BTC Sessions - EU Drops The Hammer On Anonymous BTC Transactions ep405

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Today Simply Sessions dives into Argentina's inflation-driven shift towards digital currency, the EU's ban on anonymous transactions, and the debate ignited by Greenpeace's critique of Bitcoin. We also cover the implications of the U.S.'s latest spending bill and discuss the future of digital currencies with SWIFT's impending platform. BOOK ME for one-on-one private sessions to learn about wallets, hardware, multisig, privacy, nodes and much more. https://www.btcsessions.ca/ 💪 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. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ SEEDOR is one of the most robust metal backups on the market today. Use this link for 5% off. https://www.seedor.io/discount/BTCSESSIONS?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fprodukte For US based customers: https://www.seedor.io/btcsessions Canadian customers: https://link.thecryptoboutique.ca/BTCSessionsSeedor Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - take back control of your money and data! https://start9.com/ HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC p2p solution for trading and lending. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION

Yo, what's going on everybody? Welcome to the show, another Thursday, another episode of Simply Sessions. Nico is waiting in the wings to give us the latest and greatest in Bitcoin news. And we're going to be hitting the tech updates after that. I hope you're all having a good week. It's been exciting, lots of stuff going on. And perhaps I might be seeing some of you next week down in El Salvador very much. Looking forward to that my first time there.

but we'll talk about that later in the show. Of course, if this is live, anything can happen, so I defer to my friend Bill here. Live, okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks.

If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share all those things. They help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Simply session. Before we bring in, Nika, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market today. I'm pulling up timechain calendar.com and simultaneously I'm going to be pulling up the live chat.

So everything you say from here on in will be live for the world to see for better or worse. First up, time chain calendar, we're sitting at $70,718 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will grab you 1,414. sats in terms of fees next block 36 sats per byte a little bit higher than last few days here anytime 10 sats per byte and bitcoin mine 19.67 million of them that is 93.65 percent of the total supply and that flashing ring around the outside there that denotes how damn close we are to the halving we're about 22 days and 19 hours out it's looking to hit around uh april 20th at T1 AM Eastern Standard Time.

Exciting stuff. Shout out to sponsor the show, hoddlehottle.com, if you're buying Bitcoin and you have some priorities in mind that include peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custy, no K-YC. This is a super awesome place to do it. Sign up with nothing more than an email address. Once you're in, choose a currency payment method and an amount. You can start viewing offers immediately. They also have peer-to-peer lending with no re-hypothication.

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and you can always swap out the disks if you need. Nikos laughing backstage. Swap out the dicks if you need to change out the information. Anyways, check them out. There are links down below for the best shipping options for you. Nunshok has you covered for a assisted multi-sig. Their honey badger program allows you to set up a multi-sig quorum on your mobile device with things like Tapsiron and a cold card, plenty of other hardware options. Once it's all set up, you also have baked and inheritance planning to get your sats to your next of kin if anything should happen to you. And the whole thing can be done without K-YC. You can check him out today at Nunchuk.io. And last shout out to start non-your

sovereign computing solution, these guys have plug-and-play devices so that you can host not not only your Bitcoin stack, but your digital life. You can run things like Bitcoin Core, your Lightning Node, Mempool.Space, join market. You can also host files, passwords, photos, and plenty more, including AI tools, Nosterrealizing clients, you name it, they got it. Check them out at start9.com.

And one of my favorite things, of course, that they do is they have different options for your preference. So they have beginner and entry level devices all the way up to the Start 9 server. Pure, which I'm running, if you check them out at start nine.com, use code BTC sessions with a plus sign, and you can grab that server pure for 18% off. Anyways, with that, enough of my rambling. Let's get in, Nico here. Yo, buddy. Good to see you. Yo, dude, okay, okay, okay. So I was telling you before the show, I'm like, dude, I can't hook this up to my YouTube channel. I can't

hook it up to my ex to the Twitter. I'm like, what's going on? And then I'm like, okay, I got to share the screen, you know, get ready for the show. And I realized I was using the brave browser. So that's why it's not on the Simply Bitcoin channel, the Simply Twitter. And I dropped out, dropped back in on the Chrome browser. So everything should be good now. But yeah, that was a little bit of a drop ball on my part. But happy to be here, man.

Happy to be here. Yeah, all good, man. Glad to see you. And we're going to be hanging out tip to tip down in El Salvador. Oh, we're going to bump the dicks, bro. If you have no idea what we're talking about, go back and watch the Christmas show with Kaiser. It was one for the ages.

Hey, you said it first, bro. You said it first. Love it, man. Awesome. Well, dude, let's dive into what's been going on. I'll bring up your screen here. What's been top of mind? What's happening in the big wind space lately?

