BTC Sessions - 50K BTC in BlackRock's IBIT: $2 Billion Achieved! ep394

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

In today's essential Bitcoin update, we delve into the CCP's latest anti-Bitcoin propaganda, signaling heightened scrutiny. We also explore BlackRock's IBIT ETF's significant milestone, holding nearly 50,000 BTC with assets under management soaring to $2 billion. Additionally, we cover the potential appearance of Bitcoin ETF ads on Google, the EU's stance on Proof of Work mining, and President Biden's declaration of Bitcoin as a federal emergency, unpacking the implications for Bitcoin enthusiasts and investors. BOOK ME for one-on-one private sessions to learn about wallets, hardware, multisig, privacy, nodes and much more. https://www.btcsessions.ca/ 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions Nunchuk Wallet and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted multisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Pass on your savings to your loved ones with ease in a simple claiming process with full customer support. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ SEEDOR is one of the most robust metal backups on the market today. Get your SEEDOR starter set today! Use this link for 5% off. https://www.seedor.io/discount/BTCSESSIONS?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fprodukte For US based customers: https://www.seedor.io/btcsessions Canadian customers: https://link.thecryptoboutique.ca/BTCSessionsSeedor Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab a Server Lite, One or Pro today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/ HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Furthermore, you can check out their Lend platform for p2p loans that are never rehypothecated. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to this show. Another Thursday, another episode of Simply Sessions. Nico is waiting in the wings to give us the latest and greatest in Bitcoin. I hope you've all had yourselves a very nice week. I hope you didn't make the mistake of selling Bitcoin and selling the soundest money that the world has ever seen, something meant to replace central banks simply because the head of a central bank said they might not raise interest rates yet. If you ever feel bad about yourself for any reason, just remember that people sold Bitcoin

because a central banker said they might not raise interest rates yet. How's that for idiocy? Anyways, of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. Live. Okay. We'll do it live.

Fuck it. Do it live. I can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share all those things super important, helping get this content in front of more eyeballs, the little like button below the screen.

Smash it now. Share this on whatever socials you're on. And of course, subscribe. Help me hit my 100,000 subscriber goal by the end of 2024. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your Simply session. Before we dive in, let's take. a look at where we are in the market right now i am pulling up timechain calendar.com and simultaneously i'm

going to pull up the live chat anything you say into the chat from here on in we'll be live for the world to see for better or worse uh back to time chain calendar we're sitting at 42 000 37 dollars per coin a single u.s dollar will pick you up 2,329 sats fees fire sale you guys 24 sats per bite next block use the opportunity you never know when there's going to be a tsunami of JPEGs taking out your ability to transact efficiently. So get those lightning channels going, swap into whatever you need to do, do those coin joins, be efficient, minimize your main chain exposure and get yourself ready for what may come. Also, when the normies pile in, it gets busy.

So just beware. And of course, in terms of Bitcoin mind, we're sitting at 19.6. two million of them, that is 93.41% of the total supply. If you do need additional help, you're sorting through the tutorials on the channel and you're running into some roadblocks. You need some help. Well, you can reach out to me at my website, BTCSessions.ca, and book me for private one-on-one education sessions.

Shout out to sponsors of the show hoddlehottle.com. If you're buying Bitcoin and you have the priorities that include peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custy and no K-YC, check. Check out Hoddle, Hoddle. You can sign up with just an email address. Choose your currency, payment method, and an amount. And you can start browsing offers immediately. They have peer-to-peer lending with no re-hypothication.

And remember, Baltic Honey Badger coming up this year. I'm going to be there. First time returning to Riga in quite some time. Very excited to be back. So keep your eyes peeled for that. Shout out to Coin Kite. Of course, when you stack some stats, you're going to want to secure it with some of the best hardware on the market.

I love Coin Kite. Cold card, of course, is my go. to hardware walleted choice. I've got all their goodies, tap signers, block clock, stats cards, and I pre-order, God, it seems to be coming out pretty soon. The cold card queue, I can't wait to get my hands on them. If you want to pre-order one or pick up anything else

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They have these full starter sets with everything you need to stamp one or two seeds. And if you ever need to swap out information, you can just get more discs on the cheap. Check him out in the links down below. Nunchuk has you covered with your multi-sig needs, namely assisted multi-sig with their honey badger option. Basically on your mobile device, you can set up a multi-sig quorum

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Let's get Nico in here and start chatting news. Dude, good to see you. How you doing? Yo! What's up, dude? Happy to see. Happy to see you, like always. Excited for another episode of Simply Sessions.

