Free Assange

podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. Uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 11:51

AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 20th day of May 2024, and this is episode 899 of Bitcoin. And I swear, I'm gonna turn that over to 900, this week. I did not expect that. Didn't for some reason or other, I just wasn't keeping track of that. So I've gotta be looking forward to that one. Alright. So this is episode 899 of Bitcoin, and we've got a a oh, good lord. We got the circle p. It's open for business.

The circle p is my sort of the duty that I do for you guys. If you can't afford advertising for your goods and services and just need to get a leg up and get somebody else to have your product put in front of, you know, get in touch with me. You can do that through Noster. It's david.bennett.c@gmaildot com, and we'll see about it. Only rule is you gotta take bitcoin for, your goods and services, which you will then put into the circle p. And today, it's the leathermint.comsovereigntyandstyle.

That's the name of the game. If you want a high quality handmade leather good like a belt, a wallet, passport holder, those kinds of objects, you need to go look at the leathermint.com. In fact, I'm gonna throw up the leathermint.com's website here so that you can see the kind of stuff that we're talking about. And that's for the guys over there in in zap.streamland. You can get a hold of them at the leathermint.com,

through their website. You can get a hold of them on nostr@leathermint, is their handle. And then, if you wanna go to dead birdsite and deal with the hate machine that is the dead birdsite then it's at the Leathermint The Leathermint, just all one word right there. So do me a solid. Tell them that Bitcoin and, right, put in the coupon code box, put Bitcoin and in there, and you'll get 10% off and they'll know that I moved some product for them, and they'll shoot me some satoshis

on the other end. Okay. First up today. Finally, maybe, hopefully, justice has been done, kind of? We're we're just gonna have to wait and see. But the UK high court judge has said that Craig Wright lied extensively and repeatedly in the Copa lawsuit suit over being Satoshi and Bitcoin copyright claims. This is written by Elizabeth Napolitano.

I have no idea if she is related to judgment Napolitano, but it's written by the block or at least that's where I'm finding it at. So Craig Wright lied extensively and repeatedly in a trial over his various copyright claims to Bitcoin, the code, the white paper, according to UK high court judge James Miller, as he wrote in a statement on Monday.

Now in the filing, judge Miller elaborated on his ruling in March that Wright, who claimed to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, is not the pseudonymous developer. The judgment cited Wright's clumsy fabrications and forgeries of documentation on a grand scale as the basis for the ruling. Quote, all of Wright's lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie. His claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, judge Mueller said Monday in the written judgment.

The ruling concludes a years long legal battle over the intellectual rights to the Bitcoin blockchain and database during the trial the defense submitted to the court evidence. Evidence, mind you, evidence that purportedly supported Wright's claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto including documents featuring fonts that didn't exist at the alleged time of their creation as well as metadata that showed some of the documents were created shortly before the trial according to the judgment.

The crypto open patent alliance first filed a lawsuit against Wright back in February of 2021 aiming to prevent the infamously litigious Wright from asserting unmerited copyright claims over the Bitcoin white paper and code. And since 2019, Wright has sued several developers to gain ownership over the Bitcoin network and silence critics of his claims.

According to the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund, those lawsuits have threatened the future of Bitcoin by disincentivizing developers from building on the blockchain. In his judgment, judge Miller acknowledged the effect of Wright's aggressive legal strategy on bitcoin developers citing the self proclaimed Satoshi's litigious nature as another basis for his ruling in favor of COPPA.

Quote, due to his collaborative and nonconfrontational man nature, I consider it is most unlikely that Satoshi would ever have resorted to litigation against the developers, judge Miller said. Quote, Satoshi would have recognized that differences in views led to the hard forks in the Bitcoin blockchain and then simply move on. So even the judge sees it finally. We didn't need a judge to tell us this, but at least somebody has seen it other than all of us.

Now the question remains, will there be any will there be any jail time? Will there be a fine? Will there be a censure? Will will there be some kind of notice put out to the the the courts of the world that you don't have to take this guy's cases, because he's just gonna waste you and the court's time. Nothing has been said. I I I see nothing on the horizon that suggests that Craig Wright, fraud that he is, and he is a fraud, will have any kind of actual punitive justice done to him whatsoever.