Yeah, dude. I mean, bro, so one of the things. things that I've been noticing basically across the world is, in the developing world specifically, is that people don't necessarily buy Bitcoin, even in these countries with like crazy amounts of inflation. What they're going towards is USDT and USDC. They're flocking to stable coins, right? This is the first time I've seen this type of article, and it was huge. And again, this isn't just come from a, you know, quote unquote, run-of-the-mill kind of crypto, quote-unquote, crypto publication. This is Bloomberg. And the headline for the audio listeners is Bitcoin is trumping dollars

for many inflation-wary Argentines. That is a big effing deal, right? So move over stable coins, Argentines, or at least some Argentines are picking Bitcoin instead. So here are some of the details that says Argentines are buying Bitcoin to protect themselves from the 276 percent inflation, instead of rushing to exchange pesos for dollars, upending a timeless strategy that made the crisis-prone country one of the top places for greenbacks in the world. Bitcoin purchases in Argentina, one of the nations with the highest level of cryptocurrency adoption globally, approached their highest weekly value in 20 months at a local cryptocurrency exchange lemon, the most popular among retail customers in the South American country.

Argentines are looking for ways to survive a recession. and one of the world's highest inflation rates as President Javier Malay implements his shock therapy policies intended to reset the economy. Exchanges pesos for dollars, the main safe haven for decades, has lost some of its appeal in the past two months as the commonly used parallel exchange rate has strengthened 10% against the dollar, while Bitcoin has rallied almost 60% against the greenback over the same period. Lemon recorded almost 35,000 customer transactions to buy Bitcoin in the week ending March 10th, doubled the weekly average last year. The behavior was similar to that of customers of other major exchanges in Argentina, such as repo and Bello. A major driver behind the stronger Pesso in recent weeks is Malay's tight grip of the amount of money in circulation,

not letting it grow while the central bank rebuilds its stockpile of cash dollars. Volume and Bitcoin and Ether have increased 10fold so far in 2024 compared to the same period last year at Digital Wallet Bello, the CEO said. He noted that purchases, stablecoins, crypto assets, often tied to currencies like the US dollar, have fallen to 60 from 70% over that period as Bitcoin's rally lured in more buyers. Quote, the users decided to buy Bitcoin when they see the news that the currency is going up while stable coin is more pragmatic and many times used for transactional purposes as a vehicle to make payments abroad. Okay. So kind of like breaking this down, number go up technology is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And even, you know, in a country where it does not have a stable currency whatsoever, people can't resist number go up. You know, they see Bitcoin going up and they say, you know what, F these greenbacks.

I want to get myself some Bitcoin. So this is a great trend and I hope it continues. Awesome. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's nice to see. And again, I think you'll see the ebbs and flows as the market changes over time. I don't think we're hitting hyper-bitcoinization quite yet. But people will begin to recognize over longer periods of time that as Bitcoiners have realized, hey, like, if this is anything beyond what I'm using day to day, you know, it only makes sense

to not have it in dollars. Like, dollars are just like a smooth path to less purchasing power where Bitcoin is a volatile path to eternal riches and other things. And so like it's, it's, you know, you can, you, during a bull run, of course, more people are going to flock to it. But like this is a night, especially in a place like Argentina, you know, people are beginning to kind of wake up and say like, huh, this thing actually goes up, whereas everything else goes down over time here. And so, you know, they're uniquely positioned to understand that fiat currency is a losing game. 100%. And I think that they understand it on an inherit level. And, you know, and I think that that's, you're right. We're not at hyper-bitonization yet. But I hope that this, this trend continues. And I see someone in the chat, Viva la Libertta caro. So, you know, that Javier Malie, like, I guess, political slogan. Anyways, another news. Greenpeace, absolutely getting wrecked once again. We always say, on Simply Sessions that it's the party of orange

versus the party of green. It's just ironic that it's Greenpeace, right? You know? Anyways, I'm a dad now, so I have dad jokes. So anyways, it says breaking Greenpeace just released an explosive new report exposing the deep ties between the fossil fuel industry, right-wing climate deniers,

and the growing lobbying network, pushing a plan to save dirty coal and gas plants with Bitcoin. Read now. Now the beautiful part about X is that they added the community notes now. So whether you're a central banker or politician lying about inflation or any of these things, you get literally fact-checked in real time by the Bitcoin community. The community note says the article contains many factual errors, like the flawed per transaction accounting of energy and outdated and inaccurate information, such as the proportion of fossil fuels used as energy source.

Nowadays, the majority of the energy used by Bitcoin mining is renewable. So, I mean, talk about BS, bro. Yeah. I mean, it's hilarious that Greenpeace continues to, again, they don't, they don't care if what they're saying has been debunked over and over again. They've just got whatever their agenda happens to be. Like no amount of fact checking is going to stop them from just saying, no, but it's bad, though. It's bad.

