Bitcast

US inflation just posted its biggest monthly drop since May 2020, crashing expectations and sending Fed rate hike odds on Polymarket from the mid-30s down to 8%. At the same moment, South Korea's stock market surged so hard it triggered a circuit breaker on the way up — one week after hitting one on the way down. Bitcoin is moving in the right direction, and the hosts argue the only thing that was holding it back just got dismantled.

In this episode:

• CPI drops to 3.5% against expectations of 3.8%, with core CPI hitting 2.6%; Bank of England's Bailey tells investors not to count on UK rate hikes either, and Ed Devlin of Devlin Capital says a single Canadian rate hike still priced in for the year is a bad bet.

• IBM dropped 25% in a single session while semiconductors now make up roughly 20% of the S&P 500, propping up indexes while everything else swings wildly — the Shiller PE ratio is approaching dot-com bubble all-time highs.

• Francis Pouliot, CEO of Bull Bitcoin, explains his lawsuit against the French government over DAC 8 dragnet surveillance, calling it the only legal challenge to CARF anywhere on Earth — and warning the US IRS is wiring up an equivalent system by 2029.

• Anthropic's Fable model got flagged and throttled when asked about resisting totalitarian surveillance, while a journalist's embedded report showed Boko Haram used AI to increase bomb payload capacity by telling the model the request was for research.

• Japan's upper house committee approved a bill reclassifying Bitcoin as a financial instrument alongside stocks and bonds; a Taiwanese congressman declared a 100% chance Taiwan establishes a strategic Bitcoin reserve — the country currently holds 210 BTC seized in criminal cases.

• Trump's war cabinet, including Vance, Rubio, Hegseth, and Ratcliffe, met to discuss a massive offensive on Iran; Ron Paul published a piece calling it the most unpopular war in US history with an astronomical cost the next generation will inherit.

• BTC Sessions previews the upcoming launch of Sovereign Sessions, a sister channel covering private AI tools, self-hosted software, and freedom tech step by step.

Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/so97HBPQsoI

A Duke professor just published a roadmap for profitably attacking Bitcoin using offshore derivatives markets — simultaneously mining enough hash power to take over the network while shorting Bitcoin to zero. The hosts aren't impressed, but they do take it seriously enough to dig into whether a nation-state or "nefarious geopolitical entity" could actually pull it off.

In this episode:

• Duke professor Campbell Harvey outlines a 51% attack strategy funded by short positions in Bitcoin's derivatives markets, claiming the cost is roughly 50 basis points of Bitcoin's market cap — "surprisingly affordable" in his words.

• A former Meta engineer argues Bitcoin has two ticking time bombs: quantum computing vulnerabilities and a miner fee economy that never materialized as block rewards shrink, with 95% of Bitcoin already mined.

• Lindsey Graham's death is discussed at length — the hosts examine the timeline around his visit to a Ukrainian drone facility, Russia's subsequent strike on that facility, and theories about who might benefit from his death.

• Netanyahu's Fox News interview proposing a Pentagon-Israeli military merger draws sharp commentary, including his claim that Israeli intelligence is worth "five CIAs."

• Japan's 30-year bond hitting a record high yield and South Korean stocks crashing nearly 10% in a single session are framed as symptoms of the broader fiat system unraveling.

• Oil surging nearly 8-9% on the day following the Kharg Island strike, which the hosts say accounts for roughly 90% of Iran's crude exports, with someone making "generational insider trading wealth" off the volatility.

• The mining fee debate and quantum FUD are dismissed as YouTube slop — the hosts point to the difficulty adjustment and growing node activity as evidence the network self-corrects.

Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/8a3fpIPEJvQ