BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Pump, Kraken Compliance Squeeze, Tether Liquid Migration EP004

Starting point is 00:00:01 Wasabi wallet. I'm fairly private. What's up everyone? Ben with the BTC sessions here and this is your daily session. Before we dive into the news, of course, shout out to sponsors of the show. Ledden.io, this is where you can use your Bitcoin for a variety of services, one of which is their Bitcoin savings account where you can earn interest on your Bitcoin paid in Bitcoin. They've also got Bitcoin-backed-Lones where you use your Bitcoin. as collateral to obtain a Canadian or US dollar loan. So maybe you're in a pinch.

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Starting point is 00:01:16 So Rise Wallet is a Bitcoin gift card. The way it works is you swing by the story, you pick it up. It's just like a prepaid Visa card in the way that you pay an activation fee, but after that, it's just money in your account. So all you have to do is when you gift it to somebody, which I think is one of the major use cases of this, is they download the app, the Rise Wallet app. All they have to do is scratch the back of the gift card,

Starting point is 00:01:45 scan the app, and this will create them a Bitcoin wallet on the spot that they hold themselves and then send them an on-chain Bitcoin transaction for the face value of the card at the time of redemption. This is super awesome. It's a super idiot-proof way of onboarding new people to Bitcoin, and I've gifted a bunch of these to people that I know. So be sure to check them out.

Starting point is 00:02:09 Head over to risewallet.com. Click on locations to see where you can pick up one near you. Now, this is currently only available in Canada, but keep an eye out because they are planning on expanding. And if they're not near you in Canada, you can always go to coincards.cai and get one delivered to you. And with that, let's dive into the news. So we see Bitcoin Price has a,

Starting point is 00:02:34 been on the move. It is flashing green. We've been up a fair amount, well, you know, five, six percent in the past day or so. And so this article from Coin Telegraph is basically citing that there is a potential pattern that's forming that could indicate further green in the future here. So this is, it was actually tweeted by Murad Namadov, and he is, if you're unfamiliar with He was on an excellent podcast a while back, actually. This would have been, geez, I'm not even sure how long ago. But it was called the ultimate Bitcoin argument. He was on off the chain with Anthony Pompeiano.

Starting point is 00:03:18 If you haven't heard that, please go listen to it. It is a great argument for why Bitcoin is important. Anyways, this is the information here in the article. In a tweet on January 7th X Goldman Sachs analyst, Murat Mammadov channeled the work of Rickard Wickoff to suggest Bitcoin was in the process of a major recovery. Bitcoin USD cracked resistance at $7,600 on Monday, surprising punters who considered the levels too difficult to pass under current conditions. At press time, this was obviously earlier, the pair traded at 78, 75, having reached 790 and gaining 5% on the day. Wiccoff was the father of a whole new method of analyzing price performance, dubbed the Wiccoff method

Starting point is 00:04:08 according to Murad, who uploaded the chart to demonstrate Bitcoin's position. The largest cryptocurrency has already put in a bottom. So the spike near 8,000 on Tuesday, for example, was an SOS point for Bitcoin USD. SOS stands for sign of strength and typically follows a so-called spring event, which sees a a price low point. After the SOS, a slight retracement called a backup should proceed further gains according to the model. And so if you're watching this on YouTube, here there is a chart that shows a sudden spike with an indication that is an SOS pattern, then some consolidation followed by a further sizable spike. And this is a picture of the actual model. And it's followed by

Starting point is 00:05:00 a picture of what Bitcoin price has actually been doing the last little bit, and it is incredibly similar. So I guess we'll see how that pans out. It should be noted that if you follow Plan B and his Stock to Flow model, that model has us at a range of around 8,300, which could be in the cars. We're pretty close to it already. We're fitting right within that model price guesstimate that we should be in. Anyways, let's move on to the next story here. And this is from Cracken, the online cryptocurrency exchange, and it's relating to law enforcement requests.

