BTC Sessions - Does Every Bitcoin Transaction Drain a Pool's Worth of Water?! ep381

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Join us in this exciting episode as we dive deep into the latest Bitcoin buzz! We're starting off by tackling the new environmental FUD surrounding Bitcoin, debunking myths about its water usage. Next, we discuss the launch of the decentralized mining pool "Ocean" and its potential impact on the crypto space. Don't miss our analysis of Michael Saylor and Microstrategy's unrelenting Bitcoin investment strategy. We also cover the groundbreaking meeting between Samson Mow, Jan3, and the President of Colombia, exploring what this could mean for Bitcoin's future. Lastly, we unravel the chilling story of a hacking victim who lost Bitcoin from a cold wallet, including the jaw-dropping 83 BTC transaction fee. Stay tuned for a blend of facts, insights, and expert opinions! 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions Nunchuk Wallet and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted multisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Pass on your savings to your loved ones with ease in a simple claiming process with full customer support. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ SEEDOR is one of the most robust metal backups on the market today. Get your SEEDOR starter set today! Use this link for 5% off. https://www.seedor.io/discount/BTCSESSIONS?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fprodukte For US based customers: https://www.seedor.io/btcsessions Canadian customers: https://link.thecryptoboutique.ca/BTCSessionsSeedor Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab a Server Lite, One or Pro today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/ HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Furthermore, you can check out their Lend platform for p2p loans that are never rehypothecated. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION Free video tutorials not enough? Need some extra hand-holding when mastering self-custody, multisig, coinjoin, running a node, or other skills? Book me for a private session on my website! https://www.btcsessions.ca/ Been watching the show for a while? Like what you see? Help me cover my video costs by sending some sats over on my Geyser Fund page! https://geyser.fund/project/btcsessions

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Thursday, another episode of Simply Sessions. We've got Nico in the Wings here, ready to come in and tell us the latest and greatest in Bitcoin. What's going on? All of the crazy stuff that's been happening. Every week, there's always some new crazy thing that's going on. Very excited to have them on. We're going to be chatting a bunch.

But, of course, before we get into this, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks.

If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things to help but time that little like button just below the screen. Tap it right now, preemptively. You don't know if you're going to like it. You are going to like it. You're going to hit it. Share it to all your socials and, of course, subscribe. I'm on the warpath to 100K. Let's make it there.

I'm in the mid, we'll say mid to low 80s right. now we're going to do it i'm giving myself to the end of 2024 so join me on the journey to 100k please subscribe anyways with that guys i am ben with the btc sessions this is your simply session before we dive in let's take a look at where we are in the market right now this is timechain calendar dot com and simultaneously i'm bringing up the chat which will now be on the right hand side of the screen all of your comments from here on end will be live for the world to see for better or worse. So be sure to chime in and say hello. But back to timechain calendar.com. We're sitting at 37,681 sats per, or sats, dollars per coin, a single U.S.

dollar will pick you up 2,653 sats. In terms of fees, holy moly, I haven't seen them this low in a while. 25 sats per bite next block, 22 sats per bite anytime purging anything below, we'll call it 11 sats per byte. And in terms of Bitcoin, mine, 19.56 million of them, that's 93.13.13% of the total supply. Shout out to sponsors to the show, hoddle, hoddle.com.

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nice it was that was the first time I've had you know like four days off consecutively and then a flight, then I had to jump on a flight on Monday. But it was, it was good. By the third day, I felt my soul coming back. It's crazy what happens when you take some time off. Yeah. Yeah. I, it's, I'm feeling that right now because I've got a lot of things on the go and I'm feeling that crunch where I'm like, man, I could use a few days where I don't look at the internet. That'd be nice. So good. It's so good. And then, and then just go, go to Banff and I'm going, hike. Yeah.

Absolutely beautiful. Ben knows some spots. That's what I got to say. There's some good spots. I'll take you to more next time you're here for sure. We're doing it. Yeah, man. There's been a lot going on.

What's top of mind this week for you? What's been catching your eye here? Well, you know, Sailor's just buying all the Bitcoin and just like leaving none for us. It makes me feel bad about myself. Like his one stack. He's just like, oh, man. Oh, God. Wow, I won't get, you know, a small fraction of that ever.

A little white time of stacking. And he just did it like it's a weekly Tuesday thing that he just throws in. Dude, it's so, it's so freaking crazy, man. This guy is embodying, he's embodying, you know, I think it got to him. Like, I think he thinks that he's Chad Saylor. I mean, he is Chad Saylor. Yeah. He's manifesting who he says he is or who we say he is.

Anyways, Micro Strategy has acquired an additional 16,130 Bitcoin for $593 million U.S. dollars. That's nothing. Chump change. And an average price of $36,785 per Bitcoin. As of November 29, 20203, Micro Strategy now holds 174,530 Bitcoin acquired for $5.28,000. at an average price of $30,252 per coin. Nah, just a small little smash by. Do you think he gets to 1%?

