BTC Sessions - EU Crackdown: Gemini Exchange Blocks Bitcoin Transfers! ep375

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

In today's explosive update, we dive into the startling move by Gemini Exchange, halting Bitcoin transfers in the EU to only government-sanctioned addresses—what does this mean for your digital freedom? Plus, we unravel the latest controversy as the Federal Reserve takes legal action against Bitcoin Magazine's satirical apparel. But there's a glimmer of hope: Taiwan is now flirting with the idea of embracing Bitcoin as legal tender, potentially paving the way for a monumental shift in global finance. Finally, we decode the EU's new digital ID system—could this be the first step towards a concerning surveillance state? Stay tuned as we break down these pivotal developments in the Bitcoin universe. 💪 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://a.co/d/1DkbfV2 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 got Nico here in the wings waiting to bring us the latest and greatest and what's going on in Bitcoin. There's a lot of stuff going on this week. I mean, there's always a lot of stuff going on, but there's a few things that I found particularly intriguing this week that we'll get into.

And then I've got some other cool stuff when we get into the tech updates, too, that are just, I've had a very, I don't know, I'm very entertained. Are you not entertained? There's so much happening. Anyways, very excited for the show today. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here.

We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. Yeah. If you have not already, please do like.

Subscribe, share. All those things super important. That little like button is just down below. Smack that. Give this a share on whatever socials you happen to be on. That always helps a ton. And if you're not already, please do subscribe. It helps the channel a ton. I can't wait to one day hit that 100K level. It's coming. I'm not there yet. I'm in the low 80s, but we're getting there. We can do it together, family. Help me out. Anyways, guys, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your Simply session. Before we bring in, Nico, let's pull up timechain calendar.com and see where we are in the market right now. Also pulling up the live chat. As of now, all of your comments will be live for the world to see for better or worse.

So drop them. Drop them like they're hot. Let's dive into it. Okay, first up, we're sitting at $36,569.70 per coin. A single US dollar will pick you up 2,734 sets. little bit different from last week, a little fewer sats that you'd be able to get your hands on for a single cuck buck. So keep that in mind, stack them while you can. Now, something that also has changed drastically in the past couple of days here. Fees, holy bejesus. Next block,

182 sats per bite. Anytime fee is 20 sats per bite, I wouldn't rely on that whatsoever. And Mempool is purging anything sub 10 sats per bite or in and around there. Basically just, I mean, RBF, child pays for parent, all that good stuff. But mostly like lightning, use your lightning wallets, friends. And also, you know, watch the size of those UTXOs if you've been dollar cost averaging like $20 chunks. I mean, maybe don't move anything around right now and wait for a good time when the these drop again and consolidate that shit because it can get expensive. You've got a lot of UTXOs.

Wicked covers this a ton, check them out. Anyways, and in terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.54 million of them, that's 93.04% of the entire supply. Shout out to sponsors to the show, hoddlehottle.com. If you're stacking stats and you would like to do things that are peer-to-peer, instant self-custody and have no KYC. This is the way to be. This is where you can go and get your non-KYC sats. sign up with nothing more than an email address.

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I love my Mark 4. I just did a new tutorial on yet another advanced feature this week. We'll discuss that later. Anyways, they've got all the goodies. Of course, I love my Mark 4. I've got their tap signers, sats cards, block clocks, everything. And I was saying last week with Nico on, I've got seven cold card Q1s on the way, a couple for my own use, and then some that I'm sure will be used in the future for workshops.

But nonetheless, if you want to reserve those or grab anything else, I imagine, head to coincut.com, use code BTC sessions for 5% off. Backups are super important. Cdoor has one of the best, most beautiful and robust, options on the market for your steel seed backup. It's got a disc and capsule design. And I love it. It's beautiful.

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Check them out, nunchoc.io. I have a full tutorial on it as well. And finally, shout out to Start9, who, by the way, had a big update on the platform this week. So if you haven't updated, go check it out. Anyway, Start 9, your sovereign computing solution. They give you plug and play devices to run your Bitcoin stack and your own personal computing, all of your data. So you can run things like Bitcoin Core, Lightning, Mempool.com, space, join market, files, passwords, photos, Noster Relayloral and clients, a bunch of AI tools, a whole bunch of different stuff. And they have everything from entry-level devices all the way to up to what I'm running, which is the Start 9 server pier. They just discounted by a couple hundred bucks.

And you can use code BTC sessions with a plus sign at the end to get an additional 18% off. So check him out. Links are down below, start9.com. Anyways, guys, enough my rambling. I need to get my buddy in here. Hold on a sec. Here it comes. Yo. How's going? What's up, dude? I'm feeling the energy this week, by the way. I don't know if you notice, but I'm feeling good for this show.

It's high. High energy. It's good. A lot of crazy things happening, bro. Holy cow. There's lots. There's plenty to discuss. Yeah, man.