Starting point is 00:05:42 So law enforcement requests to Cracken have hit an all-time high in 2019, up 49% from the previous year. So they did put out an infographic on their Twitter, which I will pull up here. And there's just a few key. takeaways here. There was a 49% increase in requests from 2018. There were 710 total information requests received in 2019. This impacted 1,222 of their accounts. 62% of all requests resulted in data provided to the requesting agency. It should be noted that this total includes non-valid

Starting point is 00:06:23 requests and those with no related client accounts. So if somebody requested, information from a client that either didn't have an account or that just wasn't exactly valid. Well, if that information was provided them, that still includes in the 62%. And then 28% of their requests were considered non-valid. So this means the request did not meet the local legal requirements and or internal law enforcement production policy. So if they requested something and they weren't legally required to do it,

Starting point is 00:07:03 that would be 28% of the requests. So they've got a lot of great charts kind of breaking down exactly what has been requested and by whom. It's just a few little takeaways here is that so the lion's share of these requests,

Starting point is 00:07:22 61% were from U.S. agencies, which is slightly down from 2018. They had 66%. However, that other countries in other geographical locations are gaining fast. And Jesse Powell from Cracken, they added, the trend is obvious. Compliance costs are increasing for cryptocurrency exchanges, even in a relatively flat market. So just keep that in mind when you are on online exchanges. If a government agency decides to request information about you, there's a good possibility they're going to get it. So just keep that in the back of your mind. Let's move on here. So some cryptocurrency experts are going to testify at Craig Wright's $8 billion

Starting point is 00:08:12 lawsuit. So those of you not privy, Craig Wright was sued by the estate of David Kleinman. And Dave Kleinman, now deceased, was a computer forensics expert who alleged. allegedly was involved in the early days of Bitcoin. Now, the interesting thing about this case is that the whole case is predicated on the, I guess, it supposes that Craig Wright is indeed Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. And it says that early on himself and David Klyman were mining Bitcoin and that he ended up defrauding Klyman from 1.1 million Bitcoin. And so he has thus been ordered after the case or like after the result of the case to pay 550,000 Bitcoin to the Klyman estate. However, the interesting thing about having some experts in to testify

Starting point is 00:09:21 by now that everything has kind of hit the fan. One of them is Andreas Antonopoulos, a very early Bitcoin advocate and educator. And he is of the opinion that Craig Wright is indeed not Satoshi, as is the majority of the Bitcoin ecosystem and everybody involved in it. Most cryptographers, most people agree that he is an absolute fraud. and he's done plenty. He's done plenty to kind of prove that he is not Satoshi. Much, despite his best efforts, nobody really believes him.

Starting point is 00:10:04 It all stems back to even the very first time he claimed he was Satoshi and provided a digital signature from some of the earliest mine Bitcoin, while that signature was proved to be fraudulent or rather recycled. It did not prove anything. So I'm very interested to see what the Andreas Antonopoulos testimony will mean to this case because it doesn't really help either side. It doesn't help the climate estate because obviously if Craig is not Satoshi, then he doesn't have the money to give to Climon. It also doesn't help Craig Wright's side in the way that, yes, he won't have to pay the Climmon estate if he's not Craig Wright. but he also will have committed perjury multiple times in court if he is not Craig Wright. And so he still has legal implications if that comes to fruition.

Starting point is 00:11:00 So anyways, I will, I guess we'll just wait and see what happens with all of this. But if you want to check out some of the reasoning behind why everybody by and large sees Craig Wright as a total fraud, there are a couple of good articles, one from James and Lop on Bitcoin magazine. It's an op-ed called How Many Wrongs Make a Right? And it goes through a whole history of Craig Wright and a lot of the stuff that calls into question really anything he has to say. And further to that, you can check out SeekingSatoshi.weebley.com. And this is something put together by a guy on Twitter named Arthur Van Pelt. He's also known as At My Legacy Kit.

Starting point is 00:11:42 And he has basically put together an entire timeline of everything. related to Bitcoin and Craig Wright and all of the things that have been debunked that he has said inaccuracies or just outright fallacies that he's he's done doctored especially in related in relation to this particular court case all of the doctored documents and inaccurate documents that were submitted from his legal team as part of his defense it's pretty in depth so be sure to check that out. If you have any inclination to believe that Craig Wright is indeed Satoshi, you need to read through this information. And if you still think that Craig is Satoshi, well, I suppose there's not much anybody else could say to you to convince you otherwise.

Starting point is 00:12:33 And I just want to finish on one other interesting bit of news here or information. And this is from Marty Bent from Tales from The Cript. By the way, excellent podcast. If you don't listen to Tales from the Crypt, you should start. Marty is awesome and his frequent guest, Matt Odell on Rabbit Hole Recap, is also incredible. Very, very awesome. Anyways, so this bit of news from the bent here is about the liquid network side chain. So first off, what is the liquid network side chain? This from the bent here.

