BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Stimulus Check Gains, Blockstream Satellite 2.0, myNode Update EP053

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

SUPPORT THE SHOW: Visit LEDN to check out getting a bitcoin-backed loan https://platform.ledn.io/join/0a00cca3dd61dea5909c95cd41f41685 Get NORDVPN to protect your online privacy. 75% off a 3 year https://nordvpn.org/btcsessions Get Wasabi wallet and enjoy your privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Wasabi Tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQHAzSckK0 Check out my website for private bookings: http://btcsessions.ca/ Join my Telegram channel! https://t.me/btc_sessions If you value my work and would like to send me a tip, they are always appreciated! LIGHTNING tips: https://tippin.me/@BTCsessions SHOW RESOURCES: Marty Bent from TFTC reflects on all that’s been built around Bitcoin throughout the bear market https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-731/ BTC Developer Activity hits monthly all time high https://decrypt.co/27719/bitcoin-developer-activity-hits-record-high Bought Bitcoin with stimulus? You’re up 35% https://decrypt.co/27661/stimulus-checks-spent-on-bitcoin-are-now-up-35 https://twitter.com/BitcoinStimulus Blockstream satellite 2.0 + Satellite Kits https://blockstream.com/2020/05/04/en-announcing-blockstream-satellite-2/ https://store.blockstream.com/product-category/satellite_kits/ New myNode update 0.2.05 https://twitter.com/cpc464_a500/status/1257567763624853504 P2EP on Blue Wallet coming – here’s a preview https://twitter.com/lukechilds/status/1257355521193058308 Learn about the Bitcoin futures Basis on the BTSE Academy https://www.academy.btse.com/post/bitcoin-futures-basis

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC sessions and this is your daily session. Hodel their Bitcoin. Alright, before we dive in, of course I want to give a shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a few different things. They've got a Bitcoin savings account where you can earn interest on your Bitcoin. They've of course got Bitcoin backed loans. This is the first thing I ever used. And this is where you can use your Bitcoin as a cloud.

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And this uses the same loan mechanism to buy more Bitcoin, effectively doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. So if you want to check them out, there's a link in the show notes down below. And if you use that link to get a Bitcoin back loan, they'll actually pitch you 50 bucks worth of Bitcoin for free. And secondly, we've got NordVPN. I use this all the time on my computer and my phone. And what it does is it hides your IP address. It encrypts your browsing data.

And it has a bunch of other added benefits like unlocking geo-blocked content. So you can leak a lot of data when it comes to, using Bitcoin, of course, on the blockchain itself, but also in relation to your IB address, which can give away your exact geographic location, which is not ideal when you're transacting in Bitcoin. So I use NORVPN in concert with other privacy solutions to kind of help hide some of that data from prying eyes. So if you want to check them out, there's a link in the show notes. And there's a deal right now where you can get it for about $3.49 a month. And that covers a whole bunch of different devices that you can use it on. With that, let's dive into the news.

So we are rolling up on the halving like nothing else. We are six days away. So in six days, we will see the block reward. The newly created Bitcoin that is rewarded to miners be cut in half from 12 and a half coins every 10 minutes to 6.25 coins every 10 minutes. And there's been a lot of interest. People are searching. This was shared by Hodlanaut here on Twitter earlier today, a few hours ago. And yeah, you can see on this chart here, Google searches for Bitcoin halving. And you can see that the previous one is completely dwarved. It looks like it's maybe 10% of the search volume for the having last time around. And we're not even there yet. We've still got a week, so I'm sure there's going to be a lot of more people searching. So it just

kind of shows how much more shoved into the mainstream consciousness this has been in the past four years. So pretty incredible to see. Now, Marty Bent over at Tales from the Crypt wrote an excellent issue of the Bent today where he's reflecting on the bear market and kind of everything that's happened over the last four years, how much we've grown since the mania of 2017 and he gets some pretty good points here. It's it's it's humbling to look back and see how far things have come since 2017 and how much more deserving of the value that people have decided to place in Bitcoin it has become. And so some of the things that he touches on is of course lightning network and everything being built out there to allow for more transactional instant transactions

