BTC Sessions - BTCPay Adds Payjoin With Blockstream Help | Tone Vays Banned From YouTube | More US Helicopter Money EP044

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

SUPPORT THE SHOW: Visit LEDN to check out getting a bitcoin-backed loan https://platform.ledn.io/join/0a00cca3dd61dea5909c95cd41f41685 Buy Bitcoin on Coinberry and get $20 after your first $100 purchase https://app.coinberry.com/invite/c5d52730857 Get Wasabi wallet and enjoy your privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Wasabi Tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQHAzSckK0 Get NORDVPN to protect your online privacy. 75% off a 3 year https://nordvpn.org/btcsessions 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: BTCPay Server implements payjoin privacy feature with the help of Blockstream https://blockstream.com/2020/04/16/en-bitcoin-privacy-improves-with-btcpay-servers-p2ep-implementation/ Marty Bent discusses oil & gas being the next boon for Bitcoin mining https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-717/ Follow Steve Barbour for more on O&G mining https://twitter.com/SGBarbour Tone Vays was banned from YouTube https://twitter.com/ToneVays/status/1250793993396539394 Follow me on LBRY https://lbry.tv/@btcsessions:8 There’s a bill to pay every American $2000/month https://decrypt.co/25756/democrat-coronavirus-check-bill

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 into the show, of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a few different services. They've got Bitcoin savings accounts where you can rent interest on your Bitcoin. They've got Bitcoin backed loans and this was actually the first service I ever used of theirs. It's where you use your Bitcoin. Bitcoin as collateral to obtain a Canadian or US dollar loan. So in my instance, I was in a pinch. I needed to get my hands on dollars, but I didn't want to sell my Bitcoin because I thought it could be a bad time. So I was able to lock up my Bitcoin in a dedicated address. And upon paying back my loan, I got back the exact same UTXO, actually. Finally, they've got their B2X offering. And this used the same

loan mechanism to insta buy you more Bitcoin, doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. So if you want to check them out. There is a link in the show notes down below. And if you use that link and you opt to get a loan with it, you will get $50 worth of Bitcoin for free. And secondly, we've got Coinberry. This has been my go-to for buying Bitcoin as of late, especially the past few months here. I really love the interface not only online, but via the app as well. It's super easy, super intuitive. And the funding is very, very quick. The e-transfers, I've only ever really waited 20 minutes. It can vary depending on your bank, but it's been nothing but smooth sailing for me. On top of this, they've also got some great mechanisms like dollar cost averaging, so they call

it autopilot, and you can set specific intervals and specific amounts. So after you fund you account, you can take the emotion out of stacking sats and just let it do its thing. So I highly recommend checking them out. And if you use the link in the show notes down below, after your first $50 purchase, you actually get $20 for free, which is probably one of the best promo deals I've seen for anywhere in Canada. So be sure to check them out. And with that, let's dive into the news. So I'm very, very excited about this one here. This is an article from Blockstream's blog, and they're talking about BTC pay server, they're introducing P2EP implementation, so pay to end point. And the long and the short of it is what this enables is essentially merchants and individuals will be able to now via BTC pay server,

which is a decentralized platform that allows you to become a Bitcoin accepting merchant, both via Bitcoin. on the main chain and via lightning network, as well as some other mechanisms. But what this allows is main chain Bitcoin transactions can be accepted on behalf of a merchant via pay to endpoint protocol, which is more or less a coin join in which it's indecipherable who got what coins and it's indecipherable from a regular coin, from a regular transaction on the main chain, meaning that there's no indication that it was even a coin join. And so the way it works, and I'll try to show it, it might be a little small on the screen here.

But typically a single Bitcoin transaction, you may have a sender sending a certain amount of Bitcoin, and it goes to the receiver, and that receiver gets what they're getting, and then some change goes back to a new address from the original sender. But pay-to-end point Bitcoin transaction has both the original sender, so somebody buying something from a merchant, and the receiver put in some Bitcoin. So in this instance, you would have somebody who's set up BTC pay server on their website and is accepting Bitcoin. Somebody goes to buy maybe a hat, and the sender has, say, $20 worth of Bitcoin that they're sending over.