And I feel really bad about that. That really sucks because other people are just gonna say, well, I can just go lie to the court and the worst thing that's gonna happen is the judge will write a really mean and nasty letter about me, but I'll never see the inside of a jail. So we there we are with that, and at least we've got the judge finally seeing things and publicly stating the things that we've been seeing since 2016. This guy's been lying since 2016 at minimum.

Maybe, possibly, very late 2015. I can't remember when he did the GQ article, but I'm gonna say 2016. Okay. Let's move on. Now that we've finally figured out that the judge finally figured out that, right, Greg Wright is a fraud, will go to Blockstream's Rusty Russell. He wants to revamp Bitcoin script. Bitcoin Magazine writing for Bitcoin Magazine. Rusty Russell, lead lightning developer for Blockstream, is spearheading an ambitious initiative known as the Bitcoin script restoration project.

The effort aims to restore and expand the functionality of Bitcoin script language, which was significantly limited in the early days of Bitcoin due to security concerns. In a recent interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Russell elaborated on the project's goals and the potential that it holds for the future of Bitcoin. When Bitcoin first launched,

its script language included a variety of op codes or operational codes that enabled complex programmable functions. However, many of these op codes were disabled in 2010 due to severe security vulnerabilities. Satoshi, Bitcoin's mysterious creator, you know, the real one, made this decision to protect the network from potential denial of service attacks. This was necessary to move at the time, but it left Bitcoin script language much less capable than initially intended.

Rusty Russell recalls, quote, the house is burning down. You put the fire out, but then you rebuild. Right? Well, we never got that second stage. The Bitcoin script restoration project seeks to re enable these disabled opcodes with proper safeguards in place. The goal is to bring back the powerful features of Bitcoin's scripting language while ensuring that the network remains secure. Here's what the project aims to achieve. 1, handling arbitrary numbers.

Restoring the ability to work with arbitrary numbers will allow more complex transactions and conditions making Bitcoin more versatile. Enabling introspection. This means giving scripts the ability to examine and verify transaction details directly which can enhance security and functionality. And 3, improving self sovereignty and privacy. By expanding the script language, users will have more control over their transactions and enhance privacy features.

In the interview, Russell highlighted the importance of these features saying, we want that. Right? We literally lost the ability to multiply or divide. I think there is, among people who are developing on top of Bitcoin, there's an amazing hunger for this. They're like, yes. Can we have it all back? Reenabling these opcodes isn't just about restoring lost functionality. It's about unlocking new possibilities for Bitcoin. With a more powerful scripting language, developers can create

innovative applications directly on top of the Bitcoin network. And this can lead to more advanced financial products, enhanced privacy tools, and more. Rusty Russell expressed his optimism during the interview, quote, my whole life has been building stuff for other developers to do things on. So I have a huge amount of faith in open ecosystems and their ability to innovate. And the things that will get built on top of a solid base are amazing.

One of the primary concerns in the restoration project is maintaining the security of the Bitcoin network. The project aims to introduce these powerful features with limits that prevent potential abuse. I'm looking at you, hornals. This ensures that while Bitcoin becomes more capable, it doesn't become vulnerable to the same issues that cause these features to be disabled in the first place.

The Bitcoin script restoration project is a crucial step towards realizing the full potential of Bitcoin as a programmable money system By addressing past security concerns and reintroducing powerful features with appropriate limits, the project aims to create a scalable, secure, and innovative ecosystem for Bitcoin. As Rusty Russell put it in his interview, quote, let's restore script to what it was supposed to be originally. And we think that we have a way of doing that that's clean and neat and safe.

This project not only looks to the past to recover lost functionalities, but also paves the way for future innovations ensuring Bitcoin continues to evolve and meet the needs of its users. That's the end of the article. But here's my general commentary. Those opcodes were disabled for a reason. 2, Rusty Russell is more than competent to be able to do this.

And 3, how competent do you have to be to make sure we do not get another ordinals slash inscriptions slash runes pile of burning garbage happening again. Nobody saw inscriptions coming. And these guys are really bright. They're a hell of a lot brighter than me. I am certainly certainly not saying anything bad about Rusty Russell.