Do you think he gets to the 210thau? I think based on his, I saw an interview of his. I forget who it was on. But he was like, yeah, essentially all the tech companies have this monopoly. Although like the seven tech companies have this monopoly. And then I saw Bitcoin. And then I saw the opportunity. for micro strategy to be the monopoly.

So like, yeah, I think, I think he has, he has a target, man. And I wouldn't be surprised if you move heaven and earth to get to that 1%. Yeah. That's great. It's just so crazy. It's, yeah. It's thanks, Michael. Man, oh, crap.

Great. It's like, was this responsible for the pump from 28 to 30 something? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well. Yeah, yeah.

We'll continue feeling bad about ourselves well into the future, I'm sure. Let me ask you something. So I know he came on last year during your Christmas special, right? Yes. That was the depths of hell. That was the depths of the bear market. Yeah. How was he?

He was great. It was good. It was like more of a philosophical talk. And it was him, I let him choose his panel. He was like one of the only people that I was like, Here's the guest list. Pick. And he picked the one with John Valis and Tip.

Okay. Interesting. It was like the societal implications of living on a Bitcoin standard or something like that. That's crazy. Yeah, I enjoyed it. It was great. That's crazy. That's crazy.

Yeah, man. If you want to get philosophical, definitely Valis is your man. And tips are genius too. Oh, yeah. So let's go down some stuff that's been happening. And this kind of is a perfect segue to the big news of the first so-called decentralized mining pool, the attack from the legacy media. Literally the day after Jack Dorsey announces Jack Dorsey Ocean,

Luke Dash Jr. And Bitcoin Mechanic announced the first Bitcoin mining decentralized mining pool, the legacy media pilot. And they say that Bitcoin is using more waters than entire pools. Is that a coincidence? I don't think so. I think that's information trench warfare right there. The stats on it, like just the idea.

I mean, it's so quickly disproven because you're like, how many Bitcoin transactions are happening every single day. And it's like, somebody gives stats. It's like if they're just talking about on chain, then every pool in, like in terms of water usage, every pool in the United States would be gone inside of a month.

So like, obviously it's not, they're not referring directly to like pools, but they're like that amount of water usage is what we're looking at. And that completely ignores the fact that obviously there's lightning network and everything like that, which then negates the whole premise of it. But if they include lightning network, it's like every, every pool inside of the United States would be gone by tomorrow. Dude, it's just like, like, okay, you tell me this. We'll get to the whole, the censorship and all this stuff, right? So here's Jack and he was referencing, you know, the launch of ocean.xyz.

First, you know, quote unquote, decentralized mining pool. And he kind of made a joke out of it. And he said, she thought it was the ocean. It's just the pool. The next day, the 29th of November. So that tweet went out the 28th. Okay. The next day, the BBC is every Bitcoin payment uses a swimming pool of water.

water. Okay. Now you could say, Nico, that's an offshoot. No, no, no, no. They all piled on. Something happened there. They got the memo, the independent. Bitcoin consumes as much water as all the bats in Britain. Single Bitcoin transaction may use pools worth of water. It's not electricity. Bitcoin mines burn through a lot of water too. A single Bitcoin transaction uses enough water to fill a swimming pool. A Bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of water as a swimming pool. Like, okay, Ben. And all within like when you look at those, all those headlines, like those pictures, it was showing literally like like 16 minutes ago, 29 minutes ago, 29, 31 minutes ago. They all literally hit within minutes of each other. That's insane. It's not like it's like when it's a

minute apart. It's not, oh, somebody saw this show, saw this, and then, and then looked and like did their own take on it because that takes time for it to proliferate. Like these were queued and ready and dropped in tandem. Yeah. Like, like, I'm telling you, bro, like, call me a conspiracy theorist, dude. Okay. Jack announces the first decentralized mining pool, all right?

And then the day after, they're like Bitcoin payments uses a swimming pool of water. And then you would think, okay, Nico, how is that attack? You're not, like, if you think about it from the adversarial perspective, if you're a normie, all of a sudden you have associated the word pool, bad Bitcoin, right? Yeah. If you don't know about Bitcoin, now essentially what they plant, what they intercepted in your head is Bitcoin uses more than pool. And then you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what a mining pool is.

You don't understand, right? Like, it's, this is crazy, bro. This is, I guarantee, and I can't say that. I don't know for certain, but it's a very big coincidence. I just got to say that. I love the comment. Yeah, I got to bring this up. I want to know where Phelps stands on that.

We should, I wonder if we could pool our funds and get, uh, and get Michael Phelps to film like some sort of an ad for Bitcoin. And he's about to like jump in to swim a lap. And then he like lands in a dry pool on the floor. Bitcoin mining is dangerous. Oh my God. Sponsored by Greenpeace. Oh, man.