While they would put that forward, the merchant would get a notification and be able to manually accept that payment and create a pay-to-end-point transaction. meaning that they would also put forth some money. So say, I don't know, another, another $10 worth of Bitcoin. So you've got a total of $30 worth of Bitcoin there. And let's say that the item itself was maybe only $10. Well, what would happen is it would split it up so that the merchant gets what they're entitled to. So they put up $10 and they're also entitled to $10 and then get $20 out.

and then $10 of change would go back to the individual. And this could be any combination of denominations here. In the example here, it shows a sender sending 527,000 sets, and the receiver getting 362 of those, and the change being 164,000. So this was the regular transaction, whereas a pay-to-end point transaction, it could look like this,

where the sender sends the same amount, 527,000 sats. The receiver adds in another 274,000 sats, just money that they had previously sitting in their Bitcoin wallet. And what happens is that the receiver, the receiver's payment and the receiver's input go together. So the merchant put in some money and the merchant receives some money and that gets aggregated into a single UTXO back out. So all of that gets combined

and the change still goes back to the original person. But in there, you'll notice there's no indication of what the actual transaction was for. You can see the original transaction, the merchant got 362,000 sets. But in this instance, that amount is not anywhere in here because the receiver is adding in extra coin, And so there's no definable way.

There's no way to find out exactly how much was received. You can see the change, but even that is not entirely clear whether that was the payment, whether that was the change, whether that was a combination of UTXOs and the above was the change. So it's completely indecidable, which is incredible. And even, so I'll outline some of the advantages that they have here. So the two-way privacy, both the sender and receiver are provided greater privacy. There's no fingerprint. So unlike traditional fixed-denomination coin-join transaction, there's no obvious fingerprint. Regular pay-to-end point transactions look identical on the blockchain, meaning even minimal

adoption of P2EP grants regular non-pay-to-end point transactions improve privacy. it breaks blockchain analysis heuristics, which is amazing. So there are companies out there that specialize in trying to de-anonomize Bitcoin transactions by tracking transactions on the blockchain and making assumptions about how they're working. Well, this breaks all of that. It breaks both the common wallet ownership assumption and the subset sum analysis, which you can click on and read more into if you choose. It also reduces blockchain bloat. So the receiver can use pay to endpoint to consolidate the UTXO set helping reduce UTXO blow on the blockchain. So if you're unfamiliar with this, when you receive Bitcoin, particularly if you're receiving a lot of small

transactions in Bitcoin, they remain as smaller bits of Bitcoin within your wallet. And when you go to spend a whole bunch of them all together, that takes up more data on the blockchain and incurs greater fees when you go to create those transactions. Whereas when you're doing pay-to-end point, what you're actually doing is you're consolidating a lot of those little pieces into larger chunks while maintaining and improving anonymity and reducing fees in the future, which is, again, awesome. And then it's also lightweight and versatile. Sending wallets can be lightweight wallets just like Blockstream Green, which brings me to the point where they highlight down below what's next for pay to endpoint. So they're working on adding support to Blockstream Green, which is one of my favorite

Bitcoin wallets. But they're also working with other projects like Wasabi Wallet and Blue Wallet to add in support for Pay to Endpoint, which also is fucking awesome. I love how much privacy stuff is coming down the pipe right now. I just did the video on Samurai Wallet. Wasabi Wallet is a partner of the show and seeing stuff like this, seeing Peta Endpoint being implemented in BTC Pay Server and Blockstream Green and potentially Blue and Wasabi as well. So that would give Wasabi Wallet potential potential post-mix tools. And not only that, but you also have things like funding lightning channels with something like pay to end point down the road. You have so many potentials here where it really starts to obfuscate the source of coins and reaffording people their Bitcoin

privacy, which is awesome. So kudos to BTC pay and for Blockstream for helping with all of this. I'm very excited to see this proliferate. Moving on here, great blog from TFTC from Marty Bent. If you're not subscribed to the bent, I highly recommend you do so. I'll have a link for this down below. Anyways, this article here was all about bringing and kind of decentralizing further Bitcoin's mining power somewhat in the U.S., but around the globe by getting oil and gas companies on board. And this is not the first we've heard of this. I've talked about it on the show pretty extensively. Marty Bent has been talking about it.

Steve Barber from, why am I forgetting the name of his? Steve Barber from Upstream Data. I've had him on the show before, and he actually, in relation to this, just did the podcast with Marty Bent on TFDC. And yeah, really cool to see. So the idea behind this is some oil and gas producers

when it comes to natural gas, you'll get stranded gas where it's just not efficient and not profitable to actually get that natural gas to grid. So what ends up happening is it either ends up being vented or flared, both of which are not particularly good for the environment. But if you can capture that natural gas and funnel it and utilize that energy to mine Bitcoin, then all of a sudden, number one, your admissions go down, and if you're paying carbon taxes, those go down. And if you're not profitable, then it can five X the profits of some of these wells. I've heard more from other sources as well.

So really, really cool to see this kind of stuff start to proliferate. Marty goes into talking about how he's been working with a company called Great American Mining. And in December of last year, they deployed their first small container in a field-owned by a publicly traded oil company here in the States. Well, they're in the States. I'm not in the States. Anyways, he did outline how he sees this potentially playing out. He said, a few things need to happen.

