BTC Sessions - Fincen's NEW THREAT to Bitcoin Privacy! Protect Yourself Now 🛡️🔍

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

In this action-packed episode, we dive into the intense battle between privacy-seeking Bitcoin users and Fincen's relentless pursuit to unmask them. But that's not all! We also bring you the latest headlines from the world of Bitcoin, including the NY attorney general's legal showdown with the Gemini exchange, a seismic shift in Argentinian politics as a pro-BTC presidential candidate heads into a crucial runoff election this November, and the intriguing appearance of BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF ticker on the Nasdaq website. Plus, we'll unveil the startling revelation that Ledger, a popular hardware wallet provider, is offering questionable cloud storage options for your precious Bitcoin keys. Stay tuned for all the essential Bitcoin news and insights you need to know! 💪 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. Lots going on this week. Then they fight you. So much of that, do you feel it? I feel it. I'm feeling it.

It's kind of, you know, you anticipate it and then it happens or it begins to happen. And it doesn't make it any easier to watch. watch come to fruition. And so I hope you've been learning about various tools and how to become self-sovereign. Because if you haven't yet, start. You need to. I know a guy who does some videos. Check them out.

Anyways, besides that, we have Nico here to fill us in all of everything that's been going on in Bitcoin. Lots of crazy shit to talk about. Well, there goes the monetization on this video. Anyways, it should be a good time. Glad to have them here. Glad to have you guys here. I'm going to bring up the chat as soon as we get into it. But, of course, this is live.

Anything can happen. I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you have not already, like,

subscribe, share, all those things super important. That little like button just below the screen, tap it, give it a little tap. It really helps. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your Simply session. All right, before we bring in Nico, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now, and I'm also going to slace in that chat.

Everybody, welcome. But this is timechain, calendar.com. We are currently sitting at $34,156 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 2,928 sats. A little bit different from the last time we went through those stats. Exciting week. Anyways, in terms of fees, next block, eight sats per byte, anytime four sats per byte, the MMPOO is purging anything sub two sats per byte.

And Bitcoin mined, 19.5, 2 million of them. That's 92.98% of the total supply. Get your stats while you still can everybody, preferably KYC free. Shout out to sponsor the show, hoddlehottle.com. If you're looking to buy some Bitcoin and you don't like draconian overlords knowing all your shit, check out hoddlehottle.com. You can sign up with nothing more than an email address. You then can do peer-to-peer trading, get instant self-custy,

and not have to give up your private information to do so. No K-YC, of course. Hottlehaddle.com. Links are down below. If you want to check them out, they also have peer-to-peer lending in which nothing is ever re-hypropocated. When you do get some sats, you're going to want to store them in some of the best hardware on the market. Coin Kite, of course, killing it. My cold card mark four is my go-to hardware of choice.

I have all their goodies, tap signers, sats cards, block clocks, open dimes, all of it. And God, Rodolfo keeps teasing me with this Twitter post, the cold card Q1 coming soon. Also, the sats link. If you want to reserve those or pick up anything else I've made, mention, head to coin kite.com, use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything in the store. Backups are also very important when you're storing your seed phrases. And seed ore is one of the most robust and beautifully made, in my opinion. Steel seed storage options on the market. It's got a disc and capsule design so that if you do need to swap out your seed, you don't need to get rid of

the entire device. You just grab some new discs and swap them in. You can get a starter set for one or two seeds. with everything you need, check them out.cdoor.io. Links are all down below and they're all different depending on where you are shipping to. It'll give you the best rate. Nunchuk.io has you covered with your assisted multi-sig needs. Super easy to set up. This is basically an app on your phone. It walks you all the way through setting up a multi-sig vault for your sats. You can set it up with things like tap sign or cold card and a ton of other hardware options. Once set up, you've got baked-in inheritance planning so your sats get to your next-of-kin. And then, the whole thing, KYC free.

