The first shots were fired in the battle to bring the rest of "crypto" to the ETF market—the impact on Bitcoin and why the SEC might not be the hero we need.
Plus project updates, the historically bad week for one Bitcoin ETF, your boosts, and more.
Sponsor: http://podhome.fm
Promo Code: TWIB
Links:
Plus project updates, the historically bad week for one Bitcoin ETF, your boosts, and more.
Sponsor: http://podhome.fm
Promo Code: TWIB
Links:
- SEC probing crypto companies in Ethereum investigation as hopes for ETF dim
- Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of Ethereum’s 2014 Premine
- GBTC getting a ‘second wind’ of outflows, $1.4b this week along, now double any other ETF in outflows YTD
- in a day when GBTC saw record liquidations (to meet bankruptcy obligations of Genesis and others) and when bitcoin tumbled, Blackrock’s IBIT saw a surge of inflows. ETF demand is relentless and price indiscriminate
- RoboSats v0.6.0-alpha: The Federation Layer
- Bisq 2 AMA
[00:00:00]
Unknown:
The reality is, if you told me a year ago that we were going to have a correction down to $63,000, I would have been ecstatic. That would have been a fantastic, fantastic price for us. Yes, the ETFs have had a big impact on the price appreciation in twofold. The first one is the fact, of course, that if you make something easier to buy, there will be more demand, and more demand than supply means prices go up. But the most important point here is actually what the ETF for Bitcoin being approved meant. It actually means that regulators can't stand in the way of legitimate products and financial products forever.
So what we're going to see and what the market is actually counting on is definitely a set of new crypto products that will come to market soon. Ethereum ETFs, Solana ETFs, many of these other crypto products that I'm sure are coming to market. So it's really this starting gun. And that's what is happening and not really just the Bitcoin ETF on its own. Music. Is it, though? Welcome back to This Week in Bitcoin. We'll get into that. This, though, is your weekly high signal Bitcoin news podcast. My name is Chris. I go by Chris LAS online. And we do this every week. Oh, and I've got my crap together.
I'm back from a road trip to NixCon and the Southern California Linux Expo. It's actually pretty great to meet some of you there already. That was pretty cool and unexpected. Many of us making it back for the first time since 2019. And while I was away, it appears the battle has begun at the ETF floodgates for the wider crypto market. Surprisingly, though, the first shots appear to be fired from the SEC. I say surprisingly because this comes after years of the SEC dodging the big question. So do you recognize, how would you categorize Ether then? I think that the general sweep of what Congress did, not just in the 30s, but as amended.
I'm asking you, you're sitting in your chair now to make. This is SEC Chair Gary Gensler testifying to Congress, and I think you can tell where this is going. Take an assessment under the laws as exists, is Ether a commodity or a security? Without speaking to any one token, it's a matter of facts. I know you've repeatedly said that you're not going to speak to one, except you've spoken to one, Bitcoin. So I'm asking you to speak to a second one, the second largest market cap here. And speaking to the tokens, there's 10,000 to 12,000. If there's a group of entrepreneurs in the middle and the public is anticipating a profit based on the... I'm asking a specific question, Chair Gensler. I said this in private.
This should be no shock to you I'm asking this question. is Ether a commodity or a security? And again, it depends on the facts and the law. And if there's a group of individuals... I'm asking about the facts and the law sitting in your seat and the judgment you are making. Clearly, Gary's having a tough time answering the question, at least in the recent past. But this week, maybe that's changed. Okay, let's talk about today's top stories. And we start with some breaking news. The Ethereum Foundation reportedly under investigation investigation by the SEC. According to Fortune, the US regulator began a probe into the foundation shortly after the network shifted to proof of stake in 2022.
The outlet also spoke to a person at a company who received a subpoena request. Back in February, Ethereum updated its website to reflect that it had received a voluntary inquiry from a state authority, one that required confidentiality. It also removed a disclosure on the foundation's website that that said it had never been contacted by an agency that required confidentiality. Now, we don't know at this point in time if it's actually a securities investigation that's happening or something just a little more routine. However, the wider crypto industry seems to be gearing up for that securities battle.
You see, the idea is that if Ethereum can get sold through an ETP or ETF product, then so could Solana and all the other centrally managed crypto products. So the whole industry is interested in what happens here. And the liquidity for these projects in the anticipation of the ETF has an impact on Bitcoin's price action in the short term. And what we really have to kind of appreciate is there's fundamental differences between a commodity and a security. And it hinges on what's being bought and what's being sold. Commodities are basic goods that can be traded or exchanged.
Securities, however, they involve taking ownership, stake in something. Maybe somebody or an entity or a group provides credit to a common group in hopes of earning a profit. They're more centrally managed. And this was made sort of decidedly clear in the Securities Act of 1933, where it creates three thresholds to determine if something is a security. Two of them are pretty straightforward, but there's a third threshold. And, well, it's a bit of a more vague threshold. And that's where Ethereum's management team will make their argument. Now, to explain it better than I can, this clip is Dan Bowen. He's a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University.
Now, what's interesting is if you look at the statutes, the organic statutes, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, each contains a section that defines what a security is. And the definitions look pretty pedestrian and obvious. They talk about stock. They talk about bonds. They talk about other instruments that most of us would recognize as clearly being securities. But they then throw in a phrase called investment contract. What the heck is an investment contract? Well, the investment contract is what I call a rubber phrase. It's flexible and it's designed to capture arrangements that act like securities but don't fit comfortably within any of the other categories of securities.
Now, you'll hear the ETH promoters and marketing team tell you that the SEC has already made past statements that make it clear they consider ETH a commodity. And if ETH is a commodity, then it is not under the purview of the SEC. And Professor Dan gets into that a bit as well. In a recent speech given in June 2018 by Bill Hinman, the director of the Division of Corporation Finance at the SEC, Bill clearly articulated that it's the SEC's position that Bitcoin and Ether are not securities. That's a very important conclusion, and the interesting question is, what's the logical process that leads to that conclusion?
Division Director Hinman reasoned as follows. He said that, to the best of his understanding, Bitcoin and Ether were sufficiently decentralized that there was no one who played the role of a promoter in the system. No one had sufficient control over the system. Not only was there no promoter, there was also no asymmetry of information. There was no situation where there was someone like a promoter or like an issuer who would know so much more than people transacting the system that it gave rise to the asymmetry that would cause the registration requirement. And in registration, the issuer or the promoter has to disclose the additional information they have so that purchasers are adequately informed with regard to the purchase and sale of the underlying security.
The problem is, there was an asymmetrical difference, and the SEC's director's understanding was wrong, and his public statements were wrong. There were people who knew more than the rest at ETH's founding. There were those who had access to ETH before the public, as this famous audio of Ethereum founder Vitalik so clearly captured for all of history. So we are going to start the Ether presale in a couple of weeks. So the Ether pre-sale will be an opportunity for anyone to purchase Ether, where Ether is the internal currency inside of the Ethereum system, sort of like the XRP and Ripple.
Now, is there a big window of opportunity for people to get in, or is there just like a one-day opportunity? No, it's something worth thinking of. It might be 45 days, it might be 30, it might be 60 days. Okay, so there's plenty of time, sort of an incremental thing, so the earlier you go in... Yes, the earlier you get in, the better price you get. Now, let's say you're one of the founders of Ethereum and your colleague, Charles, what's to prevent one of you guys to load up and get half the ethers for yourself? Or do you have to buy in to those ethers also? Yeah, well, okay.
