BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Up $1200, LNurl Simplifies Lightning, Ripple CTO Booted From YouTube EP051

Starting point is 00:00:08 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, quick shout out to sponsors of the show, ledden.com. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a few different things. They have Bitcoin savings accounts where you can earn interest on your Bitcoin. They've got Bitcoin backed loans. This is where you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to obtain a Canadian or U.S. dollar

Starting point is 00:00:48 loan, which is the first thing I ever used to theirs. I was in a pinch. I needed my hands on dollars and I didn't want to sell. It felt like it would have been a bad time. And so I was able to park my Bitcoin in a dedicated address, which I could audit 24-7. I got a loan within 24 hours. And when I paid it back, I got back all of my original Bitcoin. And finally, they've got their B2X offering. This uses the same loan mechanism to instantly buy you more Bitcoin, effectively doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. So if you want to check out any of these, 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 give you 50 bucks worth of Bitcoin for free.

Starting point is 00:01:23 And secondly, for you Canadians out there, this has been my go-to spot for buying Bitcoin as of late. This is Coinberry.com. And excellent place for picking up Bitcoin. I really like it because the web interface and the mobile app are particularly easy to navigate, but also a couple other things I really like about Coinberry. Number one, the speed of funding. The e-transfers are really, really fast. I've only ever had to wait, I think, 20 minutes in my experience. It can vary based on your bank. But then outside of that, I also really like their dollar cost averaging features where you can set amounts and intervals to regularly buy so you can take the emotion out of buying Bitcoin. So if you want to check them out, there's a link down below. And actually, if you use it,

Starting point is 00:02:05 they have a killer deal where after your first $50 purchase, you get $20 for free. So pretty solid, do check them out. And with that, let's dive into the news. So, you know, I got to mention price here, even though God knows what it'll be at by the time, uh, people start to watch this. Um, Bitcoin has smashed through resistance. Uh, we were kind of bumping up close to 8K yesterday while that is in the rearview mirror. Uh, once we smashed through that, we just went on a monster tear. Um, at this point, even this article here is out of date. Um, it's, so we, we smash through. We have now been, if we take a look here, um, at this point, um, um, at this article, um, um, it's, so we smash through. We've been up as high as, let's see, what was the high here?

Starting point is 00:02:51 In the 8,900s, just above the 8,900s, depending on what exchange you're looking at, sitting in the 8800s right now, but we've been fluctuating. We've been dipping down to the 86s. But pretty wild day all around. And you can see it just as soon as we peaked above that kind of 70, high 70, around 7,800, we just went through this crazy, a single day candle. And we went from 7,700 all the way up to 8,900. So a $1,200 single day candle.

Starting point is 00:03:26 And this is US dollars that I'm looking at right now. So pretty wild. Again, expect volatility. Shit's getting crazy. So, and I've got to say to those of you that were shorting. Oh, my God. My Twitter feed was just flooded with people getting, liquidated, people that were betting that Bitcoin would go down, it going the opposite direction

Starting point is 00:03:51 and just wiping them out. People lost millions and millions of dollars betting against Bitcoin. So crazy to see myself, I'm, I mean, I said it in the intro, dollar cost average, I'm a big fan of it. It's much easier to take the emotion out of Bitcoin when you just kind of calmly, gradually accumulate it if you think that it's going to succeed in the long run, which is my perspective. And I much prefer that than trying to time the market. It's my opinion that time in the market far out ways timing the market, especially when you're trying to trade against others. It can be incredibly difficult unless you're in the top 1% of people on many of the these trading platforms. But to each their own, some people like to roll the dice. So if that's,

Starting point is 00:04:49 if that's you, then hopefully you didn't get totally fucking wrecked just this past 24 hours. I know there's a lot of happy Bitcoiners in my Twitter feed right now. Anyways, who knows, who knows what could happen next? Again, clearly we're kind of bumping up against the 9K. It's a psychological level. There's some resistance there. Who knows if we'll, blast through it right away and move on to 10 or whether we'll be kind of bouncing back down for a little bit and trying to eke through that range just like we were with the high 7,000s. But either way, exciting day. Exciting day. It's been hard not to be glued to the charts all day. So I wanted to touch on this. This is an article out of CoinDesk and they're talking about simplifying lightning

