BTC Sessions - Elizabeth Warren - SHADOWY SUPER CODERS ARE COMING! ep190

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

Elizabeth Warren attacks Bitcoin and wants excessive regulations, Amazon is NOT planning to accept BTC, and much more on today's news roundup! 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Buy Bitcoin In Canada With Bitbuy ...- after your first $250 purchase get $20 free! https://bitbuy.ca/en/sign-up/?c=BTCSessions LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $25 free https://bit.ly/397rlLN Get Wasabi wallet for Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Keystone Wallet: secure your Bitcoin! http://bit.ly/KeyStoneSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:22 Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. I hope you're having a good week. We got plenty to talk about this week. Elizabeth Warren has been, I don't, she just decided to hit up all the news networks and start talking about Bitcoin and regulation and shadowy supercoders that will rule us all.
Starting point is 00:00:53 So we're going to get into that. We're going to talk a little bit also about the rumor, the rumor mill that was going around Amazon accepting Bitcoin, so forth. The price movement that we've seen over the past week, we're going to hit it all. As always, this is live. Anything can happen. I defer to my friend Bill here.
Starting point is 00:01:12 We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. thing sucks. As always, please do smash that like button, give this a share.
Starting point is 00:01:31 Let's get even more eyeballs in here and it really does help get the show around. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, before we get into it, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. We're on the newly revamped bitbo.io dashboard.
Starting point is 00:02:05 We are sitting at 39,500. $166 per coin. A single US dollar will pick you up. Wow, where did that even go? Man, I am not used to looking at this. A single US dollar will pick you up, 2,527 sats. 89.38% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, it's looking like up a little bit from last time we chatted here,
Starting point is 00:02:35 23 sats per byte into the next block. But if you're willing to wait a little bit, half an hour, five sats per bite, an hour plus, you could probably get in with one sat per bite. So still not bad, but we're starting to see some movement here in the price. And so, you know, if you still have things to do, if you still have to move some funds into hardware for safekeeping, if you still need to move between wallets, if you still need to open some lightning channels, if you need to do some swaps for liquid, whatever you're doing. And, you know, let's get it moving here because you never know, things could start to eke up. And we've had some low fees for quite some time now. It could be heading the opposite direction. But we shall see.
Starting point is 00:03:22 Of course, shout it to sponsors of the show, leaden.io, you can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different things here. If you're in a pinch and you need to get your hands on dollars, but you don't want to sell your Bitcoin. Because, of course, that is a taxable event. and nobody wants to have to buy back in at a higher price. Well, their Bitcoin back loans could be for you. Super easy. You deposit Bitcoin in. You get dollars into your bank account within 24 hours.
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Starting point is 00:04:12 Now, if you are stacking sats in Canada, Bit Buy is an excellent place to check out. Super easy interface on the web. And they do have a dedicated app, which is very nice to have, and ease of use is key. And these guys are no joke when it comes to security. They do their yearly proof of reserve audits.
Starting point is 00:04:30 And yeah, they're pretty on top of things. Also, after your first $250 purchase, you get 20 bucks for free. So check them out. Now, I do live on Bitcoin. Bit refill really helps me do this because they have just every gift card I could possibly imagine in every country that you can imagine.
Starting point is 00:04:46 There's a drop down of all the different countries that you can purchase from. And yeah, it's super easy to pay on-chain with Bitcoin or via the Lightning Network, which I do regularly. And you do actually earn SaaSback as you shop. So check them out. Keystone, I did my new review slash tutorial. of the Keystone, formerly Kobo Vault, the same air-gapped goodness.
Starting point is 00:05:09 You never plug this thing into anything internet-connected. It's all via QR code. It works interoperably with things like Blue Wallet, which I love, Wasabi Wallet, Sparrow, all those good ones. Check it out. It's super awesome, and I love it in my multi-sake. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, of course, get it in steel.
Starting point is 00:05:29 Pieces of paper may not do you because fire damage, water damage, maybe somebody might accidentally discard it, not knowing what it is. Just, you know, it gives you that piece of mind. So be sure to check out the billfottle over on PrivacyPros.io. And let's dive in to what the hell has been going on. I'm going to jump back to Bitbo for a second here because we're looking at the daily here, which is pretty much sideways. But on the seven day, we had kind of a big jump.