He's more than competent to do stuff. Right? He's definitely more competent than me. But my point is is that even some of the most competent developers that were behind SegWit, Taproot, and it really kind of didn't see or if they did see it, they certainly didn't alert the media. Right? So my problem and I don't have a problem with this.

What the it just seems that we should be very, very, very aware and and all of us should be pressing back on Rusty Russell and all of the people that are bringing back script to to remind them, hey, how are we going to make sure that ordinals and inscriptions or something even worse doesn't fall out of this? So it's kind of up to us to put that tension back on that system. That doesn't mean go and call them names. I just mean politely nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Hey. Are we sure we want this?

Are we sure that nothing bad is going to happen? How are we going to what's the protocol to make sure that we can't end up with something worse than inscriptions? Because something worse than inscriptions, honestly, would really really suck. Alright. Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshine has stepped down. That's right. The grayscale CEO that replaced Barry Silbert is himself being replaced, Zoltan Vardy from Cointelegraph. Michael Sonnenschein will be stepping down.

He will be replaced by former, check this shit out, former Goldman Sachs executive, Peter Mintzberg, as of August 15th, according to Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of the Digital Currency Group, the parent company of Grayscale. Silbert wrote in a dead bird post quote, as we position Grayscale for its next phase of growth, Excited to welcome Peter Mintzberg as Grayscale CEO, effective August 15th.

Joining from Goldman Sachs, Peter has 20 years of experience across prominent asset managers, including BlackRock, Oppenheimer Funds, and Invesco, end quote. Yeah. I know. Save it. Just hold if you're jumping up and down, just hold on. Founded in 2013, Grayscale is one of the world's most prominent cryptocurrency

asset management firms. And during his 10 years as CEO, Sonnenschein played a pivotal role in the launch of the first United States spot bitcoin exchange traded fund according to Silbert who wrote,

Michael guided the firm through exponential growth and oversaw its pivotal role in bringing spot bitcoin e ETFs to market, leading the way for the broader financial industry. We wish him the best in his future endeavors. I'm gonna pause right there. I don't think Sonnenshein was the was CEO for 10 years. From what I understand, he replaced Barry Silbert as Barry Silbert stepped down. If I'm wrong about that, because I I think Sonnenshine was the chief financial officer, and that he stepped into the CEO role after Barry Barry Silbert, in my opinion, was told

he's gotta get out of the picture. Otherwise, there is no way Grayscale is gonna get this spot ETF. I I don't know. I think that that was the that was the deal that was made with the SEC. I'd have no proof of that. Okay? I understand that. But I'm pretty sure that Sun and Shine was not a 10 year CEO at Grayscale, but again if I'm wrong let me know.

Grayscale was one of the first to open the spot Bitcoin ETF. Yes. We are aware. And then they run through some numbers and blah blah blah and then yeah. Okay. So what we really get from this article is the fact that Michael Sonnenshein is stepping down, but the bigger news is who he's being replaced by. And that's this dude, Peter Mintzberg, who used to work for Goldman Sachs and BlackRock and OppenheimerFunds

and Invesco. It is a litany, a literal invitation list of legacy financial shit, and it's coming right into grayscale. I think grayscale is being fully captured. I I that's what I see. I don't see this as good news, but, honestly, I don't see it as bad news either because, honestly, I don't think Bitcoin cares. But this is full capture of Grayscale.

And the entire digital currency group is probably going to fall. And when I mean fall, I kept thinking it might go into bankruptcy, but it looks like Barry Silbert and his gaggle of geese have been able to figure out how to stay alive. But I don't think they're gonna survive this. They're going to be fully and completely captured by legacy traditional financial services and banks and the people that run them. We've we we've jumped the shark. Bitcoin, as of this announcement, has officially

jumped the shark, but in a way that we all knew was gonna happen. If you're gonna get if you're gonna get Bitcoinization, then the regulators are gonna be a part of it. There's no way we can keep them out. The only thing that we can do to keep them out is make sure that we have privacy preserving transactions and that we can run our own nodes and we will do our thing. And then the TradFi guys, well, they're going to do their own thing no matter what the hell we do.