So we are going to look at exactly how much ether we're going to get. That's still undecided, but it will be very, very public and it will be a rather small portion of the entire- I mean, when you say small portion, are you talking about like 10% of the total, 5%? Yes. Right. It'll be something like... Or you guys are still undecided. What does the percentage matter if the supply is uncapped? It doesn't matter. And I've never been very satisfied with their transparency around any of this. We did get a little more insight at the time, though. What we're hoping is, is that sort of similar to what happened with Mastercoin.
If that slice is something like 20% and then the value of Ether goes up by 5%, then we basically have the entire initial BTC that we got all over again. Now, to me, that sounds like a group or a team that are clearly going to work to drive up the value of an investment. And it's kind of a point they've made over and over again on stage. They are a team. Here's a quick couple of takes on that. About 100 people that are working on Ethereum right now. Myself leading the protocol design. We also have branding teams. We have marketing teams. Branding teams, marketing teams, Vitalik's leading design.
When you buy Ethereum, you're expecting these people to grow and expand the Ethereum protocol and expand the Ethereum ecosystem. ecosystem. When this happens, you're expecting the value of Ethereum to go up. That sounds like a security managed by a team that you're making investment in with an expectation of return. And I'm not alone on this take. SEC Chair Gary Gensler has more recently said, and just made this point very clear several times, if you take funding, it's kind of clear. If you're raising money from the public and the public is in anticipation of profit profit based upon that promoter, sponsor, that group's efforts, that's within the securities laws.
And it's within the securities laws because Congress painted with a broad brush. They wanted to protect you, the investing public, so that you have proper information or what's called full and fair information and protect you against fraud and scammers and the like. Now, despite, I should say, all of the documentation and the audio I could play you, It's not actually a clear win for the SEC or really for the Ethereum team. You see, they're both going to use this broad brush, as Gary puts it, to defend their area. This is where the turf war really will happen for them is in this broad brush zone.
And that's going to be a lot of nuance. And as this drama unfolds, the contention of the investment market that invests in Bitcoin as a quote unquote risk asset is going to be whipsawing their buys and sells right along with this drama. So thanks. Thanks, Crypto. Appreciate that. And speaking of turf wars, you know, I wouldn't pass over the fact that we're seeing a actual turf war play out right now. You see, the CFTC may end up being an ally of Ethereum in this fight, arguing that, well, it's distributed enough now. Maybe it wasn't initially, but you know now.
And the chairman of the CFTC recently told Congress that if the SEC reclassified Ethereum, it would mess things up. If we do have any action by the SEC to essentially validate that decision, i.e., you know, constituting Ether as a security, it would then put our registrants, our exchanges, who list Ether as a futures contract, sort of in noncompliance of SEC rules as opposed to CFTC rules. rules. So I am working with Chair Gensler. We're working with his office. We're working with the agency to ensure that whatever steps are taken are deliberate, that we're involved, and that they understand certainly what the consequences would be if there was a decision by the agency to determine that Ether was a security.
As of now, we need to preserve the integrity of our markets and understand that this is a years-old decision where these markets are functioning well under the decision and the conclusion that Ether is a commodity. Okay, coming up, some ETF news, your boost, some project updates you need to know about, a fantastic resource, and a couple of clips of the week to round it all out. But first, I want to thank the show's sponsor, Podhome.fm. That's my podcasting, 2.0 hosting platform of choice. Use the promo code TWIB. When you sign up, you get your first three months for free. It is an unlimited podcasting platform with unlimited shows and episodes powered by their own Podhome AI.
It's like having an entire production crew in your back pocket, balances your audio, transcribes your podcast, creates chapters and clips for you. It'll even suggest titles. And it's a great platform for live streaming and hosting MP3s. Podhome.fm, promo code TWIB. Thank you to Podhome for sponsoring this week in Bitcoin. And now a quick Bitcoin ETF update. I'm going to watch these as long as it seems to be driving critical narratives or price action. It might matter to you. And this week, GBTC's bankruptcy sell-off saw record-setting outflows. Now double any other ETF in outflows year-to-date and has set a record for cumulative outflows for any ETF in history.
That's the kind of sell-off we're seeing from just the GBTC ETF, which might explain some of the price action this week. But despite all of that, the Bitcoin ETFs rank third overall out of 3,400 ETFs in annual revenue generated so far. 68% though of the Bitcoin network has not sold or moved their coins in over a year. So don't let things around the ETF scare you. The majority of the coin holders are still the plebs. But the overall Bitcoin ETF market seems to be doing very well despite the outflows. And the reality is most people think GBTC can only continue these kind of outflows till the end of the year at the most.
And as you've probably guessed, this has been really fantastic for Coinbase, as the CEO, Brian Armstrong, recently mentioned. Yeah. So with the ETFs that got approved, we've seen a huge influx of capital into the system. About $12 billion of inflow have happened. And when that happens, sometimes people ask us, well, what does that mean for Coinbase? Well, you know, it's actually incredibly positive for Coinbase. We're storing, we're the custodian for about 90% of the assets in those Bitcoin ETFs. And so we have monetization opportunities there as a custodian. But it didn't cannibalize any of the opportunity in our direct products to our retail app or institutional product.
We actually saw increased inflows there while we saw $12 billion of inflow into the ETFs. Music. I've got some project updates for you. RoboSats 0.6.0 is out. This is a non-KYC, non-know-your-customer way to buy Bitcoins using the Lightning Network. They've been working on an Android app as well. But something that I think is going to be just a big deal long term is the renewed effort on decentralization. They're picking this back up and they introduced a major upgrade that introduces RoboSats Federation, a decentralized system of independent coordinators to host orders. They say this will enhance the platform's robustness and experience now it's just the beginning but they say this is the first step toward significant decentralization allowing users to interact with any coordinator seamless seamlessly they have a new avatar generator in there and of course bug fixes and improvements and in the spirit of kyc free bitcoin another platform that just seems to be going from strength to strength now and i'm happy to actually say that is BISQ.
B-I-S-Q. And they have just released BISQ 2. They're trying to make it easier to use and something I think that is really a great resource if you're considering using BISQ. Some of their team joined an AMA and asked me anything on Stacker News and they answered some great questions about how it works, the feature breakdown, fees, the differences between BISQ 2 and BISC-1, another great way to buy your Bitcoin peer-to-peer, KYC-free. I'll have links to the AMA. And to the news article about RoboSats, two of my favorite applications out there. Great ways to stack Bitcoin without KYC.
We have some boosts. The dude Abide comes in with 77,777 sats. Oh, boy, you are our baller lobster this week, the dude Abides. He was boosting episode one. He says, let's get this thing to the first page. It deserves it. Thanks. You know, that does help in the fountain charts. Lots of people find us when we go to the top page. Jeremy Ross comes in with 20,000 sats. Great show so far. Looking forward to more episodes as I continue my own journey into crypto and value for value. Oh, be very careful, Jeremy. We appreciate you being here. And hopefully after a few episodes, you'll stop calling it crypto and you'll call it Bitcoin.
