BTC Sessions - Bitcoin vs The Pentagon, Delete Coinbase AGAIN, Brave Reflink Fail EP067

Starting point is 00:00:13 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, I want to give a shout to two sponsors of the show, leaden.io. I've been using these guys for well over a year now and they've got a whole bunch of different products. The first one is their Bitcoin back loans. This was the first thing I ever used. So ideally if you're in a pinch and you need to get your hands. on dollars but you don't want to sell your Bitcoin. This could be an option for you and it was for me. You dedicate your Bitcoin in a dedicated address that you can audit 24-7. You can get Bitcoin in, or rather you can get dollars into your bank account within 24 hours usually. And when you pay back that dollar amount, you get all of your Bitcoin back. In fact, the exact same UTXO.

Starting point is 00:01:15 Now, they've also got a couple other products. They've got their Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts We can earn up to 7.5% interest annually. And they've got the B2X offering where you use the same loan mechanism to effectively buy more Bitcoin on the spot, doubling your Bitcoin. So if you want to check out any of these, there is a link in the show notes down below. And if you use that link to secure a loan, then they'll give you 50 bucks worth of Bitcoin for free. And secondly, we have coin cards. I've been using these guys for friggin' six years now. Super awesome, especially for those of you that are attempting to kind of make that leap to living on Bitcoin,

Starting point is 00:01:56 or at least like moving away from banking as much as possible, which I am firmly in that camp. And so these guys really simple, they sell gift cards for Bitcoin. They accept Bitcoin on chain and they also accept Lightning. Or if you've got some shit coins you want to dump, then you could also dump them here. Anyways, they've got tons of stuff. They're available in the U.S. and Canada. and you can actually also top up your mobile account with them. Again, can't say enough good things about these guys.

Starting point is 00:02:27 Be sure to check them out in the link down below. With that, let's dive into the news. So, the Pentagon modeled a war game that included a scenario for a military response to a domestic Generation Z rebellion, which happens to include Bitcoin. this is real this is an actual war game that they modeled

Starting point is 00:02:53 and it did indeed include Bitcoin so those of you that don't know there are a lot of exercises where the Pentagon will model different things that could happen and how they might respond to it anyways this was just a portion of their

Starting point is 00:03:11 modeling in this particular document it was only a couple pages but interesting nonetheless so I'm just going to read some excerpts from not only the report itself, but then subsequently from this article on the Intercept here. So, born, rather, both the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Great Recession greatly influenced the attitudes of this generation in the United States and resulted in a feeling of unsettlement and insecurity among Gen Z. Although millennials experienced these

Starting point is 00:03:46 events during their coming of age, Gen Z lived through them as part of their childhood, affecting their realism and worldview. Many found themselves stuck with excessive college debt when they discovered employment options did not meet their expectations. Gen Z are often described as seeking independence and opportunity, but are also among the least likely to believe there is such a thing as the American dream and that the system is rigged against them. Frequently seeing themselves as agents for social change, they crave fulfillment and excitement in their job to help move the world forward. Despite the technological proficiency they possess, Gen Z actually prefer person-to-person contact as opposed to online interaction. They

Starting point is 00:04:35 describe themselves as being involved in their virtual and physical communities and as having rejected excessive consumerism. And so this is jumping forward into the model. They say in early 2025, a cadre of these disaffected zoomers launch a protest movement beginning in parks, rallies, protests and coffee shops first in Seattle, the New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Austin. A group known as the Z-bellion begins a global cyber campaign to expose injustice and corruption to support causes it deems beneficial. During face-to-face recruitment, would-be members of Zeebellion are given instructions

Starting point is 00:05:20 for going to sites on the dark web that allow them to access sophisticated malware to siphon funds from corporations, financial institutions, and nonprofits that support the establishment. The gains are then converted to Bitcoin and distributed to worthy participants, including fellow Z-Belps,

Starting point is 00:05:39 members who claim financial need. Zeebelian leadership says the scenario assures its members that their Robin Hood-esque wealth redistribution is not only untraceable by law enforcement, but ultimately justifiable, as targets are selected based on secure polling of network delegates. Although its origins are American by the latter 2020s, Zeebellion activities are also occurring across Europe and cities throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East, including Nairobi, Kenya, Hanoi, Vietnam, and Amman, Jordan. So very, very interesting. I recommend you go over and you check out this article on The Intercept, but I'm not sure what to think about this. It's very