Starting point is 00:05:57 We were starting to eke up and actually maybe I'll zoom out a little bit more here. in and around July 20th. So what is today? Today is the 29th. So nine days ago, we kind of bottomed out. We dropped below 30K. People were freaking out thinking that, oh, the head and shoulders formation has panned out.
Starting point is 00:06:19 Michael Burry was right. And we're going to hell in a handbasket. That obviously did not play out. We bounced off that level. And we've been kind of riding a wave up for the past week. We've basically gone up 10,000. $30,000. Yeah, actually, pretty much exactly $10,000 because we bottomed out around 29,600. We're now 39,600. So, yeah, we've basically had a 10K bounce over the past nine days.
Starting point is 00:06:46 And there could be some reasoning behind that. One thing that often plays into the price of Bitcoin is the options expiry, where people have speculated in advance on the future price. of Bitcoin. And for the past few months, that option expiry has not been great for the price of Bitcoin because people have been effectively assuming it would, you know, the incentives worked out that they wanted to push the price lower to cause maximum pain because people had been long previously. Well, it has kind of flipped and now it seems like this might be the first bullish options
Starting point is 00:07:29 expire we've had in the past, I guess it'll be the past three, four months now. So I'll read a little bit here from Coin Telegraph. On Friday, tomorrow, July 30th, a total of 42,850 Bitcoin options contract worth $1.7 billion are set to expire. This might be the first time since May 21st weekly expiry that Bulls will be able to profit from the $40,000 call by options. The most recent surge in price may have been prompted by the rumor that Amazon would be accepting crypto payments, and we'll get into that in a minute. But after the e-commerce giant denied these rumors, Bitcoin has held relatively steady.
Starting point is 00:08:14 In fact, we've only been above this price by about $1,000. It kind of peaked out around, yeah, $40,78. It looks like on Bitbo here. So we're not that far below it relatively. I know $1,000 in the days of old seemed like a lot, but nowadays it's next to nothing. Anyways, according to options markets, regardless of the reason behind the recent strength,
Starting point is 00:08:41 a few incentives are in place for bulls to sustain the $40,000 level. So we may see tomorrow and the options expiry 3 p.m. UTC on Friday. that's 650 million on CM oh sorry rather yeah that's on CME and then there's also some on Deribit that are expiring as well so anyways all in all there's a lot of options expiring tomorrow and the incentive for a lot of people is to keep the price above 40k tomorrow so you might see some movement to the upside in the next 24 hours but hey it's Bitcoin anything can happen. Now, on that Amazon note, no, Amazon is not looking to accept Bitcoin payments. So, Amazon has denied a British newspapers report that it is planning to accept Bitcoin payments by the
Starting point is 00:09:39 end of the year, quote, notwithstanding our interest in the space, the speculation that has ensued around our specific plans for cryptocurrencies is not true. We remain focused on exploring what this could look like for customers shopping on Amazon. Yeah. So, Some people speculated that this was the impetus for the pump, but as we were just chatting about, we've, you know, as they denied those rumors,
Starting point is 00:10:05 there was a bit of a dip, but then we've continued right back up on our upward trajectory. I think we dipped down to about 36K in that range, 3637, and then now we're back up right around 40. So, yeah, you know, the Amazon thing may have contributed for some people's reason for buying,
Starting point is 00:10:23 which in my opinion is a, really fucking stupid reason to buy because if you go through the thinking of it, Amazon, if they were accepting it just as a payment method, what is actually happening in the background there? Okay, so they're probably partnering with a payment processor and what happens then? Amazon is probably not going to hold all of the Bitcoin that they accept. So let's say they open it up to it. All of a sudden, people start spending their Bitcoin on Amazon. What's Amazon actually doing?
Starting point is 00:10:53 they're putting it through a payment processor and they're dumping it on the market. So that actually kind of gives more downer pressure on the price. So the whole merchant thing, it's nice to be able to spend it wherever you like. But in terms of price, I don't think it's a reason to be super bullish just because you can spend Bitcoin in a particular place. But that's not how the markets tends to interpret it. So, hey, what the hell do I know? Let's keep going. Okay, we're going to chat a lot about regulation, and this will lead us into some Elizabeth Warren stuff that's been in the news lately.