No information necessary to set it up and have it work for you. Check them out. I love them. And these guys are absolute legends. And finally, shout it to Start 9, your sovereign computing solution. These are plug and play devices to run your entire Bitcoin stack and become computationally sovereign. You can host your whole Bitcoin stack and your personal data. Bitcoin Core, Lightning node, Memble.

That space, join market. You can also host files, passwords, photos, nostrilays, nostrilays, nostrilase, and officer clients, all kinds of great stuff, and now AI stuff too, which is pretty cool. So be sure to check them out, start nine.com. They just dropped to the price of the Start9 server here by a couple hundred bucks. And if you use a code that I now have, BTC sessions, all caps with a little plus at the end, that drops it a further 18%. So get in there while you can.

Good Christmas gift. Anyways, guys, enough of my rambling. Let's get Nico in here and we can chat some news. There he is. How you doing, buddy? That opening monologue, though, bro. She's getting serious, man. She's getting serious.

Oh, man. You know, you know when Ben starts off with an opening monologue, it's going to be a fire show. Feeling festive, I feel under festive. I got a, I got it. You know what? It's practically Christmas here because it snowed at the beginning of the week. Like my whole, all of my Halloween decorations, I've got like the blow up. I sent you a picture.

Yeah, it's so good. So good. Those poor blowups like crumpled under the weight of the snow. Go and like pull sheets of ice off of them. It's crazy. Like anyways. Yeah. So I feel like it should be Christmas.

And on November 1st, I'm tearing all that stuff down. And it's just Christmas house from there on in. I'll send you pictures. It makes I'm really excited. So Ben's, uh, decoration game is is really really on point. It's it's a plus. Yeah. Yeah. We've got it. I was very impressed. I'm glad you're going to have to come here for holidays sometime so that we can be festive. You can experience the the crippling winter.

Well, I feel like I feel like it's it's when you when a Canadian says crippling winter. like it really means something and that that kind of scared me a little bit yeah I'm gonna lie it's okay we'll have we got a fireplace well oh man awesome man so what's what's been going on there's I mean I know what's been going on there's lots of stuff going on but uh maybe maybe we should chat a little bit about what's happening yeah dude so uh pretty crazy um like the series of events that have transpired this week. And it's like the reason I have this pulled up and I think we read this like every other show is just because of how spot on this book was predicting.

When I say book, I'm referring to the sovereign individual to what is transpiring. Right. And essentially for anyone who's not in the know, an article got released earlier on this week You know what? Before I get to that, let me read this passage because it'll be more impactful. Okay. So they talk about the authors, and they said that they predicted that the rise of this new cyberspace and consequently cyber money, it will become harder for a nation state to collect taxes from its citizens. They compare the state to a farmer keeping cows in a field to be milked, but that, quote, soon the cows will have wings.

They predict that for the government to collect taxes from its citizens and their citizens, this type of society, it would have to violate human rights. Even traditionally, civil countries will have to resort and turn nasty. It goes on to say lacking their accustomed scope to tax and inflate, I do believe that tax and inflating is the same thing. Governments, even in traditionally civil countries will turn nasty. Businesses that offer the, that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals will be subject to infiltration, sabotage, and disruption. Arbitiary forfeiture of property, already commonplace in the United States, where, occurs 5,000 times a week will become even more pervasive. Governments will violate human rights, censor the free flow of information, sabotage useful technologies, and worse. So that being said, kind of setting the tone, this leads me to this tweet that when I say viral, it literally went absolutely viral. It's by Sam Calhann, who is the lead analyst at Swan.

