BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Scammer Hacks Twitter, CashApp Nascar Sponsor, Zap LN Raises $3.5M EP080

Starting point is 00:00:13 Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up everyone? I am Ben with the BTC sessions and this is your daily session. Before we dive in, of course, got to give a big shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a whole bunch of different services. Now I've been using these guys for well over a year now. The first thing I ever used of theirs was their Bitcoin-backed loans where you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to to get a Canadian or US dollar loan. So in my case, I was in a pinch, I needed some dollars,

Starting point is 00:00:55 but I didn't wanna sell my Bitcoin for two reasons. That's a taxable event. And two, I was worried I'd have to buy back in at a higher price point. So I was able to deposit my Bitcoin, get a loan to my bank account within 24 hours, and as soon as I paid back that loan, I got back the exact same amount of Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:01:14 So they've also got some other offerings here. They've got their Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts, and they just up the interest rates on those to a maximum of 8.8%. And then they've got their B2X offering. And what this does is uses the same loan mechanism to instantly buy you more Bitcoin, which effectively doubles your Bitcoin on the spot. So if you want to check these guys out, and I do recommend you check them out, there is a link in the show notes down below.

Starting point is 00:01:40 And if you use that link and opt to get a loan, they'll give you $50 worth of Bitcoin for free. And secondly, if you want to help out the show in another way, and you have not yet gotten yourself a hardware wallet, well, you can help out the show by clicking the link and picking yourself up a ledger. Even if you opt not to get a ledger, I do really recommend that you look into hardware solutions

Starting point is 00:02:03 to secure your Bitcoin. I, of course, have the ledger NanoX, and I do have the Ledger NanoS, and I use them for different purposes, and lots of fun things, which we'll get into later in the show, something I've been playing around with lately. But yeah, you can check them out.

Starting point is 00:02:20 They've got a whole bunch of deals if you click the links in the show notes. With that, let's dive into the news. Now, unfortunately, I recorded before all this happened yesterday. So I'm covering it today. There was a massive Twitter hack. A whole bunch of prominent figures had their, I guess, Twitter handles commandeered by an unknown individual who then perpetrated a Bitcoin scam and got people to send Bitcoin to an address for illicit means, basically he wanted to steal Bitcoin from a whole bunch of different people.

Starting point is 00:02:54 So I'm going to read a little bit from the BBC here. It says billionaire is Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates are among many prominent U.S. figures targeted by hackers on Twitter in an apparent Bitcoin scam. The official accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kanye West also requested donations in cryptocurrency. Everyone is asking me to give back, a tweet from Bill Gates account said, you send $1,000, I send you back $2,000. Twitter said it was a coordinated attack targeting its employees with access to internal systems and tools.

Starting point is 00:03:29 We know they, the hackers, used this access to take control of many highly visible, including verified accounts, and tweet on their behalf, the company said in a series of tweets. It added that significant steps had been taken to limit access to such internal systems and tools while the company's investigation was ongoing. The firm also blocked users from being able to tweet Bitcoin wallet addresses for the time being. So some examples of these tweets that came out, Joe Biden saying, I am giving back to the community. All Bitcoin sent to the address below will be sent back doubled. If you send $1,000, I will send $2,000. Only doing this for 30 minutes. Same message from Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, all this different stuff happening here.

Starting point is 00:04:15 Yeah, and Jack from Twitter, Jack Dorsey, he did tweet out later. He said, tough day for us at Twitter. We all feel terrible. This happened. We're diagnosing and we'll share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened. Love to our teammates working hard to make this right. So essentially, what initially people thought was just, oh, some passwords got cracked and there wasn't two-factor authentication and other security measures used on these Twitter accounts,

Starting point is 00:04:50 it was actually definitely from the back end. So that seems to suggest that it was internal or a rogue employee or whatever, but it was not the fault of the individuals who owned the accounts, but rather the processes in the background governing the Twitter infrastructure. Now, with this came a load of bad takes, as always it is when anything negative happens with Bitcoin. Let's note that when something illicit happens with dollars, you never see it, you never see it denoted as a dollar scam or a U.S. dollar scam or whatever. But you do hear Bitcoin scam in major headlines like this on the BBC. See, anyways, one of the bad takes I wanted to note,

Starting point is 00:05:44 this guy Josh Barrow, I don't even know who he is, but apparently he has quite a few followers. He says, you know, we wouldn't have to worry about this sort of thing if cryptocurrency was illegal. I'm not kidding. Crypto has no socially beneficial uses and quite a few socially harmful uses. Why is it allowed?