Tiny letters, parentheses, XRP. Oh, man. Oh, God. Okay. So,

yeah. So it is so, okay. So what was this announcement? What was this ocean thing? right so block CEO jack dorsey leads 6.2 million dollar investment round in decentralized bitcoin mining pool i'm going to read you two quotes first one is ocean is solving a problem for for bitcoiners that i think all of us feel further centralization of mining pools that could plague bitcoin and how the risks a bunch of bitcoin attributes that we hold dear said jack dorsey quote when i see a project that is good for

bitcoin broadly and that's that's also good for me and my company's personal Personally, it becomes a simple decision for me. I'm happy to be a part of it. It goes on to say, another quote, traditional Bitcoin mining pools take exclusive custody of block rewards and transaction fees before splitting them up amongst miners. This gives them the ability to withhold payment from individual miners, whether by their choice or by legal requirement,

Ocean's non-custodial payouts directly to miners from the block reward, remove the risk, and the pools undue influence, over minors. It goes on to say, the role of mining pools must change for Bitcoin to exist as a truly decentralized currency. Ocean is a new type of pool that enables miners to be truly miners again. We are launching as the most transparent pool and also the only non-custodio pool where miners are the recipients of new block rewards directly from Bitcoin.

So it was kind of a big deal. I was very, very lucky to be there. I caught this video of the christening. I think that's how you say it of the start of the project. By the way, for anyone who's not in the know, you can go to at ocean.xyZ right now, and you can start hashing with them. So anyway, so here's a quick video. Let's check it out.

So, yeah. So it was pretty cool. It was pretty cool. Leave it to Bitcoiners to not be able to hard enough to break glass. So, Ben, what's your take on all this? Like, what's your take on the, you know, on this announcement? We were talking a little bit, but yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So I, it's interesting. Number one, one of the, there's, my understanding is there's a lot of things that were, that were said that sound awesome that are, coming to fruition over time. So like, you know, one of the things is stratum v2. And that's, that's kind of like one of the big polls is, is, yo, it's no longer the pool that decides what's in a block, which would prevent censorship of like, you know, any types of transactions,

more broadly speaking, because the individual miner who actually mines the block as part of the pool gets to decide what's in the block. But that's not role. out yet on ocean. That's something that's coming at some point. But that's like the goal, the stated goal of is running stradum v2. The there's been some, so like that's a positive thing. The other positive thing is this is like a non-KY seed pool. Like I went and tested out the website and I was like, okay, so I'm going to point. I've got my space heater behind me. So I was like, let's see what this process looks like. And I've done it with other pools where you, you, you create a login. And yeah, it's still pseudonymous on some of them where you go and you,

it's like an email address. This is literally, you go and you get, you get a, a Bitcoin address that you own and you go and you copy that and you paste it in and like on their website. And then you also get like a link from them and you go onto like your interface for your minor and you paste that in and you save the settings. And then that's it. It's literally like a couple copy and paste and then save. And then to look up what your miners doing and what your rewards are, it's literally you just like take the Bitcoin address that you used or however you labeled it and you paste it in on the website and then you see how much you've been hashing what your potential rewards are like all of that stuff. So it's like

there's no login even. It's just you just go there and you paste something in and then it just kind of starts working. So that, that aspect of it is, is pretty cool. I like that. There's been some criticisms levied at Ocean and kind of how things are, uh, since then. I think there, there's, there's two ways of thinking of it. Um, first I'll say what the criticisms were. Um, one of them was, um, uh, you know, they were talking about transparency, um, a lot at the presentation. And in terms of like you see what the you know how the block the block is actually going to be constructed which most mining pools don't even show you that um and as an individual miner you can like use their templates or however you see fit um so that you get to if you actually want to block yourself

you decide how it works um but in terms of transparency the the software itself is not open source it's closed source um so like there was that criticism in and around the term transparency everywhere. The other thing was in and around how payouts happen. It was like, you know, because it's a small pool, like, how do you do, like, non-custodial for people that are mining small amounts? Like, how do they withdraw it? And like, there was kind of like hand wavy, like, we're going to add lightning, which would be absolutely awesome. But it's like not in practice yet. to a degree if you're mining tiny amounts of sats off a space heater, then yeah, I guess they have your sats for the time being until there's a solution for that. And then there was

some criticism around it sounds like they're providing a block template. Should people choose to use it, that would be you would not mine ordinal's transactions, which some people see as a very positive thing. Other people see as as censorship. And yes, it would be censorship on the part of the individual minor that decided to use that template. But each minor contributing hash would decide on their own. And so it's more just offering choice. I think they don't like ordinals, but it also makes it so that they can't dictate that. They can only offer the option to people that are contributing hash. And then if somebody, they, that does want to mine ordinal's minds with the pool,

the pool can't say no. So there's tradeoffs there in that if you're mining and you're looking for like the fattest, biggest transaction fees, you want the ordinal's mind because that makes you more money. But just by virtue of using a stratum v2 pool, there's, inevitably you're gonna be making less fees because some people hashing, decide not to mine ordnals.