I appreciate the boost. Jordan Bravo comes in with 5,555 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. He says, I'm excited for this week in Bitcoin, especially in the way of the Bitcoin dad going on hiatus. Yes, Jeff, I've heard a few of those. Thank you very much. Adam Curry comes in with 10,000 sats. Make it so. Says, great clip about DOS. Happy to oblige, Podfather. Glad you found it useful. Thanks for the booth. Booth? Thanks for the booth. For the Jeff booth. No, thank you for the boost. I appreciate it. Chad F. comes in with a strong, really enjoying the show, row of ducks. Thank you, Chad F. Jeff, UConn, or an alias, probably getting that right, right?
Comes in with 10,000 sats. It's over 9,000! Says, this was a great episode. Episode two, it gives me a busy dad the distilled information I need. Now I don't have the, I don't always have the time to pay attention to everything going on with the news and the talk. So this show is filling those holes in just one hour. Oh, I'm going to try to keep it under an hour. Maybe I went long. I mean, there will be weeks where it goes a little long, I imagine, depending on the news. I'd say my nominal target is 25 to 30 minutes, but I don't push it if it's not necessary for the content. Again, it's high signal. Get you in, get you out.
This is the part where I like to just slow down and engage with the community and expand where we can. And, of course, I'm hoping this kind of becomes a revolving conversation when you guys boost in with the topics and things you care about, the things you want follow-up on or you want to follow-up on. All of that is very, very welcome. You can boost with the new podcast app at podcastapps.com. And I love it. I love it when you do. Green Everett boosted in with 5,000 sats. He says, I'm here because Adam Curry said I should listen. Very good. The Podfather, it has great taste.
This is my first time here. I'm hitting play now. Adam's people, we boost right off the bat. Now that is great. It's good people. That's what that is. That is good, good people. Gene Bean comes in with 5,000 sats. Just met Gene Bean in IRL at Scale and NixCon. And he's just as great in person as he is over booze. He writes, thanks for the advice and your time last week. I really appreciate it. I'm also loving the show. It's well done and a great format. You're a great format, Gene Bean. You're a great format. Oppie 1984 comes in. 4,000 sats with a support boost. Podhome, our sponsor and our platform, also boosting the show.
How about that? That is a hot boost. 15,000 sats. Great episode. and another great show format. Please keep going as this really is valuable information to keep me informed. Great stuff. Hashtag go podcasting. How about that? How about that? Now that is real support. Thank you, Podhome. Podhome.fm. Appreciate that. The tone record comes in with 6,102 sats. This is great weekly coverage of capturing relevant events and nice to see the nod to time chain calendar. Added your show to my rotation. I appreciate that. Nice nod of confidence. Sorry I missed you last week. Where were you? I was here.
Okay, no, I wasn't. Time chain calendar shout out. Still a great, great tool. I really love it. I have it up on a couple of my tablets that I have around my house. Yes, I have tablets around my house. Don't bug me about it. Gene Bean comes in with another row of ducks. Do you have any suggestions on how to get started running a Bitcoin node, possibly on a VPS like Hetzner? I don't know if I recommend Hetzner. I don't have experience with running a node on Hetzner. If anybody does, please boost in. I'll tell you what I've been really liking, Gene, if you're up for it, is the Nix Bitcoin project.
It's a bit intense if you're not familiar with Nix. So that's a big lift. But all of the issues you have with something like a Start9, which I think is great, or an Umbral, which is pretty good, you don't have with Nix Bitcoin. And that is somebody else is managing and packaging things up and kind of making assumptions about how your system is built. And then when big updates happen, those assumptions can sometimes bite you and things go wrong and you end up down like at a command line interface, maybe some sort of series of scripts that they've written, taking different incarnations off of their form, trying to get your personal bank back up online.
And if you're a small business like me, you know, it's a pretty critical part of what we do. And what Nick's Bitcoin does is like a prescription. It has to be followed every single time. And if anything fails, it doesn't build completely. So you have this sort of pre-flight check. And if everything doesn't check out, it doesn't build, the system doesn't switch. If you switch and there's like some sort of bug or software regression that couldn't be caught at build time, but it's like some sort of bug, maybe an LND or something like that, you just roll back. And that kind of ability to roll back without affecting your data, but be able to roll back the applications, I think a pretty big deal for a Bitcoin node.
I know Umbral just has a new update this week. Version 1.0 came out. Could be worth looking at. I don't know about Hetzner. I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on that. I have to tell you, it feels risky to some degree to use a Bitcoin, to seriously use a node on any VPS, depending on what your threat factor is. I think it's just something to keep in mind. That is something I'd love to open up for conversation to the rest of the audience. So please do boost in if you have opinions on that. Mr. Pibb comes in. Mr. Pibb? Is that you? With one extra B, that's all it takes? And that's not, okay, I'll go with it.
5,000 sats. That's Bitcoin Noob here. Totally ignorant, to be honest. Wow. Well, you got a boost in, dude. That's pretty good. You haven't led me astray on Linux, FOSS, or self-hosting. So I'll hitch onto this wagon as well. I've been curious about Bitcoin, and it's nice to have a source of information who I already trust. I learned a lot so far. Keep them coming, please. I'd welcome some Bitcoin 101 type podcasts for myself, fellow newbies who are listening. Thank you, Chris. Hmm. We should probably start as a community collecting resources for total Bitcoin newbies. I like the intellectual curiosity a lot, Mr.
Bibb. that's um a rarity you're a special person that is really something and thank you for the boost i really appreciate that too i know that first setup can be a little bit of a climb mr cospeeland comes in with 2 000 sats says love the updates segment thank you jcube 2 000 sats heck yeah dude i'm glad you're covering this stuff uh and user 82 came in with 3 000 sats this is great to see you back and hybrid sarcasm was rocking the support after getting his wall being strike issues sort I know. Well, he says managed wallets like Albion Strike make it impossible to empty my wallet to zero. That's always kind of a trick because this is one of the reasons I think Liquid and Lightning are going to be maybe more accessible to average users that are moving small funds.
Because I mean I probably have wallets all over the place with what essentially are dust sats. Because you always have to reserve some for fees, yeah. Would a self-hosted wallet be the solution to this? To a degree. You're always going to have the issue of needing to get the fees covered. But what you could do pretty easily on a self-hosted wallet is throw some more UTXOs in there, combine it into a larger transaction and move them all out. You'll have more optionality. You definitely have more optionality on a self-hosted one. There are minimum transactions and you know how they'll – you've seen this before like on the hosted ones where they're like they'll just auto-calculate the fees for you and they'll just tell you – like they don't give you like different kinds of optionality to control like how many fees you want or maybe you want to do replace by fee.
Like they don't give you access to that stuff that is tooling to solve some of this. So it does get better, but it's not perfect. 21 is enough comes in with 12,121 sats. And they write, this is the first Jupiter Broadcasting show I can catch from the very beginning. That's great. Welcome aboard, sir. Thanks for all the content. Now, that's all the boosts we had above 2,000 sats. I currently have a cutoff of 2,000 sats universally across my shows just for time purposes. It's sort of the best way I can manage, but I appreciate all of it. But we had 32 boosters this week, which is really outrageously great.
And so I read all of them. They all go in my show notes for posterity as well. So if your amount is below the 2,000 sats, don't worry. I'm still seeing it. It just doesn't make it into the actual on-air portion. But I appreciate all of them. Thank you, everybody who boosted in. We stacked 199,927 sats. Radical transparency around what we bring in in the value-for-value model is key to how this works. That's why I tell you the amounts. If you find the show valuable, the information valuable, you want to support the show and keep it going, please consider boosting with a podcast app like Fountain or Podverse or Castomatic.