Starting point is 00:11:30 But first, I want to touch on this infrastructure bill. So from Coin desk here, new infrastructure bill looks to raise $30 billion through crypto taxes. Okay. So it says here a bipartisan infrastructure bill in Congress proposes to raise $28 billion from crypto investors by applying new information reporting requirements to exchanges and other. parties. According to a draft copy of the bill, any broker that transfers any digital asset would need to file a return under a modified informing reporting regime. The draft defined digital assets as any digital representation of value recorded on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger. Okay. Now, there is an interesting little bill, a little bit here.
Starting point is 00:12:20 Kristen Smith, executive director of the Blockchain Association, told CoinDesk the draft language could mean a number of individuals interacting in the space may have to start reporting their transactions. Quote, we interpret this to mean software developers, software wallet developers, hardware wallet manufacturers,
Starting point is 00:12:42 multi-sig service providers, liquidity providers, Dow token holders, and potentially even miners. So we'll get into kind of the implications of that in a moment. But here's where this thing kind of falls off the rail. It says the $1 trillion infrastructure bill also includes provisions for funding public transit, passenger rail, investments in bridges, clean drinking water, blah, blah, blah. President Biden says everyone from unions to business leaders to economists left, right, and center
Starting point is 00:13:15 believe the public investments in this deal will mean more jobs, higher productivity, and higher growth for our economy over the long term. Experts believe that the majority of the deal's benefits will flow to working families. So here's the thing. $30 billion in terms of the budget, the yearly budget, it's a $3 trillion deficit year to year projected right now. $3 trillion in deficit. And they're scraping $30 billion out here.
Starting point is 00:13:49 And they're printing trillions upon trillions of dollars. The issue is not in taxation. The issue is in expenditures. They're spending so much fucking money that we don't have. And everybody in a roundabout way is being taxed by the debasement of the currency that is occurring. If they're going to go that route, why even bother to tax anything? They can literally just, they've shown, they can literally just print anything that they need. And so some people are saying, well, this, this pulls money out of the economy and prevents
Starting point is 00:14:26 too much inflation, I suppose, but really like that just gets spent back into the economy anyways. It's not like they actually burn the cash. They take it and then they spend it. So it's a wealth transfer mechanism. And the wealth is transferring from everybody to the government to put it wherever they see fit. And I'm not a huge fan of that because government isn't especially efficient in actually allocating funds in places that makes sense, in my opinion. Now, there's more. So here's in Israel.
Starting point is 00:15:05 There's an Israeli bill that would force crypto investors to report holdings above $61,000. The Ministry of Finance in Israel published a draft law on Tuesday that require investors to report crypto holdings exceeding 200,000 new Israeli shekels around $61,000 to tax authorities. So literally just having possession of it, you have to report it, which is not the case for any other asset, just owning it. Yes, if you realize again, you have to report and then pay taxes on that. But just the act of holding Bitcoin would need reporting if it's above $61,000. $1,000.
Starting point is 00:15:48 And I find that to be kind of fucking stupid and biased. But what are they? Obviously, it's going to be biased towards Bitcoin because it's a threat kind of to the established way of doing things. And they just, they want to keep tabs on it as much as possible. And that's what we kind of see with this additional reporting here. Wallet developers, software roll up developers, I don't think that would even be possible to implement on software wallet developers.
Starting point is 00:16:20 Like, you look at teams like Samurai wallet. Yeah, they're going to report. And plus, not only that, but the wallets themselves don't actually record information, right? The wallets themselves are just open source software for the most part, where you generate your private keys within the wallet. So that process is not. And you would effectively have to make it so that every available wallet option out there would phone home to give information to some honeypot about how much Bitcoin was in that wallet, even if they didn't control the keys. So I don't think that's possible. I also think that extends out to hardware wallet manufacturers.
Starting point is 00:17:08 Now, could they coerce companies like that into doing something like this, implement? like a phone home type thing. Maybe, but then you could also use it with alternative software. So that kind of negates that. And even still, let's step outside the realm of that. You could also use something like the Seed Siner, which is like an open source. You can build it yourself from scratch. Cold card has open sourced everything.