Starting point is 00:06:04 So, I mean, again, such a terrible tank. Number one, we would, wouldn't have to worry about this if cryptocurrency was illegal. Why wouldn't you? Because it's, you can't stop it just because it's illegal. It still functions. You can still utilize it. That's like, I mean, scamming people and stealing their money is illegal and it still happened. Before this, before cryptocurrency existed, before Bitcoin existed, there were other scams utilizing things like Apple gift cards and other major gift cards where people would say, okay, you owe you, oh, taxes, you have to go out and buy a bunch of Apple gift cards and then take pictures of them

Starting point is 00:06:46 and send them in, which sounds ridiculous, but people would still fall for it. It sounds about as ridiculous as somebody saying, send me $1,000 and I'll send you back $2,000. But besides the fact, again, just terrible takes. But I gleaned from this and I tweeted about it, I said, revel in the fact that we are so ridiculously early. Imagine the total lack of understanding. required to have this kind of a take. This is how most Normies, or individuals that have not delved into Bitcoin whatsoever, currently think. Again, just the separation from how any of this works is quite astounding. And again, in the plethora of bad takes that we got, of course, Peter Schiff had to come out of the woodwork for this one.

Starting point is 00:07:34 His tweet, good God. It looks like all verified Twitter accounts have been hacked by someone running a hashtag, Bitcoin scam. There we go again. For once, not being verified has its advantages. I wonder if this is a harbringer of Bitcoin itself being hacked. Better to play it safe and just buy gold. Only Peter Schiff could look at somebody saying, hacking a Twitter account saying, send me Bitcoin as, is Bitcoin hacked? Yeah. What I gleaned, what I gleaned, from this is that the individual, rather than causing a global catastrophe, wanted to actually accumulate Bitcoin. Who is it? Citizen Bitcoin on Twitter. Actually, I'm going to look it up right now.

Starting point is 00:08:27 But he had one of the best memes that I saw come out of this entire thing. It was the typical jealous girlfriend meme. Where is it? Tell me he didn't take it down. Oh, there we go. I love this one. I think it's so funny. Twitter hacker looking at accumulating Bitcoin over starting World War III. Again, A game on the memes. Brady, solid work.

Starting point is 00:08:56 I really enjoyed this one. And then again, we had Niraj tweeting out scammers who have taken over high-profile accounts using the hide tweet feature to hide replies saying it's a same. scam. And the reason I find this interesting is that this measure was rolled out, if you're unfamiliar, on Twitter as a way for people that didn't like the replies to their tweets to be able to hide them. And so the scammers took advantage of this feature to be able to censor, and they actually censored the people that were trying to say, nobody do this. It's a scam. They were able to remove those replies, or at least hide them so nobody saw. And, and, you know, and, you know, they were trying to say,

Starting point is 00:09:40 And potentially, this contributed to more people losing money because there were no warnings available. So it just kind of goes to show that when you allow for censorship, you can censor the bad or the abrasive things that come across Twitter. But you can also censor the people that may have something valuable to contribute. Now, through all of this, however, only $120,000, although I think it's a little bit more at this point, only $120,000 in Bitcoin was actually received by the scammer and stolen. So you can actually track the wallet address if you go look it up. I'm not going to bring it up on here.

Starting point is 00:10:25 But yeah, basically there wasn't a whole lot of Bitcoin scam given that they had access to like hundreds of millions. of eyeballs by commandeering all of these accounts. Now, part of this is probably because a large number of people that saw those tweets didn't have immediate access to Bitcoin. They weren't onboarded. They would have had to sign up, provide some sort of KYC, buy the Bitcoin, and then send it. Then I would say a large number of people who actually hide, hold of their own Bitcoin, obviously are not going to fall for this by and large because of the ethos of don't trust