It has to be bad because we've said it's bad. And if we change our minds, then what would that say about us? And so they, you know, they just continue down this path. I love the community notes. I think it's just, just chef's kiss, the best. And I mean, even the guy, the hilarious thing is in the image, they've got the piece of art that that guy made. And even the artist who made it realize that Greenpeace was wrong on their stance on Bitcoin. Like it's super, super funny.

It's great. Dude, the artist, right? The artist himself, he's like, well, I didn't know this stuff. This Bitcoin stuff is actually pretty dope, which I think that like, you buried the lead there a little bit, Ben, because I think it highlights the fact that the party of green is relying on the, basically people's lack of knowledge on Bitcoin. in order to propagate these false narratives, you know, and in order to try to convince people of things that aren't so. Yeah. Yeah, I like the comment here from, from, from Hammers.

He said, the artist realized he was a pawn. Yes, indeed, indeed. And I mean, my other favorite thing about this is that Greenpeace is basically pissed away the $5 million that they got from Ripple. Like they, like, great job, great job guys. Like they got that money and accomplished nothing. Like when you look at the change the code, whatever Twitter handle, like all of the engagement was just Bitcoiners calling them assholes. Like they're like fact checking them.

And like nobody cared about anything. Like they literally accomplished nothing. And as as people pointed out, they didn't even, they kept on saying change the code, but they didn't even get anybody to write. any code. So like what are you actually doing there? Yeah. It's, it's interesting.

It's interesting. It's interesting to say the least. They could always fork it, right? They could change the code and fork it, but you're going to have to convince people to run that code, right? That's not what they're trying to say. They want the government to step in and coerce people to use the change code, right? That's, you know, that's the part that they don't say.

So anyways, green peace. It's the green part makes sense. The peace part, not so much. Yeah. Anyways, in other news, SBF sentence today to 25 years in prison for fraud. Here's a little bit more details. Sandbank from Freed orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds in history, stealing over $8 billion of his customers' funds.

His deliberate and ongoing lies demonstrated a brazen disregard for customers, expectations and disrespect for the rule of law, all so that he could secretly use his customer's money to expand his own power and influence. Judge Kaplan also ruled Bankpenfreed's forfeited assets worth $11.02 billion can be used to help fund the repayment of victims of the FTX collapse. He knew it was wrong. He knew it was criminal. He regrets that he made a very bad bet about the likelihood of getting caught, but he is not going to admit a thing. as is his right. He goes on to say,

today's sentence will prevent the defendant from ever again committing fraud as an important message to others who might be tempted to engage in financial crimes. That justice will be swift and the consequences will be severe.

Okay, you'll say that. The consequences will be severe. The justice will be swift. All of this, all of that. Bernie Madoff got 150 years. Ross Albridge is still in jail. Julian Assange is trying, the U.S. government is trying to extradite him to the U.S. I mean, and if you compare and contrast the damage that SBF has done to people compared to someone like Julian Assange, someone like Ross Albridge, there's no comparison.

It's like night and day. So could it be, and no way to know this for sure, I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm just saying it feels like a very big coincidence. Could it be that he donated to political parties? Could it be that he was the Wonder Child? Could it be that Jim Kramer was calling him the next Roosevelt or whatever, the banker? Like, could it be that the Wall Street Journal held like literally while this guy was accused of fraud? And what was the guy's name, James Sorkin or something, the journalist?

like Andrew Sorkin, thanks, thanks, Ben. And he introduced him and the crowd started clapping for him. Like even though this guy sold like billions of dollars, there was this like this very famous comment of this mother that was like, I lost my life savings to this. Like, you know, and someone, you know, someone in the chat, right? Again, kind of a coincidence. Ross Albrecht turned 40 years old the day that SBF was sentenced.

So I mean like, yeah, 25 years. But let's not, let's not forget, you know, that Ross is still in jail. So, you know, it's, it's, man, what justice, what justice? I got to say is what justice is what justice is what justice is what tier justice is what I would say. Yeah. And I got to agree with some of the people in the chat. They're saying like he's going to, he's going to get paroled early.

He's going to, like, for sure, like 25 is probably like the initial sentence. He'll, you know, be a good little. boy in there and, you know, get, get some, some nods and some favors. And he'll, he'll be out. He'll, he'll get to enjoy, in my opinion, probably the majority of his life out of prison. He'll have a chunk of his life in prison. But I don't think he's going to serve the full 25 years by any means. I 100% agree. And so that whole, you know, speech about the judge and the justice and all that like I just

I don't know man I will say at least there's jail happening I feel like their hands were forced like they they had to do something about it because of the scale of it but like they were they were really trying to

paint him as as oh you know it was like can you remember some of the article some of the fluff pieces oh it was all just a big ass accident like poor guy go fuck yourself it like he literally just took people's money bought bahama's real estate in between orgies with his disgusting like group of people in his business and then like people thought they own bitcoin and he was just like writing numbers on a screen

and buying shit with all their stuff and like had no idea where anything was was just whatever we'll just, it's going up forever. We'll just do anything we want. Like go fuck yourself like anybody that tried to white night SBF. And that also goes for Michael Lewis, the guy who like wrote the book about him. He wrote the big short and his opinion on SBF has ever like forever tainted that, unfortunately for me. Great movie, great book.