Starting point is 00:17:37 You can literally build your own cold card. There's a lot of options around that. So around wallets, I think that point's totally fucking moose. and will not make it anywhere. Multi-6 service providers. Now, this is one that could be of some concern if this were to actually make it through because some people don't like the idea of a database
Starting point is 00:18:03 of their savings. And I think that would be most people. I think everybody watching the show would probably be in line with saying, I don't want any sort of a database detailing my exact net worth and that it's in Bitcoin, especially when it comes to something like a multi-sig service provider. So multi-six service providers where they hold a key or two of yours and you have access to all the other keys in a multi-six setup.
Starting point is 00:18:37 And so they can't actually access your funds, but they would know the balance. Their job is just to be like a signer of last resort if you lost a couple of your hardware wallets or something. So yeah, this could be an attack vector at which point I think people would just do multi-sig on their own because you can just do that with the software that is free and open source that anybody can use. So yeah. And then when it comes to exchanges, liquidity providers, I find it funny Dow token holders.
Starting point is 00:19:08 Dow token holders like in the defy space I don't know like that doesn't seem very decentralized then which I guess a lot of defy is bullshit anyways and then potentially even miners so then and we'll touch on this in a bit too but what happens to miners then
Starting point is 00:19:28 if you're using the actual grid then you've got to report everything so what do miners do they probably go off grid right they'll get power from sources where it's easy to kind of tap into and you don't have, you know, in certain jurisdictions, you don't have to like constantly report exactly what's going on. Obviously, as a business existing in a jurisdiction, you have some of those things. But yeah, I think you'll see more
Starting point is 00:19:57 off-grid mining if that was the case where it became too onerous. Let's talk about Senator Elizabeth Warren. And so this is the quote where all the great memes this week came from. She said that crypto puts the financial system in the hands of shadowy super coders. I think that might be one of the most boomer quotes in the history of Bitcoin, but I don't know. We'd have to look back through the archives. Anyways, she sent a letter to the Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, asking for greater regulation of the industry. She spoke out about some of the same issues in a hearing for the Senate Banking Committee this morning, which was in and around that bill that we just talked about.
Starting point is 00:20:43 Now, she does highlight a handful of things that I will say they're not untrue. So she talks about kind of the hype and the marketing around the crypto industry, which I agree, like outside of Bitcoin, which is actually decentralized and doesn't have like a marketing department, all of these shit tokens that come out that actually have a central point where you can point to like a person or a figurehead or a foundation that's actually in charge. Yeah, there's marketing going on there and there's a lot of promises that will not be ever fulfilled. And so, yeah, there's that aspect to it. There's also the aspect of if you're a business and you're holding people's funds, like if you're a custodian,
Starting point is 00:21:35 I'm not opposed to there being some sort of rules in and around that saying like, hey, do you actually have people's money? Which side note is severely lacking from the existing traditional financial realm, right? They fractional reserve that shit to the moon. So it seems a little bit hypocritical. But what stuck out to me is this quote here, she said, instead of leaving our financial system at the whims of giant banks, crypto puts the system at the whims of some shadowy,
Starting point is 00:22:12 faceless group of super coders and miners, which doesn't sound better to me. And I disagree because that sounds way fucking better to me. And the only thing is the descriptive words that she used. Faceless, yes, shadowy, not at all. Bitcoin is like the most open system that exists. you can literally audit the supply to the second of exactly how much is out there. You can see every transaction on an open ledger.
Starting point is 00:22:42 You cannot pervert the rules and siphon wealth away from people. And compared to the opaque traditional financial realm that we all exist in right now, it is leaps and bounds better. And I think this is just a case of boomer going to boomer. She doesn't understand, I guess, the promise. And also, I can't really blame people that when they're looking at it through the veil of, I'm not really interested in this stuff in general. And all I'm seeing is like the crypto industry, because that's 99.9% bullshit.
Starting point is 00:23:17 And then there's Bitcoin in the middle of it. And it all just gets lumped together. But they are very different things. There's Bitcoin and then there's crypto. There's truth. And then there's just marketing bullshit and lies. So I'm so torn here because she's kind of right on a bunch of this stuff, but she's wrong at the core of it because the foundation upon which all of this other crap kind of spawned from is still solid. So it is what it is.