What did you? Where do you want to start this week? let's uh i think the the great natalie bernel absolutely killed it on the legacy media but we have to analyze the significance of it right we talk a lot about the concept of the overton window on on on simply sessions right and it's just we're trying to move the window of acceptable acceptable acceptable discourse, you know, into the Bitcoin frame. And when you have someone like Natalie who has a minute or two to articulate these very complex yet very powerful ideas on legacy corporate media, she is moving that over to the

window. She is breaking the Bitcoin echo chamber. And she was dropping some total truth bombs on this segment on Fox business. If you don't mind, Ben, let's check out what she has to say. a symptom of broken money. And I think you would agree that incentives drive outcomes. And when our money is broken and real wages don't keep up with the cost of housing, education, retirement, then what is the incentive to work hard? If you work hard but can't retain the value of that work, then it's really hard to find meaningful purpose. And what do people with no purpose do? They distract

themselves with pleasure and experiences. And so what I think these younger generations really lack is economic hope that the future will be better if they work hard. I mean, in the 70s, you could have a one-income household, purchase a nice home, afford a nice middle-class life. And today, young people are seeing that even two incomes plus a side hustle doesn't make ends meet. So I think that's skewing the value system, even the morality. And what young generations really need is Bitcoin. They need to be able to save and plan for the future with a form of money that can't be manipulated.

So fix the money, fix the world, Charles. You know, it's so funny because with the Gen Ziers and so forth, they must also be angry. Every day these memes come out, and you just kind of trigger one of my head where the couple bought a house for $61,000, didn't put any repairs into it. It sold it for $1.7 million to a hedge fund and then complain why these younger folks won't work harder. So I was just reminded of that. There's another aspect of this, too, though, and the world was on fire, let's face it. It's probably going to get a whole lot worse.

And you say that Bitcoin is the currency of peace. Explain that. Sure. So with Fiat, if people in power want to finance a war, they can just print the money and spend it. But if you can't just make money at the stroke of a key, then you have to ask permission of the citizens to spend their money. And so that would limit the government's ability to fight endless wars. And so I agree with those out there who say that Fiat is the currency of war and Bitcoin

is the currency of peace because Bitcoin is about consensus. And with the incentives in Bitcoin, they benefit those who cooperate and play by the rules and put in the work. Bitcoin actually neutralizes greed because everyone who supports mines or buys Bitcoin adds to the overall strength of the network. And so most importantly, instead of projecting this sort of kinetic power and going to war as a sign of strength like America has done for many, many decades, why don't we go back to the value of building a prosperous and robust economy as a sign of strength that serves as an example for other nations and other people to emulate.

We used to lead by example because great economies are what make great nations and that is what the American dream was built on. And I think we can return to that with Bitcoin. You know, wow. Literally every talking points. That clip, like the entire segment,

I did to see the whole segment. It's like four minutes. And she smashes every goddamn talking point that Bitcoin is trying to get to, in four minutes on network news in what world like i mean you can tell that she comes from the news world and she knows how to like get her point she just she goes in and she takes it so yeah dude like a dagger like a straight up dagger uh natalie absolutely totally 100% crushed it she brought up the endless wars how bitcoin is a currency of peace

also insinuating that that fiat is the currency of war without directly saying that the news anchor even brought up memes right at one point which was hilarious and then talking about the nihilism in the younger generations because they can't save they don't have the opportunities that their parents once had and what you said ben the fact that she was able to do this in four minutes is extremely extremely impressive so shout out to natalie absolutely crushing it i'm very really happy she's on our side. Yeah, man. I mean, it's, uh, I mean, all the best people come here. It's true. It's inevitable. It's the brain drain. It's the brain drain and it's a one way door. Absolutely. 100%. All right. So the other big news for today, this is a continuation. Actually, we've, we've talked

about this many times on Simply sessions. We've talked about the financial action task force. Um, and their so-called travel rule. This is an unelected bureaucracy that basically dictates what the financial rules are for the entire world. Obviously, they're not big fans of Bitcoin. Now, if you just look at this news by itself

without connecting the dots, I would say it's a big nothing burger. But to me, it's a continuation of the trend to demonize self-custody and also really close to use Christine Lagarde's own word, the escape valve, right? Last week, we covered on Simply Sessions.

I think we actually dedicated an entire episode to the move by Elizabeth Warren. And for anyone who wasn't paying attention, Elizabeth Warren finally said the choir part out loud. She demonized self-custity. Basically, she's trying to make the connection that somehow, if you write down a 12-word seed phrase, if you have the audacity to, you know, take custody of your coins, somehow that is connected to criminal activity. Don't trust verify. Don't take my word for it. Hear from Elizabeth Warren herself. Last year, you wrote that, quote, in their attempt to avoid being traced, illegal actors have adopted ever more sophisticated cryptocurrency technologies, such as non-custodial wallets.

that is crazy it's absurd then any thoughts I mean someone who makes tutorials you might be a you might be a criminal in a couple years yeah I got a couple thoughts

I mean first of all again last week we're cracking jokes about it but I don't know about you but I feel pretty sophisticated myself I'm a man of sophistication and I'm sure that all the people in the chat will agree let us know

let us know how sophisticated you are in the chat. But also, like, are my, are the dice that I have sitting off to the side? Are they now weapons of mass destruction? Or like, am I going to roll those and create a seed from scratch and do some math on paper? And I'm now a wanted criminal. Like, how absurd this whole idea, this whole notion is? 100%.