So that's an interesting thing to think about. By being more decentralized, you're inherently going to potentially be sacrificing fees to do so. So all of this, I think at the end of the day, my takeaway is you can point your hash at Ocean if you decide to. I think there's, I think it's a number of things are a step in the right direction, but have, you know, if they are actually, you know, if they come to fruition. And there's a number of things that I do like. And there's a number of things that I'm like, nah, it could be better.

But at the end of the day, it's trivial to point your hash at whatever pool you want. So if you pointed it at ocean and all of a sudden you're like, I don't like this. It's literally a copy and paste. And that's it. So more choice, better. Stratum v2. good, in my opinion, more pools offering stratum v2

to prevent censorship overall, good in my opinion. And they're not the only pool that, like, there's a second announcement that came up from a demand. It's called a demand pool, mining pool.

And they claim to be the first stratum v2 mining pool that actually has it in practice or is going to be launched first. So we'll see. But overall, people are seeing a problem with KYC'd OFAC sanctioning miners and they're offering alternatives. So let the free market do its thing, I suppose.

Hell yeah. And the free market once again is providing a solution to just that. And Ben, that's a perfect segue to my next point, which is, you know, maybe you're not in the no, but this is something that I suspect is going to start accelerating. In fact, it's happened in the past. It looks like it happened again. Marathon, and this was back in the day. I mean, this was two years ago.

Marathon Digital Holdings becomes the first North American Enterprise Minor to produce fully AML and OFC compliant Bitcoin, right? They got so much backlash from this. Apparently, if you are to take their word for it, they walked it back. Once again, F2 Pool, which if you look at M. MMPool. Space is the third largest mining pool at the moment with 11.1% of the hash rate. But like Ben said, that's not their hash. That's people that are choosing to use F2Pool for convenience.

So just to be transparent and put that over the table. But they censored, right? So it says F2Pool disables transaction filtering patch parentheses for now. Here is, I guess, the CEO or the founder. He says, why do you feel surprised when I refuse to confirm transactions for those criminals, dictators, or terrorists? I have every right not to confirm any transactions from Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, don't I? Meanwhile, CZ is selling his soul for money. He deserves it.

So, I mean, like, did he get pressure? Was this like a, you know, a pressure thing? Look, I say yes just because of the way that marathon framed it. Right. So it's like fully AML, OFC compliant Bitcoin, right? So like Marathons obviously, or Marathon was better said, trying to get ahead of it. So do you think, and again, we've heard so much boogeyman stuff from the legacy media, right, about Vladimir Putin. Yeah.

So it's just, isn't it awfully convenient? Again, just a coincidence, I could say. I wanted to bring up two things that are in the chat here really quick. Number one, Kordick was, you know, because I think it was before. we got into the, like, the OFAC censoring with F2Pool, but Kordak is right. It's about more than, you know, worrying about censorship of ordinals. It's, it's about, like, actual censorship of, of, you know, any type of transaction. That's the thing that that should be concerning for people. The other thing brought up was after doing this, Roman was saying that F2 pool, they've now,

they're now sixth. So they've dropped, in terms of mining pools, they've dropped two spots in hash rate in 24 hours. Miners are actually moving their hash. Really? So, I mean, this is, and we saw this previously for different reasons. Back in the day, it was ghash.io got over 51% of hash rate. And individual miners that had their own hash voluntarily changed where they were,

pointing their hash rate, even though it was to pools with less hash that would mine blocks less often, they pointed their hash elsewhere because they saw it as a threat to Bitcoin's decentralization and then just voluntarily switch. So whenever there's FUD in and around mining pools in general saying like, oh, there's two or three large mining pools that you could subpoena and then you could 51% attack Bitcoin. Well, not exactly because it's not their hash, as you said. People can just point that elsewhere if anything fishy goes on. And we're seeing the market also creating alternatives that are, well, at least,

at least stating that they won't bend the knee to that kind of crap. We'll see in practice. But I think when it's a real perceived threat, then the free market creates options. 100% I 100% agree with you. I think, you know, the free market will, will create a solution. And it was F2 pool, but also it was another one, Ben,

like I forget who it was, but they stopped their payouts, for example. And then you just saw like snap of a finger, people just switch to another pool. Yeah. So again, like it's like, it's the perception that like all these pools have this hash rate. no, no, no, that's not the case at all.