No. Saying that, that privacy preserving stuff leads us right in to the announcement of peer to peer rights funds has been announced. You can go to p2prights.org. That's p2prights.org. It's the number 2. P2prights.org, and you can find this information. Here's the here's the lead. Our mission at Peer to Peer Rights Fund is to safeguard the decentralized peer to peer integrity of the Bitcoin ecosystem by defending non custodial tools and their developers from regulatory overreach.

We are committed to protecting innovation privacy and user autonomy through strategic litigation and advocacy by supporting pivotal legal cases and providing essential regulatory guidance. We aim to establish a fair legal framework that ensures the continued growth and the resilience of Bitcoin's open source community. And there's a great big donate button on this page and you're more than welcome to go donate to them if if that's what you would like to

do. But at the bottom of the page, it says what we do. To address these challenges and safeguard the future of Bitcoin's decentralized ecosystem, the p two p rights fund is designed to defend against regulatory encroachment on non custodial peer to peer tools. The fund will, one, provide critical resources to subsidize defense counsel and sponsor amicus briefs in pivotal civil and criminal cases.

2, strategically support and finance affirmative impact litigation in judiciously chosen cases to secure crucial legal precedence. And 3, offer free and subsidized regulatory advice to entities developing open source code or non custodial Bitcoin tools. Your support is vital in this endeavor to ensure that innovation privacy in the Bitcoin ecosystem continue to thrive under a fair and just legal framework. So this is think of it as like open sets for peer to peer legal defense.

It's a Bitcoin legal defense fund, but it is very specific. It is about self custody tools. It's about defending the people that develop those tools. Now see, now we have to have a legal fund that is set up to defend these people for writing code, which has already been defended in the 9th circuit Court of Appeals in the United States, which basically stated that code is protected free speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution.

And even with that, we still have to have a legal fund so that these guys don't get in trouble. Now I'm hoping, and it doesn't really it may say somewhere else on the, on on the website, that this is more than just defending developers in the United States, that this is worldwide. And I hope that is what it is.

And the constitution of the United States only applies to the borders of the United States proper. Outside of that, it's anybody's game. Right? But at least somebody has figured it out that we're going to need a wagon load of cash and attorneys and court clerks and, I don't know, summer interns to be able to protect people from riding malicious, nasty, icky, dark code. Oh, oh my god. Oh, the humanity. It's like the Hindenburg burning up. We're all gonna die because somebody said go to line 5

in code. It's ridiculous, but that's that's where that's where we live right now, man. That's where we live. Thankfully, they're doing that though. So if you wanna donate to Peer to Peer Rights Foundation, please do so. Okay. Over to CoinDesk. And, god, Runes is coming back. Hold on. Let me get to it. Internet computer based Bitfinity EVM launches as a Bitcoin layer 2, and God forbid it supports Runes. This is written by Jamie Crawley, of course, out of CoinDesk.

Bitcoin layer 2 Bitfinity has introduced its Ethereum virtual machine to bring smart contract bitcoin protocols and harness runes to enable bitcoin defi apps. Built on the Internet Computer Protocol or ICP, Bitfinity integrates with the Bitcoin network and allows assets bridging to other blockchains. Internet, computers, tech stack will allow applications that use Ethereum smart contract programming language, Solidity, to access bitcoin based tokens.

The Bitfinity EVM, the Ethereum virtual machine, is designed to allow developers to deploy bitcoin based solidity smart contracts, allowing them to transfer BTC, ordinals, and runes according to an emailed announcement on Friday. An EVM is a smart contract executing software that powers the Ethereum protocol, similar to an operating system on a computer.

Bitfinity is attempting to capture the interest in new bit Bitcoin protocol, Runes, which launched around a month ago coinciding with the halving event. Through introducing smart contract capability in order to use them as a platform to create Bitcoin DeFi apps, Runes, which allow fungible tokens to be minted on the Bitcoin blockchain, immediately sent network fees soaring, following a flurry of activity, following its launch. Activity has subsequently died down somewhat. Yeah. Right.