Starting point is 00:06:31 interesting that the Pentagon would be thinking so deeply about Bitcoin as to model it in a war game for a domestic rebellion. Pretty unbelievable that we've gone from people laughing it out of the room or paying no attention to it to seeing it as an element in a credible threat to the continued success of the United States. And I mean, in a way, yes, I mean, you can use technology in all forms for lots of different things. You can use the internet for good or for bad. You can use US dollars for good and for bad. I think the inherent fairness in how Bitcoin functions does take power away from the state. And I mean, I guess if you're the state, that can be deemed as a threat. And I mean, in a war game that they map out like this, where people are,

Starting point is 00:07:28 Now, first of all, I'm definitely not in favor of stealing the accumulated wealth of an individual or a company that goes and legitimately earns it. But as Bitcoin is a censorship-resistant immutable global money, it could be used in an instance such as this. And so I guess they have to consider that when they're looking at things like this. I don't know. Let me know what you think. What were you thinking when you heard that breakdown here? It sounds amazing to me to be hearing this almost not dystopian, but very, I don't know. It sounds like a movie. I would watch this movie. Would you watch this movie? Anyways, I'm not going to comment too much on it, but very interesting nonetheless. Let's move on. as Coinbase tries to torpedo itself further, it has said that it is going to be licensing its analytics software to the IRS and DEA. So just a quick excerpt from this article on Decrypt. On Friday, the block reported that cryptocurrency exchange,

Starting point is 00:08:46 Coinbase was looking to license its blockchain analytics software to United States federal agencies, notably the Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, and the IRS. The spokesperson or a spokesperson for Coinbase told Decrypt that this tool only offers them streamlined access to publicly available data and at no point do they have any access to Coinbase internal or customer data. Still, nonetheless, people were not particularly happy about this. Now, I will get into other things about Coinbase momentarily.

Starting point is 00:09:21 but people responding to this, James and Lop, Bitcoin developer, co-founder and CTO at CASA, he said, this is no surprise, our distrust in you is strengthened, we will make your analytics software obsolete. And that, of course, is an ode to Nicholas Doree who created BTC Pay server in an effort to make bit pay obsolete when they became somewhat of an enemy of Bitcoin. Josh Rager pointed to a whale alert tweet where they said that millions of dollars seem to be leaving Coinbase as we speak. Investors and traders are no longer limited to Coinbase or Bitmex.

Starting point is 00:10:07 If you screw over customers take part in shady deals or don't improve your product, customers can now go elsewhere to trade or invest. Matt O'Dell from TFTC. Gotta love them. Why do you hate your customers so much? I like that one. Anyways, this isn't the first time that people have been hating on Coinbase and rightfully so.

Starting point is 00:10:32 I made a video in March 2nd of 2019 when the hashtag delete Coinbase was big. And this was in response to them hiring a bunch of people from hacker team who sold software to oppressive regimes to crack down on their people. And this is after a long string of other bullshit that Coinbase has done in regards to just purposely stunting the growth of Bitcoin, being dishonest about it, surprisingly, and without announcement throwing Bitcoin cash onto the exchange and front-running that, it seemed like there was some insider trading going on there. There's just such a long list.

Starting point is 00:11:20 I made this video last year and it was 33 minutes long explaining why Coinbase sucked and at this point it could be much, much longer. So anyways, if you want to go back and watch that old video, feel free to just know that it's a year and a bit

Starting point is 00:11:36 out of date and there's been many more things piled on there. Don't use Coinbase. And speaking of other things, unfortunately, that are probably not best to use. Brave browser. Now Brave browser is good for privacy, but they recently came under fire for auto filling a Binance affiliate link. So I'll just read a quick excerpt from this Coin Telegraph article. Crypto-powered privacy-focused web browser Brave has come under fire for automatically filling an affiliate link into its address bar when a user attempts to access the website for leading crypto exchange Binance. and its United States-based subsidiaries Binance U.S. Braves' co-founder and chief executive Brendan Ike

Starting point is 00:12:24 has acknowledged the mistake, in quotes, pledging that the error will soon be corrected to remove the automatic completion of its affiliate link after the situation gained traction on crypto Twitter. In quotes, Brave default auto-complete's verbatim Binance US in the address bar to add an affiliate code. We are a Binance affiliate. We refer users via the opt-in trading widget

Starting point is 00:12:53 on the new tab page, but autocomplete should not add any code. And that was a tweet from Brendan Ike. However, they said it was a mistake, but Whale Panda on Twitter quickly pointed out that this is really bad, yet another reason to stop using Brave. Here are some more.