Starting point is 00:23:47 Now, there's one thing that I wanted to highlight here. And Warren is super, super. she likes the regulations. She wants to over-regulate. And I'm of the opinion that if we were to do away with a lot of these regulations, a lot of people would probably get burned off the bat. But we're so used to being babysat, right?
Starting point is 00:24:12 The reason people are incapable of managing their own finances and figuring shit out is because they've been babysat by the state that has said, no, you're not allowed to do this. Yes, you're allowed to do this. And what has that gotten us? Nobody knows how to have a budget. Everybody lives on excessive amounts of debt.
Starting point is 00:24:34 Nobody knows how to properly put their money in investments and assets and actually hold on to those. Everybody is a mass consumer. And she still is saying, I think we ought to tax anybody that has the wherewithal to actually hold assets. So I'm just going to play this little clip from CNBC here. Imagine, by the way, one of the issues that you were thinking about is taxing cryptocurrency. Do you think there should be a different approach to taxing crypto? That's an interesting question. I think that the way we should be thinking about taxes is I want to see us tax wealth.
Starting point is 00:25:22 And however your wealth is tied up, it shouldn't make a difference. Whether you have real estate or whether you have cash or whether you have a bazillion shares of Amazon. on, yes, Jeff Bezos, I'm looking at you. Whatever form you have your assets, diamonds, yachts, paintings, I think there ought to be a tax on that annually. Just a tiny little tax, and only for the people who have more than $50 million in assets. But notice, if we put that tiny little tax in place, that would be enough to pay for universal childcare,
Starting point is 00:25:59 enough to pay for our kids to be able to go to college, enough for us to pay for all those roads and bridges and bring them into the 21st century at the top of the line. We can pay for all of that. If we just ask those at the top, pay a little bit more. Here's the thing. The income tax was initially rolled out only for the ultra wealthy. It was a temporary measure for the ultra wealthy. And so it was very easy for the vast majority of society to say, like, absolutely.
Starting point is 00:26:32 at the top. They got to help out the rest. Now the average person has what, 20%, 30%, 40%, depending on the country. Like here in Canada, it can be 40% of your entire worth over the course of a year is effectively stolen from you, all of your time. You can work the first four, five months of the year, and that entirety of all of your time has gone to just hand it all over to the government. You've given up, you know, a third to, to, you know, a half of your year, a half of your time just to pay somebody else so they get to decide where your money is allocated. It's a slippery slope. And if somebody just owns something and it's just sitting there, and there's just sitting it in an asset that they've accumulated,
Starting point is 00:27:31 they've actually contributed and created something for other people that people find useful, I don't think that we should be penalizing that. I think we should encourage people to make things that a lot of people use. Now, a lot of people shit on Jeff Bezos, but I get why he's so wealthy. look at the insane tool that he built for that everybody uses like look at how how widely he affected the lives of so many people to be able to like click a button and get shit delivered to their house instantaneously now you can shit on some of the practices of amazon so and so forth but people find value there people use it and it makes money and it has uh, made a lot of efficiencies for a lot of people. And a lot of people would be upset if that were to go away tomorrow. So should the inventor of that not have money from that?
Starting point is 00:28:42 And should we disincentivize that by scraping more and more of that away? She quoted a very small number for a very small number of people. But that's not where it ends, right? A wealth tax, what ends up happening years down the road is if you own anything, you basically, as we're seeing with a lot of these Bitcoin related, oh, we want you to report just the fact that you own it. Well, where does that inevitably lead? In my opinion, it leads to there's effectively like a list of every person in the country
Starting point is 00:29:20 and you have a net worth beside it. and then you have a percentage of your net worth, regardless if it's sitting in assets, maybe you could be sitting in a house and they say, okay, you owe X percent of the value of your house and all of a sudden you don't have the income
Starting point is 00:29:36 to cover the tax on the house that you own and you have to keep downsizing. And so the government keeps on owning more. That's where I see it leading. I don't know. Maybe I'm off base. Anyways, let's keep it going here.
Starting point is 00:29:48 Steve Barber also made a, in terms of the regulation here, brought up this little tidbit. This little, this just dropped the other day, but Dell is no longer shipping high-end gaming PCs to California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont,
Starting point is 00:30:04 and Washington due to new regulations on the energy usage of consumer electronics. So these gaming PCs often use a lot of power, and they've deemed that when it comes to a computer, if it uses too much power, you're not allowed to use it. So now they're starting to moralize power use. And so Steve Barber said they ban consumer electronics.