And the, it's totally absurd. but the trend continues, right? So it's not only in the United States that this is happening, but this is another step in the UK. Shame on Gemini. Before I read the article, I think the great Marty Bent says it best. Shame on Gemini for bending the knee on this.

The governments of the world and the unelected officials who write their regulatory guidelines are morally bankrupt and do considerably more harm than good throughout the world. where are the people with backbones, right? So here is the actual news itself. Gemini has introduced changes to Bitcoin transfers for its UK customers in accordance with the local version of the FATF's travel rule, which makes it increasingly more difficult to use any of the regulated services in the country.

Quote, the decision was made in response to new regulations which require virtual asset service providers like Gemini to share information about the sender and the residener, and the receiver on both ends of a crypto transaction. Gemini has partnered with Travel Rural Universal Solution Technology to enable these changes, which are designed to crack down on fraudulent activity in the industry. Per Coinbase trust currently includes over 90 entities, including banks, CoinPass, Fidelity Digital Assets, Gemini, Cracken, and a couple others.

It goes on to say to ensure transparency of data from 17th, November 2023, Gemini will only permit outbound transfers to other registered trust vasp. Gemini will block any outbound transfers to a non-trust vasp. You can view the full list of registered trust vass here. From 1st December, 2003, Gemini may freeze or restrict users who are attempting to make inbound transfers to Gemini from a non-trust vasp. This is due to these transfers potentially missing the required information to ensure transparency, of the transaction. When depositing or withdrawing from your Gemini wallet to another crypto address,

we will need to request additional information from you, such as your name, the beneficiary of the funds, and in some cases, your address. Another exchange operating in the UK, Crypto.com, provided a somewhat clear explanation of what to expect when depositing or withdrawing assets from the custodian. It goes on to say, when you receive a crypto asset transfer from an external wallet, crypto.com requires you to declare the details of the originating party, the name, country of the originating party, wallet type, name of the originating crypto asset business. Now, I'm going to make a bold prediction here, Ben. What's going to end up happening is, yes, you know, from the so-called trust vaps,

okay, we accept deposits from that. But custodial wallets, we can't really like, we can't really establish that trust and that transparency there. So you could really only transact between exchanges. How convenient is that for politicians like Elizabeth Warren, right? It's the unhosted wallet, the self-custy wallet, right? So I think this is a troubling trend man because I think that this is like a, a very weak attack vector. Like this is a huge choke point for us.

Yeah. Right? Yeah, absolutely. What are your thoughts? It's becoming abundantly clear. And it's been abundantly clear for a long time that self-custody is of the utmost importance. But it's now also becoming abundantly clear that people need to brush up on their ability to use Bitcoin without permission.

And what I mean is obtaining, using, spending, exchanging for dollars or local currency if you need to. You need to learn. You may not need to do it all the time right now, but you need to learn how to do it so that when shit hits the fan, you're prepared so that you know how to deal with this. Because that seems to be the road we're heading down. and I'll be fucked if they get me to put all my stuff on an exchange and trust them with it moving forward. I don't think so. That is not happening. And so at the end of the day, I am busy trying to figure out what hoops I need to jump through to figure that out and piece together that way of living where I don't got to deal with that kind of bullshit.

And so reach out to your local community, start learning the other Bitcoiners around you, establish your circular economies, and figure out and learn how to obtain or sell Bitcoin non-KYC. There's a lot of options out there, but at least learn and be privy to the techniques so that when you have to, you're not scrambling. 100%. Someone mentioned a great decentralized kind of non-KYC alternative like BISC. Shout out Osteco, they're phenomenal too. Beauty on absolutely doing Satoshi's work over there. So yeah, I completely agree. But it's so obvious, Ben, where they're heading with this. Like, it's so obvious. Like Elizabeth Warren had a slip, a Freudian slip, I would say. and then she said the quiet part out loud finally and then literally a week later

you know Gemini is basically like look if you're not a trusted VASP made by this unelected board called the Fatfa that no one knows who they are and what they're doing but they get to set the financial rules for the world that conveniently benefit governments and central banks

yeah it's it's just crazy but I mean this is a separation of money in state after all yeah yeah 100% It's not going to be easy, but if you're watching this, you're already in a position to be privy to and learn the tools. So they're out there. 100%. You have no excuse. Just tune into BTC sessions.