Or you can even boost from sites like the Podcast Index or go sign up for True Fans FM and boost from there. Now, I do have a couple of resources of the week that I want to get to, so I'm not done with you yet. But thank you, boosters. Appreciate your support. Bolts.exchange. Now, you may know about Bolts.Exchange, but if you don't, let me just take a second and tell you this is the way that myself and pretty much everybody I know moves funds between on-chain and Lightning or from Lightning back to on-chain or potentially swap into liquid. Bolts, B-O-L-T-Z.Exchange. So if you've got some SATs sitting in a wallet.
And you want to get them in a new podcast app, and you want to get them onto Lightning, you can use Bolts.Exchange. Or if you want to take sats out of a Lightning wallet and move them on-chain to store them, you can use Bolts.Exchange. And I think it's a fantastic service, and something they've done this week that made me want to mention them, and I've got to say, I'd love to see everybody do this, is Bolts.Exchange has posted a very, very good warrant canary. Maybe what should really be the industry standard. entered. They have their PGP signature up there, and it's a signed message that says the maintainers and admins of the software project known as Bolts Exchange have received and complied with zero requests for information from any kind of third parties, including but not limited to government agencies.
We will renew this notice within 60 days time. If this notice fails to be renewed by then, you should assume the worst. I am the admin of HTTPS Bolts.Exchange. I am in control of my PGP I will update this canary within 60 days. Today is 2024-03-2022. And of course, they put the latest Bitcoin block hash in there as well with their PGP signature. Then also, they make it easy to import their keys and verify this message. They give you the actual PGP command line and curl command line. It's really GPG to do all that. Man, just a round of applause and a bell for them. them. I'm going to slap that bell hard for those guys.
I think that is something that we should see anybody who's responsible for any kind of transactions or where they touch your money for a few minutes even. I want to see that. I want to see this from, you know, Blockworks. I want to see this from Coinbase. I think we should see this everywhere. So I'll put a link to their canary, and I'll also link to Bolts.Exchange because it really truly is a fantastic and quick and cheap way to move between lightning, on-chain, and liquid. And now it's time for our final clips of the week. This one is a reminder of why Bitcoin is important.
It really is a dramatic one. India's Congress Party, not familiar with the politics of India, so I can't vouch either way for the Congress Party, but they apparently represent around 20% of the population. And this week they had their bank accounts frozen just two months before elections. If any of you imagine, anybody in the country imagines what happens happens when your bank account, your ATM card, your entire financial identity is erased. You can imagine if it is done to a family, the family will starve to death. If it is done to a business, the business will be crippled.
This is what has been done to the Congress party one month back. All our bank accounts have been frozen. We can do no campaign work. We cannot support our workers. We cannot support our candidates. Our leaders cannot fly from one part of the country to the other. Forget fly, they can't take a railway train and this has been done literally two months before for the election campaign. Bitcoin fixes this. It can happen in India. It can happen in Canada. And it happens where you live today already. You just probably, hopefully, have had the privilege of not having to notice.
And Bitcoin also protects you from inflation. And this week, some are saying that we may have just witnessed a transition from the Fed to now a new standard of high inflation for longer. Mohamed Olarian is here, chief economic advisor at Allianz, president of Queens College at Cambridge University, and a Fed, are you a whisperer? What are you? Observer. A Fed observer. Did you think it was dovish, more dovish than you were expecting yesterday? Oh, absolutely. And in two ways. One is a signal that they're willing to tolerate higher inflation for longer.
And second, something that is flying below the radar screen is what Chair Powell said about QT, said about the balance sheet, saying that he's willing to slow down the journey to a lower balance sheet. I think that twin patience means that we may well look back on this week as the week in which central banks stepped away from a very strict inflation target to a much broader concept of an inflation target. The truth is the Fed's trapped. If they lower rates, inflation will start ticking up faster than it already is in a tightening cycle.
And if they don't lower the rates, it seems like a very likely scenario that we'll enter a massive recession if you look at all the indicators that are all peaking at pre-2008 levels. And as the CNBC host was about to bring up, it's also an election cycle, which means that if the economy were to slide, it would be an even bumpier and rowdy election season. And this has, in your view, nothing to do with the election. So I would like to believe the Fed in saying that it is apolitical. You would like to believe? Do you believe? Look, I have no other reason to believe otherwise.
Well, it was a weird it was weirdly dovish. And I keep bringing up that suddenly it seems like the asymmetric risk is now of a recession after we've had two really hot inflation numbers. I was with you when when you asked me what what does the outlook look like? I told you 55 percent soft landing, 30 percent recession, 15 percent something better than than that. And I think I think that they realize two things. I think they realize that the economy is weakening, but they've also realized or hope they're going to realize that we are living in a world in which the supply side is the problem and that we need to tolerate slightly higher inflation if we don't want to sacrifice the economy.
Now, how about that? Now it's we can't risk the economy. Not we have to stop inflation. Either way, Bitcoin protects your purchasing power over the long term in numerous ways. But these two that we just covered, I think these are some of the most powerful. And these are the ones that your no-coiner friends and family are going to start to understand as their financial privilege begins to melt away. way. Now, if you made it this far, I want to just say thank you very much. Thisweekinbitcoin.show is where you can find the links. I now have a contact form if you're not a booster, but boost is really what I'd love to see from you and what you'd love to see from me.
Boost it and tell me what you'd like to see in the show, what you'd like to see covered. Was there something missed that you thought should have been in here? That'd also be great to let me know. It helped me refine what I'm watching. I'm hoping to create the number one Bitcoin news podcast for the podcasting 2.0 community and for the Jupyter Broadcasting community. And of course, the wider one as well. So I'm also soliciting value for value music, songs that fit the theme of the show. You know, normally you don't play Bitcoin songs on a podcast, but this is a great excuse to play one.
So if there's a great value for value Bitcoin song, please link it to me. Or if just there's some music you think that works really well for an outro, I'd love to hear it because I think it's it's a great way for the show to incorporate a feature that really has changed the discussion around sats. When you boost into a show or you boost a track, people are not denominating that value in dollars. The entire value for value community is using sats. Everything is being valued in sats directly. It's the beginning of something beautiful. And now music is part of that.
So I'd like to incorporate it into this show. Now this week, though, since I don't have a value for value song, I do have a meme of the week, you know, something kind of silly and old Mikey Saylor. He's always great for a meme. He's been of a meme factory. Perhaps, perhaps that's intentional. Wouldn't it be hilarious if we discovered he had writers? Helping them come up with quips that can be memed. Oh, that'd be so much drama. It'd be crazy. Maybe I should get out of here. The signal is beginning to drop, I think. Thank you so much for listening to This Week in Bitcoin.
I'll see you next week. And I mean it. What do you do with the Bitcoin besides it just gather value? Real estate developers in New York City, they're not buying the real estate because they want to live in it. But like most of the people who are buying assets at some point want to sell the assets at a profit. Music. People that use fiat currency as a store of value, we call them poor. We call them poor. Music. People that use fiat currency, we call them poor. We call them poor. We call them poor. We call them poor. There's a name for them.