Starting point is 00:11:06 verify. If you're holding your own Bitcoin, you have hardware wallets, you've been around for a while, you're less likely to fall for something like this. And then the third contributing factors of this, oddly enough, even though that this is a function of centralization being malicious in a way or allowing for malicious activity, centralization may have actually saved some newcomers. This from decrypt. On the other hand, centralized exchanges were able to play part in preventing victims from losing their money, which may have kept losses to a minimum. At least three crypto exchanges, including Huyobi, OK Exchange, and Coinbase blocked their customers from transferring money to the scammer's Bitcoin address. In some sense, centralized exchanges saved the day

Starting point is 00:11:50 after a centralized company got hacked. Yeah, so I mean, there's a give and take with this. some people just they'll go on a coinbase and they'll just park their money there and if they haven't done their research then yeah they may have been saved from this particular scam they may not have been saved from investing in all of the other shit coins that coinbase offers but I guess it's a give and take relationship anyways let me know did you see these tweets what did you see did you see any other terrible takes from the whole thing let me know Moving on, Cash App, and I guess in the same vein is still Jack Dorsey here, prints a Bitcoin logo on a NASCAR race car. So a short story here, I'm not going to dive into this too much, but Cash App signed a multi-year sponsorship deal with Dorella Bubba Wallace's NASCAR team. Bitcoin is detailed on Bubba's signature car as part of the sponsorship.

Starting point is 00:12:47 The first race on Sunday could garner viewership of over $3 million. Now, a couple things about this. The actual Bitcoin logo on it is in green and looks a lot like the Bitcoin Cash logo, unfortunately. But I guess that, I mean, Cash app is green, the logo for them. But yeah, the branding probably could have been a little bit better in and around Bitcoin. But hey, I guess what are you going to do? Now, the other thing is that Bubba Wallace, if that sounds familiar, thus because he was the center of something a little bit controversial the last month or two

Starting point is 00:13:27 in the wake of all of the the black lives matter drama and protests and everything supposedly at the time he said that he found a noose in his garage of his his NASCAR team and thought it to be some sort of a hate crime but upon further investigation by the FBI they found it to just be a regular door pull to close the door when it's up. And again, it seems to not have been any sort of a race-related scare tactic or anything like this. It was just, I think just people being on edge and looking too deeply at relatively mundane things that were in no way meant to be attacks. So anyways, I've seen some people on Twitter saying that this Cash app sponsorship with this particular NASCAR team can be seen as a little bit of

Starting point is 00:14:30 virtue signaling on part of Cash app. I dare I see I somewhat agree with that because it seems suspected that that would be the NASCAR team that Cashab decides to, I don't know. What do you guys think? Do you think it's Virgie signaling to sponsor this particular? I mean, they're going to have sponsors no matter what. They are in the media. So, I mean, is it just the best interest of a brand to get on board with somebody who happens to be in the middle of the media frenzy right now?

Starting point is 00:15:08 Maybe. Maybe it's a good expenditure of funds. I don't know. Maybe it's just capitalism. Anyways, let's move on. yesterday we were talking about PayPal and Wealth Simple adding Bitcoin. Well, Revolut, they previously allowed UK users, and I believe people throughout Europe to buy and sell Bitcoin as well as Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:15:29 while they're adding that functionality for U.S. customers now. It is, however, well, I'll just read a little bit from the decrypt article here. Revolut initially launched in the States back in March, but until today, only offered Fiat banking service. Now customers in 49 states can purchase store and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum through the Revolut app. Cryptocurrency stored in the Revolut app currently can't be sent to external wallets, which means it is 100% custodial. You're gaining exposure to the price fluctuations, but you have no way of really verifying that

Starting point is 00:16:03 the Bitcoin is actually there. You have no way of actually pulling the Bitcoin off of the app. This seems to be the case also with Wealth Simple. And it's also not insured. I don't know about Revolut here. But PayPal will see if that's the case. I would not be surprised if that was the case initially. But yeah, we'll see.

