Greetings and salutations my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
It's Wednesday, August 2nd, 2023. At the time of recording the Bitcoin block height is 801-404.
And the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is the Bitcoin Weekly News Roundup. I'm going to run through the big stories of the week.
Then zoom out and talk about narrative shifts and Bitcoin mining.
Without further ado, let's get into it.
MicroStrategy Keep Stacking
Yesterday MicroStrategy announced their second quarter 2023 financial results.
Per executive chairman and gigachat Michael Saylor on Twitter,
in July MicroStrategy acquired an additional 467 BTC for $14.4 million and now holds 152,800 BTC.
Since Q1, MicroStrategy has acquired 12,800 Bitcoins for $361.4 million, which is around $28,233 per Bitcoin.
And in total those 152,800 Bitcoins, wow that is a lot, were acquired for a total of $4.53 billion,
which is an average of $29,672 per Bitcoin.
You can read the full report and see the Q2 presentation in the article version of this podcast which is linked in the show notes.
Moving on, Tether Keep Stacking.
Via Steven Lukka, Tether has acquired another $176 million in Bitcoin since March 31, 2023,
purchased using excess profits, not reserves.
With Tether and MicroStrategy continuing to accumulate Bitcoin, I hope the picture is becoming clearer for you.
Forward-thinking companies are acquiring as much Bitcoin as they possibly can in advance of the next halving in April 2024.
We'll also likely see BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF approved soon, which will bring an entirely new wave of institutional money into Bitcoin.
So what's a pleb to do with these big corporate whales gobbling up Bitcoin?
Well, follow Odell's advice.
Stay humble, stack sats.
Brian Armstrong says Coinbase is looking into lightning.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quote-tweeted Jack Dorsey yesterday and said,
We're looking into how to best add lightning.
It's non-trivial, but I think worth doing.
I'm all for payments taking off in Bitcoin.
Not sure why you think we're ignoring Bitcoin.
We've onboarded more people to Bitcoin than probably any company in the world.
Jack Dorsey responded to Armstrong in typical Jack fashion, saying,
No doubt Coinbase introduced more people to Bitcoin than anyone else, and I'm grateful for that.
Putting more of your resources towards your original focus on Bitcoin and Layer 2 technologies would be amazing, and we'd be happy to partner.
We want an open protocol for money transmission for the internet that's not controlled by a single individual, company, or government.
Same team.
Michael Riani, the product lead at Cash App, followed up saying, We at Cash App integrated using Lightning Dev Kit by Spiral BTC.
Our team is happy to jump out of call, share our learnings, and help however we can.
Highly recommend unifying the BTC on-chain address and lightning invoice into one unified QR code.
Now, we'll see how long it takes Coinbase to look into it.
Bitfinex, Kraken, Cash App, Strike, and Binance have all integrated lightning.
Coinbase is the clear big players still holding out, but hopefully they'll take the helping hand of Bitcoiners like Jack and Michael,
who realize that a rising tide lifts all boats.
And shout out to Jack and Michael for being true class acts.
It would have been easy to respond flippantly and make some crack about Coinbase being a shitcoin casino, and maybe some of us did do that,
but they didn't do that.
They reached out their hands and offered help.
Speaking of Coinbase and potentially being a shitcoin casino, everything except Bitcoin is a security.
In the media financial times, SEC asked Coinbase to halt trading in everything except Bitcoin, CEO says.
Now, this is a huge deal, but it's also not surprising if you've listened to any Bitcoiners over the last few years.
If you still don't understand the difference between Bitcoin and crypto, fear not, because I did a whole episode on that.
I'm not a fan of the SEC as they are a bloated government organization with far too much power.
They're supposed to protect investors, but they clearly fail in that mission frequently.
Sam Bankman Freed's FTX was able to defraud investors at an absurd scale.
Where was the SEC then?
That being said, sometimes people are too stupid to realize that a shitcoin Ponzi is a Ponzi,
and need the government to spell it out for them by labeling it a security.
So, at least there's that.
The moral of the story is the same as it ever was.
Avoid shitcoin Ponzi's and work hard to accumulate Bitcoin.
Speaking of shitcoin Ponzi's and the SEC, the SEC sues Richard Hart.
On Monday, the SEC made an announcement that was a long time coming, via the SEC.
Today we charged Richard Hart, aka Richard Schueller, and three unincorporated entities that he controls,
Hex, Pulse Chain, and Pulse X, with conducting unregistered offerings of cryptoasset securities
that raised more than $1 billion in cryptoassets from investors.