and essentially he did a great kind of recap onto what is like what has transpired over the last week when like escalation is a very strong word but this type of really attack and it's a it's kind of like a sinister type of attack because it's like a information type of attack I don't think I've ever seen before, but it has happened in American history. We'll get to that in the second. So Sam goes on to say, last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article claiming about $90 million worth of crypto was used to fund Hamas, a serious claim that gained significant attention. In response to the article, anti-Bitcoin politicians directly linked to the Wall Street Journal article as evidence in a letter to the White House and Treasury, quote, to address the serious

national security threats posed by crypto's use to finance terrorism. Later, it was confirmed that that article was patently false. It was straight up fake news. This was confirmed by chain analysis, which ran the numbers. Turns out the authors of the article mistakenly counted an entire exchange trading volume $82 million for a terrorist group's address, rookie move. The actual funds that went to known terrorist-linked addresses was substantially less. Quote, Of the roughly $82 million in crypto received by this address, about $450,000 worth of funds were transferred from the known terror-affiliated wallet. Given the activity of this address, the person or group of people controlling it, likely

not the same person that controls the terror-affiliated wallet, but is rather a service provider that knowingly or unknowingly facilitated the terror financing activity. So the Wall Street Journal's figure for crypto use and financing Hamas was off by 99%. Sam goes on to ask a very, very important question. Where is your retraction article Wall Street Journal? Where is the article describing why your reporters were blatantly wrong about this? Here is the article itself. The title is Hamas militants behind Israel attack raised millions in crypto.

I think it speaks volumes the fact that they haven't retracted that article. That article led to Senator Elizabeth Warren and 100 us, 100 plus politicians writing to the White House, demanding that the White House take action, right? But here's the thing, though. Things started to come out that made it very quickly. clear that that article was total fake news. Here is the analytics company themselves saying, our data in the Wall Street Journal article in Hamas,

crypto fundraising was misrepresented. Quote, we have spoken to representatives of the league signatory Senator Warren, as well as the authors of the Wall Street Journal article, to clarify this. So think about that for a second. Think about how much that says. The people that were responsible for the data that they used in that article saying, hey, wait a second, you guys are not really showing this the right way.

I mean, like, you could make a really good argument that, hey, wait a second, was this truly on purpose? Like, was this like, did it? Elizabeth Warren that we know what her bill wants to do, the bill that she had, the bipartisan bill that she has with Senator Marshall, which would force wallet providers, miners, nodes to K.YC. Pierre-Richard said it would effectively kill the industry in the U.S. Also, it goes after quote-unquote unhosted wallets. So what it looks like to me is that Elizabeth Warren was waiting on the sideline for a crisis.

What's the famous quote from Winston Churchill? Never let a good crisis go to waste. So she used the tragedy of what is going on in Israel and Palestine to essentially go after the industry. Now what's really crazy is that the administration, the current administration, has sent millions of dollars to Palestine, which is controlled by Hamas,

and they had to circumvent U.S. sanction policy, terrorism sanction policy in order to do so. So it goes back to something that we've said on the show before, the iron law of central bank and politician projection. They project onto Bitcoin what it is they're guilty of themselves. Remember Senator Menendez of New Jersey calling Naim Buckele corrupt and then they found gold bars in the trunk of his car, right? So the whole thing is just insane.

It goes on to say, again, this is a quote from the surveillance from themselves. there is no evidence to support the assertion that Hamas has received significant volumes of crypto donations. A full understanding of blockchain analysis and the context of any analysis is needed when using these insight to draw conclusions. It goes on to say, there is no evidence to suggest that crypto fundraising has raised anything close to this amount, and data provided by Elliptic and others has been misrepresented. Elictic has engaged with the Wall Street Journal to correct misrepresentation, of the level of crypto fundraising by Hamas. In addition, we have been in discussions with the office of Senator Warren

to ensure that the relevant parties have a proper appreciation of the complexities and nuances of analyzing these wallets. What does it tell you, Ben, the fact that the Wall Street Journal or Elizabeth Warren have not retracted their statements? I mean, isn't that the smoking gun? Doesn't that tell you exactly, you know, how they feel about it? Anyways, before I continue with the story, because it's a very long, story, Ben. Do you have any thoughts so far? Yeah, I mean, you already alluded to it. No retraction,

especially from Elizabeth Warren and Wall Street Journal. But like, have you, you've seen in Congress when they've, or in the Senate, I can't recall, but when they grill people in and around whatever topic. And I've seen how Elizabeth Warren will ask somebody about how this stuff works and I distinctly remember when when she starts getting the the true answer that she doesn't like she won't she won't have any of it she'll just cut it off and and she'll inject her thoughts rather than listen to the person that is there to testify as an expert witness on something that they actually understand and so it is I mean she really shows her cards in those situations because you see the person trying to tell her the truth of how this stuff works.