Starting point is 00:16:27 Anyways, I think overall it's a positive thing to get more eyeballs seeing Bitcoin. And if the customers demand it, then companies like this will allow you to eventually withdraw to your own Bitcoin wallet. And I suspect that to be the case in a lot of this because this stuff is going to have to work with worldwide infrastructure. And if Bitcoin becomes relatively ubiquitous around the world over the next, I don't know, decade, couple of decades, well, instances like this where people are running maybe BTC pay server as a merchant and they accept Bitcoin directly, if you have a Revolut account and you want to pay a merchant that's using BTZ pay, you can't do like a bank-to-bank transfer with Revolut with the exposure to Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:17:14 You need to spend actual Bitcoin. And so my guess is that these services that right now are custodial will allow actual Bitcoin transfers as well in the future. But hey, we'll see. Now in more kind of mainstream financial news, Visa partner Zapp, if you're unfamiliar, Zap, the Lightning Network wallet created by Jack Mallors, as well as, Strike Lightning app. They raised $3.5 million to expand Bitcoin payments. So ZAP is a relatively easy to use Lightning Network wallet where you can set up channels,

Starting point is 00:17:52 everything like that, whereas strike is more of a consumer and merchant facing app where a merchant can be accepting Bitcoin, whereas somebody using the strike app may not even realize that they're using Bitcoin. So the reason that this was invented in this instance is Jack Mallor's parents are involved in the cannabis industry. And right now, it's virtually impossible to get any form of banking in the U.S. in that industry. So they're basically, even though it's legal, they're treated as criminals and have to deal heavily in cash, which incurs all other kinds of fees. You have to have security for cash. You have to have armored vehicles to transport it. Where do you hold that?

Starting point is 00:18:37 Do you have security deposit box? It's crazy what you have to do, the hoops that you have to jump through. So with this, users are able to utilize strike and instantly buy, send, and then convert back to dollars using Bitcoin Lightning Network as a payments rail. So I'm going to read a little bit from Forbes here. While Mallor's idea of a payments network for Bitcoin is nothing new, Chicago-based Zab has distinguished itself by being one of the more sophisticated online. operations using a new platform built on top of Bitcoin called the Lightning Network that can instantly confirm settlement instead of the 10 minutes it normally takes. In addition to being

Starting point is 00:19:16 faster, the Lightning Network sidesteps the fees associated with Bitcoin, which are much cheaper than traditional fees when sending large amounts, but have been proven to be prohibitive to people looking to use tiny amounts of Bitcoin in daily transactions. Quote from Jack says, one of the early use cases for us is content creators. journalists or video game streamers or even adult film actors and actresses put up profiles backed by our infrastructure and anyone in the world can tip them, Mallor says. By moving the transaction off chain and reducing the fees associated with smaller transactions, Mallors believes he'll have an edge over a rising tide of more mature cryptocurrency startups, including cryptocurrency giant Coinbase, also working with Visa. Another quote, our users today don't even know we're using Bitcoin when they're using dollars. It's just kind of like we've melted it into the background.

Starting point is 00:20:11 I think tens of millions of people will be using this stuff in the next few years, and that just takes a little bit of capital. So the amazing thing that I think we're seeing here with Strike and Zab, and I'm really hoping that these seed rounds will help them accomplish this, is we're seeing this kind of inversion of the technology. And what I mean is when the Internet first started, it had to piggyback on the existing rails of the phone networks in order to send this data. And the phone networks were not built for this type of infrastructure.

Starting point is 00:20:44 Eventually, the internet built up its own infrastructure to the point where it was so efficient that the phone networks flipped and started using the internet infrastructure in order to place phone calls and communications. I think we're going to start to see this with Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been, by and large, trying to piggyback on some of the traditional rails for transfers. So you buy Bitcoin, you want to send it around the world because it is still cheaper and quicker to use a Bitcoin transaction to get money around the world quickly. But then you have to convert that Bitcoin back to local currency. Well, what we're seeing now is Zapp does exactly the opposite.

Starting point is 00:21:28 It's actually utilizing Bitcoin to speed up the legacy financial system, and people don't even realize that they're using Bitcoin. They see dollars in this bank account going to this bank account, and it happens quickly in an instant utilized through the Bitcoin Lightning Network. So it's kind of cool to see that inversion taking place in real time, and I think this is the first inkling of it. Now, the last couple things I wanted to touch on here, well, I guess kind of one thing in general, is, You guys know that I'm a big fan of my node. Those unfamiliar, it's basically a software stack that allows you to interact with Bitcoin on many different levels. On the main chain, using Lightning, using BTC Pay server as a merchant, using privacy features, a lot of different stuff here. And so I've been diving into a little bit of something called Spectre and Caravan.