Number one, help oil and gas producers realize Bitcoin helps solve problems they have, help them retrofit their fields with mining containers. Then the oil and gas companies, if they see it's working, they can fight to protect their investments in mining, oil and gas companies and others. invest to have more control over the supply chain and Bitcoin mining becomes better distributed and oil and gas companies are better capitalized and much more efficient slash clean. So I really do hope to see that play out. I honestly think it's only a matter of time when you have these lulls and these inefficiencies

and this trapped energy. It just takes people realizing that they can actually capture the potential of that energy in those profits while also reducing emissions before they just really start to clue in and chase that. And I'm excited to see that, particularly at home here in Alberta, because we've been particularly hard hit the past couple of years with the drops and prices of gas and issues with getting it to market. But with this kind of thing here in Alberta, then hopefully it can start to help. And I hope to see Steve Barber and UpstreamData see a ton of success here in Alberta.

It is definitely sorely needed. And it's really cool what they can do here with just these little things. They just bring it out on a skid and they drop it. And they can capture that excess there and actually put it to use. So kudos to Steve Barber, but also great article from Marty. And I hope to see Great American Mining do well as well. Now, from positive to some scary slash negative, this popped up today. Tone Vaze got banned by YouTube.

He got a single warning, no strikes. So usually the way it works on YouTube is you get a warning, and then you get three strikes, and then you're banned, for whatever reason, violations that they see fit. And they do have some guidelines around that all that can be very vague, and I've had issues with this in the past before too. Anyways, his channel was just taken down completely. He got one warning and then it just disappeared.

Why? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, Tonvez is a traitor. He talks about the fluctuations in price. He does a lot of stuff like that. But who knows? So I wrote that, and by the way, they mentioned it, was harmful and dangerous content, which was the warning that I got on one of my videos around Christmas time of 2019 when a lot of YouTubers were also getting just mass banned.

Now, I also did get a warning today on some old video from around this time last year, and it was just like a news of the day video. I was talking about Warren Buffett, not liking Bitcoin and a few other random things that happened that day. nothing in particular that would be, although mine was not under harmful and dangerous content, mine was categorized under spam slash scams slash, I don't know what else. And yeah, and so that video was just taken down. Like there was no, it wasn't like flagged and demonetized.

Like it was fully taken down and just disappeared. I appealed it. I haven't heard anything yet. But it does worry me because, you know, this is a big part of what I do. is a big part of my life and to see that just hanging on a thread by the whims of some algorithm at YouTube is terrifying. So, so I wrote whether or not you like tone vase is irrelevant. This is pretty brutal. I worry every day about my educational content being purged from YouTube at the drop of a hat. I also got a warning this morning on some random news video I did in 2019. Now, I mean,

there's been a lot of support. A lot of people retweeting and liking and everything suggesting other places to go. The big thing is YouTube essentially has a monopoly in eyeballs. If you want online videos, more or less you're probably watching YouTube. Now, I do see a need for alternative platforms. I don't see a distinct secondary option right now. There's always, some people have mentioned Twitch, but that's all live and I do some pre-recorded and I do tutorial. videos that just wouldn't really work on Twitch, I don't think anyways, doesn't seem like the medium for it. And still, there's, there's that issue of, of, you know, could they just take me down as well? Obviously, I've been doing the podcast, just the audio version of my new stuff that wouldn't

cover any of the tutorials, but at least the news stuff would still get out there. So that's, currently I use Anchor, and that goes out to, you know, Google Podcast, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and a whole bunch of other platforms. So that helps a little bit, but I still have to build that up. Outside of that, some people recommended both library and BitChute. Now, I'm not a huge fan of the token

that they added to library, but I did sign up just now as a way of mitigating. So if you want to follow me on library, if you're already on there, then feel free to do so. I'll try to start uploading my content regularly there as well. And let me know what you, think of other potential platforms that I could be on because, you know, the podcast was step one,

but I think I need to take further measures just in case so that if shit hits the fan, I'm not screwed. And it sucks to say that because I've been on YouTube since 2016, but I do worry every single day that I'm just going to wake up one morning and go to upload a video and it'll all just be gone. Now, I do have backups of all my content, but, you know, when I have 30-something thousand subscribers and millions of views, to have that go away in a moment would be heartbreaking. I would hate to see that. So if you can, you know, follow me on library. Make sure you follow the podcast wherever you listen to that kind of stuff and share it around

because it will help. and if shit does hit the fan at some point, at least having a start elsewhere will greatly help me not be totally screwed. Anyways, let's move on. Enough about me. Let's talk one more thing. So, you know, money printer has been going burr quite a bit. There was a jobs report that came out another five point something million jobless claim.

