BTC Sessions - BTCPay $150K Grant, Venezuelan Gov Accepts BTC, Electrum Adds Lightning EP075

Starting point is 00:00:13 Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the PTC Sessions and this is your daily session. Before we dive in, of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, ledden.com. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services. Now I've been working with these guys for the past, well over a year now and been using them just as long. And the first thing I ever used from them was their Bitcoin backed loans. So this is where you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to get a Canadian or US dollar loan. In my instance, I was in a pinch.

Starting point is 00:00:59 I needed some dollars. I didn't want to sell my Bitcoin because it's a taxable event. And I was worried about having to buy it back at a higher price later on. So I was able to deposit my Bitcoin, get a loan to my bank account within 24 hours. And when I paid back that loan, I got back the same amount of Bitcoin. Now, they also have a couple other services. They've got their Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts. They've just upped the interest on those to 8.8% annually in the case of USDC.

Starting point is 00:01:27 And they've got their B2X offering that uses the same loan mechanism to buy more Bitcoin on the spot, effectively doubling your Bitcoin. So if you want to check these guys out, there is a link down in the show notes below. And if you use that link to get a loan, they will actually give you 50 bucks worth of Bitcoin for free. And secondly, we have coin cards. Now, these guys, the first time I ever used them was six years ago, and I'm super happy to see them continue to do well and grow and expand to various different parts of the globe. First time I ever used them. I was dabbling in Bitcoin. It was my first year in Bitcoin, and I wanted to see if I could live on it.

Starting point is 00:02:08 And these guys made it much, much easier for me to do so. Really simple, you can buy gift cards with Bitcoin. They accept it on main chain. They accept lightning. And if you've got it, a bag of shit coins that you want to load and get something of value. Hey, you can do that here too. They've got pretty much any gift card you could imagine and it's super easy to use. I recommend you check them out. There is a link, as I said, down below. With that, let's dive into the news. So Bitcoin Payment processor, BTC Pay server, which I love, has nabbed its biggest grant yet. So I'm going to dive a little bit into this article on Decrypt here. So CryptoCherency Exchange Cracken today announced that it had awarded a grant of $150,000 worth of Bitcoin to BTC pay

Starting point is 00:02:53 an open source Bitcoin payments processor. According to a post from Cracken, the grant was made in honor of the United Nations Micro Small and Medium Size Enterprises Day. Now, the exchange pointed to the processor's open source nature, free integration, and censorship-resistant nature as reasons why it chose to award this grant. Cracken also implemented. BTC Pay support with its Crypto Watch platform back in March. And there's a quote here from Pierre Richard. Accepting Bitcoin as payment may be a key feature of your product, your payment system of last resort, or just one of many checkout options.

Starting point is 00:03:33 Now, Pierre Richard is Cracken's lead Bitcoin strategist. He went on to say, in any case, it's likely that BTC Pay is the most cost-effective solution for your needs. and I'm excited to see Cracken continue contributing to this project's continued success. Now, BTC Pay has been at the winning end of a lot of different grants this year. Previously, OKC coin is contributing $100,000 over the course of 12 months. And that was in May. And in March, where I work, Bitsy, we donated $80,000 specifically to the,

Starting point is 00:04:13 BTC Pay core contributor Andrew Camilleri. And so, yeah, I'm super happy to see these guys continue to do well and that the Bitcoin community is recognizing the value and utility in this piece of open source software and helping it, its proliferation. So kudos. Good job, BTC pay. And thanks to Krakken for also contributing there as well. Now, some interesting news out of Venezuela.

Starting point is 00:04:40 Some Venezuelans may be able to pay for new passports. it's using Bitcoin. Now this is obviously particularly interesting given the situation in Venezuela where there's been such a mismanagement of their central bank and their currency issuance that they've experienced just insane hyperinflation and people are starving because of it. You know, million plus percent inflation in the past years. So I'll read a little bit here from Coin Telegram. Venezuela's administrative service for identification, my great and foreigners, known as Same, plans to accept Bitcoin as a new payment method for citizens seeking a Venezuelan passport. The information was originally leaked via a Reddit post on June 23rd.

Starting point is 00:05:27 News of the update soon reached Twitter, with some Venezuelan users abroad confirming the information. Coin Telegraph Spanish managed to verify this news as well. In quote, I have just verified it personally, and it is true. Venezuela, the immigration service is accepting Bitcoin for payments, renew passports, or request an extension. And that's from Twitter user BTC Lovera. Similar payments can already be made using the country's Venezuelan's own pseudo-cryptocurrency the Petro, although is it really a cryptocurrency? Before now, the only other option was to purchase with Bolivars through a national bank.