Starting point is 00:05:41 payments. So Lightning Network launched on Mainnet in, I believe, March of 2018. And at the time it launched, I've got to say it was already way more difficult than it is now. It's much easier to navigate. And part of it is because of new advancements in Lightning technology that are being implemented on many wallets. Now, the one in question here for this article, they are talking about LNURL. So I'm just going to read a little bit about this from this article. It says Lightning Network might be key to the future of Bitcoin, but it still has a long way to go in terms of user experience. To tackle the issue, the standard known as LN URL is quietly gaining ground.

Starting point is 00:06:26 Without much fanfare, it's been adopted in some of the most popular lightning wallets, including ZAP, Phoenix, Breeze, Blue Wallet, Wallet of Satoshi, and dozens of other apps. Sending or receiving lightning payments can often require a bit of setup and a number of Steps LN URL aims to simplify many common actions so that they instead require just a click or a QR scan. So what they're getting at here is Lightning Network because it's set up in payment channels. A lot of the time what you have to do typically or what you did have to do was you had to actually create an invoice for a specific amount which somebody could then scan and fill that invoice

Starting point is 00:07:08 specifically for you, or you could more or less create a zero invoice and then somebody could manually put in the amount. Unfortunately, with that, with that, you stood the chance of somebody kind of scooping up those funds somewhere along the way. So it's not super secure. LNURL kind of does away with that and is actually a lot more secure in being able to bypass the model that. was previously used of creating these invoices and be able to either send direct or withdraw from certain services by again just clicking a button or scanning a QR code. So I'm really glad to see this kind of stuff proliferating. There's a lot of cool stuff being built on Lightning right now, not just in the realm of helping

Starting point is 00:07:58 with the ease of payments, but also decentralized messaging apps and other things like that. In this same vein, and I'm not sure if I'm quite a fan. of this, but just kind of a proof of concept of somebody building something atop lightning. This is another article here from DeCrypt, and they're talking about an app that pays you in Bitcoin for walking, so basically like a step tracker. And so it's called S-Miles. And what it does is it lets you earn Bitcoin for simple everyday activities like walking or playing games. The app is based on the Lightning Network, Bitcoin's second-level scaling solution. And in the future, the functionality

Starting point is 00:08:36 will be expanded to cross-platform messaging app IM Plus. And so the name of it, the S-Miles, actually stands for Satoshi's, Satoshi and Miles, I believe, Sats and Miles. And so what it does is it uses kind of your geo-tracking, you know, tracking apps and location with your, what am I looking at here? It basically uses geo-tracking to track where you're at, how far you've gone, and it rewards you in SATs as like a SATS tracker.

Starting point is 00:09:13 Now, when I'm looking at this, I'm like, okay, well, what's the catch here? I'm guessing it's data collection. So if you're not a fan of people collecting your data, and you definitely may not be, then this might not be for you. They do make some privacy claims here saying that they protect your data, but, you know, you got to take them for their word. you don't necessarily have to sign up with an account, but that's for anything below. The threshold was 10,000 Satoshis, which right now is somewhere between a dollar, bit over a dollar,

Starting point is 00:09:48 depending on whether you're talking Canadian or US dollars. So really, like, don't expect to make a ton of money on something like this, but if you want to experiment and get some free sats, then it could be for you. And hey, you might look back at this day and be going, oh, well, I was walking and I was literally just getting tons of money for next to nothing for literally just walking around, which actually kind of what I've been looking at for some of these apps that have that pay out Satoshi's for doing simple tasks. I've been playing around with some of them. And now I'm looking, you know, over the past couple months where what I was making initially has now doubled since the dip. there in mid-March. So I wanted to move on another article to decrypt, but this is being covered everywhere. So some preamble to this story is the CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, said that they

