BTC Sessions - BTC Volume 2X 2017 Peak, Ledger Vulnerability, Russian Anon Payments Ban EP084

Starting point is 00:00:12 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. Before we dive in, of course, a big shout out to sponsors of the show, ledden.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services. I've been utilizing and working with these guys for well over a year now and they're super awesome. I love working with them, Mauricio, one of them. of the founders is fantastic. And so what are they? Well, they again offer services for your Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:00:59 The first thing I ever used them for was Bitcoin back loans. So I was in a pinch, needed dollars, and I didn't want to sell my Bitcoin because that's taxable and because I was worried I'd have to buy it back in at a higher price point. So I was able to deposit Bitcoin, get a loan, Canadian or US dollar to my bank account within 24 hours. And when I paid that back, I got back the exact same amount of Bitcoin. Now, they've been able to deposit Bitcoin. We've got a couple other services or products that they offer. They've got Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts. They just up the interest rates on both Bitcoin and USDC to a maximum of 10% for USDC.

Starting point is 00:01:35 I believe Bitcoin is around 8 right now. But either way, awesome. And then they've got B2X, their B2X offering, which uses the same loan mechanism to instantly buy more Bitcoin. So effectively, you're doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. If you want to check these guys out, there is a link in. in the show notes and if you use that link and decide to opt into a Bitcoin back loan or any of their loan products, you will get $50 of Bitcoin for free.

Starting point is 00:02:02 And secondly, if you want to help out the show in another way and you're keen on privacy, which is a good thing to have when you're utilizing Bitcoin, NORVPN is one of the solutions in my arsenal of privacy tools that I use. What it does is it encrypts your browsing data, it hides your IP address, and it has the added benefit of allowing you to access geo-blocked content. So I use this on my computer, on my phone, on my tablet, just everywhere, especially if you're using public Wi-Fi, something like a VPN, is a must because you never know how secure that network is and what kind of prying eyes are looking at what you're doing. So if you want to be safe, NordVPN can be a good option for you. And the

Starting point is 00:02:44 link down below will get you 70% off of three-year package plus a month free. It ends up being about $3.49 a month, so go check that out. And with that, let's dive into the news. Now, given the fluctuations in price lately, obviously I wanted to talk about it a little bit. We saw a huge spike over the weekend all the way up to over $12,000. A huge rejection back down, dropped like $1,500 in no time at all, down to around $10.5. And now we're back up. we're in the low $11,000 range show closing in on around 112, but it's been a wild ride to say the least. So let's just kind of go through what's happened recently and just a couple key points that I wanted to point out in regards to kind of the bigger picture here. Now looking back at the chart

Starting point is 00:03:38 here, you can see we're getting close to the spike that we saw in mid-June or late June of 2019, we saw this huge run-up where we went to between $13,000 and $14,000, depending on what exchange you were looking at. We're just kind of below that. So if we can kind of bust through these levels around 12K that we were tipping at, that could be the next point where we may see a little bit of pushback before we go on to perhaps soon see previous all-time eyes. I don't know. Maybe before the end of the year. I'd love to see something like that. But who knows, anybody's guess. Regardless, so to kind of hone in on what's happened here, again, we climbed from a low of around 11, 230, 11,230 to over 12 grand. So we were kind of hanging around that level within 24 hours.

Starting point is 00:04:39 Suddenly, huge drop down below 11 grand. We did see around 10-5 on some exchanges. So, over $1,000 in under an hour drop. We haven't seen stuff like that in quite some time other than the insane sell-off in March, but that was like an everything asset pop. Anyways, despite the sudden loss, these are the key points I wanted to touch on. Bitcoin has still put an impressive performance

Starting point is 00:05:08 in the second half of July and is still up 11% in the past week and 21.9% in the past month. Now these numbers are over the past day and it's been fluctuating. So besides the point, it's still been a hell of a month for July. And now we're into August and we'll see what that holds. But another excellent point here on this decrypt article that I'm looking at, Bitcoin trading volume has been climbing since early July and is now almost doubled in the last month.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Around $30 billion worth of Bitcoin, US, now changes hands every day. To put this into perspective, the crew, current Bitcoin trading volume is more than double that scene at the height of the 2017 bull run when Bitcoin reaches all-time high value of over $20,000. So we're not even close to those price points yet and that type of mania and we're double the volume. That's how many more people and how much more capital is moving around this ecosystem since that mania in 2017.

Starting point is 00:06:15 So if we get to that type of a mania again, I can only imagine the type of levels. If we're seeing this shortly after the having when there's not that much hype around Bitcoin, holy hell, we could be in for a crazy ride. But regardless, good to see Bitcoin on the up and up again. Now, one thing I did want to point out, there's this Alternative.