Starting point is 00:30:30 They will ban Bitcoin mining on all grids. Imagine being a massive Fiat investor in one of these grid mega mines. Hope you are ready to get wrecked. Bitcoin is political and the regulators will side with Fiat. Who is set up on the grid to best hide from Fiat regulators, home slash garage miners? The black market for home mining will begin this decade. I can't wait. I think he might be right there.
Starting point is 00:30:56 I think he might be right. And so why? Why is all this happening? There's a couple clips. I just want to highlight here. When you look at the on-balance sheet liability to the U.S. government at $28 trillion. And the off-balance sheet liability is entitlements.
Starting point is 00:31:25 To exceed $120 trillion. what do you do when you're $150 trillion upside down and you service those obligations for the federal budget that's in deficit $3 trillion a year? Just to reiterate those numbers, the U.S. is in debt, just shy of $30 trillion, just actual debt. then you have all of the stuff like Medicaid and, and, you know, different retirement and old age pensions and all that kind of stuff, $120 trillion there. So in aggregate, $150 trillion worth of debt. And the answer to that in our, in the budget,
Starting point is 00:32:14 is to spend an additional $3 trillion above the money that they're actually getting from taxation. Again, the issue is not taxation. The issue is how much fucking money they're spending. If you're $150 trillion in debt and you opt to continue to spend $3 trillion per year more than you earn, let's put that in perspective. Let's say you're $150,000 in debt. You better be making enough to pay down
Starting point is 00:32:50 that debt year to year, not coming up and adding $3,000 to that debt year upon year. So it's pretty crazy. And then the explanation in and around inflation, they're trapped, right? They can't tax all of their deficit because it would just be, there would be no money left. And so they have to print it, right? They have to print more money to cover the deficit. And so this was the explanation from Jerome Powell in and around inflation and it being quote unquote transitory, which we'll get into the definition of transitory in a moment. So I know it's kind of quiet there.
Starting point is 00:34:31 I know it's a very quiet clip. Joey tweets with three E's the account it's on. But anyways, it's Jerome Powell. And what he's getting at here is he's saying. we're saying it's going to be transitory inflation. So you may see, you may see large increases in prices. You may see large spikes in inflation, but it will be transitory. Now, typically what transitory would mean in what I believe it would typically mean is that
Starting point is 00:35:04 it's transitory in that it happens, but then it goes back to the norm. So an example of this would have been lumber prices spiked because a lot of the sawmills were effectively shut down. And so temporarily that it was the prices were inflated because there was a supply crunch. But then as soon as that supply crunch dissipated, the prices came back down to earth. What he's saying here in his context is that transitory inflation means that the prices could spike way up. and then that's just the new price, but then they won't continue to spike up at the same rate year after year.
Starting point is 00:35:46 So that's now what he means by transitory is normally we target 2% inflation per year. But it could be far more than that for a short period of time, but then it will go back to 2% per year. So let's say it goes up to like 5, 8, 10%, something like that. it's not that it's going to the prices are going to come back down if your stake goes up in price by 10% and then another 10% that you're after and you know you're looking at steak prices that are way way up that's just the new fucking price that's just what it is and then you can add 2% to that per year afterwards but it's not coming back down ever it's the prices are never coming back down unless it's like an actual supply chain issue where it's temporarily more expensive because there's no supply and and people are bidding up the price.
Starting point is 00:36:47 Yeah. So yeah, I love this. I'm going to bring up this comment right now that I saw here. Permanent transitory move. So, so great. Yeah. So I mean, that's why. And how are they going to control that? CBDCs, how do they get people to continue kind of playing the game? Well, it's hard with cash, but if you've got a central bank digital currency in your wallet and it gets funded directly from the central bank, we saw an op-ed in the New York Times about this. It was straight out in the open. They said, basically, we steal your money.