Starting point is 00:13:15 It isn't just Binance, it's also affiliate links for Ledger, Trezer, and Coinbase. So Brennanike is full of shit. It wasn't an accident. It was definitely filling that for everything. And there's no way. That's definitely no way. This was an accident. They were trying to get some quick afil cash for anybody using their browser, which seems predatory.

Starting point is 00:13:40 Not that it hurts the individuals doing it, but it's just, you know, be upfront about it. Like, I tell you guys if utilizing a sponsor of the show helps the show, I just say that. If you don't want to use it, don't fucking use it. You can go to the website separately, but to like sneak it in there is kind of, I don't know. Anyways, I'm going to move on from there. Solid issue of the bent today over at tfTC.io. Marty outdoes himself yet again. Marty Bent.

Starting point is 00:14:14 he's been reading some, some, some, some, um, some, um, Mises, some human action. So, um, Mises, uh, Ludwig von Mises human action. If you haven't read it, do check it out. Uh, but he gets into some thoughts about, uh, the misnomer of, of owing money to ourselves. A lot of people will refer to that when they talk about the national debt. Well, we owe it to ourselves. So it doesn't really matter. Um, So he gets into that a little bit. I'll just read a little quote from this issue of the bent today. He says, the U.S. economy is quickly turning into a banana republic

Starting point is 00:14:51 completely dependent on the Federal Reserve intervening in markets. Their intervention has gone to the point where they are the only game in town. Actual value creation and productivity from businesses does not matter anymore. The only thing that matters is whether or not the Fed is printing money, i.e. inciting the creation of public debt via treasury issuance and how much of it. Value now flows from the either, value now flows from the ether of the Fed's servers to the stock market, the structural stability and cash flows of the companies that make up the stock market matter very little in this type of environment. And then there was a tweet from

Starting point is 00:15:34 Quoth the Raven QTR research on Twitter that said the Fed is doing a such a great job of distorting markets. It has totally priced out both Warren Buffett and Stanley Druckenheimer. These guys used to rely on value to invest. There can be no value

Starting point is 00:15:53 when the Fed provides a never-ending bid. The Fed literally just ended value investing. Marty Bent goes on to say be careful out there. There are many men out there who will parrot the debt is money we owe ourselves without a

Starting point is 00:16:09 acknowledging that the we isn't a static entity, but a collection of individuals at different points in their lives with different income levels, education levels, balance sheets, time preferences, and personal beliefs. Thinking that all the individuals that make up the mythical we align perfectly in all these areas is legitimately stupid and arguably malicious. Well said, Marty. If you want to check out this article, I will, of course, as always, link to it down below. Just a couple more things here. New article over on the Bitsy Academy. Very stoked to be working with the guys over at Verify, at Verify BTC on Twitter with this.

Starting point is 00:16:53 And they pumped out a solid one. So what is a BIP? A BIP is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal. And this article gets into what the Bip. process is how somebody can create a BIP and put it forth in order to improve Bitcoin and have it considered to be made part of the protocol and kind of how that works. And it goes through not only that, but what is BIP 119 and what does it achieve? I'm going to read a little excerpt here.

Starting point is 00:17:22 It does get a little technical, but I encourage you to take a look and even if some of it goes over your head, the more you read stuff like this, the more you'll start to absorb and have those little aha moments. So if this seems like great to you, I apologize, but again, I encourage you to do more reading in this kind of stuff. So this BIP was put together by Jeremy Rubin. It was published on the 1st of June. Okay, it's so it proposes a new op code called Op Check Template Verify.

Starting point is 00:17:54 So an op code is short for operation code. And these operations are what you can do with a public key source. script or signature script permitted by the Bitcoin script language. So, moving on, Jeremy wanted to make it simpler and safer to develop smart contracts at the protocol layer of Bitcoin. Currently, there are numerous so-called covenants, which are restrictions that a Bitcoin sender can apply to a UTXO or some unspent Bitcoin and unspent transaction output, so that it only gets spent in a certain pre-established, if certain pre-established requirements are respected.