Starting point is 00:06:41 me indicator I've referred to before it's the crypto and fear the crypto fear the crypto fear and greed index and so it uses a whole bunch of different factors to kind of calculate whether we're at like the far end of the spectrum for fear or greed and right now we're around a 72 which puts us firmly in the middle of kind of the greed indicator we're not super high so there is extreme greed anything over 75, which we saw last week, kind of as we were picking out, we were up at 76, although, again, not like, not anything as crazy as some of the craziness that we've seen, even, even last year during that spike. But let me just zoom out a little bit on the crypto fear and greed index. Now, we did, whereas 2019, okay, so we got up to a 95,

Starting point is 00:07:38 in June last year when we spiked between 13 and 14. Okay. Now, they didn't have this index going, unfortunately, during the insane run-up in 2017, but they did have it kind of through the rest of the year. And even as we were seeing kind of like these lower highs, we were still up in the 70s back then. And then we've been spending a lot of time over the past year,

Starting point is 00:08:06 well below 70. We peaked up in and around the mid-60s, but never above that until now. So are we potentially seeing a return to mania-style thinking? Perhaps, because we haven't seen these levels in quite some time. So I guess we'll see if we continue to peek up there. If so, then things could get bubbly over the next year or so, but time will tell.

Starting point is 00:08:36 Let's move on here. There was a U.S. Congressman, his name is Tom Emmer, and he was recently on the Pomp podcast. And he was talking about Bitcoin versus centralized monetary systems. And he said some interesting things. Now, before I get into what he said, just a couple, just from his Wikipedia page here on what he's after, a couple things really kind of stuck out to me was his stance on state sovereignty. So in 2010, Emmer sponsored an amendment to the Minnesota Constitution that would allow the state to nullify federal laws. He also, in regards to taxes, he says he strongly opposes tax increases. He has also proposed gradually reducing the state corporate tax with the eventual goal of repealing it altogether. So he's very kind of almost seems libertarian in some aspects. Basically, he's a hands-off governmental approach.

Starting point is 00:09:35 He doesn't think that government should be dealing in money and policy in regards to how money is spent. And that will become very clear in his comments here. So a couple notable things. He says, as we come out of the crisis, obviously we're referring to COVID, Bitcoin ain't going away. It's going to get stronger. And now the act and controller of the currency, Brian Brooks is saying, hey, institutions, you can start. banking this stuff, you can provide a home for it, you can start working with it. So he's talking about the recent clarification from the act and comptroller of the currency

Starting point is 00:10:11 saying that banks are indeed allowed to offer custody services for cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. Now some other stuff, he did tweet out after the Twitter hack, he said Bitcoin isn't the problem, centralized control is. And he clarified during the podcast, he said, look, Twitter's the problem. They are the ones that screwed up. Bitcoin didn't screw up. Twitter, your security was not adequate. They hacked Twitter. You're going to have bad guys all over the place.

Starting point is 00:10:40 Yeah, he basically said that Bitcoin scams are different from Bitcoin being a scam. You can scam somebody and take their money. Just because you want a certain type of money doesn't mean the money itself is a scam. Again, and I echo this sentiment, you're vilifying the action rather than the medium of exchange. It makes no sense. You don't blame US dollars when a bank gets robbed, right? So he goes on to say a few other things. He talks about in China in regards to the shutdowns. He says he's worried about government control and he talks about the government has your currency all on a card. And guess what? If you lived in Wuhan, they shut you down. You couldn't get a ride out of Wuhan to another city.

Starting point is 00:11:27 you couldn't go to some groceries, get some groceries unless the government released you to get groceries. So need I say more when I say I don't like what I don't like about centralized control. He does poke fun at Facebook's Lieber Project and said, you know, he said, great concept, wonderful, but somebody's got to be in control, right? Now, he does cite the road to serfdom. Again, very, very Austrian economics-leaning, libertarian kind of feeling. resource material when he's talking about things. But regardless, he said that moving into the,

Starting point is 00:12:07 I think we're moving into the next phase, which is why crypto in that area excites me, because I do think that the government, do I think that the government has a role? Yeah, I'm going to say no. I don't think it has a big role. I think people can police themselves. Again, very, very hands-off governmental approach. Kind of cool to see somebody like this actually sitting in office and representing the people, somebody that's effectively trying to make himself obsolete in a way, right, to lower the role of government.