Starting point is 00:37:27 If you're not spending it fast enough, then we do deeply negative. interest rates. And we see that here, this from the Bank of England themselves, I'll read a little bit here. It says it's rather impractical to pay or charge interest on cash. However, as central banks, including the Bank of England, are considering a move to central bank issued digital currency, this constraint can potentially be moved more easily in the future. If digitization becomes sufficiently widespread so that cash has used much less, this, opens up the possibility of having more deeply negative interest rates in the distant future. Without causing any negative effect on bank profits, since interest rates on all safe assets
Starting point is 00:38:16 would become negative. So banks can maintain their net interest margin. Yeah. So basically protect banks and fuck everybody else is what they're getting at here. Yeah. So how do you opt out of this? What if this all sucks and you just don't like it? Well, I did do a threat on this.
Starting point is 00:38:32 I mentioned this last week. This was in regards to potential EU regulation around it. But basically, there's a whole ton of things you can do to tell them to go fuck themselves. Number one is owning Bitcoin. But if you want to truly be off grid, you can use peer-to-peer exchanges like BISC. You can run your own node to make sure that all of your privacy is intact. You can, of course, run software wallets on your desktop and connect them to your node. You can use coin join via Wasab, your samurai.
Starting point is 00:39:02 You can set up your own lightning node for easy payments, infrastructure, and better privacy. You can dive into Liquid Network and start using confidential transactions there. Anyways, there's a lot of options. I literally have videos on all of them. Go check them out. Let's move on. Let's move on to some more happy stuff. New development in and around the Lightning Network.
Starting point is 00:39:23 I love it. So those of you that have used Lightning Network previously, you probably know that by and large, for the most part, It's all about lightning invoices. So you create an invoice and then somebody else scans that invoice and then sends over the amount. In some cases, you can scan a blank invoice without an amount. And then you can send over, you can set the amount yourself. But it's still very limiting.
Starting point is 00:39:51 Those invoices can expire. You can't have a static invoice like a Bitcoin address that anybody can spend to. this called Bolt 12, a Bolt 12 offer, which is in the process of being implemented. Rusty Russell over at C Lightning for Blockstream has implemented this. And effectively what it is is rather than setting up a new invoice every time that you're accepting a payment, you can have a static lightning invoice that is still privacy preserving. that effectively allows you to accept lightning payments without having to create an invoice
Starting point is 00:40:35 and without setting an amount. And it also allows you to put a lot of cool little settings in and around these both 12 invoices or these both 12 QR codes or offers that make lightning even more interesting. So I just wanna pull up, and again, it's not like the prettiest website to look at, but they give some examples.
Starting point is 00:40:58 So the simplest thing would just be no amount specified. It's basically like a static QR code. People can scan it and then put in an amount and then send to it easy, just like a regular Bitcoin address. That's super awesome. That could be like a tip jar. Now, you can add certain things to it. You can use a fixed amount, which would be like a minimum.
Starting point is 00:41:18 Let's say you have like a tip jar and you say, I don't want like fractions of a penny for tips. Maybe you want like a minimum of like five bucks or whatever. it is, you can set that and people can then scan it and it'll say, you can send $5 here or you can adjust the invoice upwards if you choose to send more. And you can do it so that you can do multiple invoices with a single QR code. Again, it remains static. You can offer or rather ask for a certain amount of SATs every minute. You can ask for a certain amount of SATs every minute. only a limited number of time. So you can settle all these interesting conditions in and around this static QR code that just
Starting point is 00:42:05 remains and doesn't need to be changed. Super, super cool. And yeah, lots of cool innovation in and around lightning. Now on the other side of things, I just saw this drop the other day. I played around with it a little bit. It's still, I'd say earlyish phases. But this is in and around the liquid network. And it's effectively, and again, I'm going to treat this with a bit of a
Starting point is 00:42:28 grant assault, but like a decentralized exchange on liquid network. So you no longer need like a shit token. You no longer need like Ethereum to be utilizing something like this. You can go between like a US dollar or Canadian dollar denominated stable coin and liquid. Or you could have some sort of like a token that is redeemable for a good. Okay. So an example of this just a proof of concept is I had a token that was basically a voucher to buy a hat on a store.
Starting point is 00:42:59 And I was able to use that. And that was like a payment. Okay? So you can effectively use this app on mobile to trade between these things. I'm experimenting with it a little bit. Could be interesting. I don't know. We shall see.