Starting point is 00:22:23 So Spector is a kind of a front end for Bitcoin Core, which is, the most utilized software for using Bitcoin wallets and confirming Bitcoin transactions. Basically running a full node, running a full copy of the Bitcoin blockchain, a full record of every transaction. So you're verifying everything yourself. Well, Spector allows you to import various wallets and create multi-signature. So what multi-signature does is it allows you to use a whole bunch of different devices, Let's say I want my Ledger Nano X, my Ledger Nano S, and my Cold Card, or Trezor.

Starting point is 00:23:05 I don't have one in front of me, but besides the fact, let's say I want to use all of those wallets and I want to combine them and I want to require at least two of these three devices to approve a transaction. What I can do is when I set that up, I have an address that I can accept to without needing these. but if I want to send money out, let's say it's for long-term savings and I'm worried about somebody, you know, breaking into my home or whatever. What I can do is I can have each of these devices in different locations. So not in my home, but maybe one in my home and one in another person's home and maybe one in a totally different city.

Starting point is 00:23:47 However, I want to do it. And what can be done is that I'll need to get access to at least two of the three of these to send that transaction. So what that does is it greatly increases my security. If somebody wants to break into my home and steal my Bitcoin, well, guess what? You should have luck because you've got one of three keys and you need two of them. So unless you're going to cart me around across the globe to go get those other keys, tough shit, you're not getting the Bitcoin. And I think that this is an excellent tool.

Starting point is 00:24:20 It is still very early on with this kind of stuff as far as making it accessible to all. are semi-custodial solutions where you'll have a company may hold a key for you. But this Spector one created by Crypto Advance is one where you can set it up all on your own. Now, I was playing with it a little bit via my node. I ran into some issues, things not updating and uploading correctly. But the interface does look relatively easy to navigate if you're, I'd say, kind of like a mediocre bit corner and have a general idea what you're doing. It's not a bad. Now, in doing that, I also figured, hey, well, let's take a look at Caravan, which is also on the MyNode software stack here. So you have Caravan down here. And this one was quite easy. I was surprised.

Starting point is 00:25:11 It took me two seconds to set up a two of two because they don't support cold card yet, but unchanged. Let's see that happen. But just with the two ledgers that I had here, it took me like a minute to set it up. Basically, you go in, you hit the drop-down, you choose what you're using, you hit ledger, and then it'll say plug in your ledger, unlock it, and open the Bitcoin app, and then you hit import, and you just got to confirm it on your device, and then you do it again with another device, and then another device, or depending what you're doing, maybe I want two of two, so I would only do two of here. I'd say two of three is better

Starting point is 00:25:55 because if you lose one, then you're not screwed. But besides the fact, I was able to set this up quite quickly and export all the information as a backup just in case, super simple. So I'm pretty happy about this. I will be making a video about this probably pretty quickly here.

Starting point is 00:26:14 There was some issues before with it, but Mino did an update, and it seems to be working well now. So I will be doing that. And I'm quite excited about it. So I'll have that out to you as soon as humanly possible. With that, I'm going to wrap up, you guys. Thank you so much for watching and or listening. If you are here on YouTube, do hit like, subscribe, and share.

Starting point is 00:26:37 Please do share. It's always great to get new people watching the show. Now, if you want to help out the show in another way, you can do a few things. You can hit up the sponsors or affiliate down below. That was Ledden. and that was the ledger. So if you go check out Ledin, you can get 50 bucks for free. If you go check out Ledger, of course,

Starting point is 00:26:57 you get that great security, and you would also be helping out the show. You can also find me on other platforms. I'm on Facebook, D-Live, Twitch, all that stuff. And I'm audio only on the podcast. So if you prefer to listen and go, be sure to check me out there on Anchor. And then besides the fact,

Starting point is 00:27:15 if you really loved what you saw, you can drop me a Bitcoin Lightning Network tip. at my tippin.me page, that is tipin t-i-p-p-in.me-slash-at-B-T-C sessions. And with that, I am out, have yourselves a wonderful day, a wonderful evening, and I will see you next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Scammer Hacks Twitter, CashApp Nascar Sponsor, Zap LN Raises $3.5M EP080

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