Starting point is 00:12:43 So, awesome, awesome. Now, on the other side of the spectrum, in Russia, we have Russian government banning anonymous wallet deposits. Now, we are not talking about Bitcoin here. What are we talking about? So the Russian Federation has banned anonymous deposits to online wallets in a move that will affect 10 million users across the country. According to lawmakers, this initiative is supposed to curb illegal activities such as finance and terrorism and the illegal drug trade, as is quoted in any sort of control over money.

Starting point is 00:13:15 But I do think that it is, maybe that's part of the reason, but it's a bit more of a control thing. if you lose control over the currency and the ability to collect taxes and things like that, you have major problems. And the government obviously is in the business of creating more government programs and growing those types of things. Government very rarely shrinks. It always tends to grow and try to claw more responsibilities and money from people. Now, online wallets through services such as Yandex, Web Money, PayPal, and Kiwi are very popular

Starting point is 00:13:49 in Russia. These services maintain approximately, as we said, 10 million users who use the accounts anonymously by topping them up with cash. Some people use these anonymous wallets to purchase cryptocurrency, although the exact numbers are unknown. So, again, there's kind of like a not a direct correlation with what could happen with cryptocurrency in Russia and with Bitcoin in Russia because it's just kind of like a secondary effect. where some people may be trying to purchase Bitcoin with stuff like PayPal and fund their PayPal anonymously, but realistically, that's probably mostly not the case. But it does kind of point to the fact that in an instance like this where they're saying, hey, you're not allowed to do certain things with your money, they can actually stop those

Starting point is 00:14:45 activities for the most part. whereas something like Bitcoin, if they say, hey, you're not allowed to send money or transact in a certain way, sure, they can outlaw, they can have consequences for people if they go ahead and do that and then get caught. But the transactions themselves that are executed on the Bitcoin network cannot be stopped. Also, as we all know, as soon as a law is passed, everybody always abides by it, right? So I don't think that if they were to extend this to cryptocurrency and Bitcoin in particular, it would really have much of an effect in it. Maybe it would have a short-term chilling effect on it like we saw the multiple China bans that really did nothing. But yeah, I think Bitcoin is too big to fuck with at this point.

Starting point is 00:15:38 And yeah, this kind of goes to show that they're banning all these KYC'd or non-KKKC. or non-KYC legacy payment methods, but what can they do with Bitcoin? Now, moving on, let's get a little bit more techy here. There was a disclosure about a vulnerability with the ledger wallet. And so what is going on here? Now, this points to something that I've been leaning towards a lot lately, and that's trying to deal with Bitcoin only. I mean, all I hold is Bitcoin, right?

Starting point is 00:16:17 I don't have altcoins. But the Alledger wallet does allow you to also store alternative currencies, the light coin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, all of these different ones. And this shows the vulnerabilities that can happen when you're dealing with stuff other than Bitcoin. Okay. So this particular post, it says, will disclose a vulnerability in the ledger hardware wallets that can lead to theft of user funds. An attacker can exploit this method to transfer Bitcoin while the user is under the impression that a transaction of another less valuable altcoin, like Lightcoin, TestNet Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash, is being executed. If you use Bitcoin forks on your device, which include the above aforementioned, you could be affected.

Starting point is 00:17:08 You should avoid using these ledger apps until fixes are available. So before we dive into how this is executed, if you're only dealing with Bitcoin, you are not affected because you know that you're sending Bitcoin. And that's just you're not going to be fooled into thinking you're sending another coin if you don't deal with them at all anyways. So that's what this attack is. So steps to reproduce.

Starting point is 00:17:36 Basically, so the issue is, Bitcoin and Bitcoin forks, the device exposes its functions for any of the assets. In other words, having unlocked the Lightcoin app, you will receive a confirmation request for a Bitcoin transfer while the interface represents it as a transfer of lightcoins to a light coin address. Accepting the confirmation produces a fully valid signed Bitcoin main net transaction, meaning you see an invoice for light coin, you go to send it, but in doing so, the receiver is able to actually query for Bitcoin public keys, like what you're holding, create a separate invoice, and actually get you to send those Bitcoin when you think

Starting point is 00:18:30 you're sending another coin. That is scary as hell. And again, really points to the fact that if you're serious about stuff, you don't want to be dealing with altcoins, or at least if you're dealing with altcoins, you want to have your Bitcoin on totally separate devices that don't have any altcoin related software on them. It's, again, just perfect example of how scary that can be. So yeah, I guess it allows them to query what you've got in a public key. And it also allows them to send a payment transaction, I guess invoice or prompting an approval of that transaction and then send it off. So, ooh, scary. Anyways, if you do have alt coins on your ledger, I would maybe wait to even bother moving them. what I would do is if you have another ledger or if you have a totally separate device, like a cold card,

Starting point is 00:19:37 send your Bitcoin to that and then deal with your altcoins if you need to deal with them. And then maybe dump them. I'm not saying you have to dump them, but I don't know. I just feel like it's so much of an attack vector dealing with other coins. It just compromises your security if you've got Bitcoin sitting in the same place. And those stats are precious. Moving on to something a little bit more positive. The blue wallet has a cool update.