It's just like people are just choosing to pull with them because it increases the probability of a steady payout, so to speak. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So speaking of censorship, a quick update on something that I think we covered two weeks ago. And this has been actually a pretty big deal in terms of the fight for freedom of speech, which I believe, Ben, is the front line for the fight for Bitcoin. Like I think if we lose the fight for freedom of speech, you know, if they're not okay with you saying certain things, what makes you think they're going to be okay with you transacting certain ways?

Yeah. Right. So this is something, this is like a huge story that broke out over the last couple of weeks. We touched upon it, but essentially what happened is this organization called Media Matters. The way here, the Associated Press describes it best. So X says in its complaint filed in federal court in 4th Ward, Texas, that media matters, quote, knowingly and maliciously portrayed ads next to hateful material, as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform. X complaints claim that Media Matters manipulated algorithms on the platform to create images of advertiser paid posts next to racist, incendiary content.

The juxtapositions, according to the complaint, were, quote, manufactured in organic and extraordinary rare. It says media matters did this by using X accounts that just followed X users known to produce quote extreme fringe content and accounts owned by X majors advertisers. This complaint says led to a feed aimed at producing side by side placements placements that Media Matters could then screenshot in an effort to alienate X advertisers. Media Matters said Monday that it stands by its reporting. and expects to prevail in court. Quote, this is a frivolous lawsuit meant to bully ex-critics into silence. Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxson announced his office is launching an investigation into media matters for possible fraudulent activity

related to the group's reports. Now, here's another thing. A bunch of other organizations tried to produce the same results and they weren't able to do it. Now, what did this lead? This lead to massive amounts of X's advertisers to essentially pull the plug.

IBM, Lionsgate Entertainment, Apple, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, NBC, Comcast, Sony, Ubisoft, major companies with deep products. Now, you would think, okay, what are they doing? Since Elon took over Twitter, he's done two things. he's said willingly and openly that he supports free speech and also he released the Twitter files which released which which uncovered that the US government was tapping on Twitter

to censor certain American speech it happens to be that those certain Americans leaned a certain political way but this highlights two things right thing number one is the weakness of centralized platforms. This is why protocols like Bitcoin and Nostor are so important because you can't knock on the CEO of Bitcoin on the CEO of Noster's door to say, hey, you got to censor this person. That's thing number one. And thing number two is that clearly, clearly, there are very, very powerful institutions that want to control what you can say and what you think. I know, Ben,

you in Canada have experienced that lately with the Instagram blockage and all that stuff, right? You can't even see certain media sources. Now, this, all this, what, with all this happening, it reminds me of this article that Naim Bukhelaide dropped a long time ago called Don't Drink the Elites Kool-Kul-Aid in which he says, the most vocal detractors, the ones who are afraid and pressuring us to reverse our decision are the world's powerful elites and the people who work for or benefit from them. They used to own everything, and in a way they still do. The media, the banks, the NGOs, the international organizations,

and almost all the governments and corporations in the world. And with that, of course, they also own the armies, the loans, the money supply, the credit ratings. Here's the kicker. The narrative, the propaganda, the factories, the food supply. They control international trade and international law. But their most powerful weapon is the control of the truth. and they're willing to fight, lie, smear, destroy, sensor, confiscate, print,

and do whatever it takes to maintain and increase their control over the truth. And this is what it's about. And the reason that I wanted to bring this up again today is because Elon did a giant FU and you could just tell by Andrew Sorkin's reaction, kind of like what my reaction is to when, if Opti ever goes off the rails, just put my head. I'm like, God damn it, bro. He did the same thing. And here's Bitcoin therapist, awesome memer. And he says, the elites are doing everything in their power to bankrupt X, control the media, stop Bitcoin and keep you as a prisoner. Now, let's check out what Elon

has to say. Obviously, you know that there's a public perception that, and you're clarifying this now, but there's a public perception that that was part of a apology tour, if you will, That this had been said online. There was all of the criticism. There was advertisers leaving. We talked to Bob Eager today. You hope they stop. Don't advertise.

You don't want them to advertise? No. What do you mean? If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. But, fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.

Hey, Bob. Here in the audience. Well, let me ask you, then. That's how I feel. Don't advertise. How do you think then about the economics of X? If part of the underlying model, at least today, and maybe it needs to shift, maybe the answer

is it needs to shift away from advertising, if you believe that this is the one part of your business where you will be beholden to those who have this view, what do you do? F Y. I understand that, but there's a reality, too. Right? Yes. No, no. I mean, Linda Yaccarino's right here, and she's got to sell advertising. Absolutely, so, no, no, no, totally.

So, no, actually, what this advertising boycott is, is going to do, it's going to kill a company. And you think that the company? And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will documented in great detail. But those advertisers, I imagine, are going to say, they're going to say, we didn't kill the company. Oh, yeah. They're going to say. Tell to Earth.