Yeah, man. How's the week been going? What's, uh, you've been good? You've been busy? Yeah, bro. I mean, you know, working in Bitcoin, making content. Uh, it's cool. It's, uh, it's a brave new world.

Now that I'm independent, but it's fun, man. It's fun. Yeah. Well, soon you're going to have a dependent, right? I know. I know, bro. In two weeks, everybody keeps telling me, uh, Nico, your life's going to change in two weeks. Like my mom and my wife are just like showing me the baby room and I'm like, what is that? I don't understand. Can't compute in my head.

That's okay. I was totally clueless. I was like I had no idea what's going on. I will say that, you know, try not to make too many plans because we had our delivery date and everything set. And then it was like two weeks prior and we went in and they were like, oh, no, we're inducing you tomorrow. And I was like, my brain, I was like, oh, I've got two weeks to get my life in order. And then it was like smack in the face of reality. Like, oh, God, I am a dad tomorrow. I mean, so I have the, we're going to see each other, the Medeta conference. Yes. And then I might miss that because like, you know, so.

I really roll on the dice there, man. We'll see. I have like the whole housing thing set up. I'm about to buy my flight, but I'm at the same time, I'm like, oh, what if,

uh, yeah, yeah, get that, get that insurance. Uh, yeah, I'm going to get that insurance for that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, awesome, man. I'm glad to have you here. I'll bring up your screen here. What's been going on this week?

What is top of mind in, in the Bitcoin world? Yeah, dude. So, uh, this is an old one, but it's a gold one.

It's a good one. Uh, this is some, like, You know, this is when the propagandists get so lazy that they just have run out of things to say. But it's absolutely hilarious. This is real. This is like actual mainland China news.

And he had some things to say about Bitcoin. Well, if Bitcoin will become the ultimate type of a form of the currency, been adopted by human society, I can tell exactly what's going to happen as the worst scenario or the master scenario. or the mast is in there we're all gonna die I love it just like just not even like oh the bad things will happen and we're all gonna literally we will all die you guys that's a street poker face

like no shame like fucking smirk isn't that crazy this is wild and what is this coverage where is like China this is this is like the Chinese state television. I wonder how many people watch this and we're like, oh my God, we have to stop Bitcoin. It's over, bro. Wrap it up.

Wrap it up. It's done. I like in the comments, John was like, well, he's not wrong. We will all die. They do be facts, though. They do be facts. But I guess they just ran other things to say. Like they're just so lazy.

They just so lazy. Anyways, speaking of propaganda in other news, crazy, like, okay, okay. The U.S. like is essentially grandstanding. Here is Representative Omar, and she had some things to say about President Nguyen Buckele, who, coincidentally, his election is around the corner. And she had some things to say. So she wrote this letter to Secretary Blinken, Secretary State. And she said, we are writing to express their significant concerns regarding democratic black

backsliding and an increase in reports of human rights violations in El Salvador. These concerns are especially pressing with elections planned for early next month, in which the incumbent president Naim Bukele is running for an unconstitutional second term. The state of exception declared by President Buckela in March 2020 has provided the framework for tens of thousands of arrests without due process, including that of a U.S. citizen, and also served as a smokescreen for the targeted harassment of political opponents of the government, human rights defenders, environmental activists, and others. President Buckele has also during his first term overseen the militarized harassment of the legislature, a significant erosion of judicial, independence and the de facto criminalization of civil society with the election approaching this crushing dissent and restriction on multi-party democracy has extended to the arrests and arrest warrants of political opponents, including the former Salvadorian ambassador to the United

States. Ruben Zamora, much of this persecution has been done with the active complicity of El Salvador's judicial system. Okay. So blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the point is, is that, okay, Naimu Keel is a threat to democracy. You know, he's arresting his political opponents. This is horrible.

This guy's, you know, breaking due process, et cetera, et cetera. Let's take a look at what some of the bitcoins had to say because the comments were golden. Dylan Leclair said, you need to go back. Stacey Herbert said, how exactly do you define democracy? The will of the people is all of that, all that matters. It is their inalienable right to self-determination. The people of El Salvador support President Dain-Bukele and do not want to return to plunder, mayhem, and murder of the previous era.

Here is the El Salvadorian ambassador to the United States. She says, please don't get involved and interfere in the election of a sovereign country. Here is her getting community noted, saying the president of El Salvador democratically won the elections in 2019. His party obtained democratically a majority in the legislative Assembly. A president can be reelected in El Salvador if in the six months prior to taking office, he was not in charge. Naim Bucale goes, we are honored to receive your attacks just days before our election.