of small value for very, very cheap as well as is building cool applications on top of it like messaging apps to displace things like we chat and WhatsApp. He talks about the proliferation of nodes, which we'll be talking about in a bit, some updates there, but things like the Nodle, MyNode, Razpy Blitz, basically ways that you can set up a software stack and be completely self-sovereign when it comes to running the Bitcoin protocol and not having to rely on anybody else to provide you that information. He talks about privacy assurances and how Bitcoin, the base layer itself, is really not that private. But there's so many options starting to come out like Samurai and Join Market and Wasabi Wallet and Pay to End point,

things that obfuscate the transactions on the base layer to make it very, very difficult to understand who owns what. And those continue to be built out. He talks about BTC pay a server. That was non-existent before. and this was basically created because of the shit sandwich that BitPay became trying to hobble Bitcoin, but in doing so, it's kind of spelled its own obsolescence. And so Nicholas Doria created BTC Pay Server, and now we have a decentralized open source alternative to accept payments in Bitcoin in a way that cannot be clamped down upon.

We've also seen a ton of new on-rams created, especially those ones that are Bitcoin-only. We see satellite networks that are helping, and we're going to touch on that again in a moment, but we see satellite networks encircling the globe, allowing people to access the Bitcoin network without internet. And then also we have a lot of people that are just doing the right thing in helping out these open-source developers and contributing to them so that they can focus where their focus needs to be on building Bitcoin. And it's, again, this article, kudos to you, Marty. Thank you for writing this because I've got to say it is very easy to forget how much has been done in the past few years.

And this was an excellent summary. Now, moving on, and actually, I guess in the same vein, Bitcoin developer activity has hit a record high ahead of the having. So Bitcoin Core, the main implementation of the Bitcoin software, had 510 commits in April alone, and this is far ahead of any other month in Bitcoin's existence. And so a commit is essentially when you upload code to the GitHub repository to submit an idea for the Bitcoin Protocol. So again, the most commits in a single month, there are over 800 contributors to the Bitcoin

Protocol. So super impressive to see. Now, there's some speculation as to why. this is, and some people are saying, hey, maybe it's because during the coronavirus lockdown programmers are lacking other distractions. Probably a good guess. Anyway, so let's move on there. So it's a little bit, a couple of weeks after the stimulus checks went out in the US, and stimulus checks had they been spent on Bitcoin are now up 35%. So when the stimulus checks were going out, we saw a lot of people announcing on Twitter and other places that they were either going to splurge their

stimulus checks on guns, tigers, that's relation to Tiger King on Netflix, or Bitcoin. And we even had Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, which I'm not a fan of Coinbase, but still fun to see this information, he showed basically a fourfold increase in the number of Bitcoin purchases on his exchange worth exactly $1,200 at the same time as the stimulus check on the day they were handed out. Yeah. So obviously, somebody was using their stimulus check to buy Bitcoin. So yeah, there's been a return of 35% since that point in time. The basic price on April 13th when those went out was $6,674 were now around the $9,000 mark. And actually, somebody even created a Twitter account called $1,200 stimulus is now worth.

And all it does is tweet out prices and the amount of dollars that your stimulus check is now worth had you converted it to Bitcoin. It's only been around for, I don't know what it says April. So we're only a few days into May. I'm not sure exactly when this was started, but it's hilarious. It's already got 4,000 followers. So, yeah, I just find this super funny. Now, in Marty's article, he was talking about the Blockstream satellite network,

and this essentially gives people access to be able to download and sync a Bitcoin node with zero access to the internet while they've upgraded their network to version 2. So this means that users can now synchronize a full Bitcoin node without an internet connection. Initially, you needed the initial synchronization to be done via an actual internet connection, and then you would be able to kind of keep up with the satellite connection. No more. You don't need internet at all. And it's also, Blockstream is also launching specialized satellite receivers and dishes, so they're going to get satellite kits out.