We call them poor. We call them poor. Okay. Right, like, the point is, if you have the superior asset, it's going up forever, Lauren. Forever. Right, I mean, right, but I mean, we can all look. Bitcoin sort of as forever more people that use fiat currency as a store of value. We call them. Music.
The reality is, if you told me a year ago that we were going to have a correction down to $63,000, I would have been ecstatic. That would have been a fantastic, fantastic price for us. Yes, the ETFs have had a big impact on the price appreciation in twofold. The first one is the fact, of course, that if you make something easier to buy, there will be more demand, and more demand than supply means prices go up. But the most important point here is actually what the ETF for Bitcoin being approved meant. It actually means that regulators can't stand in the way of legitimate products and financial products forever.
So what we're going to see and what the market is actually counting on is definitely a set of new crypto products that will come to market soon. Ethereum ETFs, Solana ETFs, many of these other crypto products that I'm sure are coming to market. So it's really this starting gun. And that's what is happening and not really just the Bitcoin ETF on its own. Music. Is it, though? Welcome back to This Week in Bitcoin. We'll get into that. This, though, is your weekly high signal Bitcoin news podcast. My name is Chris. I go by Chris LAS online. And we do this every week. Oh, and I've got my crap together.
I'm back from a road trip to NixCon and the Southern California Linux Expo. It's actually pretty great to meet some of you there already. That was pretty cool and unexpected. Many of us making it back for the first time since 2019. And while I was away, it appears the battle has begun at the ETF floodgates for the wider crypto market. Surprisingly, though, the first shots appear to be fired from the SEC. I say surprisingly because this comes after years of the SEC dodging the big question. So do you recognize, how would you categorize Ether then? I think that the general sweep of what Congress did, not just in the 30s, but as amended.
I'm asking you, you're sitting in your chair now to make. This is SEC Chair Gary Gensler testifying to Congress, and I think you can tell where this is going. Take an assessment under the laws as exists, is Ether a commodity or a security? Without speaking to any one token, it's a matter of facts. I know you've repeatedly said that you're not going to speak to one, except you've spoken to one, Bitcoin. So I'm asking you to speak to a second one, the second largest market cap here. And speaking to the tokens, there's 10,000 to 12,000. If there's a group of entrepreneurs in the middle and the public is anticipating a profit based on the... I'm asking a specific question, Chair Gensler. I said this in private.
This should be no shock to you I'm asking this question. is Ether a commodity or a security? And again, it depends on the facts and the law. And if there's a group of individuals... I'm asking about the facts and the law sitting in your seat and the judgment you are making. Clearly, Gary's having a tough time answering the question, at least in the recent past. But this week, maybe that's changed. Okay, let's talk about today's top stories. And we start with some breaking news. The Ethereum Foundation reportedly under investigation investigation by the SEC. According to Fortune, the US regulator began a probe into the foundation shortly after the network shifted to proof of stake in 2022.
The outlet also spoke to a person at a company who received a subpoena request. Back in February, Ethereum updated its website to reflect that it had received a voluntary inquiry from a state authority, one that required confidentiality. It also removed a disclosure on the foundation's website that that said it had never been contacted by an agency that required confidentiality. Now, we don't know at this point in time if it's actually a securities investigation that's happening or something just a little more routine. However, the wider crypto industry seems to be gearing up for that securities battle.
You see, the idea is that if Ethereum can get sold through an ETP or ETF product, then so could Solana and all the other centrally managed crypto products. So the whole industry is interested in what happens here. And the liquidity for these projects in the anticipation of the ETF has an impact on Bitcoin's price action in the short term. And what we really have to kind of appreciate is there's fundamental differences between a commodity and a security. And it hinges on what's being bought and what's being sold. Commodities are basic goods that can be traded or exchanged.
Securities, however, they involve taking ownership, stake in something. Maybe somebody or an entity or a group provides credit to a common group in hopes of earning a profit. They're more centrally managed. And this was made sort of decidedly clear in the Securities Act of 1933, where it creates three thresholds to determine if something is a security. Two of them are pretty straightforward, but there's a third threshold. And, well, it's a bit of a more vague threshold. And that's where Ethereum's management team will make their argument. Now, to explain it better than I can, this clip is Dan Bowen. He's a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University.
Now, what's interesting is if you look at the statutes, the organic statutes, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, each contains a section that defines what a security is. And the definitions look pretty pedestrian and obvious. They talk about stock. They talk about bonds. They talk about other instruments that most of us would recognize as clearly being securities. But they then throw in a phrase called investment contract. What the heck is an investment contract? Well, the investment contract is what I call a rubber phrase. It's flexible and it's designed to capture arrangements that act like securities but don't fit comfortably within any of the other categories of securities.
Now, you'll hear the ETH promoters and marketing team tell you that the SEC has already made past statements that make it clear they consider ETH a commodity. And if ETH is a commodity, then it is not under the purview of the SEC. And Professor Dan gets into that a bit as well. In a recent speech given in June 2018 by Bill Hinman, the director of the Division of Corporation Finance at the SEC, Bill clearly articulated that it's the SEC's position that Bitcoin and Ether are not securities. That's a very important conclusion, and the interesting question is, what's the logical process that leads to that conclusion?
Division Director Hinman reasoned as follows. He said that, to the best of his understanding, Bitcoin and Ether were sufficiently decentralized that there was no one who played the role of a promoter in the system. No one had sufficient control over the system. Not only was there no promoter, there was also no asymmetry of information. There was no situation where there was someone like a promoter or like an issuer who would know so much more than people transacting the system that it gave rise to the asymmetry that would cause the registration requirement. And in registration, the issuer or the promoter has to disclose the additional information they have so that purchasers are adequately informed with regard to the purchase and sale of the underlying security.
The problem is, there was an asymmetrical difference, and the SEC's director's understanding was wrong, and his public statements were wrong. There were people who knew more than the rest at ETH's founding. There were those who had access to ETH before the public, as this famous audio of Ethereum founder Vitalik so clearly captured for all of history. So we are going to start the Ether presale in a couple of weeks. So the Ether pre-sale will be an opportunity for anyone to purchase Ether, where Ether is the internal currency inside of the Ethereum system, sort of like the XRP and Ripple.
Now, is there a big window of opportunity for people to get in, or is there just like a one-day opportunity? No, it's something worth thinking of. It might be 45 days, it might be 30, it might be 60 days. Okay, so there's plenty of time, sort of an incremental thing, so the earlier you go in... Yes, the earlier you get in, the better price you get. Now, let's say you're one of the founders of Ethereum and your colleague, Charles, what's to prevent one of you guys to load up and get half the ethers for yourself? Or do you have to buy in to those ethers also? Yeah, well, okay.
So we are going to look at exactly how much ether we're going to get. That's still undecided, but it will be very, very public and it will be a rather small portion of the entire- I mean, when you say small portion, are you talking about like 10% of the total, 5%? Yes. Right. It'll be something like... Or you guys are still undecided. What does the percentage matter if the supply is uncapped? It doesn't matter. And I've never been very satisfied with their transparency around any of this. We did get a little more insight at the time, though. What we're hoping is, is that sort of similar to what happened with Mastercoin.
