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Brandon: Well, hello, hello everybody, and welcome to Good for Bitcoin, your weekly pulse on Bitcoin innovation. My name is Brandon and it is just a solo show today, my friends. no Kate, she is out traveling across the country, I think. doing a big move. I'm sure we'll we'll talk a little bit about it next week, but you are stuck with me and we have a lot to get into still. we didn't want to cancel the show because there's just so much going on in the industry. So much going on just in technology in general, with just AI, just just hacking everything these days, I guess. We're gonna get into a few things there. But thank you for tuning in. we're live on goodforbitcoin.com. and if you wanna if you want to chat with us on the YouTube stream, I think I think we'll still see incoming messages there. So thank you to everybody again for for tuning in and Yeah, let's get into it. of course, we got to start off with all of the public companies that are buying Bitcoin, starting with strategy. They bought 267 Bitcoin this week. They now hold 848,517 BTC. they also repurchased 193 million dollars worth of STRC this week, which has pretty much made its way back up to par. It's like within maybe 50 cents or so of $100, which is what they Targeting. they also have an update to their US dollar kind of balance sheets. There's $5.3 billion of USD assets. they also increased the size of their digital credit securities repurchase program. the the method that they are using to, you know, repurchase so much STRC every week, from $2 billion to $3 billion. So I don't know how Sailor keeps doing it. They just keep being able to acquire all this all this extra cash and all this extra Bitcoin. week over week. So impressive stuff. some big news from Strive this week. they bought 1,223 BTC, so a lot more than Strategy bought this week. Strive is now holding 36,818 BTC. but they also launched a new product called SATS. so they already have S A T A, which is kind of like their equivalent of S TRC this one's pretty interesting. So SATS pays 15% annualized dividends every business day. which is kind of their existing offering, pays 13% by comparison. where SATA, the difference though, is SATA is optimized for price stability. So you know, it's trying to be around $100, similar to STRC, where this new product, SATS SATS, It's optimized for income stability. So basically it's designed to pay the equivalent of around $15 annually per share. they launched it this week at $90 a share. I guess the target for them is like that it's a designed to trade around $100, but that's not what they're specifically targeting. They're they're specifically trying to make it optimized for income stability. So it's trying to basically pay fifteen dollars annually, no matter what. so Interesting stuff. We'll see kind of how the relationship, I guess, between SATS and SATA plays out. But all these different, you know, Bitcoin treasury companies trying all these interesting novel ways to effectively acquire more Bitcoin. while kind of reducing some of the risk, maybe for for other people that don't want to hold BTC directly, but still really like the dividends and you know, want to be able to capture some of that upside. So another News Alpha Modus Holdings. They have entered the public company Bitcoin Treasury Arena. they are now holding 3170 BTC. they become the 27th largest public company holding Bitcoin. So a new a new challenger in in the arena through Alpha Modus Holdings. all right, let's get into some of the stories this week. Kate had added this one. I was interested in in talking to her about it. But this one is super interesting. it's this announcement for something called Bitwater. So from HeatBit, we we talked about on the show before, they're like a mining company, but they make all these like unique ways of mining Bitcoin. So this new product called Bitwater is basically a water heater element. So you take out your old heating element in your existing electric water heater and you put this new element in, which still heats the water, but it also mines Bitcoin. So it mines Bitcoin that produces heat, that heats your water. So you kind of get, you know, dual purpose, right? You're you would be paying to heat the water anyway. So you might as well also have been mining Bitcoin with it. pretty interesting concept. I personally just had replaced my water heaters at the beginning of this year. but we have we have gas water heaters here, so I don't think it's compatible. I think I did see somewhere they mentioned that it was maybe a gas version would be coming soon. But in any case, super interesting. If you have an electric water heater, might be worth looking into. super, super interesting stuff. All right. gotta get into I think the main story of the week, which is really a collection of stories, which is All of these crazy hacks that are happening in the traditional computer world and all these vulnerabilities that are being discovered in in the traditional computer world that's kind of breaking the internet. So, first one, which is the biggest one, is this PHP. This this I think it's two different vulnerabilities on PHP. And for those that maybe aren't familiar, PHP is a really critical piece of infrastructure that powers most of the internet. It powers roughly 70% of websites globally. so these two critical vulnerabilities were found in PHP, which is yeah, a widely used programming language, powers websites, web apps, a lot of the back end stuff, a lot of like servers, things like that, are powered by PHP. So basically what these vulnerabilities do is that they could allow malicious cyber actors to remotely execute code in PHP, which potentially compromises, of course, sensitive data, networks, things like that. If you can Do remote code execution. That's really a big deal. that's one of the one of the most serious types of vulnerabilities in in the space. And PHP is interesting because it is a what's known as a server side
