BTC Sessions - At $288K BTC Plan B Goes Dark, Wasabi Mobile, Justin Sun Gets $2M Relief Grant EP054

Starting point is 00:00:11 Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC Sessions and this is your daily session. Before we dive in, shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for, well, a few different things. They've got Bitcoin savings accounts where you can earn interest on your Bitcoin. They've got Bitcoin backed loans, which was the first thing I ever used. And this is where you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to get a Canadian, or US dollar loan. So for me, I was in a pinch.

Starting point is 00:00:53 Wanted to get my hands on dollars, but I didn't want to sell my Bitcoin. So I parked it in a dedicated address that I could audit 24-7. I got a loan in my bank account within 24 hours in my case. And as soon as I paid back that loan, I got all my Bitcoin back. Now, they've also got B2X offering, which uses the same loan mechanism, and it uses it to buy more Bitcoin, effectively doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. If you want to check these guys out, there is a link. in the show notes down below.

Starting point is 00:01:21 And if you use that link to get a Bitcoin back loan, they'll actually give you 50 bucks of Bitcoin for free. And secondly, we've got NordVPN. I use this all the time on my computer and on my phone. When you're using Bitcoin and really anything, you can leak your IP address and your IP address can allow people to see your exact geographic location. So NordVPN can hide your IP address.

Starting point is 00:01:44 It encrypts all your browsing data and has a bunch of other added benefits like being able to unlock geo-block content. So if you can access something, you turn this on, set your country of origin, and you can access whatever is available in that country. So if you want to check that out, there is a link down below, and that will get you a deal where it's about, I think it's $3.49 a month to grab that. With that, let's dive into the news.

Starting point is 00:02:09 So there is an excellent interview on the Stefan Lavera podcast the other day that had Sabina Moose, author of the Bitcoin Standard, and Plan B, or at 100 trillion. USD on Twitter, and he's the creator of the stock to flow Bitcoin price model. Now, he just released a new price model that we talked about the other day, where he talks about phase shifts, where the narratives and the use cases for Bitcoin go through these shifts from essentially a toy to a collectible, to a peer-to-peer kind of payment system. He talks about when we've reached dollar parity versus gold parody and kind of the narratives that shift with that. And when he plotted it on the stock to flow model, which measures the amount of outstanding Bitcoin currently on the market versus the

Starting point is 00:03:00 flow of new coins into the market, he used that versus gold versus silver. And when we reach the stock to flow ratio that of gold, which we get very close to this having, over time he projects a possible price point of around $288,000 per Bitcoin. Now, whether or not that actually plays out is anybody's guess, and it will take time to see if the model holds or not. But in this interview, he said that a lot of people are saying, oh, you're just going to go dark if this doesn't work out and your model is wrong. And he said, quite to the contrary, if it doesn't work out, then he'll probably stick

Starting point is 00:03:43 around because he'll want to experiment and try new models and see what can be used. What he did say is, and I'll just read a little bit from this Coin Telegraph article here, it says StocktoFlow's latest incarnation S2FX was released last week and increased average Bitcoin price expectations five times compared to the previous version for Plan B, despite the obvious satisfaction of Bitcoin versus USD increasing by an order of magnitude in line with stock to flow, the results would not be without its problems. He said, I will go dark if the model is successful because if the model is successful, it will not be a pretty picture.

Starting point is 00:04:25 It will be nasty. It will be maybe war. People have Bitcoin. Some don't have Bitcoin. It'll be some countries do have Bitcoin. Some won't. It will be the US dollar losing its reserve status. It will be geopolitical.

Starting point is 00:04:39 It will be military. Yeah. So very interesting to hear him say that, that he'll disappear if it does come to fruition. But he does raise a good point in a world where Bitcoin kind of gets to those levels and then starts taking on that role. What are the global implications to other reserve currencies, namely the US dollar and most other currencies in the world where they've just been printing with very little regard for what happens to the value and purchasing power of the currency itself down the road? They're just trying to get past this current crisis without any regard for the future. And so what happens in a world like that where you have a currency that no matter what, no matter what is happening globally, it doesn't know or care and continues on with its built-in monetary policy

Starting point is 00:05:34 forges forward. And we're about to see that, right? In five days time, the halving happens and the issuance of new coins gets cut in half. at a time when there is unprecedented money printing by central banks around the world. So time will tell, but kind of interesting little tidbit from Plan B there. I wanted to touch on a few cool things that I saw on my Twitter feed today, some features and some things on the horizon. First thing being partially signed Bitcoin transactions or PSBT on Samurai wallet using Sentinel.