And she may as well have her fingers in her ears going, la, la, la, la. Like, she doesn't care. She has a goal. 100%. I think you hit the nail on the head. Like, she has a political goal. And she's using anything and everything. She's using certain source material.

She's misrepresenting the facts in order for that to fit her agenda. I think you hit the nail on the head. And I have, I have memories of that because it's so blatant that she's doing that to, you know, other, other members of Congress and whatnot. So what is, like, what did the Treasury do in response to, think about how crazy this is. Okay, just like, break it down. There is a fake Wall Street Journal article that led to Elizabeth Warren to write a letter to the White House. which led the White House to propose these crazy regulations. Now, history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes.

The legacy media has been used in the past, in American history, to do really bad shit. Back in 2000, it was the New York Times that broke the story that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was revealed after the fact that that author, Her name was Judith Miller got the information from intelligence agencies and that information turned out to be wrong. Now, was the invasion of Iraq reversed? No. Was the Patriot Act reversed? No. In fact, the Patriot Act was used as one of the tools in order to potentially implement this proposal.

So again, we've seen this in the past. Now, the only difference here is that because of the internet, because of social media, individuals are able to circumvent the gatekeepers of information and talk amongst themselves and say, wait a second, I'm calling bullshit. I don't care that this looks very legit and it's hiding behind the Wall Street Journal. oh my god, and these very fancy letters and all that stuff, this is no different than the coin telegraph tweet saying that the BlackRock spot Bitcoin ETF was approved.

This and that are exactly the same. The only difference is that they're riding on the coattails of the legitimacy that they've built over, you know, the decades that they've been in, you know, releasing media and whatnot. Anyways, Ben, did you want to say something? I mean, yeah, I mean, it's just, just more of the same. It's to be expected, but again, off the top of the show, when I was saying, it doesn't, just because it's to be expected doesn't make it easier to see happen again and again.

And it's super frustrating. And, you know, I see a lot of people in the chat, like, does Bitcoin fix narcissism? You know, Bitcoin fixes crazy politicians. And, you know, a sat-wise jank. was saying that if you care enough to own your keys, you should care enough to comment on the FinCEN public comment for this proposal. And he said first, fourth and tenth amendment violations. I mean, yeah, I think that getting involved in the discourse in and around the creation of policy is a useful tool for one thing. And it's a useful tool to bias time. And that's it. because at the end of the day, there's always going to be some new narcissistic politician that thinks that they know best and that wants to impose their beliefs and their drachronian rules

on their citizenry. And there's no escaping that because those people will always exist. There will always be those people that want as much power as possible and that want to clamp down on the citizens. And so the only thing you can do is try and build tools that stop that and allow them to proliferate amongst the society. But if you can buy time in the meantime to help that along, then great. But it's a double-edged sword because some people don't,

move until until they feel the pain and a lot of people don't prepare. But if we can be a bit more prepared, then great. 100%. And I agree with you. I think long term this doesn't matter, but it's the transition,

right? It's the transitionary period that things could get hairy. It's the transitionary period where Fiat politics are, you know, I don't want to say they're important. I would hate using that word, but, you know, they are, they're, they're, they're, they just, they're just a thing, you know, it just, it just sucks. It really, really does. I don't know how else to put it. Anyways, um, so this is the actual thing. This is the actual proposal. Um, one of the things that you'll notice is that the proposal is extremely, extremely broad. Um, it includes many, many things. that Bitcoiners would use. In fact, the Bitcoin magazine article I think does a, does it really a more thorough job really covering it.