So the U.S. now well over 20 million jobless claims. claims in the past four weeks, which is crazy to think. Stock market still doing fine because they're printing plenty of money to keep that afloat. But now there's a bill being presented about more helicopter money. So some of those, the Care Act just dropped and people are starting to receive $12, depending on if they qualify of helicopter money, just money deposited in their account to help get them through. Clearly, that's not going to make much of a dent. It was more of a stopgap measure, I think, because with 20 million people out of work, $1,200 doesn't go very far, especially

depending on where you live. If you're in New York, what do you do with $1,200? Probably, in most cases, wouldn't even cover rent. So anyways, here's the lowdown of what they're proposing here. Two Democrats have proposed a bill that if passed would send $2,000 each month to every American over 16 years old. Called the Emergency Money for the People Act, the bill which was introduced on Tuesday by Rep. Tim Ryan and Rep. Um, um, Ro Kana. I'm not sure how to say that last name. It would curb the economic fallout by the coronavirus pandemic that's sweeping through the U.S. The coronavirus relief money would be sent to Americans earning less than 130k a year. Married couples earning less than 260K would receive at least $4,000 and families with up to three children

would get an extra 500 bucks per month per child. The unemployed would also be eligible for this. man that's crazy like I mean part of it I guess I get if you're totally out of work and you have no income but I I don't understand the reasoning behind if you're earning as an individual less than a hundred and thirty if you're earning a hundred and thirty K still you're doing pretty well now I'm wondering if that means you used to earn a hundred and thirty K maybe I don't I don't know it doesn't it doesn't really say, but that's, okay, so the main issue here that I see is that that is a hell of a lot of money. That's like $400 billion a month. And they say until after the impacts of the coronavirus are done. So who knows how long that lasts, but $400 billion per month pumped directly into people's pockets.

And that hits the economy like that. And with QE that happened. back in 2008, 2009, and kind of in the years thereafter, that was pumped into banks, which, you know, I'm not advocating that at all either. They definitely screwed up with that. But what the only reason we didn't see some form of inflation from that is because it was funneled directly into stock buybacks and into other equities, which meant that the only thing that saw inflation was the stock market. And so that's why we saw this insane. run for the past 12 years where just it always seemed to be going up. Whereas if that money is no longer kind of restricted to the equity markets, it

starts to flow out into the day-to-day economy and that starts to affect the regular prices of day-to-day goods. And while it may be nice to have that money, once they turn on the spigots, they're not going be able to turn them off very easily because something a temporary measure like that it becomes very, very evident that it's tough to take stuff like that back in the end because people will become accustomed to it. And what if the economy starts to fail when they go to pull it away? They're going to come back in full force. Just like they said they weren't going to do QE, we're not going to do it. We're not going to do it. Okay, we're doing it. And now we're doing a lot.

So I don't see how this gets rolled out and doesn't just go on perpetually until hyperinflation happens. Now, this is just a proposal. I kind of don't believe necessarily that this type of a bill would be passed. But you may see some type of a neutered version of this, which eventually leads to more or less exactly. this. I could see more of that, more of a trajectory like that. I don't know. I don't know what to expect anymore because everything that's happened in the past month is beyond belief. Like if you would have said, hey, they're going to print trillions of dollars in the span of a few weeks and just dump it everywhere and send every person $1,200 each, I would have thought it was crazy. And so I guess

I guess in me saying I don't believe this would happen and get passed right away. Partly, I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about because who would have ever guessed that any of this would have happened? So I don't know. Let me know what you think. And if you were getting 2K a month, where would you be putting that money? I would be stacking at least a few stats out of that. I mean, you've got to cover your expenses if you're out of work. But holy hell, it seems counterintuitive not to own a money that is. cannot be debased when the president set by the World Reserve currency is to dump dollars in the lap of every man, woman, and child. Holy crap. Anyways, guys, I'm going to wrap up there. Thank you so much for watching. As always, if you're on YouTube, assuming this is still there, do hit like, subscribe,

and share. If you're listening to this on audio only via the podcast, of course, share that out. And do leave a review that really helps for visibility and getting more ears on the show. If you want to help out the show in another way, you can hit up the mention sponsors down below. That was Ledden and Coinberry, both have some deals for you. And also check out Wasabi Wallet to help with your Bitcoin privacy, which was a key topic today. And other than that, if you really liked what you saw,

you can always drop me a lightning network tip at my tipin.combe. That's tippin.combe slash at VTC sessions. With that, I'm out. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I'll see you guys next time for your... daily session.