The I don't give a shit about that part. The part that I care about here is that if you've listened to the show for any length of time, you've probably heard me talk about the possibility that in the fungal world, you know, talking about biology here. K? Let's let's use I use it as a model all the time. Different species of fungus, but all fungus, generally speaking, forms a mycelial mat. The great guts and feathers of most fungus do this. And it's just a network. It's a network of tissue,

very fine hairs. And I've always wondered if a species of one of these networks can physically connect and trade information like, you know, nucleuses full of DNA, proteins, yeah, that kind of thing, with another completely different species fungal network.

And I used to think this way before I figured out that shit coins and what they were, being shit coins, before I figured it out, I used to think of how glorious it was going to be when one pro completely different protocol would be able to interact with and hang out and do stuff with a completely separate protocol. But now I just view this as an attack. The eat the this this this bitfinity bullshit in my opinion is an attack Whether or not it is malicious, we will have to wait and see.

But it's an attack. And by malicious, I mean, with forethought of malice, which means that they designed Bitfinity to basically screw up Bitcoin and has no other possible use case. If that's the case, then it is a foregone conclusion that it is a malicious attack. But let's say that it's not. Let's say that they have no intention of attacking the Bitcoin network.

It's still an attack because now there's a potential, if it works, for the Bitcoin network, the security of the layer 1, to somehow be harnessed for and siphoned off in a way to drive some other bullshit Rune or token or shitcoin or defi token or something like that. So I don't like this,

but expect more of this to come. Let's say that Bitfinity decides to hang it up or we figure out a way to completely squash it. If you think this is the last time that people come after Bitcoin to do something like this, then you're wrong. And here's the reason why. What's the most valuable network that there is on the face of the planet right now? This one thing tells you that it's not Ethereum.

Ethereum has to be the parasitic virus that it is in order to be able to stay alive, and it has to go suck the energy up off of something of value. So this is not to mycelial species in the forest singing freaking Kumbaya and having hot chocolate around campfire sharing information and ghost stories. No. No. No. No. No. This is a parasite and I hope that it doesn't work. But even if it doesn't, expect a lot more of this. Alright. Boys and girls, let's run the numbers. CNBC

Futures and Commodities. I've got West Texas Intermediate struggling a little bit this morning. It's been kind of a roller coaster day for energy because of the whole, Iran president getting killed or whatever the hell happened over there in Iran, but it affected markets. Right now, West Texas Intermediate is trading down about a half to $79.71 a barrel. Brent Norcia is down a 3rd. Natural gas, however, is up 4 and a half.

Gasoline prices are gonna come down 1.26 percent to the downside for gas, puts it at $2.54 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks doing well. Well, except for platinum, which is down 2 and half points. But gold is up 0.82%, and silver is up damn near 4%. Ag is doing pretty good today. I suppose it's good. I don't know exactly what that means. But lumber is up 5.64%, and the only loser today is chocolate. It's down almost 2 points. Live cattle, however, is down 0.17%. Lean hogs down 0.17.

Feeder cattle down 0.44%. The Dow is the only legacy financial index that is down in the red today. It is down by almost a half. S and P is up 0.12%. Nasdaq is up 0.69. S and P Mini is pretty much trading sideways. Now we have a price of $68,710 for 1 Bitcoin. That is $1,350,000,000,000 of market cap, and you can buy 28.4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,700,000 836.74 of, and fees have dropped again. We are now down to 0.1 BTC being taken in fees on average

per block. And speaking of blocks, how many blocks do we have? Tell me tell me tell me true mempool. It is 169 blocks, so we're mempools are starting to clear up a little bit, and we are at high priority rates of 11 satoshis per v byte, low priority is 9, and anything under 3 and a third are being purged from mempools around the world.

From episode 898, the palindrome episode of Bitcoin and called Veto coin, Richard Grieser from The Bugle, it's a publication, he also has his own podcast, boosted me 10,000 sats. So, mister Grieser, you and your journalistic capabilities, when are you gonna put me on the show? Anyway, 10,000 sats. He says, appreciate the pod. Definitely the best non credentialed journalist in the game. We are in an Anne Rand book, and the bugle is the Galt's Gulch of journalism.