Starting point is 00:10:44 were going ahead with a lawsuit against YouTube because of the number of scams that were impersonating Ripple CEOs, this Ripple CEO and people from Ripple, these giveaway scams. And we've seen them all over Twitter and other platforms, but the gist of it is they'll put up some old video or they'll rope people in in some way, shape, or form and say, hey, if you send X number of ripple to this address, we will send you X number back, will double or triple or 10x your ripple. And they've done this with Ethereum as well. I don't see as much of it with Bitcoin because I think Bitcoiners are a little, a little they think a little bit more adversarially

Starting point is 00:11:31 we'll just say to put it kindly anyways so there's all these dubious kind of fake accounts on YouTube and they're putting up old videos and old interviews of some of the CEOs and CTOs whatever and then they put

Starting point is 00:11:46 like a banner down below being like hey send money here and then we'll send you back and then obviously they never sent back and they just get away with all the money Well, the solution floated by Ripple was, hey, we'll just sue YouTube because they're not cracking down on this. However, and I saw some people praising them for this, I was not on that side. I was saying this is only going to further hurt anybody trying to get any good information out there, myself included.

Starting point is 00:12:17 I'm sure a lot of you saw that I was booted from YouTube for a period of time, along with other people like Tone Bays. who else do we see somebody another one crypto lark there's there's been a few there's been a good number of people booted from the platform or or very close to being booted from the platform and then reinstated this only serves to exacerbate the problem in that if youtube is worried about losing money they're not gaining that much from having people talk about bitcoin and cryptocurrency on their platform and so why would they even bother dealing with that if they thought that this was a real monetary threat and they would just probably just sweep the topic from the platform, which is more so my worry and the reason that I branched out to so many other platforms,

Starting point is 00:13:05 I just don't want to deal with that shit. And I think that Ripple's lawsuit will only make it worse. And to prove that point, the Ripple CTO was just kicked off YouTube a week after this lawsuit for impersonating himself. So his name is David Schwartz, and he tweeted out weirdly. YouTube just decided to suspend my channel for impersonation. I wonder who they think I was impersonating. And then the quote from them from YouTube was,

Starting point is 00:13:37 please be aware that you are prohibited from accessing, possessing, or creating any other YouTube accounts. Yeah, so that was the same message that I got when my channel was barred. Luckily, through the appeal process, I got it back. But it's, again, and I'm not cheering on. I'm no fan of Ripple. I think it's an absolute garbage project. And I think that the token is totally worthless.

Starting point is 00:14:05 And I think that everything that Ripple has done has been borderline predatory in that they printed 100 billion units out of nothing, held on to most of them, dumped a ton on retail, and continues to do so while feigning decentralization. But that's besides the point. I still don't think this guy should be kicked off YouTube. I think if there's shitty content on YouTube, one, dispute it and point out how it's false, rather than just blanket banning everything right away. But two, in a way, we've been babysat way too long.

Starting point is 00:14:43 Far too few people have critical thinking skills, as evidenced by anybody even owning Ripple in the first place. But besides the point, far too few people think adversarially. They're just sending money to a random QR code just because it's on YouTube. What fuck are you thinking? You need to start being more responsible with your money when it's in a digital form and transactions are irreversible. And so part of me is while I sympathize with people who have been scammed. Obviously, I hate scammers. You know that about me too, and I will screw with the scammers as much as anybody. But people need to start thinking for themselves. And a lot of the time, people do not do that until they've been burned once or twice. And so I just think the whole approach of ripple here

Starting point is 00:15:36 is counterintuitive, and it's going to do more harm than good, because not only will they get the scammers taken off, which the scammers will just create new accounts all the time. Meanwhile, the good content will continue to be removed, and so it'll be harder and harder to get reliable information from solid sources in the future if this goes forward as I think it might. So, anyways, Ripple, what the hell are you doing? Let's move on. Okay, one more article I wanted to touch on here. This is also from the decrypt. U.S. economy sees the sharpest dip since the great recession due to the pandemic.