But the one that he wrote in and around SBF, like he basically was like, well, you know, He was very apologetic for SBF. Yeah, I mean, and it's, it's, it's, uh, yeah, I saw that. He was like apologetic. He's like, you don't understand. It's like, I do understand, you know, but like, uh, man, maybe it's just, he was so biased because he got so past. He was like writing the book and like 90% of the book like was done.

And then all of a sudden he's like, this guy's actually a criminal. Um, you know, so. Yeah, she like dropped the book and then like it becomes incredibly clear how the because that must have been like all right this thing just went to the printers oh no oh man yeah bro so uh anyways for anyone who's listening smash the like button i apologize to the simply bitcoin audience i literally was on the brave browser uh but we'll be back simply sessions next week live from el savador and i'll make sure to have it on the simply twitter and the simply youtube account as well So live simply sessions from the shining country on a hill El Salvador.

That should be a lot of fun. Anyways. Okay. So in other news, you guys know that I love the term Overton window. Well, it's shifting. We're living in time. What's the very famous decade? There are decades where nothing happen.

And then there are weeks where decades happen. Okay. and this is exactly what we're living through. We're living through. A lot of people call it the fourth turning, this very tumultuous era and human history. And I found this really interesting because, you know, what I got to say about this?

I got to say that Ron Paul was right. Should have listened to Ron Paul when he was dropping the fire, you know, 15, 10, 15 years ago. He was right. You know how everyone says Alex Jones was right? Well, a Bitcoiner is going to say Ron Paul was right instead. Anyways, so let's check out this clip from Tucker. I had that experience.

I was just saying off air at one of your speeches probably 20 years ago. I'd never seen you speak before and you went off about the Federal Reserve. And I remember thinking, what a weird, what an esoteric subject and knew nothing about it. I thought only crazy people cared. But again, I was completely ignorant about monetary policy at the time. And I was shocked by how much the crowd loved it. They were completely tuned in. They thought it was really important.

Why would the average person 20 years ago have a better sense of that than say, me who was paid to follow the subject, but wasn't. How did people know? I got it from literature. You could read about it. We didn't have an internet. We didn't have the radio or TV giving us good information, but it was out there. For one group that helped me a whole lot was Leonard Reed, the Foundation for Economic Education. I knew him, and he was a true believer. He was a dignified person and very likable. And he talked about process, how you reach people. But he was very, very libertarian in his own way, but he was he was sort of an intellectual. And he influenced me a lot. So I read everything he did. And he did a lot of

literature. But the follow up of that was, of course, the Beezis Institute. And I was part of that. And I think, see, I think they're important people. I know people on TV are really. Really important. Oh, so important. So important. So important. But there are a lot of people that are important. I think the ideas are the most important.

So, I mean, like, how deep is that? How deep is that, like, that whole thing? The people knew inherently 20 years ago that something was wrong with the Federal Reserve, right? But someone who was a professional in media looked away. Right? They said that you're a kook. There's nothing wrong with the Federal Reserve. Now, from a historical standpoint, think about how much has changed in terms of the

public perception for someone like Tucker with his following to be like, dude, like, you were right. Like, this is crazy. Like something's going on here. we've made so much progress. I would like to believe in perhaps I'm extremely biased that Bitcoin has played a huge role in at least shining a light on the scam that is central banking.

But for this type of conversation to be had in kind of mainstream discourse, and then I'll add something on top of that to kind of prove that we're actually making tremendous amount of progress. for the first time in human history, a libertarian candidate was elected as president in Argentina, and literally part of his campaign rhetoric was taken an effing chainsaw

and literally chainsawing a central bank in half. We've made so much progress kind of exposing this money racket, this cartel. And I think that this small clip is just another example of just that. It is a very, it does make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to know that, you know, Ron Paul in his early days, well, like, you know, 20 years ago where people just didn't understand a lot of people other than people around him and some like niche groups didn't understand this. And like you said, for it to be blasted out there all over the place. And like, you know, you have. central bank digital currencies as as election issues. You have, like you said, libertarian candidates in Argentina being elected as president. You have a country that is opting into sound money as a legal tender. You're having all of these things happen and you have a populace that maybe doesn't yet know

exactly how things are working because really like they, they, it's, it's, It's it's obfuscation through complexity, right? Like, they just make everything so complicated that, oh, you couldn't possibly understand this. It's way too complex. Don't worry, we got it. Like, that's been the tactic. But meme culture has boiled it down to very simplistic terms that everybody can understand. Money printer go burr, right?