All right. So the other big news, which again, you couldn't write this if you tried. Dude, I always feel on Monday, I'm like, Ben, I'm going to have nothing. to talk about this week. And then it's just like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, but for audio listeners, I am not kidding. This is not comedy. The Federal Reserve threatens to sue Bitcoin

magazine. Can you imagine going back in time to like 2017 and being like, yo, this happens. People would be like, you're insane. That is so stupid. Dude, we would be like, No, that's no.

There's a country that made Bitcoin legal tender. The Federal Reserve, Elizabeth Warren, is calling for banning self-custody? No way. Do you imagine five years from now? Holy shit. Like, we're either going to all be in gulags or we're going to win. It's one or the other. Oh, man.

Hopefully they let us make content in there. Okay. All right. For all the other members of the gulag. Okay. So here's the article. from Bitcoin Magazine. I'm going to read it because it's so badass. I don't know if we have time to get through the entire thing, but their response was epic. So essentially what happened is

the U.S. Federal Reserve, the American Central Bank, is taking legal action against Bitcoin Magazine in an attempt to silence criticism of its recently launched Fed Now Interbank Clearing and Settlement Service. I've made the case on Simply Sessions before that that is the American version of a CBDC. They can't pass it through Congress. So they're kind of doing this like weird kind of backroom type of deal. And they're trying to roll it out. For anyone who's paying attention is clear that it's like the first iteration of an American of an American CBDC. Anyways, it goes on to say in a letter sent to the publication by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Central Bank of the United States is claiming that Bitcoin magazine merchandise that parodies its services are not

protected speech. But rather an unauthorized infringed of its image and trademarks. The dispute centers around the use of the Fed Now service image and trademark in a line of merchandise sold by Bitcoin Magazine that seeks to criticize the surveillance capabilities of the FedNow system and how it threatens American civil liberties. The Federal Reserve alleges that Bitcoin Magazine used a trademark without permission to mislead readers into believing a connection exists between the publication and the central bank. In response to the allegations, Bitcoin Magazine has penned an open letter

to the Federal Reserve Services Deputy General Counsel, Thadis Murphy. So this is the epic letter. And shout out to Bitcoin Magazine because they absolutely killed this. So it says, dear Thetis Murphy, on behalf of the entire team at Bitcoin Magazine, I wanted to take the time to thank you for your thoughtful inquiry after having browsing or online store. Doing your Christmas shopping early, you love to see it. Let us know if we could send a box of merchandise to any of the 12 Federal Reserve banks.

You might enjoy our content from the latest print of Bitcoin magazine, which discusses the damages your policy have done to our economy and our country. Please don't hesitate to reach out with the list of coveted items, and we'll be sure to send them. We want to do our part to, quote, stimulate the economy. On to business. It's fucking hilarious. Oh, man.

On to business. we'd like to inform you that while we received your cease and desist request, we refuse to comply. We will not be intimidated by your efforts to silence criticism. As you may know, our publication and our readership are deeply troubled by the new Fed Now Interbanking Communication System. We believe not only that it is possibly unconstitutional, but it threatens the very freedoms that all liberty-lobbing American citizens should hold dear. With that in mind, we believe it is within our First Amendment rights to exercise, exercise speech on this issue. And to that end, we will be defending our right to sell merchandise that makes buyers aware through fair use imagery our position that the system is a threat to civil liberties. So, I mean, it keeps going, but you guys get the general gist of it. Bitcoin magazine absolutely slayed here. But once again, Ben, I think that this is just another example that our opponents are scared. They're worried, right? I mean, how far off is this from, really, like we just saw a story, what, last week, two weeks ago, Javier Millet.

They blamed him for the crash of the Argentine peso because he was criticizing it. And now you have the Fed suing Bitcoin magazine or threatening to sue Bitcoin magazine because they're criticizing the Fed's policies and news. rollout of their interbank system. And so like to a degree, it's just different flavors of the same sentiment. It's you better not criticize because then we will blame you for our failings and hold you accountable for our failings. This is what it seems like to me.

100%. It's it's ludicrous. It's, and there's something that we're going to talk about today in regards to one of the most well-known content creators on the face of the planet. Ben, you're a YouTuber like myself. I'm talking about Mr. Beast, and we'll get to that in a second, but essentially you have the legacy corporate media getting mad that Mr. Beast built Wells in Africa because it makes the governments of that said

country look bad. You know, it's that type of thing where it's like they ignore the issue at hand. It's like, no, forget about our actual. claims and our actual worries about the Fed Now system. Forget about, you know, the fact that, you know, all these Africans didn't have water. It's the fact that you're pointing it out that is a problem. You shouldn't be pointing it out. That is an issue to us, right?