But they're going to say that they're going to say, Elon, that you killed the company because you said these things and that they were inappropriate. You said the company because you said the, no, no, no. Yeah. They killed the company because Elon did not want to censor. And then just to put the bow on top on all this, Elon once asked September 17, how did most of the legacy media go from superheroes of free speech to supervillains of speech suppression? And Jeff Booth, like Jeff Booth always does, said it perfectly.

Because broken money ensures the centralization of power by stealing the productivity through inflation that should flow to society in the form of lower prices. Then those enriched by that theft in subsequent power must control. the messaging to keep it. Bro. Just like Jeff's Jeff Booth's ability to

basically focus down into two sentences the problem with everything is unparalleled. Like in two sentences he basically said, here's why the world is broken and

also how to fix it. Yeah. And it's crazy because it had to do with money. It has to do with the money. It has to do with the broken money. And what's crazy to me, Ben, is the fact that, you know, and Naimu Keli hit the nail on the head. And this was before any of this was happening.

He identified the problem. He's like, look, these people, they don't want you to talk freely. And they're willing to go to whatever means. And if that means creating this bogus artificial results where you're only, following the neo-Nazis and only following the sponsors so that we could take screenshots of it so that we can go in the media and say, see, you see Elon's a racist, you know, whatever it takes in order to take down people's speech. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to keep happening. What, yeah, I mean, this is, this was the impetus for, people recognize the problem with the money and

Bitcoin came to fruition. People that came to Bitcoin realizing that Bitcoin fixes this also created a network that enables people to not have censorship of speech. Like actually, truly not. Like the only reason that some people are allowed to say certain things on X is because Elon permits it. Like, let's not get a twisted. Like he gets to make. that call and sometimes and sometimes in certain instances, somebody in the chat early on had a quote from Elon or from his whoever's in charge of all the advertising or whatever. But nonetheless, it was something along the lines of freedom of speech, not freedom of reach. So you can say whatever you want, but like we may not amplify it or we may not like, effectively we may throttle you, which is like just another form of the same. same thing. So like, yeah, the only way to bypass that is to not have algorithms that decide or to have customizable algorithms for individuals. Like you can't put that responsibility in the

hands of anybody other than the individual who's consuming the content. 100%. And it also highlights the important. It's like, okay, Elon's a little bit better, right? but it also highlights the importance of the protocols. Yeah. Noster. Bitcoin. Doesn't matter, bro. It doesn't matter.

You know, you can't block that person. You can't other that person. And I think that's where we're heading. Anyways, Ben, it's an honor like always. Guys, this was your Simply sessions.

Peace out. Later, man. Awesome. And everybody, stick around. We got a few things that I want to get out here. and make you guys privy to some of the tech updates that have been going on. So let me pull my, and I mean, I guess, exciting show updates as well.

Let's talk Christmas show. It's coming, you guys. It's coming. Tomorrow is December 1st, and the Christmas show is happening on December 22nd. Take a look at this guest list that we got. So the first panel is going to be on circular economies. It's going to be Joe Hall, Mike Peterson from Bitcoin Beach, and Brian DeMint from Orange Pill app. We've got Fiat is Broken.

That's going to be Larry Lepard, Peter St. Aodge, and James Lavish. We've got Bitcoin tools, including privacy, self-custody, no K-YC, Francis Pooleyat from Bull Bitcoin, wicked, amazing educator. And the return, the return of the one vortex, if you're unfamiliar, he was integral in my understanding of why Bitcoin is different from everybody else. We've got an ostrich panel with Walker and Carla, Will from Domus, and of course, Rockstar Dev. We've got Lightning Growth and Tools with Guy Swan, Ben the Carmen from Mutiny Wallet and Nate, aka Beef for Bacon, and he works at Voltage as well. We've got making it as a blue-collar club, of course, with the blue-collar Bitcoin guys and Dombay.

And we've got Clown World at its finest with a reunion of Maidex, Harry Suttock, and American Hoddle. We've got lessons from 2023 with Nico, of course, Natalie Brunel and Tour de Meester. And then we've got the after party. Of course, Anders and Publy are going to be joining me, Rick from Crypto Cloaks, and about six other people. So it's going to be insane. Make sure you mark your calendars December 22nd, of course, on a Friday. It is a marathon. So it starts at 5 p.m. Eastern time.

And it will go well in. into the evening. It's going to be wild. Anyways, let's get into some of the updates that we saw this week from stuff. Envoy has a new update. This is their beta. It has intuitive coin control and more. So basically, they dropped a huge Envoy release to all their VIPs,

but it basically allows you to use coin control, activity center, and privacy shield, and a redesign learn lab. So if you do use Envoy either as a hot wallet or with a pack. passport, then keep an eye out for that update. D-TAN, this is a distributed torrent archive on Noster. So basically, it is, again, you can basically have a torrents distributed on Nostr so that you can download files. And again, it's just like, I feel like Bitcoin in and of itself took some lessons from torrent files in the first place.