Starting point is 00:06:08 Now, I think the most interesting thing here is the fact. that the government is accepting it as a form of payment when it's also been quite hostile to it in the form of some of the miners there, or rather, I didn't interview with one of the co-founders of Leden back in the day, and he hails from Venezuela. He still has family in Venezuela. His brother was mining Bitcoin in Venezuela and actually had to flee the country in the middle the night because people from the army came and started to crack down and basically trying to swindle money out of him and blackmail him for payoffs. And so it hasn't really, you know, while Bitcoin can help preserve your wealth and gives a way to get money into and out of the country, the government

Starting point is 00:07:05 has definitely not been favorable to it when citizens utilize it versus the national currency because that would be a detriment to the central bank and their control over the citizens. But maybe they're recognizing that value. Regardless, I think Marty Bent had a pretty good take here when he said, the Maduro regime is now openly acquiring Bitcoin in a self-sovereign fashion using BTC pay server. You may not like it, but Bitcoin cannot discriminate. And he's very right there. With the good comes the bad. Anybody can use this. just as anybody can use cash. And so people need to take that into account.

Starting point is 00:07:47 I think that the positives of Bitcoin far outweigh the negatives, because even if a regime like Venezuela is, like the Maduro regime in Venezuela, is utilizing Bitcoin and holding it themselves, the same thing can be afforded to its citizens as a way to hedge against the terrible monetary, policies that have been putting them in such dire straits and as a way to transact globally and again, hedge themselves in a way from these sanctions.

Starting point is 00:08:21 Now, to play devil's advocate here, this could just be a way for Maduro to discover at least some of the people that are using Bitcoin in the first place. If you pay with Bitcoin to get a new Venezuelan passport, they know you have Bitcoin. and if you don't practice good coin control and you don't use privacy techniques before doing that, then they can probably see how much Bitcoin you have. So if you're Venezuelan and you're watching this, I probably wouldn't pay this way.

Starting point is 00:08:55 Number one, you probably want to hold the sats, but number two, it could cost you your privacy and you could see somebody knocking at your door sometime soon. Let's move on here. So crypto.com's card issuer, wire card files for insolvency. So we touched on this the other day, but let's dive a little bit into this coin desk article. In a statement Thursday, the Munich-based card issuer said it had no choice other than to begin insolvency proceedings as it faced, in quote, impending insolvency

Starting point is 00:09:27 and over-indebtedness. The management board has come to the conclusion that a positive going concern forecast cannot be made in the short time available. Thus, The company's ability to continue as a going concern is not assured, Wirecard said. Wirecard's share price tanked nearly 80% on the news. This comes just over a week after Wirecard, a former German blue chip, admitted that it could not account for over a quarter of its balance sheet around $2.1 billion US dollars. In a bombshell statement, the company said some employees may have inflated revenue

Starting point is 00:10:06 in an attempt to mislead auditors. On Monday, CEO Marcus Braun was arrested on suspicion of accounting fraud and market manipulation. And if you're unfamiliar with the story already, the reason that this is interesting, as we alluded to earlier, is that Wirecard actually provides a lot of the Visa cards to many of these cryptocurrency-related transitional cards where you can pay with crypto or in some way make a few hops, skips and jumps to effectively be paying with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency. So they they currently create the cards for 10x and crypto.com. Now I should say they're not the issuer for for the Bitsy card that I was just showing the other day. So I mean that's that's a positive. Now they're saying that the user funds

Starting point is 00:10:57 aren't affected. Somebody from 10x came out to say this. Crypto.com has not really commented and they don't plan to until when they deem fit. But 10x did say that user funds are safe as wire card does not have any custody of any cryptocurrency. And it looks like if you've loaded up a card, and don't quote me on this, but it looks like if you've loaded a card with a certain currency, then it should be available on that card regardless. Because of that point, it's, it's, it's, it's loaded up within the Visa network, if I'm not mistaken. So regardless, not great, and we'll just have to see what happens here. I haven't heard of anybody unable to use their cards from this.

Starting point is 00:11:46 There hasn't been any stories of that. So hopefully that continues to be the case. And this is kind of domicile, not domicile, but it's kind of kept totally separate from users being affected, and it just affects the corporate structure of wire card itself. Moving on into more, I guess, techy stuff. Electrum wallet is releasing 4.0, version 4.0 in beta this week. And what that means is it's going to support PSBTs, which is partially signed Bitcoin transactions, being able to construct and sign a transaction on your hardware device

Starting point is 00:12:25 without connecting it to the internet, and then putting that transaction onto an SD card, and then plugging that into your computer without any risk. of spending additional funds. So that's going to be nice to have. They're also adding Lightning Network. They're adding Watchtowers, which is a security method in which it penalizes people

Starting point is 00:12:45 that try to cheat the system in Lightning. And submarine swaps, which is easy swaps between on-chain Bitcoin and Lightning. So very cool to see that rolling out, or rather it has already rolled out. I will be taking a look at it, probably when it's out of beta. But nonetheless, very, very exciting. I'm glad to see that with Electrum. Moving on, I was touching last week on Caravan, how I was going to do a video on Caravan.