If that slice is something like 20% and then the value of Ether goes up by 5%, then we basically have the entire initial BTC that we got all over again. Now, to me, that sounds like a group or a team that are clearly going to work to drive up the value of an investment. And it's kind of a point they've made over and over again on stage. They are a team. Here's a quick couple of takes on that. About 100 people that are working on Ethereum right now. Myself leading the protocol design. We also have branding teams. We have marketing teams. Branding teams, marketing teams, Vitalik's leading design.
When you buy Ethereum, you're expecting these people to grow and expand the Ethereum protocol and expand the Ethereum ecosystem. ecosystem. When this happens, you're expecting the value of Ethereum to go up. That sounds like a security managed by a team that you're making investment in with an expectation of return. And I'm not alone on this take. SEC Chair Gary Gensler has more recently said, and just made this point very clear several times, if you take funding, it's kind of clear. If you're raising money from the public and the public is in anticipation of profit profit based upon that promoter, sponsor, that group's efforts, that's within the securities laws.
And it's within the securities laws because Congress painted with a broad brush. They wanted to protect you, the investing public, so that you have proper information or what's called full and fair information and protect you against fraud and scammers and the like. Now, despite, I should say, all of the documentation and the audio I could play you, It's not actually a clear win for the SEC or really for the Ethereum team. You see, they're both going to use this broad brush, as Gary puts it, to defend their area. This is where the turf war really will happen for them is in this broad brush zone.
And that's going to be a lot of nuance. And as this drama unfolds, the contention of the investment market that invests in Bitcoin as a quote unquote risk asset is going to be whipsawing their buys and sells right along with this drama. So thanks. Thanks, Crypto. Appreciate that. And speaking of turf wars, you know, I wouldn't pass over the fact that we're seeing a actual turf war play out right now. You see, the CFTC may end up being an ally of Ethereum in this fight, arguing that, well, it's distributed enough now. Maybe it wasn't initially, but you know now.
And the chairman of the CFTC recently told Congress that if the SEC reclassified Ethereum, it would mess things up. If we do have any action by the SEC to essentially validate that decision, i.e., you know, constituting Ether as a security, it would then put our registrants, our exchanges, who list Ether as a futures contract, sort of in noncompliance of SEC rules as opposed to CFTC rules. rules. So I am working with Chair Gensler. We're working with his office. We're working with the agency to ensure that whatever steps are taken are deliberate, that we're involved, and that they understand certainly what the consequences would be if there was a decision by the agency to determine that Ether was a security.
As of now, we need to preserve the integrity of our markets and understand that this is a years-old decision where these markets are functioning well under the decision and the conclusion that Ether is a commodity. Okay, coming up, some ETF news, your boost, some project updates you need to know about, a fantastic resource, and a couple of clips of the week to round it all out. But first, I want to thank the show's sponsor, Podhome.fm. That's my podcasting, 2.0 hosting platform of choice. Use the promo code TWIB. When you sign up, you get your first three months for free. It is an unlimited podcasting platform with unlimited shows and episodes powered by their own Podhome AI.
It's like having an entire production crew in your back pocket, balances your audio, transcribes your podcast, creates chapters and clips for you. It'll even suggest titles. And it's a great platform for live streaming and hosting MP3s. Podhome.fm, promo code TWIB. Thank you to Podhome for sponsoring this week in Bitcoin. And now a quick Bitcoin ETF update. I'm going to watch these as long as it seems to be driving critical narratives or price action. It might matter to you. And this week, GBTC's bankruptcy sell-off saw record-setting outflows. Now double any other ETF in outflows year-to-date and has set a record for cumulative outflows for any ETF in history.
That's the kind of sell-off we're seeing from just the GBTC ETF, which might explain some of the price action this week. But despite all of that, the Bitcoin ETFs rank third overall out of 3,400 ETFs in annual revenue generated so far. 68% though of the Bitcoin network has not sold or moved their coins in over a year. So don't let things around the ETF scare you. The majority of the coin holders are still the plebs. But the overall Bitcoin ETF market seems to be doing very well despite the outflows. And the reality is most people think GBTC can only continue these kind of outflows till the end of the year at the most.
And as you've probably guessed, this has been really fantastic for Coinbase, as the CEO, Brian Armstrong, recently mentioned. Yeah. So with the ETFs that got approved, we've seen a huge influx of capital into the system. About $12 billion of inflow have happened. And when that happens, sometimes people ask us, well, what does that mean for Coinbase? Well, you know, it's actually incredibly positive for Coinbase. We're storing, we're the custodian for about 90% of the assets in those Bitcoin ETFs. And so we have monetization opportunities there as a custodian. But it didn't cannibalize any of the opportunity in our direct products to our retail app or institutional product.
We actually saw increased inflows there while we saw $12 billion of inflow into the ETFs. Music. I've got some project updates for you. RoboSats 0.6.0 is out. This is a non-KYC, non-know-your-customer way to buy Bitcoins using the Lightning Network. They've been working on an Android app as well. But something that I think is going to be just a big deal long term is the renewed effort on decentralization. They're picking this back up and they introduced a major upgrade that introduces RoboSats Federation, a decentralized system of independent coordinators to host orders. They say this will enhance the platform's robustness and experience now it's just the beginning but they say this is the first step toward significant decentralization allowing users to interact with any coordinator seamless seamlessly they have a new avatar generator in there and of course bug fixes and improvements and in the spirit of kyc free bitcoin another platform that just seems to be going from strength to strength now and i'm happy to actually say that is BISQ.
B-I-S-Q. And they have just released BISQ 2. They're trying to make it easier to use and something I think that is really a great resource if you're considering using BISQ. Some of their team joined an AMA and asked me anything on Stacker News and they answered some great questions about how it works, the feature breakdown, fees, the differences between BISQ 2 and BISC-1, another great way to buy your Bitcoin peer-to-peer, KYC-free. I'll have links to the AMA. And to the news article about RoboSats, two of my favorite applications out there. Great ways to stack Bitcoin without KYC.
We have some boosts. The dude Abide comes in with 77,777 sats. Oh, boy, you are our baller lobster this week, the dude Abides. He was boosting episode one. He says, let's get this thing to the first page. It deserves it. Thanks. You know, that does help in the fountain charts. Lots of people find us when we go to the top page. Jeremy Ross comes in with 20,000 sats. Great show so far. Looking forward to more episodes as I continue my own journey into crypto and value for value. Oh, be very careful, Jeremy. We appreciate you being here. And hopefully after a few episodes, you'll stop calling it crypto and you'll call it Bitcoin.
I appreciate the boost. Jordan Bravo comes in with 5,555 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. He says, I'm excited for this week in Bitcoin, especially in the way of the Bitcoin dad going on hiatus. Yes, Jeff, I've heard a few of those. Thank you very much. Adam Curry comes in with 10,000 sats. Make it so. Says, great clip about DOS. Happy to oblige, Podfather. Glad you found it useful. Thanks for the booth. Booth? Thanks for the booth. For the Jeff booth. No, thank you for the boost. I appreciate it. Chad F. comes in with a strong, really enjoying the show, row of ducks. Thank you, Chad F. Jeff, UConn, or an alias, probably getting that right, right?
Comes in with 10,000 sats. It's over 9,000! Says, this was a great episode. Episode two, it gives me a busy dad the distilled information I need. Now I don't have the, I don't always have the time to pay attention to everything going on with the news and the talk. So this show is filling those holes in just one hour. Oh, I'm going to try to keep it under an hour. Maybe I went long. I mean, there will be weeks where it goes a little long, I imagine, depending on the news. I'd say my nominal target is 25 to 30 minutes, but I don't push it if it's not necessary for the content. Again, it's high signal. Get you in, get you out.