And so this is just a natural progression where Bitcoiners, you know, Bitcoin took lessons from torrents. Bitcoiners went on to create Noster, and then Nostr went on to integrate torrents. It's, you know, it's the circle of life, you guys. Amazing. Moving on here, Blockstrom Green update.

Now, I have had Axe, to the Lightning Wallet in Bloxstream Green for a while, but I know that wasn't accessible to everyone previously. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure when they made that accessible to everybody. Maybe somebody in the chat can let me know if you've had access to Lightning for a while. But either way, they've done some updates on Bloxroom Green for mobile. So they support Lightning with Jade Air Gapt BIP 85 mnemonics. So basically your Lightning wallet can be managed.

by a BIP-85-generated seed from your Blochrome jade, which is kind of cool. I actually, my whole Blockstream Green wallet is a Bip-85 generated from my cold card. But nonetheless, you can do it with your Jade as well, which is pretty cool. They support Jade Watch-only import by scanning the animated QR codes, to a fake call method as a SMS backup. They also fix the key, just bug fixes and everything. They also pumped an update for iOS as well with a lot of the same things. But nonetheless, I do quite like Blockstrom Green and I've been using it a lot more lately

because I've also been using liquid a lot more, and I'll mention that in a moment. Also, interesting, BitBox is working on its integration. with the same kind of thing where you can generate like a child seed that manages a lightning wallet on their mobile app. So you can basically receive both on desktop and on your mobile app. And we're starting to see all these cool lightning innovations because of number one, Blockstream's Greenlight, where basically they'll host a lightning node for you in the cloud, but you have the keys to control said lightning node, as well as Breezes SDK. So it's like this developer kit so that you can easily integrate all this stuff and they provide liquidity.

So all of this stuff allows you to make these automated lightning wallets where you don't have to think too much, where you can just kind of set it up and have it work, which is awesome. So I'm stoked to see all this stuff kind of rolling out. And I love the idea that your lightning wallet backup can be your hardware as like a BIP 85. If you're unfamiliar with BIP 85, basically you can have a seed phrase that spits off a bunch of child seeds that you can't work backwards to compromise the parent seed, but you can always recover the child seeds by going back to the original and saying, what was account number one or five or whatever? So super cool there. Moving on, let's go to let's talk Sats Market. Do I want to do

Sats Market first? No, let's talk to Start 9 first. So start 9, the restart program. This is cool. basically what they've done is they've started combing old office buildings that are getting rid of their computers because there's been an exodus of office buildings and commercial real estate and everything. So oftentimes offices will upgrade all their computers and they'll get rid of these kind of like, you know, relatively powerful desktop PCs that, you know, are sometimes is difficult to resell because you have to deal with like, you know, actually having screens, keyboards and all this stuff. But if you repurpose them as nodes, then you don't need all that because you can just

plug it into your local network via your, via your actual plug into the internet and just have that sitting there. And you don't need a screen interface because you can access it from your laptop or your, your tablet or whatever. So what they've done is they've started buying up. some of these, again, quite powerful devices and repurposing them and installing Start9 OS or StartOS on them and then selling them for actually pretty cheap. And so they've picked up a whole bunch of these HP Elite Desk 800 G3s that have some good

specs. These are an NVME SSD, 16 gigs of RAM, a four core four thread Intel I5 processor. Yeah, I mean, it literally has two times the performance as a 2023 server one. And it's just, it's starting at $329 for a two terabyte hard drive on it. That's solid. And I love that they're basically repurposing hardware that may have just hit the trash heap. And like, what else can Bitcoin do to prove the environmentalists wrong? We're basically taking e-waste and repurposing it to further bolster the resiliency

and censorship resistance of the Bitcoin network. How fucking cool is that? So hats off to Start 9 and the restart program. Good for them. Continuing on, yeah, let's talk Sat's Market. So I am hosting, well, I'm helping put together. I shouldn't say hosting. I'm basically bringing together,

helping bring together a group of people here in my home city of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. And we were doing the first ever Saturday Sat Market coming up on Saturday, December, 16th. So far, I have in and around 30 merchants for this thing. And so this is going to be hosted downtown in Calgary at a place called the White Diamond Conference Center. It's in Chinatown. Huge room. We've got tons of space. I've already started doing one-on-one calls with all the merchants, setting stuff up. There's going to be Bitcoin films that are played. There's going to be learning

tables where you can partake and just like go up and learn or you can, there's going to be some like individual 30 minute sessions where people can learn about various things. There's going to be some one-on-one Q&As that you can watch. There's going to be live music. We might have a Bitcoin Santa there. There's going to be all kinds of stuff and obviously all of the merchants. And I think we're going to be doing maybe a bit of an after party or something like that somewhere as well. It's all coming together.

