.
And I don't really want to win fiat prizes either.
I just want to stack hard money and focus on my life, my kids, and my work.
So I think what we just saw with the BIP-110 stuff, with everything that's going on,
is we just saw Bitcoin reaffirm that it is truly one of the hardest monies in the world.
A small group of radicals failed to change it.
and the distributed incentives worked.
Well, let's check in on the state of the network
as I'm wrapping up at Blockite 962,187.
Bitcoin is clocking in at 63,270 US dollars.
That puts our stats per dollar at 1,581 satoshis to 1 US dollar.
We're down a sharp 49.9% from our all-time high 310 days ago.
The upcoming difficulty change is a downward adjustment of 3.1%.
Reachable Bitcoin nodes right now 26 I actually expected that to go down a little bit We down 2 from the last episode and we down 0 for 24 hours
but we're still up 1.9% for the 30th.
It's not too bad.
We're kind of just hovering in this range right now, aren't we?
Just looking at it.
It sort of feels like we've been locked in.
Like we used to have the 58K gang,
and now we need like the 64K club or something like that.
But, you know, things are moving right along.
We saw fees go up and down during all the BIP10 stuff.
The blocks continue to be produced.
We're now hundreds of blocks ahead of the BIP110 chain, and the network continues to be very strong.
All right.
Excuse me.
All right.
If you made it this far, I'm barely making it this far.
It was a long one.
Thank you, everybody.
This Week in Bitcoin.show is where you go to get the links.
Lots of links this week.
Some stuff didn't even make it into the show.
My goal is to not get distracted by the emotions or the politics or the groupthink,
but to focus on the signal of what's happening.
So that way you can plan for yourself, your friends, your family, and your future.
So you can always let me know how I did with the boost.
I always appreciate the value returned.
And of course, I want to know where you're at after all this BIP 110 stuff.
Any questions you have about the cold card story.
And if you have a knots node, what the heck you're doing with that?
So boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com, let me know.
I'm going to wrap up with a value for value track.
This is by a value for value veteran.
It is Joe Martin and it's his track, The Jetsons.
And I'll see you back here next week.
Thanks for joining me.
Is it an ocean of color growing exponentially?
What keeps me up through the night time?
Keeps me dreaming through the day?
Is that the goddess of wisdom is only a block away?
I wanna fly with the Jetsons
I wanna shoot past the stars
I want to take you to a place you've never been before
When nothing rhymes like purple and orange
You can count the coldest law
I want to fight with the Jetsons
I want to shoot past the stars
What's done is done
Oh, we'll live and die by the number 21
Where energy is flowing
Through machines that are all known
And the lightning outshines the sun
I want to fly with the Jessens
I want to shoot past the stars
I want to take you to a place
You've never been before
When nothing shines like purple and orange
You can count the colors more
I want to fly with the Jesselands
I want to shoot past the stars
With you
Twelve words in my head
With how you've all answered
A phrase in my mind
I've got a role mankind, I wanna fly with the Jetsons
I wanna shoot past the stars
I wanna take you to a place you've never been before
Nothing rhymes in purple and orange
You can count the cold as law
I wanna fly with the Jetsons
I want to shoot past the stars
With you
I want to fly with the Jetsons
you