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language. you might have also heard of things like JavaScript, which we'll also get into this week, which is a a a user side or a client side language. so basically the way that PHP works is the server receives a request from you when you like visit a website or query their app or something. And the server processes that request and then it delivers the result to you. So all of the processing happens on the server side, which you can see if all the processing is happening on the server side and you can inject code into what you know, the calculations that it's making, that could potentially be be really dangerous. where on the client side, like JavaScript, for example, is a client side language, your computer Or your phone or whatever device you are using is receiving sort of all the building blocks of the possible scenarios of of what could happen with when you click a button or do a particular action. And your computer is making those renderings on you know and then sending the result, the end result. so on the JavaScript side, there was another really big vulnerability that was encountered this week from Next.js, which is the fourth largest web framework globally. Next.js, which is kind of like a JavaScript framework, had an issue as well. we also saw a hosting provider, Railway, that was hit with a hack this week, which caused huge downtime. I think up to like 24 hours or even more than 24 hours in some cases for some of their users, and leaked environment variables. And I guess the main thing with this one is it was like hackers that were trying to hack into Railway to see if any Railway users Which of course many of them were using you know different like AI API codes. So they raise basically were able to hack in to find all of the all the secret codes that all of their users were using, including like the API keys and stuff for things like Claude and you know, of course all the other all the other AIs that are out there. So pretty crazy stuff. yeah, lots of lots of fear, I guess, in the in the market overall. but I think. I've also been seeing, you know, a lot of positive kind of reactions for this as well, which is you know, we're we're discovering all these vulnerabilities, and maybe there's like a little bit of like growing pains as we kind of are quick to fix a lot of these things, but in the end, it's gonna make for you know a stronger, more robust internet. And, you know, a lot of this is also translating into Bitcoin, right? Every single week we talk about, it seems like, some you know, Bitcoin infrastructure company or exchange or wallet or something that, you know, got hacked. but, you know, these things happen, but we learn from them, right? there's a really good open letter from Jamison Lop that he posted this week, kind of in response to this as well. And just a couple of the points, a couple of quotes that he made that that really stood out to me. First one is he said, when security controls fail, the solution is to not give up on security controls, but to learn from the failure and architect a more robust system. He also mentioned that it's also worth thinking about the threats that don't make headlines, like what happens to your Bitcoin if something happens to you. so we have talked a lot about, you know, on the show about things like multi-sig, you know, making sure that your Bitcoin is is safe, not just from, you know, people trying to hack into your wallets and hack into your Bitcoin, but it's a really good point that that he makes, right? Like what if something happens to you? Like, do you have an inheritance plan? Do you have, you know, certain certain kind of disaster scenarios? set up personally for your for your self-custody. So a lot of what he was pointing to was to use multi-sig. Of course he has you know Casa, which is his company that you know supports multi-sig. there's a lot of other options out there Anchor Watch, BitGo, Unchained, BitKey, they all kind of have a a place depending on your needs. But yeah, I think you know we'll at we'll get through this at the end of the day, I guess. even though yeah, it it does seem like there's a lot of crazy stuff out there and it seems to be accelerating, right? Every single week on the show we are talking about some new company or some new thing that that got hacked or some vulnerability that was discovered. so I'm sure we'll continue to talk about it. But you know, hopefully these things get fixed. It doesn't, you know, end up being too bad, you know, for anybody and and we come out stronger kind of at the end of it. All right, into some Better news. AnchorWatch, we just just mentioned them, but they also have some news this week. They launched a Bitcoin custody service called Anchor Watch Trust Company. Really a big deal for them. So this service is aimed at public companies that are holding Bitcoin. also includes fiduciaries and trusts and high net worth individuals and you know, anybody that any whale basically that's like holding a really large amount of Bitcoin. the one thing that's really cool about their custody solution here is they're Big differentiator is pricing. so they have fixed dollar annual fees that are tiered by vault size and they're capped at $10,000 a month. and once the client hits that cap, any additional Bitcoin purchases or price appreciation do not increase that fee. So they talked about, you know, specifically compared to like some other custodians that are out there. if you are using one of those types of custodians and you switch over to Anchor Watch, you could be potentially saving like hundreds of thousands of dollars. monthly for this depending on you know if you're like somebody like Michael Saylor, right, that has just hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin to to custody, you could be potentially paying a lot less for custody fees, which is a big deal. So they're gonna be offering two custody models. one is their flagship custody where they hold the keys that are required for