Starting point is 00:06:08 So what is this? Now, I've done a walkthrough of Sentinel quite a while ago, but I did recently do a walkthrough of Samurai wallet. And I went through their whirlpool, how to set up the wallet, everything. What Sentinel is is a way to, it's a watch-only wallet. So you can load in your extended public keys, meaning that you can monitor everything that comes into a wallet without spending capability.

Starting point is 00:06:35 but with this Sentinel can essentially again have access to all of the public keys and all of the money and see the balances you can construct a transaction within Sentinel but then you can use samurai wallet which can be exclusively offline and would hold the private keys and you can port over the information to samurai use it to sign the transaction and approve it and then port that signed transaction back over to Sentinel and send it from there. So Samurai wallet essentially becomes a digital hardware wallet within your phone. So very interesting to see. Now, I did cover partially signed Bitcoin transactions in a video that I did covering the cold card wallet. And it was done via microSD. No, I'm not sure exactly how this would play out if it would be on the

Starting point is 00:07:34 same phone or on a different phone. I imagine to have it truly like air gap, you'd have to have a separate device with samurai on it that is not connected to the internet and then port the information back and forth between the two. But still, really, really cool to see. And I could be incorrect there. Maybe there is a way to have samurai wallet never touch the internet, but I would be curious about that given that if it was on an internet connected device. Now, in the same vein of privacy and mobile mixing, cipher.io. I just saw this pop in my news feed today. And it looks like they are using CipherNode, which is an open source software put together

Starting point is 00:08:20 by my former teammates at Bull Bitcoin. And it's essentially a software stack, kind of like my node. You can build Bitcoin-based applications on top of it. And while this guy, he went in and he's creating. He's already created like a lightning wallet on top of it, and he's now started to integrate Wasabi wallet and CoinJoin into this mobile wallet that is right now it will be Android first, but really, really cool to see this. In fact, I believe most of the Wasabi team wasn't even familiar with this.

Starting point is 00:08:54 I reached out to Adam Pfizer and said, hey, have you seen this? and he was just as surprised as I was. So really, really awesome to see this. You can't get it yet from what I've seen, but I mean, the UI looks pretty nice, actually. I quite enjoyed just the black kind of flat, easy to navigate. Yeah, anyways, stoked to see if this comes out anytime soon, then, yeah, Wasabi Wallet, Mobile Mixing as well.

Starting point is 00:09:28 Again, just overall, it's really cool. to see a lot of these privacy solutions start to propagate and lots more options out there for people, whether it be mobile or whether it be on desktop and other things like Peta Endpoint that we're seeing more and more privacy for Bitcoin. So it's solid. And moving on, I wanted to touch on one other thing. This is really cool as well from friends at Open Dime and Rodolfo Novak. This is the block clock or rather the block clock mini. He did make a previous iteration, which was very, very expensive. It was like five grand for the thing, but it was nice looking. And what you can do with this is, number one, it shows the blocks of the Bitcoin blocks

Starting point is 00:10:13 as they are published. You can also use it to manually connect an open dime, which is a little stick that you can store Bitcoin on without revealing the private key until a circuit is broken, at which point you know not to load any more Bitcoin on it. And you can essentially turn it into a bearer bond. You can hand somebody Bitcoin physically with them being certain that you cannot steal the funds back after they leave. So turning Bitcoin into actual cash. Anyways, you can plug in an open dime to this and actually display the balance, the Fiat value, or a deposit QR code. This version, instead of being five grand, will be, they're estimating around 350 bucks, I believe, and you can reserve one prior if you put down about a hundred bucks to block off your space.

Starting point is 00:11:02 I'm considering grabbing one of these, to be honest, and just a size comparison between this and the cold card, which obviously is also made by coin kite. Yeah, looks pretty awesome. I'm stoked about this. I might have to get one of these from my new office when I move. Yeah, anyways, let's move on. Marty Bent, over at TFTC, love his issue of the Bent today. He's talking about how Bitcoin is changing, how we interact with internet, and he's talking about

Starting point is 00:11:31 something called LN URL. I touched on this the other day on, I think maybe it was a week ago or so on the show. I mentioned this in passing. So he goes into a nice description of what this makes possible. Okay. So he says this can be used instead of usernames or passwords for websites. And this is how you would do it using lightning. When you go to set up an account on a domain that is compatible with LNURL dash off, the site sends you a QR code with a special message that allows you to use a public key associated to your wallet to derive a unique key that is only compatible with the domain you're interacting with.