Starting point is 00:16:15 today the Department of Commerce has officially announced that the U.S. economy shrank 4.8% in the first quarter of the year, the biggest quarterly decline in gross domestic product since the great recession of 2008, according to the Guardian. In order to contain the spread of coronavirus, the lion's share of the U.S. economy was shut down in March, resulting in 26 million people filing for unemployment. So far, I should know. Yet the worst could still be ahead since the shutdown began only in the last part of quarter one. It's kind of incredible when you think about the fact that the economy was running pretty much on a normal footing for over 80% of the first quarter, Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst,

Starting point is 00:16:58 Pierpoint Securities LLC, said on Bloomberg Radio. Now, Kyle Hassett, a senior economic advisor to the White House, has predicted that the American GDP could fall at an annualized rate of 30% in the next quarter, effectively overshadowing by a long way, both the 2008 recession and the Great Depression of 1932. That's when the U.S. economy shrank by 8.4%, which was the Great Recession, and 13%, which was the Great Depression. So they're calling for a 30% annualized drop in GDP for next quarter. They could see that happening when the Great Depression was 13. That is awful.

Starting point is 00:17:43 Worrying. And the other thing that is worrying about this is these stimulus checks and these bailouts seem to be not particularly allocated to good places. Like people are getting their checks and everything like that. They're starting to roll in. Some of them are going to be delayed for months. So people may not see money for an extended period of time. You've got 26 million people out of work. And then you're getting these major public.

Starting point is 00:18:10 publicly traded companies that are coming into money and cheap loans that was meant to go out to small businesses. And it's riling a lot of people up to the point where some of these companies that were on the receiving ends of these loans are being publicly pressured into actually returning the loans, which a bunch of them have already done. And so, yeah, it's, it seems like shit is broken. And the solution by the Fed has just been to spray and pray, you know, turn on the spigots, fire up the money printer, and just kind of see what happens. And it's tough because you get Main Street, which is getting screwed. Everybody's out of work.

Starting point is 00:18:54 They're getting fed breadcrumbs. And then you get trillions of dollars being printed. And anybody who's buddy buddy with anybody in a position of power is getting access to those dollars. And once again, we're kind of seeing the scales. being tipped where money is maybe not ending up where it should be to help people out as best it could. Yeah, so I guess I want to sum it up here with an excellent tweet from Vortex. One of the earliest people I started kind of watching in and around this space and I learned a lot from him, but this was his tweet from this morning. Yes, the system is rigged.

Starting point is 00:19:34 Yes, the bailouts will give billions more to the 1%. Yes, the bailouts will give billions more to the 1%. Yes, the bailouts will give billions more to the corporate entities that have no regard for the human condition. Yes, there's a cabal slash deep state powered by this corruption. Upset? Good. Buy more Bitcoin. So, I love the hyperbole there.

Starting point is 00:19:56 It's great. Anyways, I'm going to wrap up there, guys. Thank you so much for watching and or listening. If you're on YouTube, like, subscribe, share. Always helpful. But also, if you're on YouTube, please do check out my sources from any other platform, as I have obviously alluded to, I can't really trust YouTube at this point. So do try and find my Facebook page or find me on Twitch or follow me on Twitter or D-Live or library

Starting point is 00:20:22 or really any other video platform you can think of. And then also if you're into audio only, check out me on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you consume your podcast, you can find me there. Now, if you don't want to help out this show in another way, you can hit up the sponsors. I mentioned down below. That was Leden and Coinberry. They have some deals for you in the links below. And you can also check out with Sabia Wallet, which helps with your Bitcoin privacy.

Starting point is 00:20:46 A nice desktop wallet for you to check out and coin join. And if you really loved what you saw, hit me up with a lightning network tip at my tippin. dot me page. That's tippin.combe slash at BTC Sessions. And with that, I'm out. Have yourself a wonderful evening. And I'll see you next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Up $1200, LNurl Simplifies Lightning, Ripple CTO Booted From YouTube EP051

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