Shout out to Shinobi, by the way, so because he was the author. It really kind of breaks down, you know, all these things. He says it. Look, it is truly mind-blowing large grab attempt at private information of anyone that they can get their hands on. So what are the, what are the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, numerous things that this proposal would cover. Because I know a lot of people are thinking, hey, maybe I don't, I don't do any mixing. I don't do any Bitcoin mixing.

This won't affect me. Trust me, this will affect you. Like the details are insane. Yeah. So first, pooling, aggregating funds for multiple persons, wallets, addresses, or accounts. This encompasses so many different activities than a traditional custodial mixing service.

Lightning channels, that is multiple persons pulling and aggregating funds together. Multi-sig wallets held by multiple people in general are doing the same thing. Just combining a recent withdrawal from Coinbase with coins you had from Cracken from the point of view of both exchanges is pooling funds for multiple addresses. According to the language of this protocol, something that just happens on a regular basis in the normal course of using Bitcoin with no attempt whatsoever to obscure or render private anything about the activity fits into the definition of mixing. The second one, using programmatic or algorithmic code to coordinate. manage or manipulate the structure of a transaction. Again, that completely covers the lightning network.

Coin joints fall into this definition. In fact, you know what? This is so ridiculously and absurdly broad, it doesn't even specify manipulating the structure of a transaction to attain obfuscation of the sources of the funds. That this literally encompasses any piece of Bitcoin software that handles making and signing transactions. 100% of the transactional activity on the Bitcoin blockchain

out of sheer logical necessity fits this definition of mixing. Splitting for transmittal and transmitting the funds through a series of independent transactions. This is also incredibly broad. How are legitimate independent transactions between the same parties to be distinguished from a single transaction split into many for obfuscation purposes? What about situations where this is a perfectly legitimate thing to do for no reason other than your personal privacy. What if I only have three different UTXOs that three separate people know about and I don't want to reveal to all three of them my payment history with the other two in order to make a payment requiring all three UTXOs? Does opening multiple independent lightning channels with the

same node constitute this? Here's the crazy part, man. Okay. Creating and using single use wallets, addresses and accounts, and sending funds through such wallets, addresses, or accounts through a series of independent transactions. That is the entire Bitcoin network. That is by default how Bitcoin wallets work. Every time you receive a new, like every time you're receiving something, Sparrow, Electrum, by default, they will give you a new address. So is that a single, you actually by best practices you should only use an actress once

yes so again right you got to connect the dots because if you just see this by itself you're like these people are crazy no no no the passage from the sovereign individual the history of using legacy media in the United States for political means like Iraq in the 2000s

and now this you know the only difference is we have social media. That's the only difference. That's why they can't get away with this. This backfired to such an epic proportion that is so blatantly obvious that they misrepresented in light.

But anyways, before I get to that, Ben, I know you feel very strongly about these things as someone who dedicates his life to making dank-ass tutorials. Isn't this crazy? This is insane, bro. It's literally like, buy, this definition, if this were to be the information that actually drafted a bill to sign something

into law, it would make effectively every single Bitcoin wallet that you, I, and everybody watching this show has would be illegal. Just for best practices. And I think a lot of people fail to appreciate the implications of using a singular address on the regular. and then using that for day-to-day movement of funds. Because Bitcoin, it doesn't operate on like an account system. You don't have like just a balance. In the background, you actually, every time you receive money, that chunk of Bitcoin is sitting there decipherable from the rest.

And so the reason that you do that, the reason that you have a new address every time, is by default when you receive funds, it's segregated from every other transaction you've received. They can then be combined if you need more than one piece of Bitcoin to spend. But the kicker is when you go to spend Bitcoin, your wallets, again, programmatically choose which UTXO, which piece of Bitcoin to use based on what the amount is and whether you want to be efficient or private.