So the satellite project hopes to answer the question, what good is Bitcoin if the internet fails, which is obviously quite good because it doesn't need it anymore. The startup uses teleports around the world to beam the Bitcoin blockchain data to six geostationary satellites around Earth. These satellites then broadcast the data to almost all populated regions on Earth. So pretty impressive there. Now, I'm super stoked to try out one of these. The way that it works, wrong page here, the way that it works is essentially you can get a basic kit or a satellite pro kit. Now, I should note that you can also do this without these kits. You can build this on your own. You would just need like a satellite receiver that you have already. And then you would need to, you'd need to do a little bit of coding here. But here they kind of sell. I'll send you something out of the box. The basic kit and the Pro Kit and the Pro Kit and the way that this works is you can also get,

you need to get a separate antenna kit. You can get the flat panel from Blockstream or you can use like your own, again, your own satellite. But the Pro Kit is to go to multiple devices in the same network, whereas the basic just goes to one. There's a few other differences here. I won't get into the technicals of it, but I don't know, pretty cool stuff that I would like to try out.

And also I think pretty good marketing from blog stream because I don't think they were anticipating so much interest in this when they first launched the network. But it got a lot of buzz all over Twitter and then people started asking for satellite kits. And I mean, all they're doing here is just kind of catering to demand. So, but yeah, you can literally get Bitcoin block information from space now. Well, you could before, but now it's getting easier and easier. So kudos to block stream. I think this is a fantastic thing.

And again, just another point to shut people down when they say, well, it's not going to work if there's no internet. Yes, it is. Okay, moving on. And again, a lot of this is in the same vein of Marty's letter here. but updated version of MyNode BTC. I've, of course, done a walkthrough tutorial to set up MyNode and how to connect some of your wallets with it.

But they have a new update. One thing that I really like, they've got the countdown to the block having. They've upgraded LND to version 0.10.0. They've upgraded Loop to version 0.6.0. A loop helps with liquidity and helps you loop around funds without having to start close and restart, reopen channels. Join market to 0.6.2.

Upgrade LND managed to version 0.10.1. They update Whirlpool client to version 0.10.5, which has to do with Samurai WorldPool and mixing. They added links between settings and status pages and some other minor bug fixes and improvements. So kudos to my note of BTC. Again, I can't say it enough, but these guys keep on iterating and adding more stuff every single week. And super impressive to see the pace at which they implement new features. And speaking of which, I saw this drop just yesterday,

and this is a sneak peek of BTC pay server and Blue Wallet doing Pay to Endpoint, which is another privacy-enhancing version of coin join that is indecipherable from a regular transaction. So you can now use pay to endpoint or you will be able to use pay to endpoint from Blue Wallet to BTC Pay or any other pay to endpoint enabled wallet. And what this does is when you go to spend money at a BTC pay related merchant using your Blue Wallet, what it will do is it will send the initial transaction. Then BTC Pay takes that transaction and adds money to it so that nobody on the outside looking in knows how much was initially contributed by the merchant versus the person buying the goods.

After that, all those funds are mixed together. And then each of you take what you need. You take your change and the merchant takes their change, also your payment. And so you never actually see the real payment amount anywhere in there. So really, really cool to see and keep iterating on this. This is super awesome. Cudos to BTCPA and Blue Wallet on this. And then I wanted to bring up this Bitsy Academy article that one of our writers did for us just recently. I found this super interesting because it was stuff that I'm just not really all that familiar. So Bitcoin futures, essentially you can bet on the future price of where Bitcoin will be. And you essentially are saying you will buy it at that price or you will sell it at that price in the future.

And so what's what this article does is it takes a look at the futures basis and what it tells you. And the basis is the difference between the current price and what the projected price on these futures markets is in aggregate. And so you can be in contango or you can be in backwardation depending on whether you're above or below the current price in the futures markets. And it also talks about how this relates to miners, how they can kind of hedge any downside risk that they may have or take advantage of a much higher futures price to lock in those gains at the current time. And it also just kind of shows how it can impact the price and when it could signal a reversal, either in the short term or the long term. So very interesting information here, and it goes through some historical examples to, reiterate some of that. So I will link to that down below. Hopefully you find it interesting and useful. But yeah, that's about that. Guys, I'm going to wrap up here. Thank you so much for

watching and or listening. If you're here on YouTube, of course, hit like, subscribe, and share. But also if you're on YouTube, be sure to check out the other video-related platforms that I'm on because I can't necessarily trust YouTube to always get my stuff out there. So I'm on my Facebook page. I live stream on Twitter via Periscope. I'm also on D-Live. I do upload to library and I'm on Twitch as well.

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