I'd be very worried if we had your support, absolute king troll. And then here's Pierre Rischard. He says this reminds me of when Senator Bob Menendez, who represents Egypt in the U.S. Senate, also criticized El Salvador. Bob Menendez was that senator that was found with gold bars in his trunk, and he was lecturing us essentially, lecturing us about how Naimu Keli is corrupt, even though he was caught corrupting. And, okay, so let's talk about democracy, because they love to bring that up. So Naimu Kela is the most popular president in the Americas in every single one of these polls. His poll numbers do not go under 80%. The lowest one is 80.1.

he's poll numbers for the recent election. He's up like 84, 85%. If you combined all the other candidates and you combine their poll numbers, it doesn't even break 10%, just to kind of give you an idea of how popular this person is. And if you compare that to the United States, Joe Biden's approval rating is 38%.

And, you know, Representative Omar is on the Democratic Party, and I just got to say, the leading political candidate of the opposing party in the United States was arrested in New York City. So I find it kind of, you know, hypocritical and like, who are they to lecture anybody? If they're doing the things themselves, this is like total clown world. This is insane. You can't look, if you live in a country where the leading political opponent,

whatever you disagree with him. The fact is that half the country supports him. He's wanting, he won the primary in Iowa. He won the primary in New Hampshire. Most likely it's going to be Trump versus Biden and the opposing political party is charging him with crimes. Like, that's what you're saying, Naim Bucela is doing. Like, who are you to lecture us, essentially, you know?

And again, as an immigrant, as someone who has a Hispanic background, I find this racist as a racist as fuck. Like, I'll be blunt. Like, this is, this is messed up. Like, who is the United States, the lecture, this small, you know, central American country that no one cared about before they made Bitcoin legal tender? They had record, they had a record homicide rate. The crime was through the roof.

No one cared. And all of a sudden, when they made Bitcoin legal tender, somehow, now this dude is a threat to democracy. Yeah. It's, again, I think that last point. is the thing that sticks out the most to me is nobody could give a shit about El Salvador if you went back for five years, right? Nobody cared. And it was the murder capital. Like, it was the country with the highest murder rate on earth at a time.

And now the homicide rate is below the U.S. And so like the the change in quality of life for people there is is quite stark. And so if there had been outcry about the horrible conditions prior, maybe there would be a leg to stand on and say like, well, you know, we recognize that things have improved. but also we're worried about the trajectory. But the fact that nobody cared prior to this, and now for the vast majority of the entire country, things are markedly improved, and they can actually go out at night

and enjoy their lives and everything. And whether or not you agree with the tactic that is used to ensure that safety of the people, that again, if they're talking about democracy, people are voting for this. It's not like this, they're like rigged elections or anything. Like the people voted and this is this is within the laws. Even if, even if he, you know, put it to the people and said, should we change this rule and they voted for it, that's democracy, right? So it's kind of like, well, I mean, what's your problem?

what what's the real reason you're upset here like it's it just seems so backwards that things could be so bad and then get so much better and now the criticism comes 100% I 100% agree with you dude it's it's it's it's just hypocritical dude it's hypocritical the who are they to say this you know like it stop interfering in other people's elections like clearly the Salvadorian people want this 90% of isn't that the definition of democracy like you know it's that's the definition of democracy right it's like the they're talking about democracy but it's like they're only like democracy when it goes a certain way yeah so is it really democracy that they want you know anyways um so yeah that's what's happening el Salvador u.s is interfering in foreign

elections of of the bitcoin country which is interesting but also not surprising and then on the home front, actually there's two big news, right? The continue attack on Bitcoin miners, it accelerates, not only in the United States, also in Europe, right? So here's Pierre Richard. He is the VP of research at Riot, so he probably knows something. And he says, Biden has declared a federal emergency because Bitcoin is winning. Pierre is such a troll. And the highlighted line is absolutely hilarious. As evidence, the price of Bitcoin has increased roughly 50% in the last months and higher prices incentivizes more Bitcoin mining activity, which in turn increases electricity consumption.

You are correct. Absolutely hilarious. And let's check out some other comments from other people in the community. The government uses reporting and information requests as weapons. This is how they protect the incumbents by declaring emergency. Here is Gerson Martinez. He says the U.S. Department of Energy is requesting to collect data to build a standard for Bitcoin mining energy use.