Like that wasn't even a Bitcoin meme, right? Like that came out of like the whole Wall Street bets like in and around that. it became common, you know, common vernacular for people to talk about money printer go burr and they like are making fun of the fact that our central banks just have no control over the monetary base. And so it's being memed into recognition. And it's a beautiful, beautiful thing to see. And I've got to say, Ron Paul must be so happy to see so much progress being made.

I hope he continues to live on to see even more happen because I think we're at the beginning of the, you know, the suddenly. We're at the beginning of the suddenly and I hope he gets to see most of the suddenly. A hundred percent. I hope so too. He's still going strong and he still has his own show on YouTube and it's kicking ass, right? So I hope so too. I hope he sees that so-called bright orange future. And he did mention this when he spoke at Bitcoin 2021.

He's like, I'm so happy that so many young people are, or he's like, I might not understand Bitcoin 100%, but I understand freedom. And what I'm seeing here is a lot of young people asking and wanting freedom, right? But this is a legend man. He started it all, really. And a lot of people laughed them out of the room for it. Anyways, I do kind of on a very similar topic. And as a first generation American,

we are sold on this idea of you come to the U.S. and Ben, I'm sure you've heard this. It's a very kind of like famous, you know, pitch on the U.S. all over the world. You're pitched on the U.S. that, you know, this is a country to opportunity. You can come here with nothing. And if you work really effing hard,

you know, you could live out your dreams. I think that that is just, just being completely annihilated by this type of BS. You know, House passes $1.2 trillion spending bill. That's trilling with a T, by the way. That's more than the GDP of a lot of countries. And just to kind of give you a visual representation of what that means, here's a stack of $10,000 bills, here's $1 million.

Here's a guy sitting next to $1 million. Here's a guy next to $100 million. It's about a pallet. of a hundred dollar bills. Here's a guy next to a billion dollars. It's about 10 pallets. Here's the same guy next to a trillion dollars. That's two football fields next to each other.

And the pallets are stacked on top of each other. There's double stacked. That's just to kind of give you an idea of how much a trillion is compared to a billion. Right. So they're stealing this. They're stealing time from people. We always say on simply sessions every time they, print money, it's a wealth through distribution mechanism from the lower and middle classes,

which tend to be the younger generations that don't have the means to save in assets, to the very wealthy and back to the government. The wealthy benefit from the money printing because every time they print money, there's asset inflation, the price of assets go up. And it's not that they're getting richer per se. It's that at least their purchasing power is somewhat protected. And what this is is it's theft. I think I saw it was Robert Breedlove on Peter McCorm.

podcast and he like kind of he did the actual calculation and all the printing that they've done over the last five years equates to stealing the working hours of 3.2 million people if you do the math from the age of 18 to the age of 65 that's how much time they've stolen with this printing and what does that do it outprices a lot of people that are trying to get their first home and I'm sure you've felt this pain. I'm definitely feeling this pain, right? We don't, we didn't have the opportunities, the same opportunities that our parents had. Here is professional Galloway and he posts, buying a home in 1985 versus 2022, right? So the baby boomers, you know, the average salary is 23,000. The home was 83,000. Millennials. The average salary is 74,000. I think that's a little bit

on the high side, to be honest. And then the medium home price, $468,000. Right? Absolutely absurd. Now, the South scene's dark and it's like this is kind of sucks and this is dark and whatever. But then that's when I came to a realization when I saw this. And I said, the American dream isn't dead. You just aren't on a Bitcoin standard. And then I came to like another realization, which is it's not the American dream anymore if you're on a Bitcoin standard. It's the Bitcoin dream. The American dream is now. exported everywhere around the world. It doesn't matter where you are. If you've been living on a Bitcoin standard, housing has actually gotten cheaper. So while things continue to melt in Fiat world and how things become unaffordable,

they become hard to reach, there's something to remember that if you're on the orange life raft, you're protected from the madness. And just to kind of give a little bit more graphs to kind of, you know, point out to what I'm trying to make, the trying to show the point that I'm trying to make. Here's the M2 money supply.

Here's, you know, the pandemic. They printed money like crazy. And take a look at this. Isn't that a coincidence how housing prices just kind of went up? It's almost as if it's correlated to the amount of money that they printed. Right. So the American dream is not dead. It's living.

And it's not the American dream anymore. it's the Bitcoin dream and anywhere around the world doesn't matter where you are you can be living this dream if you adopt the Bitcoin standard. I love it. I mean, it's true. Again, if you're able to

if you're able to and I pair at these three points all the time, you're able to one, create value for others, two, spend less than you earn and three, saving Bitcoin, You are going to be having a standard of living that continues to increase at an accelerated pace. And on top of that, you're also going to form very good habits in and around how you spend your money. You're going to be a little bit more conscientious about what you're purchasing because you are going to have a degree of, you know, do I want to spend this money on this particular thing?