Starting point is 00:12:14 This key is how you authenticate that you are the owner of the account on that particular site. no more remembering unique passwords for separate sites, no more creating unique email addresses for different services, no more having to worry about the site you are interacting with having your data stolen from them. Pure self-sovereign control of your accounts across the internet. No usernames, no passwords, or identifying information other than the public key that is derived upon your sign-up. Now, with this obviously, he goes on to touch on. how you're going to have more responsibility when it comes to this because you won't be able to just reclaim your password after the fact. You've got to keep the unique key for this site and you've

Starting point is 00:13:01 got to keep it back up just in case you screw up and lose it. So again, I do think this is a very interesting way to interact with the internet. And I think honestly, probably a desirable one. How often do we hear about mass hacks and data leaks from major companies? All of these ones, are all of these major companies that hold your data are just giant honeypots and he's right it does come with a new level of security and a new level of responsibility but when you have money that is natively digital and irreversible you need to have some fucking responsibility when you're dealing with that and up until now there's been no incentive to bother with that security because everything was based on soft promises and could always be reversed.

Starting point is 00:13:53 And you don't notice it at the time, but you pay through it over time in additional fees because merchants have to mark shit up in order to deal with the potential losses that they face from fraud. Because a lot of times they're the ones that are on the hook when they get chargebacks and fraudulent transactions and people stealing money from them. So it'll be a difficult transition for a lot of people, but I think a needed one. And I think personal responsibility will grow with the proliferation of something like this. Moving on, I wanted to touch on this really quickly. You can now watch Bitcoin being mined around the world. So the people over at the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance have launched an interactive map

Starting point is 00:14:39 that shows the average monthly Bitcoin hash rate in different countries. Now, two-thirds of the mining activity is still concentrated in China. This is a step up from where we were before. And it does continue to grow in North America, especially with natural gas wells and stuff like what Steve Barber is doing with upstream data, where they're able to tap into this wasted energy and turn it into actual profits for a lot of those companies. But regardless, the researchers used global. use geolocation data of mining pools,

Starting point is 00:15:17 BTC.com, pool and via BTC. And so kind of a cool interactive map here. You can actually zoom into various locales and kind of see the data there. You can scroll down, obviously, again, lots in China, but then it breaks it down by country thereafter. Yeah, yeah, so interesting information. And it is nice.

Starting point is 00:15:41 You can also go back month by one. month and use the slider to see how hash rate allocation has changed. Like you see a little bit of a sum of them disappear in March, obviously because of the drop in price and it was no longer profitable for some mining companies. So yeah, cool. More tools like this. Moving on, the European Union predicts the worst economic downturn since World War II. So a little bit from this decrypt article I'm looking at.

Starting point is 00:16:11 quote, it is now quite clear that the EU has entered the deepest economic recession in its history, said Paolo Gentiloni, the European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs. Gentiloni also said that it is the worst economic shock without precedent since the Great Depression. Gentilone's comment follows predictions that the economy of the European Union will shrink by 7.4% this year before expanding by 6.1% next year. Much of the damage has already been done. Unemployment is through the roof. State spending is at record highs

Starting point is 00:16:51 and Europe's five largest banks have lost 40% of their market capitalization in the first quarter of this year. Yeah, so things looking bleak and I think we haven't even really begun to see the entirety of the fallout from shutting everything down. know. Whether or not you think it was prudent to do that is besides the point, we still, again,

Starting point is 00:17:17 with 30 million unemployed in the U.S. so far and probably more to come because the lack of liquidity and the lack of movement and the economy, still really a lot of those implications have yet to be felt. It's going to be a bumpy ride. Now, in the meantime, you have you have stimulus, checks going out. And you had, what was this for? This was for payment for, payment for employees. And they were giving out grants. And unfortunately, one of those landed in the hands of Justin's son, the creator of Tron, $2 million of coronavirus relief. He got a grant. And so they successfully applied for the $2 million grant in small business relief from the United States government. The money was for salary protection to shield U.S.-based companies from the effects of the

Starting point is 00:18:18 coronavirus crisis. And then meanwhile, many U.S. businesses have reported problems accessing the aid. Now, if you're unfamiliar with Tron, you may be unsure why I'm not particularly happy about this. Well, one is because they raised $70 million in their ICO in 2018, and then they raised a further $7 million in under 15 minutes for their BitTorrent ICO just last year. So I don't think they need the money, not to mention that they've just gone on a string of acquisitions as of late. They acquired the Steam platform. They acquired Poloniacs, I believe, they've just been buying everything. And so the fact that they would apply for and actually receive this grant is absolutely ludicrous to me.