They've requested emergency handling of the data collection requested because public harm is reasonably likely if normal procedures are followed. Further, quote, as evidence, the price of Bitcoin has increased 50% in the last three months and higher Bitcoin prices incentivizes more mining activity. Seems to me this is mega bullish for the hash rate. Now, Marty Bent, actually, in these articles are quite long, so I don't know if I'm going to be able to get through all of them, but he just, broke it down. And first of all, I love the caricature and the artwork and whatever. And he says,

the Biden administration wants to create a registry of Bitcoin miners. In the beginning, Marty Bent essentially gives them the benefit of the doubt. But then, you know, upon review, it proves to be, these are his words, it proves to be one of the most orrellian things I've seen come out of this administration. He goes on to say, not only does it start with the threat, here's the threat, by the way, this is what was sent to the public minors. your response is required by law. Not only does it start with a threat, but it requires that all commercial cryptocurrency mining facilities

in the United States respond. This is utterly insane. Miners will be expected to provide information about their companies where they're domiciled and the address of where their operations are located. It goes on to say the companies will also be required to identify whether they are running operations that involve proof of stake or proof of work.

They will need to tell daddy government how many mining facilities that operate. After that, they will be expected to disclose the location of their individual operations, including geographical coordinates, and the amount of electricity that was consumed at the facility altogether, regardless of whether or not the miner has any control of the electricity that is not using. From there, they will have to disclose the percentage of the facility's electricity consumption that was used specifically for mining and docs, their electric service provider.

Next up, they will have to somehow come up with the average percentage of all the electricity dedicated to Bitcoin mining at different energy suppliers and again docks them. And last, but certainly not least, miners will be expected to give detailed information about their mining fleets. The EIA wants to know the number of ASIC miners running at individual facilities, the model of the numbers, which will determine by cross-referencing the age of the miner with different model releases, the amount of energy needed to power these mining machines, and the maximum amount of hash rate they produced during the reporting period. I mean, bro, like, what the

what the F, dude? What is this? Is this communist China? Like, okay, let's just like talk about this for a second. Yeah. Toasters and video games use more electricity, okay? Imagine the same executive odor directed to toasters or directed to video games. Or your Christmas lights. It would be like, this is absurd. What is the point? point of this. And I think the ultimate point of this is because, and they said it, they want the geographical location, the amount, the point of contact. This is just creating a list so they can seize them. That's essentially what it is, in my opinion. This is what it's all about. This is insanity, dude. This is crazy. By the way, this is the same administration that's lecturing El Salvador

on threats to democracy. This is total, utter bullshit and projection. I think people need to get some hash rate the fuck out the US. Yep. Like, and, and that's the funny thing because that's what would happen, right? It would be, they crack down and they say, oh, we're, you know, we're shutting all this down. You're not allowed. We already saw it. China, China gave the fucking blueprint of how this goes and the play by play.

And I, again, if, if it goes this direction, the same thing will happen. They capital flight and all of those rigs if they're not just fully taken, then they will go somewhere else. The crazy thing would be the crazy thing would be if they if they took control of those facilities and then they mined with them. Yep. Like the government did because that's probably the direction that it would go because like what the fuck are they going to do like or the other thing that they could. do, which would end up being the dumbest thing, would be destroy the machines, right? And that's, again, also what China did. Like, there were, didn't they like steamroll? There's videos of them steamrolling ASICs and stuff like that. Like that, it's going to go one of two ways. They, they, you know,

I, well, assuming that this administration kind of gets what it seems to want, it would be either in those scenarios, it would either be they take it and destroy them or they take it. And then in the end, they end up mining them again. Or maybe they do the same thing they did with all those confiscated Bitcoin is they sell off the assets, not realizing that how much more they're going to be worth over time. Yeah. So I don't know, man. It's insane to see. And it's hilarious.

I bet there's not a mention of where do you get. your power from and how much of it would have been wasted. It doesn't matter. Like, it's great. I don't think it matters. Like, it's just like, I don't think it matters to these people. I think these people are just hell bent on. And like, the awesome part about Bitcoin is that it exposes incentives.