Is it going to last me for a long time? Because I don't want to waste my money that is actually now valuable and will hold value and accrue value over time. I don't want to waste it on something that is inferior that won't actually give me like the gratification that I'm looking for, right? It's not that people won't seek out gratification and get things that they like and purchase items, but they're just going to scrutinize a little bit more. They're going to say, do I want this?

is it good quality isn't going to last me a long time. And I think what goes away is the consumer culture of just buying shit just to buy shit. And, oh, it broke. I'll just get another one. Whatever. I'll just get a crappy one. I'll just, if it breaks, whatever, I can just get a new one. No, it'll be, I want a quality one.

I want it to be good. If something breaks, people will fix it like we used to. And it's going to shift the entire culture. 100%. It's going to change the mindset of people. it's going to change the culture. Fix the money, fix the world. 100% agree.

And it makes me hopeful, man. And I hope this optimism that Bitcoin gives to everyone who adopts a Bitcoin standard, I can't wait for this to be exported worldwide, right? This type of mentality that if you work hard enough, you can save. You have the opportunity to save for the future, which I think fiat money and inflation rock. It takes that opportunity away from people. Anyways, I do want to cover this.

This is a kind of big news, specifically coming out of the European Union. This is a trend that we've seen can happen for over the last couple months to a year. We've been on top of this. The hostility towards anonymity, the hostility towards Bitcoin in the European Union, as they're simultaneously rolling out their central bank digital currency. So in the article it goes on to say, in a divisive move, the European Union has implemented stricter measures to combat money laundering, aiming to safeguard financial transactions effectively. The recent directive prohibits the use of crypto wallets lacking clear proof of ownership, emphasizing transparency in these transactions. The new rule aims to eliminate the cloak of anonymity surrounding the certain crypto transactions ensuring closer scrutiny to prevent illicit finance.

Approved by the EU's Parliament top committee on March 19th, it mandates that all crypto payments must be traceable back to real-life identities. In addition to regulating crypto, the EU has controls on cash dealings. Transactions exceeding 10,000 euros are now illegal, with private transfers capped at 3,000 euros. These measures seek to prevent the concealment of funds and enhance oversight over significant financial movements. While many support the EU's proactive approach, I want to meet who is about supporting this. Criticism has emerged. Some European Parliament members express concerns about the impact on individual freedoms and financial privacy. They argue that stringent regulations could hinder economic activities and limit financial autonomy.

Critics suggest that while tackling financial crimes is crucial, banning anonymous payments might not be the most effective. solution. So here's the thing. Criminal's don't follow the law already. So what this is going to affect the most is the average everyday person. And again, the demonization of an anonymous, you know, anonymous. Like, you can't be anonymous. Like, why is that criminalized? Like, I don't understand. right so you know but look i don't know how they're going to enforce this whatsoever and this is a one way door right this one someone's going to exit the system they're going to go on a bitcoin standard and they're going to be like you know what it's a lot nicer over here you guys could keep your gilded golden cage you guys could have fun with it i'm going to stay here yeah and and i wanted to

outline something about this so i was looking into it and um you know some of this is is in and around, is in and around specifically from exchanges to external wallet. So like this relates back to, what was it? Was it Micah? I can't remember what it was. It was the Mika rules. So when transferring, you like, you know how they want to basically have proof that you own a particular wallet when you send out in an exchange?

So like those that, what was it, 10,000 and 3,000, those were in and around cash, but they're basically looking at, you know, if you're sending Bitcoin off of an exchange. Obviously, it's going to be really fucking impossible to enforce anything around like a person with a Bitcoin wallet sending to another person with a Bitcoin wallet. But like this is where the slippery slope comes in. Like right now it's, oh, if you're using an exchange, like here's some here's some shit that you now have to comply with. But like that slope of like, well, if it's over this amount and you're sending to your own wallet, we're going to need proof that it is indeed your wallet turns gradually into, you know, register your wallet, register your private keys if it gets moved. Or you can't, you know, it gets us eventually to a place where app stores within certain jurisdictions

begin to have only approved wallets and, you know, their KYC'd and all that kind of stuff. So the point here is that all of these proposed rules and these things that the EU is leaning towards and other jurisdictions and, you know, people like Elizabeth Warren are leaning towards. If you don't fight back against them or you don't build tools that just fully subvert them, then that's where you lose. And so this is where it's important to, one, again, support your developers. Two, create local economies, circular economies. Again, I'll toss back to what we did this past weekend.

We had our sat market for the second time here in Calgary. And it's just a bunch of bitcoinsers that got together and we decided like, listen, it's easy to clamp down on on and off ramps. It's hard to clamp down on individuals simply creating relationships with each other. And so, you know, make yourself resilient in the face of draconian overlords. We can do it, but it's going to take a little bit of elbow grease. So get to work. Beautiful, beautiful rant.