I'm very excited for it. I've got a lot of good help. There's so many people volunteering to help do stuff. And there's people coming in, not just, just from Calgary, but from British Columbia, from Saskatchewan. There's people that are driving in seven, eight hours to be here for. There's people that are getting on planes to be here for it. So I'm super, super excited about it.

What I could use from you guys is go to my ex-twitre, Twitter, I guess, go to Noster. Find the pages. There's on Orange Pill app. There's a page for this event. There's also on meetup.com. search for the Saturday Sat Market, and please share it everywhere. Even if you're not local, the visibility helps a ton. If you know somebody in and around Alberta or neighboring provinces that would like to be here as a vendor or just visit, tell them about it.

Please, we are going to build this and then we're going to make a blueprint and we're going to make it so people can do it everywhere. Because nothing is more censorship resistant than actually knowing each other. than actually being able to interact one-on-one and build those relationships with people. Because people can kick in a door to a market and say, no, we're not going to allow this anymore. But they can't tell you to no longer have the relationships that you've already built.

If you already know each other, you can interact with each other. So this is what I want to build. Please help me do it. Share it. Tag me in things and help me make this one a, a success so that we can do it everywhere. Let's keep going here.

I want to let you guys know about a tutorial that I dropped this week that I think is important. Luckily right now, fees are not crazy. So that may be giving you some relief if you guys felt the pinch there. But I think it's important for people to be privy to the tools and, of course, the tradeoffs in using various tools to help reduce your on-chain footprint and thus. reduce your Bitcoin fees. So I dropped a tutorial earlier this week, and it uses a combination of on-chain, liquid network and lightning network to effectively allow you to stack sats with like dollar

cost averaging or whatever to spend day to day in an efficient manner in a way where you can, with the tradeoffs of liquid network, still secure in the midterm your stack with hardware, basically not have to pay on-chain fees during that time. So you could be dollar cost averaging in $50, $200, $200, whatever it may be without incurring on-chain fees, as long as you have a good way to withdraw. A lot of exchanges will say, hey, we'll eat the minor fee because we're batching transactions. You can withdraw directly to a peg-in to liquid and then secure it with hardware there. You can then use things like bolts. that allows you to auto-convert to lightning.

And so I kind of show the best practice if you're going to use a self-custody lightning wallet, which I highly recommend, how to make it so that you have a ton of liquidity and you use it in the most efficient manner so that you basically experience one on-chain fee to set up like a beefy channel with your own funds and then swap them back out to liquid

and maybe perhaps peg back out to on-chain. But then like my Phoenix wallet, I have a $5 million sat channel there that is just there and I can easily receive funds. And I don't have to worry about lightning liquidity anymore. And it's all easy on my mobile. So give it a watch. Let me know your thoughts. Of course, there's a tradeoff with liquid. I tried to explain it the best I could in the video.

But, you know, make that consideration. I would say don't sit in liquid forever. But I would say that for me, the tradeoff is acceptable as. I'm building up some savings so I minimize my on-chain footprint. I don't mind it building up there a little bit and then pegging out to a regular on-chain Bitcoin to store my cold card. So that's my thoughts on it. Anyways, take a peek at that tutorial video and it might help you, you know, when we start

hitting some crazy fees again. And then finally, tomorrow, I think this is going to be an interesting mix of people for a show. But we got BJ Dichter, so long-haul trucker. integral in the Canadian trucker protest and one of the gents that was helping with the Bitcoin fundraising for that. We got Surfer Jim legend part of now employed by the BTZ advisor, which is awesome, good for him. And then of course we got Seed Siner, who I'm excited to have back on the show as well. So I think this is a unique, eclectic group of gentlemen to have on the show.

Something about this mix here makes me excited. I think it'll be interesting. So please, please join in for that and that's going to be tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern Time should be a good time. So please do join us. Anyways, guys, I'm going to start wrapping up here. First of all, thank you all for being here. And thank you all in the chat. I really appreciate when you guys come and you partake in the show. It does mean a lot. Thank you guys very much for that. If you want to help with the show, of course, smash that like button. If you have not already, it's just below the screen. Takes a second to do. Please do. Of course, you can also hit up the previously mentioned sponsor. in the show notes down below,

hoddle, hoddle, coin kite, cedar, nunchuck, start, nine. They're all down here. And then finally, if you need some handholding, if all of the free tutorials and stuff online aren't scratching that inch and you need a little bit more assistance,

you can always book me for 101s via my website. There's a QR code on the screen right now. It will take you right there and you'll be able to book me for a session. I've been busy with them lately, to be honest. I don't know how many more I can fit in. but I guess I'll just stop talking about it when I get too full.

But you can do that if you're listening on the pod afterwards and you don't have the QR code. It's just BTCSessions.ca. Anyways, guys, with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. I'll see you guys next time for your Simply session.