And the tyranny eventually boils down to the surface. Like, there's only so much terrorism, money laundering, you know, energy. Like, that, it gets. tiring and people, once they get educated, they're like, wait a second, hold on. Like, the vast majority of illicit finances conducted using the traditional fiat rails. Bitcoin only uses stranded and otherwise wasted energy. Like, once you get the start to truth, you're like, wait a second, then why are they lying? Like, why are they so hell bad? And they stick to the lie. They're not interested in the truth. Yeah. Right. So again, and the thing that they don't address

here either is they're assuming, like a lot of the argument is they're assuming that there's an opportunity cost, like, oh, well, this energy could have been used for something else. No, that's kind of the incentive mechanism of mining is people go after waste energy. And so it's like, what else would it be used for? It's already being produced. What do you want to do with it? If not this, then what? And the answer is probably fucking nothing, right? The answer is that the prices for electricity and that jurisdiction will just go up because there's going to be no buyer of last resort. No less energy will be produced because they have to have peak consumption considerations, right? They've got to have everything humming at the

absolute peak demand. And again, that energy just goes nowhere and none of the electricity costs are subsidized. And so then that cost gets thrown on to the consumer. Meanwhile, as you compared Toasters and all that shit, that comes directly from the grid and is paid for. And like, it's not waste energy that's powering your toaster. It's like there, it's part of the demand of the peak demand that is generated. 100%. 100%. Again, it's a misrepresentation of the facts in order to achieve a certain political end goal.

And here is, it's not only in the U.S., Europe as well. This article dropped January 30th, so a couple days ago, the EU is attacking proof of work. It goes on to say, here's something that's not being talked about enough in Bitcoin circles. The European Union could potentially enshrine the technical standards, specifically certain requirements of markets and crypto asset regulation, Mika, as laid out by the European Securities Exchange and Markets Authority later this year. If past, it would kneecap Bitcoin mining across the EU. It goes on to say, as should be expected from a collectivist society. I mean, Marty is injecting, I mean, he's saying his point of view there.

That has completely shot itself in the foot over the course of the 21st century with objectively suicidal energy policy. The ESMA's main grip with Bitcoin is its energy consumption, preferring that Bitcoin transition to a less energy intensive proof of stake consensus mechanism pointing to Ethereum as a responsible project that successfully made the transition. Of course, you know, Ethereum is co-opted, right? We know that the vast majority of Ethereum transactions happen. Most of Ethereum nodes, better said, are run on AWS servers. So it's not actually run by Vitalik, it's run by Jeff Bezos. And if it's run on AWS servers, it is, it is co-opted. So it goes on to say, while the focus of these requirements focuses on the impacts of proof of work,

the ESMA is trying to economically de-incentivize or even prohibit investment into any Bitcoin or Bitcoin-adjacent products, as a fight with a threat to environmental security. This makes it sound like the EU would enact tax policies that would make it un-economical for entrepreneurs to start Bitcoin businesses or outright ban people from starting any businesses that is Bitcoin-related due to the fact that it would be anchored to Bitcoin's proof-of-work in some fashion. Beyond this, their jurisdiction for the abolition of proof-of-work is that it threatens Europe's energy security.

This is real rich when you consider the fact that the biggest threat to Europe's energy security is the energy policy that it has set over the last 20 years. The death back, better known as net zero carbon emissions, has created an artificial scarcity of energy infrastructure that has put the EU at risk. Bitcoin miners are not the problem. If anything, they could be a crucial part of the solution if Europe gets its act together.

Like, it goes on, blah, blah, blah, but you guys get the point, right? The United States, Europe, all misrepresentations, right? And like, oh, like, what a coincidence. Well, it's Bitcoin. Like, what a coincidence? It's Bitcoin. What about the toasters? What about video games?

What about all the other? What about washing machines? You know, it's energy washing machines? What about AC? How come AC is not being talked about? Well, because, dude, AC isn't a threat to the government. AC isn't going to enable the separation of money in state. This is completely political bullshit.

It's nothing to do with energy use. It's just fucking lie, in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know that any of this will, in the end, have the effect that they want it to. And I think that I wonder if Bitcoin's kind of injection into the traditional financial system will almost perhaps cement in that you can't just tell it what to do. because like, does that, like, I'm just trying to think and adversarially here. Like, let's say, first of all, I mean, I don't think BlackRock's going to be pushed around by any administration. But like, let's say there was pressure to be like, oh, you got to convert, you know, your ETF holdings into a fork, a forked, like proof of stake Bitcoin. I mean, investors aren't going to are going to go for like, if anything, like I feel like there'd be

massive outflows of that. I feel like it's Bitcoin is becoming too entrenched to try and think that you can change it. And again, like them, them saying that, oh, oh, Ethereum's a much more responsible project. It's switched to proof of stake because it can because it's centralized. Like I remember working at an exchange and I had the unfortunate job of having to send out the emails whenever bullshit happened with some shit coin. And one of the emails was like, oh, there's a fork happening to Ethereum, of course, that they had planned. And it's happening this day. This was in 2019.