So, yeah, it's tyranny. I can't think of another word for that. Yeah, it's, yeah, I mean, exactly what you said. It's, it's, um, the people in power, uh, are on their highest defense when the criticisms they're receiving are the most accurate. 100%. And they don't have a good reply to that, right? And they don't have a good reply, so they'd rather silence your speech instead. And I just want to remind everyone how serious this is, because, you know, we take a lighthearted approach, right? But these CBDCs are being rolled out

throughout the world, right? This is a great website, great resource. And it just shows you basically in every single G7 country, right, in the Europe, you know, in Europe, they're rolling it out. In the United States, you know, it's in development. In Europe, it's in development. In China, it's basically already launched. In Russia, it's launched. In India, it's launched. In Australia, it's launched. South Africa, in Brazil. So you guys get the point. They are hell-bent on rolling out this, you know, this digital enslavement mechanism. And they're not stopping. And a couple months ago, we would have been labeled conspiracy theories,

conspiracy theorists for talking about the connection between the so-called digital ID and the CBDC money. Now, they're literally telling you online and they're doing it with such glee that I cannot believe like it's right up in your face it's like the Christine Lagarde video man where she's like the digital euro is coming through the legislative process but there's nothing you could do about it so shut the fuck up and just download the app and use our user coin this is some of the latest news is coming out of Europe says we're one step closer to the first trusted and secure EU digital identity framework today's final agreement on the

EU digital identity wallets paves the way for his successful digital decade in which every European has access to safe and secure digital wallets across the EU. All citizens, residents, and businesses will be offered a possibility, a possibility, Ben, to have an EU digital identity wallet to access private and public online service. This revolutionary tool, you see how they're using our words? Very, very, very important. They're using our words. evolutionary database that they've got going there. Empower users, right?

It's almost as if they're watching Bitcoin content, almost. Put them in control of their data and privacy, enhanced security. Like, holy cow, like, they don't care, man. They don't care. It goes on to say, on top of that, the EUEID will allow users to open bank accounts, make payments, hold digital documents. These can include a mobile driving, driving license, a medical prescription, and a professional certificate or a travel ticket.

Ben, you that live through a historical moment when you see this, and they're definitely going to try to roll this out in your country, are you excited for the empowerment it's going to give you? Honestly, the part that got me was where they said this digital ID was, you, was a digital ID will, quote, will allow, that's one step away from will be required to do all of the things that you listed. That's what is next. They roll it out. You know, they incentivize people to use in some way, shape, or form. And then once they've got most people just like kind of sleepwalking through it and they're all kind of using it anyways and they've given up, you know, any semblance of

privacy or sovereignty by doing so. And those people are just used to that. They'll say to the rest of society, you now have to do this. And then they'll already have the support of everybody else because they'll be like, well, I'm doing it. So whatever, you should have to do it too. Like that's how they do it. And yes, like the whole QR code thing here, it was wild. And like, Alberta was the most lenient.

with everything, it still got really stupid. But then, like, you had instances in, like, Quebec on the other side of the country where, like, if you wanted to get groceries at Walmart and you didn't have your QR code, they would effectively, they didn't want you to shop anywhere else in the store. You couldn't, you could only get groceries because it was a human need. But if you, you couldn't, like, go and buy clothes or, or toys or, like, toiletries or anything like that. And so they had little cones and so you'd come into the store and people would have to stand inside the cones and then they would have to wait for a representative from the store to come and escort them through to make sure that they only went to the food section it was insane dude bro i mean

it's so crazy and so like i'm sticking by i'm sticking by it bitcoin or slavery it's like it's bitcoin or slavery i that i'm i'm sticking by it's bitcoin or slavery i that i I wouldn't say it's an exaggeration. I think that's like the future in front of us. And we got to decide as, you know, as Bitcoiners, as sovereign individuals, what future you want to live in. And it tells me how terrified they are of their opponents of Bitcoin, based on Elizabeth Warren's behavior, based on this crazy regulation that just got implemented in the UK. Clearly, they're very scared. And it tells me that if you were to put these two systems next to each other and they were to compete,

it's very, very clear that Bitcoin's incentives will rule the day. So obviously they're not playing fair. Now, I always show this because it's a great example of the control mechanisms that would come with a CBDC, of a money that's linked to your digital ID, and what they can do to you. And they're really taking the queue from China. So, you know, it's, it has a couple things, right? So you obviously want the best social credit system, and that gives you, that grants you

privileges, right? And you have certain things that either move you up and move you down. So what it does, it, it becomes kind of like a, like a forcing mechanism, right? So it says high scores can give you priority to school, easier access to cash loans, consumer deposit free bicycle and car hire, free gym facilities, cheaper public transport, shorter wait times in hospitals, fast track promotion at work. Oh, you see that one? That's a hard one. Jumping the queue for public housing tax breaks. Now punishments could lead to denial of licenses, licenses, permits, and access to some social services. Exclusion from booking flights or high speed train tickets. So you can't travel. That's nuts. Less access to credit.