V 4 v is vital to earn cigarette money where we're going. God, I hope you're that's not a reference to prison, but knowing Dick Grieser, it probably is. Anyway, mangy mangy pigeon with another 10,000 says, I enjoy your show. Thank you. I don't think you. Bitcoin potter with 555. Fives across the board. 5555 says keep sending the signal. Dubravco with 1740 says, with Ibex what can we say? United States citizens aren't worth the hassle as a customer,

especially when our federal police do what they do. Yeah. No shit. DeBravco coming back at me with another 1740 says, regarding that big investment bank using our favorite trust turned ETF, we have to put ourselves into their shoes. Homo Sapiensapien often make a decision and then make up a reason why, so that's a possibility. If they mark up the fees, then a higher fee would make for a higher markup.

Lastly, that I can come up with at a drop, is some silver haired dude had to pick someone so they pick the 1st major holder of BTC for the public out of the batch. That's a branding in and of itself. Katty Kit with a 1,000 says thank you. Alright. She actually says thanks. God's death with 898 says thank you, sir, no thank you. User 507-40894 with a 100 says thank you, no thank you, no thank you. Pies with a 100 says cheers with clinky glasses emoji. That's the weather report.

Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. What do we got here? Oh, oh, oh, I forgot to mention. It's bugle.news. Okay. That's Richard Grieser's outfit, also known as the bugle, but it is bugle, bugle.news. You can go, check them out. I've read a couple of their pieces on the air before, but I'm not going to do it now because we've got news about Julian Assange that you need to hear. Julian Assange can appeal extradition to US according to UK High Court.

The high court in London has ruled that Julian Assange does have the right to make a final appeal against his extradition in the United States. So but but will he get it?

So let's see if this says anything about that. In March, the court asked the US government provide assurances that Assange would receive a fair trial and not face the death penalty if extradited to face charges related to the publication of confidential military and diplomatic files, the judges found the US submissions insufficient, granting Assange permission for a full appeal on the points of freedom of speech and nationality.

Quote, we spent a long time hearing the United States putting lipstick on a pig, but the judges did not buy it, Stella Assange said in a reaction. Quote, this is a victory. This means that the issues at the very heart of this case, freedom of expression, freedom of press, will get consideration by these courts, said Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns for Reporters Without Borders.

Quote, the high court has rightly concluded that if extradited to the USA, Assange will be at risk of serious abuse, including prolonged solitary confinement, which would violate the prohibition on torture or other ill treatment, said Simon Crowweather, legal adviser at Amnesty International. A date has not been set for the full appeal. It's been 12 years since Julian Assange has lived as a free man. 12 freaking years.

The whole thing is freaking just makes me sad. It makes me sad, but he does get he does get to appeal. I don't know what to say, I mean, yay? Because I got a bad feeling that, okay, we'll we'll give them the right to appeal. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. He ain't gonna win it. That's what I think is going on in the background. I don't know. I just want this whole thing to be over for that poor man. Now Venezuela has cracked down on Bitcoin mining according to no bullshit Bitcoin.

Venezuela, the South American country, has declared a ban on Bitcoin mining and pledged to disconnect all mining farms from the national power grid to, quote, unquote, alleviate pressure on the country's electricity supply. Venezuela's Ministry of Electric Power has started to disconnect Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining farms from the national grid. The local government claims that the move will help regulate excessive energy consumption.

A post on Deadbird from Venezuela's National Association of Cryptocurrencies states that cryptocurrency mining is now prohibited in Venezuela. So they banned it. They banned Bitcoin in Venezuela like anybody gives a shit. Well, we recommend that any person or company that has installed equipment uninstall it and store it to avoid inconvenience. We do not consider this to be a solution in the medium or short term, added the institution.

As part of the crackdown, over 11,000 bitcoin miners have been confiscated. This follows another anti corruption initiative in the city of Mariquet where 2,000 cryptocurrency mining devices were seized. Venezuela has been experiencing recurring blackouts since 2019

due to shortages of fuel and rampant corruption that weighs down the country's economy. Yeah. This doesn't have anything to do with that doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoin mining. That's everything to do with about how Venezuela is yet another failed state brought to you by your good friends, most likely

well, I won't say it, but I don't think it's internal. I think its external pressures have basically caused most of the countries in South America and Central America to become failed states. You can point the finger at whoever you think needs to have the finger pointed at them. Okay. But be silent about it. Silentium. Is that the way you pronounce it? Silentium? I hate this name. Proof of concept for silent payments, light wallets.