And then it forked. And then they're like, oh, fuck, we forgot the difficulty bomb. This is before they went to prove of stake. And it was like mining difficulty was supposed to like ramp up like, They're like, why is it so slow? What the fuck's going? Oh, right. This other thing that we should have known about. They're like, cool, it's fine. We'll just do another hard fork in two weeks with no notice. And they did it successfully. Think of how difficult it is to get a fucking soft fork into Bitcoin and like the PTSD that everybody has from the latest soft fork and how much more

difficult it will be to change Bitcoin. And then you've got Ethereum that's like, oh yeah, we just hard forked. Oh shit, we forgot something. That's cool. Like three people run a node. So like and they're all on AWS. So we'll just, uh, we'll just do another fork in two weeks. If you can turn on a dime, it's because nobody's enforcing consensus rules. That's why. 100%. 100%. And, and, and, and, and, and then that kind of like ruins the, like, it ruins the whole point. But that's the reason they're okay with it. Right. That's the reason that they're okay with it. But anyways, oh, man, it's, it's just, it's a disaster. Ben, I know that we started a little bit late.

Are we good for another one? Yeah, do you want to do the, do you want to do the title one? Yeah, yeah, the Black Rock Run, right? Yeah, yeah, let's touch on that because I guess we alluded to it anyways. All right. So, yeah, so this is a live view right now. What we're looking at is a live view of Bitcoin's incentives. And it's just sucking up everything.

Like, right? And yeah, this is why we're winning. No, but in all seriousness, let's start with this. Bitcoin ETF ads may appear on Google starting Monday, and it seems like that is already the case. I verified this myself. When I actually Googled it, I think I got a Franklin Templeton ad. Spare your virgin eyes.

Oh, my God. So, yeah. So like clearly, you know, Google has accepted this. No one can resist BlackRock. Here is BlackRock's investment page or investor fax page. If you take a look at the time of recording right now of Simply Sessions, they currently own 66,200 Bitcoin.

That's nothing. It's just a little, some little chump change on the side. And of course, back to the black hole. People can't resist Bitcoin's incentives. halfway across the world in Hong Kong, it seems like they are trying to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF.

And if that gets approved, which I have a feeling it will, remember we read you an article, Beijing has the stamp of approval. They're okay with this. They're okay using Hong Kong as this isolated testing bed for the rest of the, for the isolated testing bed for the, you know, for the, They want to benefit from Bitcoin, but they don't want mainland to benefit from the freedom and number go up. So they want to separate the two, right? So Hong Kong is going to have an ETF.

The U.S. has an ETF. Canada has an ETF. Europe has an ETF. And that's exactly why I started with the black hole. No one can resist Bitcoin's incentives. And if you add fidelity and you add BlackRock, the amount of Bitcoin that they both own, it's over 100,000 Bitcoin at this point. And what? The ETF was only approved.

a couple weeks ago. Yeah, yeah, this is the black hole for you. You can't, can't resist it, can't stop what's coming. You can't stop the honey badger. Yeah. It's, it's interesting now, too, because it seems like the gray scale outflows have slowed down significantly. Like, all that shit got dumped. Anybody who was bankrupt and needed cash and anybody who did want to jump ship because the fees weren't to their liking, it seems like most of that has kind of cleared. And now you're even seeing, like, I mean, I said it off the top of the show, but, like, people, there were some people that speculating on Bitcoin based on what Jerome Powell said, which I find hilarious. But even that couldn't, like, it dropped down into the 41s and it's right back up

around 43 again, like a day later. So it's having like, like, the inflows seem to be, like, hard to overcome. Like it doesn't seem like, it doesn't seem like things are going to shake it too much now because, I mean, look at how much is being gobbled up. It's kind of, it's,

it's, I don't, I don't know how I feel about it. There was a good quote from, uh, MaidX the other night. He was on, uh,

the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. It was something to the tune of, uh, something like, fuck the suits. I don't want them to own Bitcoin. They're the whole reason. for this mess, they don't deserve it or something like that.

And yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate that because Bitcoin kind of reaches the fringes of society first, it'll reach the most disenfranchised, but it'll also reach the richest people that recognize that it's a way to preserve their purchasing power. And that means that the people that were super successful at exploiting the fiat system have that first inroads to stack a shit. load of corn and save themselves from the oncoming Fiatpocalypse. I love that. I love that. Oh, the Fiat politics. Yeah, 100% bro. I think you, I think you hit the nail on the head. It is, it is quite strange. It is quite strange.