Hart called on investors to buy cryptoasset securities in offerings that he failed to register.
He then defrauded those investors by spending some of their cryptoassets on exorbitant luxury goods.
They go on to say that Hart began marketing Hex in 2018, claiming it was the first high-yield blockchain certificate of deposit,
and began promoting Hex tokens as an investment designed to make people rich.
Now, if you don't know who Richard Hart, aka Richard Schueller, is, consider yourself lucky.
It means you haven't fallen for his scams or lost all of your money.
This is a guy who constantly flaunted his wealth on social media, posting absurd and laughable photos with luxury goods and sports cars,
and was generally just an insufferable manchild.
Regarding the getting rich part that was promised to investors, Jameson Lopp subbed this up well.
Over the past two years, Hex has lost an astounding 98.8% of its market cap, $83 billion.
Richard says he tried to save people from block-fi, Celsius, and such,
but according to my math, Hex lost more value than all of those bankruptcies combined.
The big takeaway here is, when a flamboyant egomaniac pitches you an idea that sounds too good to be true,
and promises he'll make you rich, laugh in his face and walk away.
Bitcoin isn't a get rich quick scheme.
It's a way to save wealth slowly, to save the value of your time and energy across time and transfer it across space.
It's not about flashy watches and fancy cars, unless you're into that kind of thing, in which case do whatever the fuck you want, it's your money.
But Bitcoin is about building a better future for yourself and your family, and hopefully making the world at large a little less full of shit.
Twitter officially changes to X.
Twitter finally made the switch to become just X.
It seems silly to throw away the brand recognition of the bluebird, but hey, Elon owns it and can do whatever the hell he wants with it.
And that's the point.
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is a centralized platform.
It's controlled by one company, by one man.
If you're thinking to yourself, man, I wish there were some other social media that wasn't run by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.
I have good news for you.
There's a protocol called Noster that has dozens of different apps that you can use to interact with the network.
It's an open, decentralized protocol, like Bitcoin, not a centralized platform like Twitter, X, shit, sorry, Threads, Instagram or Facebook.
You don't need to give away any personal information to start using Noster.
You just need to generate a username and a password.
On Noster, they're called your public key and your private key.
So keep that private key like you do your passwords safe.
You can start using Noster in seconds by downloading Damos on iOS, Amethyst on Android, or trying any number of web clients, like Primal.net, Iris.to, Snort.social and many others.
But wait, there's more.
In addition to being open source and censorship resistant, on Noster, you can get paid in Bitcoin for your posts.
This is called zapping and it's made possible by the Bitcoin Lightning Network.
It's value for value in action.
So give Noster a try.
Share your thoughts, share your art, share nature, share pictures of your feet.
Share whatever the hell you want.
No one can stop you.
You can find me on Noster by going to Primal.net slash Walker.
I'll see you there.
KPMG Bitcoin ESG Report
Top four accounting firm, KPMG, released a report called Bitcoin's Role in the ESG Imperative.
Here's the highlights of the report as summarized by Sam Callahan.
Environmental.
Bitcoin can reduce emissions through one, use of renewable energy, two, demand response, three, recycled heat, and four, methane reduction.
Social.
Bitcoin can benefit society by one, promoting financial inclusion, two, improving cross-border payments, three, providing a new method of global fundraising,
four, making microgrids financially viable, which provides cheaper and more consistent electricity for communities.
Governance.
Bitcoin's decentralized governance structure makes the protocol immutable, ensuring the validity of data which provides a high degree of confidence in the overall system.
This results in a system that can't be abused or manipulated.
Now, I think the general ESG movement is a bit of a scam.
The way for asset managers to extract higher management fees from their clients by framing a fund as ESG, I'm looking at you, BlackRock.
That said, a report like this from a top four accounting firm is further proof that the narrative around Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining is shifting in a very positive direction.
It's also just a recognition of objective facts.
I went back in June that made the argument that Bitcoin is the ultimate ESG asset, and I can't believe KPMG didn't even reference me, but whatever.
But not the fake performative fiat ESG that defense companies use to pretend making bombs is good for the planet.
It is genuinely the best investment in terms of environmental, social, and governance.
Bitcoin mining incentivizes renewable energy use and build out its uniquely positioned to harness otherwise wasted energy like flared gas.
It promotes financial inclusion by providing financial services for unbanked populations worldwide via a decentralized system that is free from government control and overreach.
And it's open source operating on consensus mechanisms.