This is the part where I like to just slow down and engage with the community and expand where we can. And, of course, I'm hoping this kind of becomes a revolving conversation when you guys boost in with the topics and things you care about, the things you want follow-up on or you want to follow-up on. All of that is very, very welcome. You can boost with the new podcast app at podcastapps.com. And I love it. I love it when you do. Green Everett boosted in with 5,000 sats. He says, I'm here because Adam Curry said I should listen. Very good. The Podfather, it has great taste.
This is my first time here. I'm hitting play now. Adam's people, we boost right off the bat. Now that is great. It's good people. That's what that is. That is good, good people. Gene Bean comes in with 5,000 sats. Just met Gene Bean in IRL at Scale and NixCon. And he's just as great in person as he is over booze. He writes, thanks for the advice and your time last week. I really appreciate it. I'm also loving the show. It's well done and a great format. You're a great format, Gene Bean. You're a great format. Oppie 1984 comes in. 4,000 sats with a support boost. Podhome, our sponsor and our platform, also boosting the show.
How about that? That is a hot boost. 15,000 sats. Great episode. and another great show format. Please keep going as this really is valuable information to keep me informed. Great stuff. Hashtag go podcasting. How about that? How about that? Now that is real support. Thank you, Podhome. Podhome.fm. Appreciate that. The tone record comes in with 6,102 sats. This is great weekly coverage of capturing relevant events and nice to see the nod to time chain calendar. Added your show to my rotation. I appreciate that. Nice nod of confidence. Sorry I missed you last week. Where were you? I was here.
Okay, no, I wasn't. Time chain calendar shout out. Still a great, great tool. I really love it. I have it up on a couple of my tablets that I have around my house. Yes, I have tablets around my house. Don't bug me about it. Gene Bean comes in with another row of ducks. Do you have any suggestions on how to get started running a Bitcoin node, possibly on a VPS like Hetzner? I don't know if I recommend Hetzner. I don't have experience with running a node on Hetzner. If anybody does, please boost in. I'll tell you what I've been really liking, Gene, if you're up for it, is the Nix Bitcoin project.
It's a bit intense if you're not familiar with Nix. So that's a big lift. But all of the issues you have with something like a Start9, which I think is great, or an Umbral, which is pretty good, you don't have with Nix Bitcoin. And that is somebody else is managing and packaging things up and kind of making assumptions about how your system is built. And then when big updates happen, those assumptions can sometimes bite you and things go wrong and you end up down like at a command line interface, maybe some sort of series of scripts that they've written, taking different incarnations off of their form, trying to get your personal bank back up online.
And if you're a small business like me, you know, it's a pretty critical part of what we do. And what Nick's Bitcoin does is like a prescription. It has to be followed every single time. And if anything fails, it doesn't build completely. So you have this sort of pre-flight check. And if everything doesn't check out, it doesn't build, the system doesn't switch. If you switch and there's like some sort of bug or software regression that couldn't be caught at build time, but it's like some sort of bug, maybe an LND or something like that, you just roll back. And that kind of ability to roll back without affecting your data, but be able to roll back the applications, I think a pretty big deal for a Bitcoin node.
I know Umbral just has a new update this week. Version 1.0 came out. Could be worth looking at. I don't know about Hetzner. I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on that. I have to tell you, it feels risky to some degree to use a Bitcoin, to seriously use a node on any VPS, depending on what your threat factor is. I think it's just something to keep in mind. That is something I'd love to open up for conversation to the rest of the audience. So please do boost in if you have opinions on that. Mr. Pibb comes in. Mr. Pibb? Is that you? With one extra B, that's all it takes? And that's not, okay, I'll go with it.
5,000 sats. That's Bitcoin Noob here. Totally ignorant, to be honest. Wow. Well, you got a boost in, dude. That's pretty good. You haven't led me astray on Linux, FOSS, or self-hosting. So I'll hitch onto this wagon as well. I've been curious about Bitcoin, and it's nice to have a source of information who I already trust. I learned a lot so far. Keep them coming, please. I'd welcome some Bitcoin 101 type podcasts for myself, fellow newbies who are listening. Thank you, Chris. Hmm. We should probably start as a community collecting resources for total Bitcoin newbies. I like the intellectual curiosity a lot, Mr.
Bibb. that's um a rarity you're a special person that is really something and thank you for the boost i really appreciate that too i know that first setup can be a little bit of a climb mr cospeeland comes in with 2 000 sats says love the updates segment thank you jcube 2 000 sats heck yeah dude i'm glad you're covering this stuff uh and user 82 came in with 3 000 sats this is great to see you back and hybrid sarcasm was rocking the support after getting his wall being strike issues sort I know. Well, he says managed wallets like Albion Strike make it impossible to empty my wallet to zero. That's always kind of a trick because this is one of the reasons I think Liquid and Lightning are going to be maybe more accessible to average users that are moving small funds.
Because I mean I probably have wallets all over the place with what essentially are dust sats. Because you always have to reserve some for fees, yeah. Would a self-hosted wallet be the solution to this? To a degree. You're always going to have the issue of needing to get the fees covered. But what you could do pretty easily on a self-hosted wallet is throw some more UTXOs in there, combine it into a larger transaction and move them all out. You'll have more optionality. You definitely have more optionality on a self-hosted one. There are minimum transactions and you know how they'll – you've seen this before like on the hosted ones where they're like they'll just auto-calculate the fees for you and they'll just tell you – like they don't give you like different kinds of optionality to control like how many fees you want or maybe you want to do replace by fee.
Like they don't give you access to that stuff that is tooling to solve some of this. So it does get better, but it's not perfect. 21 is enough comes in with 12,121 sats. And they write, this is the first Jupiter Broadcasting show I can catch from the very beginning. That's great. Welcome aboard, sir. Thanks for all the content. Now, that's all the boosts we had above 2,000 sats. I currently have a cutoff of 2,000 sats universally across my shows just for time purposes. It's sort of the best way I can manage, but I appreciate all of it. But we had 32 boosters this week, which is really outrageously great.
And so I read all of them. They all go in my show notes for posterity as well. So if your amount is below the 2,000 sats, don't worry. I'm still seeing it. It just doesn't make it into the actual on-air portion. But I appreciate all of them. Thank you, everybody who boosted in. We stacked 199,927 sats. Radical transparency around what we bring in in the value-for-value model is key to how this works. That's why I tell you the amounts. If you find the show valuable, the information valuable, you want to support the show and keep it going, please consider boosting with a podcast app like Fountain or Podverse or Castomatic.
Or you can even boost from sites like the Podcast Index or go sign up for True Fans FM and boost from there. Now, I do have a couple of resources of the week that I want to get to, so I'm not done with you yet. But thank you, boosters. Appreciate your support. Bolts.exchange. Now, you may know about Bolts.Exchange, but if you don't, let me just take a second and tell you this is the way that myself and pretty much everybody I know moves funds between on-chain and Lightning or from Lightning back to on-chain or potentially swap into liquid. Bolts, B-O-L-T-Z.Exchange. So if you've got some SATs sitting in a wallet.