You know, we hit 39, but we went right back up to 43. It is going to be weird. But I'll tell you what, Ben, like, you know, the general consensus right now is that like diminishing return, diminishing returns. And Bitcoin tends to do the exact opposite of what everyone else is thinking. And I remember the last narrative of the last bull market was 100K, 150K Bitcoin guaranteed. Mind you, that was 2021. Right now everyone's like, oh, 100K, 150K. Now I'm not speculating, but what I'm trying to say is that the general crowd,

the general consensus is really buying into diminishing returns or only hit 100K, 150K. And Bitcoin tends to do the exact opposite. And the reason I'm saying all of this is because, like, take a look at how much Bitcoin they're buying. And here's the thing. There's not enough to go around, right? Like, there's only so much Bitcoin on the market for them to buy up. And then it's over. There is no more, right?

Which means the price is going to go up. Right. So, yeah, I mean, this is a perfect storm or a black hole in my opinion. Yeah, yeah, man. Don't sell your corn to Black Rock. All those sads precious. Exactly, exactly. Anyways, that was a lot of fun like always.

Guys, this was your Simply sessions, Ben. I will see you next week. Take it easy, brother. Better have a good one. All right, everybody else. Stick around. We've got a few things I want to highlight for you before we close out this show.

A few cool things that have been coming out. I want to give a shout out to Domas. So if you're unfamiliar, Noster client for iOS. And it's awesome. I did a video on it a ways back. But they were, you know, J.B. was basically worried that he couldn't stay on the project because he just got grants and stuff like that. But like at the end of the day, you got to pay the bills.

And I remember on Twitter some idiot suggested that he make like a Noster token and then do a presale and he basically said, go fuck yourself. Like, this is not how we do things. Well, kudos to them because rather than going the ICO Noster token route, they just said, hey, Noster is free to use. But if you want to support the project, we decided to create additional value, add additional features. And if you want to become a member of Noster Purple,

then you can sign up and pay X amount per month, to be part of it. And they've got, again, it's 15,000 sats for a month or 150,000 sats for a year. And you get a bunch of additional features. So he basically says we're pumped to announce the launch of Domus Purple. You can be part of the roadmap for the year to come and beyond by supporting our team with this optional membership. Currently, it's in test flight users only in the app store.

Thanks for joining us in the wild. premium features currently include automatic translations of posts and more perks are coming soon. So if you want to support Will and what he's doing with Domus, then yeah, go get yourself Nostra Purple. I'm not an iPhone,

but I think I'm still going to do it on my iPad and support, in my opinion, what's a solid project. Also, shout out to Zeus. They just had a solid update with 0.8.1. It allows import of Nostra context. just enter your NPUB or your NIPO5 address and Zeus will add your Nostr contacts into it.

You can have a standalone point of sale with inventory management, which is really, I've been playing around that you can like add items and give them prices in in dollars or sats. You can do contact sharing via QR code. You can have persistent L&D. So this quote here, Android users now have the option to keep L&D running. Even when Zeus is closed, this enables instant Zeus. pay redemptions and makes zapping faster. Additionally, this work paves the way to implement Noster Wallet Connect down the road.

Yeah, also improve the SendView, a whole bunch of different other stuff. But yeah, Zeus hadn't shipping the features. Awesome. Also, in the realm, same realm, Mutiny wallet. They added pay join support, which is basically as you're spending at a merchant of the other person has a pay join enabled wallet. well, it makes every spend look like and actually become a coin join, which is super awesome. And also shout out to BitCold, who's been on the show here before for Why Are We Bullish?

He's super bullish on Pay Join and kudos to him. Yeah, they also made some underlying changes to Noster Wallet Connect in Mutiny. We've switched over all the new connections to use our new stir-fright-based relay instead of using Blaster. Yeah, so anyways, lots of cool stuff coming out of Mutiny Wallets. Love to see what they're working on there. Also, BitKit, I don't know if you've tried it. I played around with it a little bit, you know, respect what they're doing. It's not my number one use, like I don't use it a ton, but I'm glad to see them continuing to iterate.

Nonetheless, they added paying to lightning addresses. They added some fee savings when transferring to your savings. account. They basically have a spending and savings account. And then they can, you can also request support within the app. So if you haven't played with BitKit, take a little peek. Also, this is just a fun one. But if you're unfamiliar, new trend, 100, 100 a day until 100K. So a bunch of us are doing 100 pushups every single day until Bitcoin hits 100K. Even if it never does, we win. So if you want to join me in doing 100 pushups a day, there's a Twitter chat. There's also a telegram group where everybody's in.