Silentium is a free and open source experimental and privacy Introducing, the easiest Bitcoin wallet to experience the future of silent payments. Wow. I've been hearing a lot about this shit lately. One static address without the privacy concerns, announced Lewis Singer on Deadbird. Silentium is mobile first progressive web app. You can install it anywhere, access it from any browser at app.silentiumdot dev. Silentiumd is a public indexer. It stores and serves bip352 public data quote.

Special thanks to Volpum Ventures sponsoring the infrastructure for the first Cylentium server at BIP 352 support in your wallet today. And then there's bitcoin.salentium.dev, is a, well, website that you can, I guess, maybe get the API or the tools that you need to be able to add BIP 352 support to your wallet? So if you wanna go do that, you got a wallet, you wanna go do it, go do it. Let's learn more about silent payments or BIP 352 here. We'll get to that. Key features.

Mobile first progressive web app. 2. Your keys. Your coins. 3. Only the receiver and the sender may link a transaction with the wallet address. 4. Connects to a server digesting blocks and serving to you the tweak data that you need. It does not expect any of your keys and drastically reduces the bandwidth that you need to run a silent payments wallet.

And 5, and finally, privacy focused. No tracking, no analytics. Silentmd, Silentiumd cannot track your UTXOs nor the transactions, uses compact block filter or BIP 158 to fetch UTXOs and transactions. Now I've been hearing a shit ton about silent payments all of a sudden. And what's odd is that everybody's talking about it like it's been around forever and ever and ever. And, honestly, I've been around since 2015. I've never heard of silent payments before.

So this is from silentpayments.xyzforward/docs. That's silentpayments.xyz. This is the tldr. Silent payments allow you to create a single static address to share with friends, to use for donations, or post for tips without sacrificing privacy. When someone wants to send you a payment, they use the unique public key that is part of your silent payment address.

Combine it with the public keys of the outputs they want to send and generate a unique one time address that looks on chain just like any other Taproot address. The main advantages of silent payments are simpler user experience, your users just need to worry about a single static address instead of the hurdles of generating new addresses

for every receive. Now I'm gonna pause because that's always been one of the things that we talk about as privacy best practices on bitcoin main chain transactions is you always generate a new address. Now back in the day like WikiLeaks when they were taking bitcoin and they still do, I don't know if they've changed their address, but back in the day way way way long ago,

they had one static address. So everybody that donated to WikiLeaks basically everybody was connected to everybody else because all of the transactions were going to that one address. So anybody, like or well, not anybody. Any transaction that sent to that single address was immediately doxxed for giving money to WikiLeaks.

And if they backtracked it and somehow or another connected the transaction you sent, your u t the UTXO that you sent to WikiLeaks, and they can tie that to your identity, then they knew that you gave money to WikiLeaks. And that's all that all has to do with a couple of things. One is it's just so many different people over so many time spans and so many different amounts. The amount of data collected on that one address is staggering. It's eye watering.

Okay? So now with that said, we have this silent payment which enables you to use a single address for all of your donation needs except the payment structure where people are paying you to that address all of those are different. Let's continue on. Number 2. Better receiver privacy address reuse with silent payments is impossible as no 2 senders can generate the same on chain address Number 3. Better sender privacy.

Receivers have no way of connecting sends from the wait a minute hold on I got I got a a rendering problem here. Let's do that again. Better or better sender privacy. Receivers have no way of connecting sends from the same receiver together providing better privacy for even the sender and 4 no server is required.

Anyone with a wallet that supports silent payments can receive funds without address reuse, without communication, and without running complex infrastructures, so you don't even need to run your own node for this. Now, that is you now know everything that I know about silent payments. Again,

this shit just crept up on my radar like 2 day or 2 weeks ago. It was the first I heard anybody mention the word silent payments was either 2 to 3 weeks ago. Before that, if I heard silent payment, then I forgot about it.