Starting point is 00:13:18 In fact, hold on. I've got a whole bunch of these Ledger Nano S's kicking around. And so I'm going to be using those. I actually picked those up at Bitcoin 2019 on the cheap. So I've got a handful of them here. I'm going to be doing a video on how to use Caravan, which is a way to do multi-sig. So multi-sig is where instead of just requiring a single hardware wallet or a single signature from your wallet to send your money, it requires multiples. And so you can easily set up one with, as they've listed here, Treasur 1, Treasur Model T, T, Ledger NanoS, Ledger NanoX. And so what you can do is, in my case, I'll have three Ledger NanoS's, and I will require

Starting point is 00:14:01 at least two of them to be able to send money out of a wallet. So you can then spread these devices out amongst multiple geographically diverse locations so that if somebody were to break into your house and demand that, hey, I want all your Bitcoin. Well, guess what? You've got key number one of three and you need at least two of them. So unless that person wants to cart you around to different locations, which they're probably not going to do, they're just shit out of luck. So now, Caravan is, was recently added to MyNode and I do plan on doing this video. Unfortunately, the way that it's linked with Minode at the current time, there's a little bit of an issue with the way that it opens up the window. It's not a private window.

Starting point is 00:14:51 It opens up via HTTP instead of HTP, those of you that are familiar what I'm talking about. Once they have that fix, I'll be able to do it. So, slight delay there, but it shouldn't be too long. They said it's going to be in the next release, and I look forward to that. Now, on the topic of multi-sig, though, unfortunately, Caravan does not yet support the cold card. And I do really enjoy the cold card, but I did come across this, and it seems to be relatively new. So it's new, and I believe it's still in beta, so it's still early. But it's called Lily Wallet. And it, allows you to do a multi-sig setup with cold card, which is very exciting to me. Now, it's fully open source. You can go in and audit the code. It's new, so I'm gonna let people, some other people be those beta testers

Starting point is 00:15:43 and kind of get some more eyeballs on it before I dive in. But nonetheless, very, very happy to see new open source software dropping in the market. It also, the user interface seems to be very, very user-friendly. It's very pretty and not super intimidating. So yeah, I'm excited to dive into this. I'll take a peek at it over time. But if you want to take a look, if you can audit the code, awesome. If you want to take a peek at it, then wonderful. But nonetheless, awesome. Happy to see

Starting point is 00:16:22 this pop up. Kudos the Lily Wallet. Hopefully it's a good product. Now I wanted to touch, since we're in the vein of hardware wallets, there was a new drop on the Bitsy Academy, again, by the guys at Verify. Again, loving their contributions. Thank you very much, guys at Verify. But this is about choosing a hardware wallet. And it uses some of the top names in the game, Treasor, Ledger, and Cold Card. And so they go through kind of the ins and outs of what the tradeoffs are between these particular hardware wallets. It goes through things like open source versus having a secure element or having elements of both. It talks about Bitcoin only and why that matters. It talks about ease of use and it talks about expanded capabilities, privacy, everything that ties into that. So it's nice and thorough.

Starting point is 00:17:15 And I do recommend you give it a read and then glean from that the information that you need to decide what's best for you. Also, if you're watching this and you're in the comments or you're in the chat or you just want to comment on the video after the fact, let me know what's your hardware wallet of choice and why? Very interested to hear from you guys. Now, I'm going to sign off now. Thank you guys very much for watching and or listening. As always, if you're here on YouTube, do hit like, subscribe, and share, but also so I can mitigate my risk a little bit and not rely solely on YouTube. do follow me on one of my other platforms, whether it be Facebook Live or Twitter or D-Live or Twitch,

Starting point is 00:17:58 audio only on the podcast on any podcast that you may, platform that you may listen on. You can find me there. Yeah, just go ahead, take a look, subscribe elsewhere, just in case. Now, if you want to help with the show in another way, you can always hit up the sponsors I mentioned down below. That was Leden and Coin Cards, both of those links in the show notes. And if you want to help in another way, we've been talking about. about hardware wallets, if you don't already have a hardware wallet, please do get one, regardless of the kind that you like and you prefer. But if Ledger seems to be attractive to you,

Starting point is 00:18:33 I have the Ledger NanoX and the Ledger NanoS, as well as a myriad of other hardware wallets. But if Ledger is attractive to you and you'd like to pick one up, there is an affiliate link in the show notes down below. And by using that to get a deal on Ledger, you will also be helping out the show. So I do appreciate that. And if you're really, loved what you saw, you can always drop me a lightning network tip at my tippin.me page. It's tippin.combe slash at BTC Sessions. And with that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful evening, a wonderful rest of your day.

Starting point is 00:19:03 And I'll see you next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - BTCPay $150K Grant, Venezuelan Gov Accepts BTC, Electrum Adds Lightning EP075

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