It's completely transparent, auditable and predictable and resistant to censorship and manipulation, which we see a lot of these days.
It's not controlled by any single entity or government removing the risks of corruption and mismanagement.
No trusted third parties required.
At this point, if you don't hold Bitcoin, you're signaling to the world that you don't care about environmental, social, or governance issues.
Is that really the message you want to send?
Landfill gas Bitcoin mining accelerator.
Speaking of Bitcoin and the environment, yesterday Daniel Batten announced that they kicked off their CH4 capital landfill gas BTC mining accelerator.
Quote, eight Bitcoin mining companies all committed to turning an environmental pollutant, vented methane, into a source of power for the future of finance.
This is really incredible news.
Congratulations to Daniel Batten for spearheading this initiative to take energy that is otherwise harmfully wasted and turn it into the ultimate sound money. Bitcoin.
United States credit rating downgraded by Fitch.
Fiat Reuters. Rating agency Fitch on Tuesday downgraded the US government's top credit rating, citing fiscal deterioration over the next three years and repeated down to the wire debt ceiling negotiations that threaten the government's ability to pay its bills.
In a previous debt ceiling crisis in 2011, standard and pours cut the top AAA rating by one notch a few days after a debt ceiling deal, citing political polarization and insufficient steps to write the nation's fiscal outlook.
Sound familiar?
Now I know this may seem worrisome, but don't worry. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called this decision arbitrary, so I'm sure it's fine.
After all, as my dear Canadian friend Greg Foss likes to say, the US is the prettiest horse at the glue factory. Now that was a terrible Canadian accent. I'm not even going to try.
But anyway, this downgrade situation was perfectly summed up by James Lavish who said, US government's plan, increased government spending, increased GDP, increased taxes, lower deficits, US government's reality, increased government spending, interest expense exploding, deficits exploding.
The result? Treasury must borrow 1.85 trillion in the second half of 2023, US credit rating downgraded.
To finish up this show, let's zoom out and talk about the larger narrative around Bitcoin mining and the environment. Across the world, the amount of gas flared into the atmosphere is truly massive.
The University of Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index estimates that global gas flaring alone could power the entire Bitcoin network five times over.
So when you hear the ripple funded idiots of Greenpeace USA's propaganda arm say things like, Bitcoin is not sustainable. Remember that they are either lying through their teeth or are just too dumb to realize objective truth.
Bitcoin mining is one of the most sustainable industries on the planet. It uses over 50% renewable energy, far better than the traditional finance industry, and way better than gold mining.
Far better than basically every industry, as a matter of fact. Bitcoin isn't dirty. It simply uses electricity, just like your computer or electric vehicles.
And if you really want to get into indirect energy sources, Bitcoin uses a higher renewable energy mix than electric vehicles do, because unlike EVs, Bitcoin miners are able to use off grid power, mostly renewable sources such as hydro.
So it has a lower scope to emission profile than EVs. Put simply, if you're still claiming that Bitcoin is bad for the environment, then pardon my French, you're a fucking idiot.
But not only are you a fucking idiot, you're a privileged fucking idiot. Because if you think Bitcoin is a waste of electricity, then you clearly haven't thought through how people around the world, especially in the global south,
struggle with monetary colonialism like the 14 African countries forced by France to use the CFA franc, access to financial services, and hyperinflation, which can make the money you worked hard for worth next to nothing overnight.
Bitcoin is good for humanity and a net positive for the environment. Bitcoiners have been saying things like this for years, but now it's not just Bitcoiners saying it.
Now, top four accounting firms like KPMG are saying it. Now, presidential candidates like RFK Jr. are saying it. Hell, even the freaking Biden White House released a report in 2022 saying crypto asset mining can be powered by stranded methane and renewables.
The tides are changing. The narrative is shifting towards truth. In a few years, it will be widely regarded as incredibly ignorant to say something as supremely stupid as Bitcoin is a waste of energy.
Change happens gradually and suddenly until then, all the Bitcoin naysayers can do is lie. All we must do is tell the truth.
And that's a wrap on this week's Bitcoin news roundup. You can find the written version of the show along with all the references via the link in the show notes or by going to BitcoinPodcast.net.
You can find me on Noster by going to primal.net slash Walker. And if you want to follow the Bitcoin podcast on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it these days, go to at TTC podcast and at Walker America.
You can also find the video version of this podcast and others at youtube.com slash at Walker America.
Bitcoin is scarce. There will only ever be 21 million. But Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.