So me and you you guys, we're all in the same boat together. Okay? So so if you don't know what silent payments are, go to silent payments dotxyz because they have a whole bunch of different documents that probably go well, not probably, that go into a lot more detail of silent payments. But the gist of it is this, we're back to where we can use a single address, but it somehow disconnects everybody paying to that address from that address as well as everybody else. There's no

way according to these guys now I've never used it before, so I don't know. I'm not sure. I I'm trusting these guys so far. Right? That's all I can do. But nobody's connected to anybody else, but that that address remains the same. So it's interesting. This entire space is moving so fast. I'm it's it's hard to keep up with, which is why I bring you this show at least 3 times a week nowadays. Okay. Last up on the list, Canaan has launched the Avalon a 1566 Bitcoin miner.

Canaan Incorporated, the creator of ASIC Bitcoin Miners, has unveiled its latest Bitcoin mining machine, the a 1566 air cooled miner from the Avalon miner a 15 series at bitcoin Asia 2024. The Avalon miner a 1566 is the 2nd generation of Avalon miners with 1 x joules per terahash power efficiency ratio. It's fine tuned for the shaw 256 minuteing algorithm.

It can compute more data while consuming less energy with regard to its advanced power efficiency which clocks in at 18.5 joules per terahash. Hence, it will enhance users profitability and offer customers a competitive ROI after the recent bitcoin having event stated the firm.

Now this seems to be on par if maybe a little high, with the s 21 Antminer that came out, the liquid cool version, I think goes all the way down to 15 joules per terahash which is the if that's correct, makes it the most efficient Bitcoin miner on a jewels per tera hash basis than any other miner on the face of the planet. And this thing's clocking in kind of close. For being air cooled, it's not bad. 18.5 joules per terahash.

So this leads me into thinking about something, and that's the heat transfer issue of all Bitcoin miners. We've been getting real creative with what do we do with the excess heat. You've seen people heat up hot tubs. You've seen people hook these things up into their air handling units in their house and run them during the winter so they can heat their house

and mine Bitcoin all at the same time. Brilliant idea. You'd have your hot tub all hot and steamy and mine Bitcoin all at the same time. And people have made hot water heaters. Right? Some people are using, the waste heat from mining rigs to heat up greenhouses. There's all manner of stuff that you can do with this, but here's my thing.

I keep hearing about people there's, like, at least one guy I know of that is starting, either has already done it, or is very, very close to building a company that retrofits household air conditioning units or air their air handling units. Basically, all the whether they're air condition you know, heating or cooling their house, it all goes through the same ductwork.

This guy is talking talking about building a company that goes in and retrofits and takes out the old heater and replaces it with bitcoin miners. And that's great. I'm I'm not I don't have a problem with that idea. But what happens when these miners get so efficient that they're no longer putting out that much heat?

And that the way that we would be able to get the same kind of heat to heat our hot tub, let's say, and somebody's like let's say, I I think somebody's using like, I don't know, 2, like, old s 9 amp miners to heat their their their tub. What happens when we get so efficient that we're not really wasting? We're not we don't have a lot of waste heat.

What happens with all the people right now that are thinking about how great this waste heat is? And believe me, I'm one of them. I think being able to utilize waste heat is one of the most interesting physics problems that we have in Bitcoin today, and a lot of other problems too. But let's just keep it to Bitcoin. It's one of the most interesting physics problems. We're talking about, like, you know, straight up, you know, second law of thermodynamics.

You know, entropy. It's all about entropy. We won't get into it, but I'm just saying if we have all these systems like boilers that are designed to be working with excess heat that is of a certain flow and a certain temperature, what happens when that rig dies and you gotta go get another mining rig and it puts out half the heat because the chips are so much more efficient in doing the hashing algorithm. It's something to think about.

You know, it's like we it it we have this problem where we don't we're not as adversarial in this space as we used to be. And that is a question that I put to you. What happens with all this stuff that we've we've brilliantly figured out how to harvest the heat and no heat is actually being produced anymore off of these miners. So give that a thought and ask it to do for the morning roundup. Dad says jokes. I've just joined a dating site for arsonists. I've been sent a lot of matches.

Alright, ladies and gentlemen. That's gonna do it for me on this Monday, Episode 899 of Bitcoin and is in the bag, and I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and, and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.