Restricted access to public services. Well, I think that's a good one. That's a positive one. Disguise as a negative one. But you would be ineligible to get a government job. No access to private school. Public shaming. Expose either online or TV screens in public spaces of the names, photos, and ID numbers

of the blacklisted citizens. Phone dialed. Go ahead. Oh my God. Yeah. That's like black mirror. Yeah. That's literally black mirror like the social credit one that they had.

Ben, this is, I'm seriously. This is what is in front of us, bro. Like, this is what they want. Like, it is so. Could you imagine how giddy, like, a lot of these bureaucrats and these politicians would be if they had this level of control? because 80% of the population wouldn't fight it. They would just be like, dude, just do the good thing.

And the politicians wouldn't be subject to it, right? The people in power wouldn't be subject to this. They would be immune to all of it, right? Like it's rules for thee and not for me, right? Of course. This is a new, like, this is a new version of neo-feudalism. Like, this is feudalism, essentially. So I'm just going to start from the bottom because this is where Bitcoiners

will be. So here is a couple things. So cheating in online games. Okay. Participating in anything deemed to be a cult. Yep, yep. Going down there. Shit. Insincere apologies for crimes committed. That is so broad. What does that mean?

Spreading rumors on the internet. Oh, yep. Falling down one. Posting anti-government messages on social media. Yep, definitely going down. And see, the ones in the top, you know, there's just like not visiting aging parents regularly. Okay, okay. You know, it's nice. I think everybody in the chat would have broken every single bone on the way down that staircase.

Illegally protesting against the authorities. Okay. So what is the legal protest and what is in the legal protest? Yeah. Good Lord. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

So look at this one. praising the government on social media. Oh, man. This is wild. Again, like this is, it's crazy when it's so in your face because China is so much further along and has so much more control over their populace

as compared to the West. But directionally speaking, it's all going the same way, right? 100%. I truly believe that. And, you know, I think that's really the future ahead of us, man. And I think it really falls down to us Bitcoiners to really break the Bitcoin echo chamber. Like Natalie did so great today, just breaking that echo chamber, getting the truth out.

To really spread that message that Bitcoin's a great unifier doesn't mean whether you're left or right. Bitcoin is for you. It's not left versus right. It's not liberal versus conservative. With the real battle here is the party of orange, the party of Bitcoin, peace, prosperity, opportunity versus the party of green, the party of nihilism, slavery, poverty. That's really the battle at stake. That's the battle of our time. Those are the two options that we have in front of us.

And we have to fight for what we want, right? Because what they want is pure slavery. And they're not hiding it anymore. They're telling you, they're blatant, telling you to your face. what they want for you well i think we've got a good group around us to push back as best as we can so here we go 100%. all right guys this is nico from simply bitcoin bitcoin bitcoin this was your simply sessions later man have a good one bro see you next week all right guys a few more things before we get going here i got to fill you in on the latest and greatest in the tech updates uh thank you nika

for being here and go follow simply bitcoin if you're not subscribed already what do you do in go do now. Let's take a look at everything going on. Up first, Geyser is migrating. Geyser Fund, if you're unfamiliar, a way to raise, you know, put up fundraisers and stuff and raise via Lightning Network. They're migrating over to Noster. So basically, your Geyser project lives on Noster, regardless of whether you're logging in via Noster or Twitter. This means broader visibility and more engagement for your content on Noster platforms, aligning with Noster opens doors to exciting features like Nostra posts, replies, polls, hidden posts, basically Patreon, but with content flowing seamlessly across the Nosterverse.

So again, cross-plot platform freedom, stronger connections, trust and transparency, data ownership. Super awesome. I love that marriage. It just makes sense. If you're not on Noster, check it out. It's pretty cool. You got to get on there.

And this is streaming live to Noster as we speak. So you could be watching it there if you really wanted to. So yeah, check it out if you're not all over there. And then also obviously check out Geyser Fund. They are awesome. And there's a lot of great projects that you should support there. Up next, there's a lot of lightning stuff, which is very poetic given that on-chain fees are crazy right now due to the Ordinals people. But I digress.

This, you know, everything is good for Bitcoin. These tests, these push in fees are helping us bolster our lightning infrastructure. So that's great. Anyway, ZapRite launched integration with Albi. So ZapRite now offers, this is by the way like a payment processor that people can set up so they can accept Bitcoin. They offer the ability to connect your Albi wallet and receive payments directly into your Albi lightning address. Once you have your account connected, you can quickly enable Albi. on your default checkout or on individual invoices and payment links.

Our hosted checkout pages will now use your Albi account to receive Lightning payments. Yeah, super awesome. Congrats to both the ZapRite and Albi. Albi is a really cool tool. Actually, it's in my, it's right up here. I got it there. So anyways, moving on, Athena Bitcoin to integrate Lightning Network into its ATM, starting with El Salvador.