Starting point is 00:19:16 I don't know. I don't know what to say about this. I'm sure you guys will have some choice words for it, but I'm going to leave it right there. Last thing I wanted to touch on is another article on the Bitcoin halving on the Bitsy Academy from a guest author. Now, they talk about using some of the previous having. data to try and map up, map out some potential price targets post-having this time around. And contrary to the plan B model, they actually projected something along the lines of 80, what did they say here?

Starting point is 00:19:52 They were saying around an $87,000 price point in June of 2022. I'll be honest, I kind of, and I know this sounds ridiculous, but I, think this is low and I think it's too slow. Bitcoin doesn't move that slowly after the having, at least not previously. And I think that with the number of new on-ramps that have been created, because let's not forget that people had issues accessing and buying Bitcoin last time around. The amount of infrastructure that has been built over the past four years is absolutely insane. you now have access to much larger onramps and OTC portals for large buyers. You have, when you look at the data of people actually just looking up the halving,

Starting point is 00:20:44 it's at least tenfold right now and we're not even at the having yet. So I just think it's a lot more ingrained and not in the forefront, but in the back of people's minds and they've seen it more and it's become more accessible than ever. You just saw cash app low-key bump up their, I believe, monthly limits from $10,000 to $100,000. And so it just becomes a lot more accessible, again, for people to purchase Bitcoin and not just small amounts of Bitcoin, but large amounts of Bitcoin. So we will see. We will see what happens with this. But again, my opinion is this might be a little low.

Starting point is 00:21:23 And I think it will happen quicker than they then imagined in this particular article. article. And I think that by the middle of June 2020, I honestly think we'll be back into the start of a new bear market by that time. But who knows? Who knows? What the hell do I know? I don't know. I'm just, I'm pulling this out of my ass. I'm guessing. I did make a price prediction video back in early 2018. That's actually paned out pretty well. I'd say it's been pretty spot on. The thing that I, a couple of things that I, a couple of things that I, missed was the spike in in mid 2019. I didn't see that one coming and obviously I didn't see like COVID and the drop in half happening. But that was a there's a quick recovery after that anyway. So yeah, anyways, I didn't get everything right. But I'm going to stick with my prediction, which was again post-having about a year to year and a half after somewhere between one to maybe 300k. That's what I'm guessing. But then a bear market where we dropped down back down to like 60 years. something. Anyways, I'm going to wrap it there, you guys. Thank you so much for watching and or listening.

Starting point is 00:22:35 Of course, if you're here on YouTube, do hit like, subscribe, and share, but also check out the other platforms that I'm on so I can kind of mitigate my risk in case anything it happens to YouTube. So I'm on Facebook Live. I'm on Twitter as a live stream from Periscope. I'm on Twitch. I'm on D-Live. I try to upload the library as much as I can. I'm also audio only on Google Podcast, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, basically wherever you can find a podcast. So do check those out. Links down below. If you want to help with the show in another way, you can do a few things.

Starting point is 00:23:06 You can hit up the sponsors I mentioned that was Leden and Nord, both in the show notes. You can also use this link. I'd love to get more people taking a look at, I made a de facto guide to buy, sell, and use Bitcoin in Canada. I've done a ton of stuff here, basically on ramps, wallets, how to use various hardware wallets, spending Bitcoin, Bitcoin privacy, using lightning, using nodes. It's all there. And it's kind of, yes, it's kind of focused towards Canada, but a lot of good information for just about anybody. So if you can give that a share, that would be a huge help. I'll have a link down below for that. And other than that, if you really liked what you saw, you can drop me a lightning network tip at my

Starting point is 00:23:49 tippin.mee.m.m. slash at BTC sessions. And by the way, I saw some, some crazy tips. I mean, you know, crazy tips for lightning coming in. Somebody dropped like 200,000 sats in there the other day. So whoever did that, thank you very much. I do appreciate it. It was a bit of a surprise to me. But thank you very much. And there was a few other like 10K, 20K, 50k, uh, Satoshi donations there. So, so thanks guys. Really appreciate that. Anyways, I am out. Have yourself a wonderful evening and I will see you guys next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - At $288K BTC Plan B Goes Dark, Wasabi Mobile, Justin Sun Gets $2M Relief Grant EP054

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