Starting point is 00:43:15 I want to give a shout out to my good friend Adam O'Brien over at Bitcoin. Well, him and Dave Bradley have put in a lot of work. And as of tomorrow, they will become the first public. publicly traded Bitcoin ATM company in the world. So kudos to them. Adam, you are awesome. You helped me out a lot early on in my journey in Bitcoin. You let me run errands and help you with your ATM business and get paid in
Starting point is 00:43:49 sets. And you help me stack a lot in the early days. So thank you very much. You're a good friend. And Dave, too. you've helped me learn a lot. And again, if not for you, I wouldn't have had the great experience
Starting point is 00:44:03 of working with Bull Bitcoin as well. So to both of you guys, congrats. This is huge. And I wish you all the success in the world. Now, guys, I want to kind of round out here
Starting point is 00:44:14 by giving you a few things to maybe check out in the coming days over the weekend, whatever. There's an excellent article by Lynn Alden called the ultimate guide to inflation. It is fantastic.
Starting point is 00:44:24 It has also been turned into audio on Bitcoin Audible by Guy Swan. That's how I checked it out. But go back through the article afterwards. There's a lot of great charts here. That M2 Money Supply is terrifying to look at. Jesus Christ. Anyways, excellent article.
Starting point is 00:44:41 Go check it out. And another great one, which of course, Guy Swan immediately got on his podcast for Bitcoin Audible. This one from Alex Gladstein. He's been knocking it out of the park with his article. lately. But this one is called, can freedom be Palestine's currency of freedom? Sorry, can Bitcoin be Palestine's currency of freedom? And he goes, he talks a lot about the economic situation in and around the West Bank and talks about just some of the fishy
Starting point is 00:45:15 and, I don't know, he talks about a lot of the currency controls and issues economically between Israel and Palestine and how difficult it can be to navigate. And a lot of the state level, like oppressive stuff that just happens in and around there overall. Like we saw it earlier with that Israel, hey, like, yo, you're going to have to report if you have over $61,000 worth of any digital currency. So it's an excellent, excellent read or listen depending on how you take it in. Either way, check that one out. Highly recommend. Now, if you're looking for some other stuff to check out over the weekend,
Starting point is 00:45:52 And I did just do a CASA multi-sig three of five setup. I haven't done a video on CASA before. So I walk through their platinum version. Now they do two of three multi-sig, which is way cheaper. This is like the more expensive version. If you're sitting on like hundreds of thousands of dollars, then maybe this is the setup for you. Anyways, I walk through the whole thing.
Starting point is 00:46:15 And yeah, it's pretty badass. So be sure to check that out. And tomorrow, by the way, why are we bullish? got a pretty solid lineup. We've got Natalie Brunel. We've got Aaron Siegel, who's wrote in some really, really good articles for Bitcoin Magazine lately. We've got Lauren Seekman.
Starting point is 00:46:32 I'm not sure how to say the last time. I probably butcher that. And we've got Dan held. So swing by, check out, why are we bullish tomorrow to round out the week. And guys, as of next week, I'm going to have one more tutorial on Monday. And then it might be a little bit spotty as I figure out exactly how I'm doing it. But I'm going to Greece. I'm going to Greece and I'm going to be living there for like the next five weeks with the family.
Starting point is 00:46:57 We're going to be doing some traveling. I'm still doing shows on location. I'm just working out exactly what my mobile workstation is going to look like. So come join me. Come join me as I'm on the road. I will be doing regular shows still. I'll still be doing tutorials and I will make it work. The timing might be a little bit different because I think I'm like nine hours.
Starting point is 00:47:21 is ahead or something like that. So we'll see. Either way, guys, thank you so much for joining the show. As always, please do hit, like, subscribe, share all those things. I can't stress enough. They really, really do help. So please give this a share. If you want to help out the show in another way, hit up the sponsors I mentioned down below. Ledin, Bit Buy, BitRefil, Keystone, and Bill Fottle over at Privacy Pros. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page that is strike. dot me slash BTC sessions. When you head there, you type in any amount
Starting point is 00:47:55 you like, you hit the tip button, and you will be greeted with a lightning invoice or if you click to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code and super easy. Anyways, guys, thank you so much. Have a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be, and I will see you next time for
Starting point is 00:48:11 your daily session. Hottle the Bitcoin.

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