And you want to get them in a new podcast app, and you want to get them onto Lightning, you can use Bolts.Exchange. Or if you want to take sats out of a Lightning wallet and move them on-chain to store them, you can use Bolts.Exchange. And I think it's a fantastic service, and something they've done this week that made me want to mention them, and I've got to say, I'd love to see everybody do this, is Bolts.Exchange has posted a very, very good warrant canary. Maybe what should really be the industry standard. entered. They have their PGP signature up there, and it's a signed message that says the maintainers and admins of the software project known as Bolts Exchange have received and complied with zero requests for information from any kind of third parties, including but not limited to government agencies.
We will renew this notice within 60 days time. If this notice fails to be renewed by then, you should assume the worst. I am the admin of HTTPS Bolts.Exchange. I am in control of my PGP I will update this canary within 60 days. Today is 2024-03-2022. And of course, they put the latest Bitcoin block hash in there as well with their PGP signature. Then also, they make it easy to import their keys and verify this message. They give you the actual PGP command line and curl command line. It's really GPG to do all that. Man, just a round of applause and a bell for them. them. I'm going to slap that bell hard for those guys.
I think that is something that we should see anybody who's responsible for any kind of transactions or where they touch your money for a few minutes even. I want to see that. I want to see this from, you know, Blockworks. I want to see this from Coinbase. I think we should see this everywhere. So I'll put a link to their canary, and I'll also link to Bolts.Exchange because it really truly is a fantastic and quick and cheap way to move between lightning, on-chain, and liquid. And now it's time for our final clips of the week. This one is a reminder of why Bitcoin is important.
It really is a dramatic one. India's Congress Party, not familiar with the politics of India, so I can't vouch either way for the Congress Party, but they apparently represent around 20% of the population. And this week they had their bank accounts frozen just two months before elections. If any of you imagine, anybody in the country imagines what happens happens when your bank account, your ATM card, your entire financial identity is erased. You can imagine if it is done to a family, the family will starve to death. If it is done to a business, the business will be crippled.
This is what has been done to the Congress party one month back. All our bank accounts have been frozen. We can do no campaign work. We cannot support our workers. We cannot support our candidates. Our leaders cannot fly from one part of the country to the other. Forget fly, they can't take a railway train and this has been done literally two months before for the election campaign. Bitcoin fixes this. It can happen in India. It can happen in Canada. And it happens where you live today already. You just probably, hopefully, have had the privilege of not having to notice.
And Bitcoin also protects you from inflation. And this week, some are saying that we may have just witnessed a transition from the Fed to now a new standard of high inflation for longer. Mohamed Olarian is here, chief economic advisor at Allianz, president of Queens College at Cambridge University, and a Fed, are you a whisperer? What are you? Observer. A Fed observer. Did you think it was dovish, more dovish than you were expecting yesterday? Oh, absolutely. And in two ways. One is a signal that they're willing to tolerate higher inflation for longer.
And second, something that is flying below the radar screen is what Chair Powell said about QT, said about the balance sheet, saying that he's willing to slow down the journey to a lower balance sheet. I think that twin patience means that we may well look back on this week as the week in which central banks stepped away from a very strict inflation target to a much broader concept of an inflation target. The truth is the Fed's trapped. If they lower rates, inflation will start ticking up faster than it already is in a tightening cycle.
And if they don't lower the rates, it seems like a very likely scenario that we'll enter a massive recession if you look at all the indicators that are all peaking at pre-2008 levels. And as the CNBC host was about to bring up, it's also an election cycle, which means that if the economy were to slide, it would be an even bumpier and rowdy election season. And this has, in your view, nothing to do with the election. So I would like to believe the Fed in saying that it is apolitical. You would like to believe? Do you believe? Look, I have no other reason to believe otherwise.
Well, it was a weird it was weirdly dovish. And I keep bringing up that suddenly it seems like the asymmetric risk is now of a recession after we've had two really hot inflation numbers. I was with you when when you asked me what what does the outlook look like? I told you 55 percent soft landing, 30 percent recession, 15 percent something better than than that. And I think I think that they realize two things. I think they realize that the economy is weakening, but they've also realized or hope they're going to realize that we are living in a world in which the supply side is the problem and that we need to tolerate slightly higher inflation if we don't want to sacrifice the economy.
Now, how about that? Now it's we can't risk the economy. Not we have to stop inflation. Either way, Bitcoin protects your purchasing power over the long term in numerous ways. But these two that we just covered, I think these are some of the most powerful. And these are the ones that your no-coiner friends and family are going to start to understand as their financial privilege begins to melt away. way. Now, if you made it this far, I want to just say thank you very much. Thisweekinbitcoin.show is where you can find the links. I now have a contact form if you're not a booster, but boost is really what I'd love to see from you and what you'd love to see from me.
Boost it and tell me what you'd like to see in the show, what you'd like to see covered. Was there something missed that you thought should have been in here? That'd also be great to let me know. It helped me refine what I'm watching. I'm hoping to create the number one Bitcoin news podcast for the podcasting 2.0 community and for the Jupyter Broadcasting community. And of course, the wider one as well. So I'm also soliciting value for value music, songs that fit the theme of the show. You know, normally you don't play Bitcoin songs on a podcast, but this is a great excuse to play one.
So if there's a great value for value Bitcoin song, please link it to me. Or if just there's some music you think that works really well for an outro, I'd love to hear it because I think it's it's a great way for the show to incorporate a feature that really has changed the discussion around sats. When you boost into a show or you boost a track, people are not denominating that value in dollars. The entire value for value community is using sats. Everything is being valued in sats directly. It's the beginning of something beautiful. And now music is part of that.
So I'd like to incorporate it into this show. Now this week, though, since I don't have a value for value song, I do have a meme of the week, you know, something kind of silly and old Mikey Saylor. He's always great for a meme. He's been of a meme factory. Perhaps, perhaps that's intentional. Wouldn't it be hilarious if we discovered he had writers? Helping them come up with quips that can be memed. Oh, that'd be so much drama. It'd be crazy. Maybe I should get out of here. The signal is beginning to drop, I think. Thank you so much for listening to This Week in Bitcoin.
I'll see you next week. And I mean it. What do you do with the Bitcoin besides it just gather value? Real estate developers in New York City, they're not buying the real estate because they want to live in it. But like most of the people who are buying assets at some point want to sell the assets at a profit. Music. People that use fiat currency as a store of value, we call them poor. We call them poor. Music. People that use fiat currency, we call them poor. We call them poor. We call them poor. We call them poor. There's a name for them.
We call them poor. We call them poor. Okay. Right, like, the point is, if you have the superior asset, it's going up forever, Lauren. Forever. Right, I mean, right, but I mean, we can all look. Bitcoin sort of as forever more people that use fiat currency as a store of value. We call them. Music.
Crypto is Waiting at the Gates
Welcome to This Week in Bitcoin
SEC Chair Gensler Testimony
Ethereum Foundation Investigation
Differences Between Commodity and Security
Ethereum Founder's Pre-Sale Revelation
CFTC's Support for Ethereum
Sponsorship by Podhome.fm
Bitcoin ETF Outflows and Revenue
RoboSats 0.6.0 Update
BISQ 2.0 Release
Boosting and Engagement with Community
Running a Bitcoin Node Discussion
Support Boosts and Listener Feedback
Bolts.Exchange Resource Highlight
Reminder of Bitcoin's Importance