I completely agree. And, you know, look to very sophisticated tutorials that. to show you how to, uh, uh, show you how to take self custody and really, really take back your financial sovereignty because it's exactly what you said, man. Like, they can roll these out and I think it's just going to push it underground. I think, you know, you're going to have what you see in the developing world or you don't really see, they don't really have developed financial rails. So like most of the transactions are happening peer to peer over telegram groups. Right. So yeah, they can't stop this. But,

you know, I saw someone kind of like saying like, guys, this is overblown. No, it's not. It's not overblown at all. You don't just go from zero to 100. You start to normalize this idea in people's minds, right? Where like, oh, for some reason, this arbitrary number of 10,000 euros, if you spend 10,000 and 1 euros, you're now a criminal, says the bureaucrats, right? Mind you, at the same time we had Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, asking Tucker Carlson for a million dollars to be interviewed in gold, Bitcoin, or dollars, right? So you know, they're not following their own, you know, guidelines and whatnot. So anyways, it's effing bullshit. Guys, this was your Simply session spent. I will see you next week live from El Salvador.

Cool, man. See you later. All right, everybody, stick around because we got our tech updates coming right now we're going to cover some of the new stuff to drop this past week. Lots of stuff going on. So I'll pull up my screen here. First up BTC pay server version 1.13.0.

So a bunch of new features here. They've been shipping a whole bunch of stuff lately. But we're thrilled to announce the release of the new BTC pay server. This major release introduces several brand new features, improvements, bug fixes, and stands for immediate usage.

Server branding and contact options. So server owners now can apply custom name to their server. This functionality complements the previously added capability to upload custom logos, allow for branding and user on the user interface. You can have you only admin overview of all the stores on the instance. You can invite new users to the server via email or link. You can also have new store roles, so managers and employees. So you can make sure that people only have access to the credentials you want.

They also have new functionalities for the keypad, point of sale, better Bitcoin QR support. So basically, Rodolfo from Coin Kite, he's been working on BBQ, BBQR, rather, which is like a far improved QR standard for Bitcoin-related stuff. And so they've chose to implement that here. And it helps a lot getting more data into a more condensed space. And yeah, they've got lots, lots more stuff. So kudos to BTCPA for everything they're doing. This is cool in and around CASA. They just launched an inheritance product,

and I'll point out the cool thing about it that I quite like. So they said, we're excited to introduce CASA inheritance, which empowers CASA members on all our latest plans to share vault access with someone they trust to facilitate the generational transfer of digital assets. Our approach to inheritance feels incredibly smooth and familiar, invite your spouse or a designated recipient to CASA, share keys with them securely via the app. They won't be able to use those keys to sign transactions until you've passed away. Now, this is what I liked.

CASA inheritance is available worldwide without requiring KYC information. This ensures privacy and accessibility for global users. And so the reason, I kind of know the reason I think why they leaned so hard into that, which is great. First of all, I'll say kudos to Nunchuk for being trendsetters in this direction, having a multi-sig option with inheritance baked in, but being able to do it without having to take ID and all of the private information from the individual setting it up. Now, Kasa has been doing some work with the Human Rights Foundation, and I, because Because of the sensitive nature of a lot of people that are involved with the Human Rights

Foundation and some of the work that they do and the need to not be easily identified by local governments and all of that, you know, CASA probably had to step back and look and say like, if we're going to be offering things, you know, and trying to help out in this realm, it's actually, it's a detriment to the people using it if they're required to produce ID or in some instances, They may not even have ID to produce. And so yeah, I mean, it makes sense that they offer something like this, but I think involvement with the HRF has kind of opened them up to doing that. Nonetheless, looks cool, excited for them to have this rolled out.

And again, it's just something where you see one entity be a trendsetter and that causes innovation across other products. And I will say that Nunchuk actively, you know, shared out this information and said, congrats to Kasa for rolling this out. So I love seeing Bitcoiners lift other Bitcoiners up when they're doing good things. So good for them. Feddi, they just rolled out. Fedi Bravo.

So their beta. You can now use Feddi with real money. You can play with more mods. You can send and receive funds with your friends. So basically, this is Fedemence, the Feddi app. You can head over to Feddy.xy slash builders, and it will have links to be able to download on iPhone, Android, or just the APK file. And basically, they have two different communities that you can use.

They have a test net version where you can play around and just learn how to use Feddy, but they have a live version. And the cool thing about this is this was the Fedomint that was used for the Madeira conference. And it was just for the conference initially, but now they've rolled it out and it's going to be the Fedomint for the island of Madeira or for the free Madeira project, which is super cool. So what is the tradeoff here? Basically, it is effectively community funds in a multi-sig. When you're part of the Fedomint, basically all you need to do to fund a wallet is send in a lightning transaction. Once you're within the Fedament, when you transact with anybody in the Mint, transactions are instant, free, and perfectly private. When you send out of the Mint, it becomes a regular transaction, a regular lightning transaction, I should specify.