Starting point is 00:18:37 So you can put conditions on Bitcoin that need to be met before it can be spent. So one of these covenants or conditions is called lock time. It gives users the ability to specify how many blocks before a certain UTXO can be spent. It can be used in various use cases like higher operational security, as it is impossible to spend a UTXO that is time locked. Now, the new proposed op code, it renders all existing covenants, all different types of restrictions that you can set on Bitcoin spending, into a single template.

Starting point is 00:19:14 This decreases security vulnerabilities that could be exploited if they were to all be used separately. When constructing a transaction with that op code, it is possible to verify that a certain UTXO was conditioned to result in the set of a new UTXO by matching its resulting hash to the pre-image of the transaction. I know this is getting deep here. Anyways, you can subsequently link multiple transactions of that type together with conditional rules in a tree-like manner.

Starting point is 00:19:46 And so what this gets into is you can construct a transaction with a whole bunch of different recipients and each one of those different recipients and those bits of Bitcoin going out can be attached different conditions in which the recipient will actually receive the Bitcoin. So you can take a lot of complicated complex things and put it all together into a single constructed transaction. And this can be used for things like scaling. So if, let's say an exchange needs to regularly send out money to its users. You can set it so that it will only spend at certain points when the mempool is not as full

Starting point is 00:20:33 or when fees get to a certain level. You can set up vaults, again, embedding pre-existing spending conditions with transactions with multiple signers. And then it also helps that you can actually have some of these individual spends when you have a ton of different UTXOs going out at the same time, that some of them can obviously be creating lightning network channels as well, just individual UTXOs in a batch transaction.

Starting point is 00:21:04 So there's a lot in there. Again, I know some of this might sound a little bit great to everybody, but do go read the article. Interesting, nonetheless. And if it just goes totally over your head, at least you tried. Anyways, one last article I wanted to point you. to today. I'm still actually kind of parsing through this myself. Jameson Lop, we just mentioned him earlier. He had a good clap back to Brave earlier. But anyways, he published in the CASA blog,

Starting point is 00:21:32 the do's and don'ts of Bitcoin key management. So he goes into detail about how to protect yourself. He talks about not getting fished. He talks about not installing malware. He talks about technical weaknesses through various means. There's a really good video from Andreas there he's talking about splitting up your seed phrase and why that's actually a bad idea and it doesn't help your security. A whole bunch of great stuff, avoiding getting scams, just not getting hacked, a lot of different things in here. And it's just like a treasure trove of little tidbits about how to be more secure in your Bitcoin dealing. So I do encourage you to check it out. With that, I'm going to wrap up you guys. Thank you so much for watching and or

Starting point is 00:22:22 listening. If you are here on YouTube, do hit like, subscribe, and share. But also check out the other platforms that I'm on. I'm trying to migrate people to all over the place. So if I get shut down on YouTube, that's not that painful. So I'm on Facebook Live. I stream live to Twitter. I'm on D-Live. I'm on Twitch. A bunch of places, I'm also audio only on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and Google, pretty much anywhere that you consume podcasts. Now, if you want to help out the show in another way, you can hit up the sponsors down below. Those were leaden and coin cards. Or if you're not already using a hardware wallet, you can use my link down below, which surprise, surprise is an affiliate link, and I'm disclosing it to you. You see how this works?

Starting point is 00:23:04 Anyways, if you click that link and you opt to pick up a ledger, which I myself use, I use the X and the S depending on use cases, but they're both excellent. And again, if you're not on a hardware wallet yet, you should do that because it can get out a hand where you're looking at the money sitting on your phone. You're like, ah, crap, that's kind of scary to carry around all day. Anyways, Ledger, excellent. There's a link down below, and they've got some deals where you can get like packs of them and it is just everything. And besides that, if you really loved what you saw, you can always drop me a lightning network tip at my tippin.comee page. That is tippin.com. slash at BTC Sessions. And with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful rest of the day,

Starting point is 00:23:47 a wonderful evening, and I'll see next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Bitcoin vs The Pentagon, Delete Coinbase AGAIN, Brave Reflink Fail EP067

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