Starting point is 00:20:03 This is, again, rapidly becoming my favorite mobile wallet to deal with. Obviously, I still love Green Wallet and Samurai wallet, but Blue Wallet, just the ease of use and the implementations of new features constantly. Gotta love it. So what did they add here? Two things that I really like,

Starting point is 00:20:22 okay, push notifications every time you receive transactions as well as when transactions get confirmed, which is awesome. They also added LN URL pay support. So what does this mean? It has to do with Lightning Network. And I'll include this article from back in April talking about LN URL. So basically it's a standard of ways to do things on the Lightning Network that multiple wallets are starting to adopt and makes things a little bit more intuitive and easier to utilize.

Starting point is 00:20:55 And so two key things can be done here. Number one, in receiving funds, if you're actually just utilizing wallets yourself and actually managing channels, Lightning Network works when you lock up a certain amount of Bitcoin between you and another node in the network and another individual or whether it be a company or whatever, but there's Bitcoin actually locked up there inauditable, and transactions are just pushing Bitcoin to either side of the channel. And it's kind of like a, you can push Bitcoin to your side of the channel and then push Bitcoin out on another channel to somebody else. So it kind of like has this like bumping effect of funds being moved around that way. However, if you don't have, if you need more liquidity, incoming liquidity and you don't have it, sometimes it can be a pain in the ass to get the incoming liquidity.

Starting point is 00:21:50 This makes it a lot easier where if there's, say, like a company offering incoming liquidity for you, instead of having to go in and manually set that up, it's a simple scan of a QR code, and there's a small fee associated with it to set up the channel, and then you have whatever amount of incoming liquidity that you've asked for. Now, the other thing about this is moving funds around, particularly if you're utilizing a service where you have maybe like an online wallet and you want to withdraw instead of creating a payment request copying that going to the other service hitting withdraw pasting in that information and then hitting send all you have to do is whatever service you have your

Starting point is 00:22:41 lightning bitcoin on there's a little URL that's a QR code and you can simply scan it and it'll say hey, you're creating a payment request for this amount. Is that okay? You hit the button and it instantly transfers all of the information back and forth between you and the service. It's essentially scan, hit a button and the money comes to you. So it's a withdrawal request in a single scan and button push. So I played around with this on this website called lnpay.co, which is actually already really cool if you haven't played with this. Basically, it allows you to set up paywalls, to whatever web page you want. So I have a website and I just played around

Starting point is 00:23:26 with one of my blog pages. I put in the URL here and set up a paywall and like a special link. And so when I use that link, it puts up this paywall and says, hey, you need to pay a hundred sats in order to view this. And I was able to pay it and there was, so it went to this service and it was deposited

Starting point is 00:23:47 on this online dashboard to withdraw it, I used LN URL. And when I went there, it's just in the wallet section. It's just a little URL. And I scanned it with Phoenix wallet and I scanned it with Blue Wallet. Tried both of them. And all you need to do, scan it, approve it, and it comes to you. So, yeah, I think is really cool.

Starting point is 00:24:11 It's making things a lot more streamlined. So kudos to Blue Wallet for implementing this. And I can't wait to see even more people implemented. Anyways, guys, I'm going to wrap up there. As always, thank you so much for watching. If you want to help out the show, you can do a whole bunch of different things. Please do remember if you're here on YouTube to hit like, subscribe, and share. All of those things really do help, so please do them.

Starting point is 00:24:37 If you want to hit me up on other services or on other platforms, I'm on Facebook Live. I stream live to Twitter. I also do like Twitch and D-Live. You can find me there. If you like this audio only, you can check me out on every podcast platform pretty much. You know, Spotify, Apple, Google, all of those. You can search up BTC sessions there. Now, if you want to help all the show in a big way, you can hit up the sponsor down below.

Starting point is 00:25:01 Lennon, you can hit up my affiliate link for NordVPN. Or if you really loved what you saw, you can always drop me a lightning network tip at my tipin.me page. That URL is tipin, tipin. slash at BTC Sessions. And with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful evening or a wonderful rest of the day wherever you are. And I'll see you next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - BTC Volume 2X 2017 Peak, Ledger Vulnerability, Russian Anon Payments Ban EP084

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