And that regular lightning transaction, you are getting the benefit of the privacy of the crowd. So there's no indication which person in the mint sent out. And if you're sending into another mint, there's no indication which person within that other mint received. Otherwise, you can just send out to any lightning wallet. So pretty cool. If you want to play it out, play around with it, download the app.

And when it says add a mint, you just scan the free Madeira one. And then you'll be able to receive a regular lightning transaction into it. And then send and receive Chiamian eCash on top of Bitcoin. Pretty cool. I've been playing with it for a bit here. Albi extension version 3.7. Oh, so this gives Safari browser support.

So basically if you're on Apple, you can now use Albi extension in Safari on iOS, MacOS, and iPad. So that's pretty cool. It also has stable stats integration via Blink. They also have permission management or improved permission management for Nostr. So no more annoying Nostr requests, pop-ups if you want it.

They also have better onboarding flow So no separate Nostor onboarding needed. It's all just kind of baked into one. So kudos on them for the new drop there. This is interesting, and I'm not going to go too deep on it, but a new protocol called Hedgehog. And this is a two-party payment channel system, kind of like lightning.

Channels are similar to lightning channels, but with a few benefits, such as offline receiver capabilities. So setting up channels and everything doesn't require you in order to receive. You don't need to be online anymore. So you know how lightning payments you need to have an online lightning node. This is no longer the case.

So really cool. There's obviously some tradeoffs here. But this is a layer two thing that can be done. It does, my understanding is it doesn't require any changes to Bitcoin at all. It can work now. Yeah. And so it's cool. I love seeing stuff like this because it's just new shit that we didn't know was a thing

that comes out of nowhere that also scales Bitcoin. So when people worry about Bitcoin scaling, you know, things like this popping up, just get me excited because I think that we don't know what we don't know. And to paraphrase an old video by Andreas Antonopoulos, you know, Bitcoin will, continue to scale ungracefully. We're going to bump into a wall and then, you know, we'll worry for a little bit and then we'll move past it. And this is what I think we're seeing right now. There's a bit of a wall. We're realizing like, hey, not everybody can have a lightning channel. Lightning onboarding still requires on-chain transactions, all of these different things that, you know, we have to

grapple with over time. And so when fees are high, it's tough to onboard to self-custodial lightning. But solutions are being created. There are things that are happening that are promising. So exciting stuff. A couple last things here. This was announced today. And I'm very happy to be a part of this. Alex Gladys said,

thrilled that the Human Rights Foundation is launching a free quarterly webinar to help nonprofits learn how to integrate Bitcoin led by myself. While designed for human rights groups in difficult political environments and activists at risk. It's going to be very helpful for just about anyone in any sector. Grant givers, grant receivers, et cetera. The sign up form is here. Please share with anyone who might be interested.

And yeah, so I've retweeted it. If you want to go check it out, please do. And we're very much looking forward to getting this thing rolling. It's really cool to see people utilize Bitcoin because it makes sense to utilize. it and people are starting to understand that this is a tool that can be used. It's not a silver bullet for everything human rights related, but it's a tool in the tool belt that can help some people in need. And that's great.

What else we got here? I did drop a tutorial just the other day on a Bitcoin well. So they are based in Canada and the US. And they're basically a non-custodial Bitcoin exchange. So you can pretty much send in money. They don't ever hold your Bitcoin for you. It just goes straight out directly into your designated wallet of choice. And it was actually a very quick tutorial because it's very quick to do.

So it's probably one of my shortest tutorials in quite some time. I think it's like 10 or 12 minutes. So if you want to check it out, it is on the channel now. And then, of course, coming up, I'm heading, as me and Nico were alluding to, I'm heading down to El Salvador. I'm flying out on Monday. So I'm going to be down there for the week. Very excited for it.

It's going to be a lot of fun. I'm down there for the having party. If you are, we're waffling on going to the having party and you do want to go, of course, you can head to my website, bTCSessions.ca. There's an event section and there's details there about where you can grab tickets for that. I think I have a code. I forget if it's BTC sessions or sessions, one of those. Try them both.

It'll get your discount if you haven't got tickets yet. And then coming soon, I'm going to be going to the Canadian Bitcoin Conference in Montreal, the Azo Freedom Forum in Norway and BTC Prague. Those are the next ones on the docket. And there will be others coming soon as well. But hopefully I'll see it down in El Salvador. Let me know if you're going. And again, just head to my website and go to the events section for any of those.

And then finally, tomorrow, very excited. We're going to have, speaking of Bitcoin, while we're having Adam O'Brien, CEO on, we're also having Jeff Walton. He was just on Preston Fish's show and he killed it there. And of course, Tatum classing up the joint with that picture. But nonetheless, very excited to have all of them. It'll be a good time. So make sure you come back tomorrow at 6pm Eastern Time to join us for Why Are We Bullish.

So with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening where if you may be. I'll see you guys next time or your daily session.