So Athena Bitcoin, an operator of 2,100 Bitcoin ATMs and 6 different. countries will start offering services utilizing lightning networks, starting with 200 ATMs of the Chivo project in El Salvador. They're planning to have 100 Chivo branded ATMs operating on the Lightning Network by December 23rd, starting with the ones in San Salvador. And then it will take two to three more months to complete the rollout for the rest of Chivo and Athena ATMs. So Athena Bitcoin ATMs and the rest of Latin American United States will receive the feature in 2024, one Bitcoin ATM at a time. And then here's Peter Todd. He just dried out one of the lightning ATMs from Athena down at adopting Bitcoin in El Salvador right now. And he said, good timing. And he's showing the fees

on the main chain. So awesome for Athena, rolling that out. Another lightning thing coming up, LNESIM. You can buy travel ESIMs over Lightning Network. So they let you instantly buy travel ESIMs. No KYC or email required. We're launching LNESIMs. ESIM.com instantly by, again, ESIMs are using Lightning Network, no KYC, easy refund policy. If you can't get your ESM working, they contact us for a refund. And so they are also on Noster. There's a Twitter account called ESIM for Bitcoin. There's no X profile for LNESIM, but they are on Noster.

So you can go and search them and find them there. And if you're like, what the hell is an ESM? And basically, if you go traveling about and you can only get kind of crappy plans for traveling, you can go and buy a native e-s, like a digital SIM card for your phone for any country that you travel to. And you literally just install it digitally, turn off your regular SIM. You don't have to take it out or anything and turn on the digital, the e-Sim. And then all of a sudden you have like a native connection to the local carrier in the region that you're in. So super awesome.

and really awesome that you can do that with no KYC and pay with lightning. So another great thing. Let's go to OnChane. 85% of Whirlpool users are using self-hosted solutions. Interesting. There was some people were very curious about this and they were worried about the privacy implications of not enough people self-hosting their own infrastructure. But anyways, Samurai Wallet's recent maintenance and the data it unveiled underscore the growing trend toward decentralization in the, the Samurai and Whirlpool communities.

On the 30th of September, 2023, Samurai Wall initiated a pre-planned server maintenance phase. The scheduled downtime was initially pegged at two hours, starting from 1 PM UTC. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, samurai later extended the downtime, and it was just around 10 hours. The maintenance period acted as an unexpected quasi-experiment with self-hosted dojo users running whirlpool without interruption, a use. unique opportunity arose to evaluate the volume of Whirlpool users dependent on Samurai Samurai self-hosted public node.

World pool users continuing remixes without interruption constituted 85 to 90% of the total user base actively mixing before the downtime. This data provides a transparent and verifiable metric measuring the volume of world pool users reliant on Samurai wallet's public node and figure now confirmed to be a minority of 10 to 15% of the Whirlpool community. Due to public nature of the Bitcoin blockchain, anyone can verify the credibility of this data independently. And the last point here that I really like,

the overarching mission of Whirlpool is achieving complete decentralization. The next major milestone is eliminating the need for a centralized coordinator perceived as Whirlpool's last primary attack vector. So that's pretty cool to see. Anyways. Warning, if you're still using a ledger and you haven't at least, least started using your sparrow wallet with it instead, which you should. There's a fake Ledger Live app on the Microsoft App Store, and it has been used to steal 16.8 Bitcoin. The app has now been

taken down, but not before it received more than $768,000 worth of user funds. Yeah, so anyways, the scammer address is there. You can see what it was and how much Bitcoin it has. Microsoft removed the malicious app the same day it went up because people gave warnings. Yeah, that's super unfortunate. One of the users posted on Reddit, downloaded a new Ledger app I found in the Microsoft store after reinstalling Windows on my computer about a couple hours ago.

Had not accessed it through Ledger Live in a while and was prompted to input my 20-4-word-seed recover phrase. There's the red flag. Never enter it onto the computer. I didn't think more about it since so much it happened with both reinstalling Microsoft OS and Ledger Live app, but it took a few minutes before I saw everything I owned 18 and a half grand worth of Bitcoin and AK and L coins disappear. Yeah, that is too bad.

Anyways, beware, guys. If you're unsure, the best thing is to just wait where you are, do nothing, double check. You know, there's nothing to be lost in sitting put instead of making rash decisions. And I mentioned it before, but StartOS, Start9 Labs, they dropped version 0.3.5 for the Start9 server. They say this is our most stable release ever with massive improvements to performance and reliability. And cryptically, a big step towards version 0.4.0. You won't see the difference. You will feel it.

I'm very excited for version 0.4. That's going to be, I maybe got a little sneak tease about what's going on there. But it's going to be awesome. Anyways, a couple last things that I wanted to bring up. I just got my, it's off to the side. I would grab it, but it's out of reach. Anyways, here's the picture of it. This is over on my nostler.