And yeah, 100 pushups a day. I think today was day six for me. And there's a bunch of people. There's like 170 people or something in the telegram group. And everybody just drops in their numbers every day. And then there's just like a fun chat. So anyways, don't be this guy. Be this guy.

Or girl. There's actually some awesome. and that are also partaking. So, yeah, I love the meme from Walker. Wow. How did you get like that? Every time Bitcoin isn't 100K, I do 100 pushups. Jesus Christ.

I love it. Anyways, so join me. Moving on here, a couple of other things to announce. Yeah, as we alluded early in the show, I'm headed to Madeira. They announced on Twitter today, Demystify Bickr, on the VTC sessions. Anyways, we're doing a lot of exciting stuff. I'm going to be speaking on some of the stages there,

but I'm also curating some awesome educational stuff. So if you're going to be down there, make sure you, I think we're calling it session central, something like that. But anyways, you can come down. There's going to be a whole schedule of educational material, not just like panels and talks, but actually come in and get hands on, like, follow along and learn some,

while you're there. The goal is to make sure that you actually level up during a conference instead of just listening to a bunch of nice talks and being bullish, come and learn something. Novel idea, hey? Sat market. It's coming. So we did the sat market in Calgary in December. It was awesome.

We had 30 plus merchants. We did a bit of a live stream there. A whole bunch of people from a whole bunch of different types of business. businesses, all of us creating a Bitcoin circular economy. Well, round two is coming. It is March 23rd. Again, a Saturday. So the Saturday market happening here in Calgary.

If you're in Calgary, make sure you do come. There's a meetup page. It's also on Orange Pill app, of course. And it's listed on my website as well. So if you just go to BTCSessions.ca and go to events, you'll see it there and you can get all the information. But even if you can't make it, please. do go and share out the event everywhere and raise awareness, not just to try and get people to

attend, but also to encourage people to replicate it. I want to see more of these start popping up around the globe. The only way that you can truly step out of the Fiat matrix is to just build your own community. Get to know the Bitcoiners around you and build meaningful relationships with them and build a community where you are immune to the the the the fiat disease right um and i agree i see roman in the chat there you should open source the blueprint to replicate this i'll do my best i'm trying to take notes um i will start taking uh some more in-depth notes and suggestions and get more suggestions from other people and and try to put something together uh so that people can then add to it over time. But yeah, we'll see. This is round two. We'll see how it goes. And then I'm

hoping for a big one in July when we have the Bitcoin rodeo in Calgary, which should be a good time as well. And then a couple last things. I dropped a full tutorial on Aqua Wallet on Tuesday. And yeah, I actually quite like Aqua. They did open source that. I was kind of waiting for them to go open source. But I think it's incredibly useful. I do use both lightning and and liquid quite regularly because I do more or less daily transactions living on Bitcoin. So I need to be nimble. The thing I like about this one is you can receive a lightning transaction it auto swaps into liquid.

You can secure liquid with hardware. I typically just have the amount that I deal with on a monthly basis for bills and daily expenditures and all that. And then the rest is obviously cold storage savings. But to be nimble for my transactional means, it's either lightning or liquid. So it's kind of a combo of Aqua and Phoenix for me, recognizing obviously the tradeoffs with liquid. But if you want to check it out, again, go check on the channel, Aqua Wallet.

It came out just a few days ago. And yeah, you can get filled in on how it works early days still. But I mean, it's pretty solid entry this early into the launch of a new wallet. I think it's awesome. So anyways, check it out. And then tomorrow, why are we bullish? We've got Alex Leishman from River. We've got Lisa, aka Nifty, and she does the Base 58, and the Bitcoin Larp, like a walkthrough

of how Bitcoin works. She's just an amazing educator. And then we got Kent Halliburton from Saz Mining. It should be a killer show. So make sure you make it out. That is at 6 p.m. Eastern Time tomorrow evening. And with that, thank you guys all for being part of the show. Of course, if you want to help out the show, you can like, subscribe, share, all those things super important.

Hit that little like button below the screen. Share this everywhere that you happen to be and subscribe. Help me hit that 100K. You can also hit up the previously mentioned sponsors. They're all in the show notes. And then there is a QR code on the screen right now. As I mentioned before, if you need some additional help with anything Bitcoin-related, wallets, hardware, multi-sig, privacy, whatever it may be.

You can reach out to me by scanning that QR code. It'll take you to a place where you can book me for one-on-one private sessions. If you are listening to this on the pod, it is simply btcsessions.ca, and there will be a link there for one-on-one bookings. Anyways, guys, with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. I'll see you guys next time for your... Daily Session.