qualified custody while the client's trustees or executives hold additional keys. So still a multi-sig, but basically they're holding it and then you know the the user, the you know, is is holding the rest of them kind of in a more distributed way. they also will be offering multi-institution custody where they will basically distribute key control across three different institutions. So one is Anchor Watch, second is Bitgo, and then Coin Corner as well. So really cool, really compelling if you are a large whale, which I'm not sure if anybody that's on this show here is is meets the qualifications there, but still a pretty cool offering there. they'll also be offering $370 million in insurance per client, which covers the loss of Bitcoin from perils including violent coercion and kidnapping, as well as losses arising from fraudulent acts by Anchor Watch itself. So pretty compelling product overall. Seems very interesting. next bit of news is from SoFi. They announced this really cool product called SoFi Earn, which is a first of its kind tokenized deposit that pays a yield. With FDIC insurance. So this is not a stable coin. SoFi did launch their stable coin called SoFi D earlier this year or SoFi USD. so they've now launched this new product alongside it, which is SoFi E or SoFi Earn, which basically represents a $1 deposit into SoFi. and because it's you know a $1 deposit into SoFi, which is a bank, you get FDIC protection from that. and it offers currently, I think the rate is 4.4%. APY, so pretty decent returns for you know low it's lower risk, right? You have FDIC protection, which is huge. No other stable coin can offer that because of the way that you know the Genius Act works. So really big deal there. and yeah, it's kind of designed as an alternative for basically holding stable coins in between trades, which which don't earn a yield. So you might as well earn some yield and you know have it in a bank, I guess. so it's safer there. And yeah, you can use it to buy crypto. You can withdraw it to, I guess, a traditional SoFi checking and savings account. or you can, you know, move it over to SoFi D if you want to move it on chain as like a stable coin. so yeah, pretty, pretty cool stuff from SoFi. next big announcement is from I thought this one was pretty interesting. I'm gonna I'm gonna pull up the slide that that Matt Hogan shared from from Bitwise as I as I talk about it here. So JP Morgan, they came out with this this report. And basically, they JP Morgan Asset Management added a Bitcoin forecast to their long term capital market assumptions for the first time. This is, I guess, the 31st edition of the annual report that they've put out. And basically you can see Bitcoin right here at the top. their 10 year base case. for BTC is a 10 pound compound 10, excuse me, a 10% compounded return with 55% volatility. So it is volatile, but you know, over time they're kind of their 10-year base case is a 10% compounded return annually, which is still pretty good. That's 2.5 points above their 7.5 estimate for US large caps and 4.5 above its 5.5% estimate for gold. So basically, this is JP Morgan coming out and specifically saying. They think Bitcoin is going to appreciate faster than you know US equities and gold, which is really crazy. Really crazy to to to just reflect on how far this company has come, or how much this company has kind of reversed course on their positioning with Bitcoin. So I guess they still don't treat Bitcoin as a portfolio diversifier. pointing to kind of unstable correlations, high volatility. and they do have a bear case, I guess, of negative eleven point two percent a year. But especially because, you know, if you look out co kind of over a 10 year period, you know, Bitcoin does occasionally have, you know, down years, but at least historically, right, it's it's been pretty good. So if you look at, you know, the next 10 years of BTC's price, it's hard to imagine the price lower than it is now. And I guess JP Morgan agrees with that, which is is pretty cool. All right. a couple quick headlines to to round it up. first one is from BitKey. So they announced an auto withdrawal feature in Cash App that basically lets you withdraw your Bitcoin from Cash App directly onto your BitKey when the balance, your BTC balance in Cash App reaches a certain threshold, which is really cool. Cash App also has, I think, like a paycheck feature. So you can have, you know, you can basically be paid in Bitcoin. And you know, they they convert like a portion of your paycheck to Bitcoin. So you can really set up like a fully automated DCA strategy here that is compatible with multi-sig, you know, cold storage, which is really, really cool, really neat feature. Just love to see all the stuff that that you know, BitKey and Cash App block is doing with Bitcoin to make it easier to acquire and without like having to think about Bitcoin. So super, super interesting stuff. And the last one is is funny. the McRib is coming back. And for for those that don't know, there's this kind of meme that's going around. And I think this is so funny because the this tweet came from what is his title? He is he works at McDonald's. He is the senior marketing director at McDonald's and He talked about, you know, the fact that the the micrib is coming back next week, I guess, as early as 1027 in in Select McDonald's restaurants. And in in his announcement tweet, he says, he acknowledges Bitcoin. He says, funny enough, over the years, the Mick Rib has found new meaning online within the crypto community, as some claim Bitcoin tends to perform well after the McRib makes a comeback, particularly in 2017, 2020, and 2021. The joke reached its peak in December 2024 when Bitcoin broke $100,000 for the first time in history on the exact same day that McRib returned to menus. So in one week from now, will we see Bitcoin hit new all-time highs? I guess we will have to wait and find out, but that is certainly interesting. maybe I'll have to go get a McRib to to celebrate. but Yeah, I think I think that kind of wraps it up for the week. thank you everybody for tuning in for kind of this shorter, shorter episode. Well it's just me talk I can only talk for so long, right? I can't talk for more than what has it been, twenty minutes now? My gosh, you've been listening to me for way too long. Hope everybody has a good week. have a great weekend. We will see you all next week. I think Kate should be back and settled by next week. So we will both see you there. And yeah, have a great weekend, everybody. Bye bye.