I just got the new metal seed signer enclosure. Oh, my God, it is beautiful. And it's like, it's hefty too. It's got some weight to it. and it just feels slick as hell, plugged it in, did some playing. It is badass. I've got to say, this thing is beautiful. So anyways, if you're not following SeedSigner, go follow them, they'll have links

to where you can grab this. I think it's at four different online merchants. You can grab them. They are selling out quick, but it's got to be one of the nicest things that I've got sitting there. It just feels so like the metal just feels so nice. And yeah, anyways, excited about that. I should probably do a refresh on the Seed Sign.

or any time soon anyway. And another thing that I dropped just earlier today, the cold card seed vault. This is an advanced feature for your cold card. I love this feature. This is probably one of my favorite features now next to BIP-85 itself. Okay, so what is it?

Basically, to give you a little background of what BIP-85 is, basically you can have a seed phrase, your main seed phrase on the cold card, And then the cold card can from that derive up to 10,000, we'll call them child accounts or child seed phrases from the master. Okay. And all of these 10,000 child accounts can be used for whatever you want, like hot wallets, other cold wallets, you know, maybe even like lightning wallets like Phoenix and Mutiny for friends and family if you want to be their last line of defense. Anyways, all of those seeds are completely independent from the original seed phrase.

And what I mean by that is, if somebody gets a hold of one of the child seeds, they cannot work backwards to compromise the master. And so it keeps the master safe. But what it does is if anything goes awry and you lose one of those child seeds, say you had, you created one and it was a hot wallet on your phone, you don't need another backup. Because if you delete the app, if you lose your phone, you go back to your cold card and say, hey, what was account number four? And it spits it back out for you, and you got your recovery right there.

And if you smash your cold card, you can just go back and you can say, I've got my backup of my cold card, my single one seed phrase to rule them all. Once you plug it back in, then you can generate the BIP 85 seed again. Anyways, I digress. What the hell is seed vault? Well, it does a bunch of things. One, any of those child seeds that you can generate, you can now put those in effectively a seed vault for easy acts.

in the main cold cards. So you log in normally and then you go to seed vault and you say, and you can label all of them and you say, oh, I need to get access to mum's seed phrase and you just click on it. It opens it right up. It also allows you to import external seeds to be stored in the RAM of the cold card. So it's not on the secure element, but it is encrypted by your master seed, which is in the secure element. So obviously like a tradeoff there, but like, the stuff that's on the RAM is encrypted by the material in the secure element anyways. So you can take any seed phrase, any external seed phrase, and import it onto your cold card and use the cold card as an additional backup for that seed phrase.

And this includes your tap signer. So if you have a tap signer and you're like, oh, the backup is kind of different. There's a file. There's a password. No more. I mean, you can still do it that way. But you can take that backup and import it onto your cold card as a backup for your tap signer. And then if you use that seed on the cold card, your cold card effectively becomes your tap signer, which is wild.

And you can import that into sparrow and use it with your cold card normally. You can generate seeds and put them in the seed vault. And you can also have it point to duress wallets and stuff. So if you need to fund them easily and make it look like there's activity, and then, link that to a trick pin. So if somebody is threatening you, you can put it in a trick pin and it goes that. Anyways, holy crap, there's so much there. If you don't understand, go watch it. It's crazy. It's crazy. Anyways, I love this feature. One of my favorite new things. I'm so glad that I spent some time on it this week. And then finally, tomorrow coming up, why are we bullish? So who we got? We got Mr.

Jeff Booth, one of my favorite people of all time. I love this guy. He's going to be on the show. So nobody caribou, if you guys recall, he is one of the guys that was integral in getting Bitcoin to the Canadian truckers directly to them during the protest. So he was on the ground. He was handing that stuff out, you know, braving the absolute sub-zero temperatures to do all that. And he's just an all-around great guy. So it's been a while since I caught up with him. Very happy to have him on. And then a dude that's been making the round on spaces lately quite a bit talking about

talking about Bitcoin and everything. And he's like a serial entrepreneur. He's been doing lots of stuff. He's going to be on the show as well. His name is Gary Cardone. And some of you, I think, are familiar with them. But he's going to come on and have a little conversation. We did a spaces a couple days ago.

And when we said we're going to do the spaces, we also said that we would do the Friday show as well. So if you want to come partake in the live chat for that, ask your questions, drop your comments, anything that you may have, and be part of the conversation. I would love to have you there. And so, and I very much value all of your input in that conversation. So nonetheless, looking forward to tomorrow. So be sure to tune in. I'm sure it's it's bound to be a very interesting episode. So come check it out and we will see you there.

Anyways, guys, I'm going to start to round out here. Number one, thank you guys so much for being here. Of course, make sure you hit that like button just down below the screen. That helps a ton get this content in front of more eyeballs. Give this a share on all your social media. That really helps as well, of course. And then if you're not already, please do subscribe that. helps an absolute ton in bolstering the channel.

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