Starting point is 00:13:12 Blockstream's Liquid Federated Sidechain is a second layer. scaling solution that allows users to lock Bitcoin in a multi-sig, which enables them to send and settle Bitcoin faster and more privately, as well as enabling the creation of digital assets that can be moved and traded. Liquid's target market is large exchanges and the traders who play within their digital walls who are looking to move Bitcoin between each other in more efficient ways. So essentially, the liquid federated side chain allows people to move a peg token to Bitcoin much quicker. The block times are one minute, and typically it can be settled within two blocks, so within two minutes. And so that's excellent for a trading arbitrage opportunity. So BitFinex and

Starting point is 00:14:02 Bitsi both have, are founding members of the Liquid Federation. And so they're able to you know, accept liquid deposits. But you can also issue digital assets on the liquid side chain. And this is what this particular article is about. So there is something called Tether. Tether is essentially a pegged US dollar in digital form that can be easily sent around and held in a private wallet. This was originally created and used on something called the Omni Protocol, which was built on top of Bitcoin. However, wallet support was pretty lackluster. And as Ethereum kind of built out their ERC20 ecosystem where you could easily issue tokens and it was super easy to add them to wallets, most of the outstanding tether was moved over to ERC20 and resided on the Ethereum blockchain. However, with the new liquid federated side chain, you can issue tether on liquid on top of Bitcoin, or I guess alongside Bitcoin using the side chain.

Starting point is 00:15:18 The difference being that everything on the Ethereum blockchain is completely transparent. Not only that, but the wallet addresses are static. They just remain, unlike Bitcoin, where most wallets, though, generate. a whole new address every time you receive funds. Ethereum does not work that way. So there is a bot on Twitter called Whale Alert. And so every time somebody moves a large amount of tether on chain for Ethereum, it sends out a tweet.

Starting point is 00:15:51 And so people can see what's happening and see that money is moving and a lot of time do some sleuthing and figure out where money is moving from and to. with liquid there are confidential transactions which hides the amount which you are sending and suddenly this whale bot is unable to track those movements now why is this important well in a very competitive trading environment you may not want to tip off an entire market that you're moving 15 million dollars worth of tether which we see in the example here whale bought there's a alert of 15 million USDT or USD Tether being transferred from BitFinex to the Tether Treasury. And somebody tagged on that it was actually a cross-chain swap from ERC 20 to Liquid.

Starting point is 00:16:50 So somebody took $15 million worth of Tether and moved it from the Ethereum blockchain onto the Federated Liquid Side Chain built upon Bitcoin. So somebody is taking advantage of the benefits that the liquid side chain offers over the Ethereum blockchain. And so the point of this whole article is, hey, we may be seeing a mass migration of assets eventually onto liquid versus Ethereum because of the privacy benefits of using the liquid side chain. Now, of course, that remains to be seen.

Starting point is 00:17:30 but if this is any implication, then we could be seeing a lot more of this in the future. And I'm very interested to see this play out. Let me know what you think about Liquid. Now, I did do an interview with Samson Mal from Blockstream about Liquid. So I will link to that in the show notes as well if you want to listen to that. It's only on YouTube, but maybe I'll think about uploading that to the podcast as well. So you can give a listen here if you're listening in audio only. But with that, I'm going to wrap up you guys.

Starting point is 00:18:01 Thank you so much for watching and listening. If you're on YouTube, please do hit like, subscribe, and share. And if you're on the podcast on any platform, please do share it on your social media. It will be great to get more people watching and listening on various platforms. Now, if you want to help both the show in another way, you can hit up the sponsors down below, Leden and Rise Wallet. Those links are down there. You can also check out wasabiwollet.io, X,

Starting point is 00:18:28 desktop wallet to increase the privacy of your Bitcoin. And finally, if you want to help with the show in one last way, you can check out NordVPN. This helps hide your IP address. It encrypts your browsing data and has a whole bunch of other added benefits like unlocking Geoblog content. So if you can't access some certain content in your area, you can just simply change your country of origin via NordVPN. And boom, it is unlocked for you. If you click the link below or you go to the website and use the code BTC sessions, all one word. You save 81% and it ends up only being about $3.49 a month, which is pretty damn good. So with that, I will sign off.

Starting point is 00:19:10 Thank you guys again for being here and I will see you next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Pump, Kraken Compliance Squeeze, Tether Liquid Migration EP004

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