And in terms of that, the privacy implication is, imagine going to a store and buy buying a candy bar. If you go into a store and you have a bunch of different bills in your wallet, you're probably going to pick the smallest bill to pay for the candy bar. The person at the till doesn't need to know what bill you're using. If you pull out a $100 bill and you pay for that candy bar, the person at the till doesn't just know that you have the two bucks you spend on the candy bar. They know about the $98. and change. The same is true when you buy something for, for, you know, 50,000 sats and it comes from a one Bitcoin UTXO. The recipient knows the change. And it's worse when you have a single address

because that person then knows the change and they know your entire net worth and they know your entire history of every transaction that you've ever done if you've only used that address. And that to me is fucking insane. And nobody, nobody should put up with that even if it becomes a rule. Yeah. It's, dude, it's insane. And you said something about them trying to pass this into law. Ben, here's the crazy part.

They're using the Patriot Act to circumvent having to go through the legislative process in order to enact this into law. Yeah. Because Senator Elizabeth Warren knows that legislatively her bill is dead. Yeah. So she waited for the perfect occasion. Remember, we've read you articles from her before. As soon as Russia, the whole Russia thing, Russia is going to use crypto to circumvent U.S. sanctions.

She needed the perfect excuse. Yeah. And this is it. Yeah. This is it. Always, there's always, go back to the last couple years. Perfect example. If all you need to get rid of the rule of law is an emergency, there will always be another emergency

to suspend the rule of law and to suspend the rights of the citizenry. There's always going to be another crisis, another thing to point to saying, this is the thing why we need to take away your rights, because this happened. Oh, no, nobody, nobody bought that one. Okay, well, no, here's the next crisis for why you don't deserve privacy, for why you need to have your entire net worth in every financial transaction you do, available for anyone to audit. Not even just the government, anyone, because that's what they're saying here.

Single address, nothing else. everyone can see that shit forever forever 100% for and that's the thing like they know they're not you can't say this is stupidity or naivety they know they know exactly what they're doing yeah and the purpose of this is to attack bitcoin to use the tragedy that is happening in israel in Palestine in order for to use that as a justification in order to take away freedoms, just like they did in 2000. It's the government repeating the same playbook. And then connect the dots with the passage from the sovereign individual, right?

It kind of starts to paint a clear picture. Now, here's the third part of the story, because I know this is a pretty big story. So I like the fact that we're going back and forth and all that stuff. And I think this is what we're going to cover today. but here's the happy ending because there is a happy ending. And actually, this started to come on my radar. It was on Monday. It was basically as soon as I saw the first news about the Wall Street Journal article,

it was before Sam put out his tweet. I was very concerned because it's something that we've been covering on Simply Sessions for a while. now all the like moves by Elizabeth Warren really to to attack the industry. Not to mention Operation Choke Point 2.0. Not to mention, you know, all the fact that Kaylin Long's bank got, custodia bank got denied the federal banking charter. And then around the same month, the American version of the CBDC was launched. So it's like we've been watching these pieces on the board move.

Now what surprised me and it was a very pleasant surprise is, Boy, oh boy, did Elizabeth Warren stir up? Can I curse? I mean, I already blew it like two seconds into the show. So go ahead, man. Did she stir up the fucking Hornets nest? Like, she stirred it the F up. And I had no idea the community was going to react the way it did.

This is my third show today covering this topic. Cafe Bitcoin, we talked about it for, An hour and a half, I think two hours this morning. Simply we talked about it. The Sam's tweet got 5,000 likes. Preston Pish wrote an article for Bitcoin magazine, and he's currently spending his time lobbying about this in Capitol Hill. I've never seen an immune response like this before.

People are really taking this seriously. And here, like, I just put some tweets together from various people, including, you know, Senator, the Bitcoin Senator, Senator, Senator Cynthia Lamis. Pierre Richards says, Elizabeth Warren spread disinformation to exploit a crisis. It's backfiring and now undermines her misguided anti-Bitcoin agenda. It's very true because it's like that was a one, that was a one shot move that she could make. If people didn't buy into the BS, now it's very clear that she has an agenda and she's not interested. in the truth.

Senator Cynthia Lama says when it comes to illicit finance, crypto is not the enemy. Bad actors are. I sent a letter asking DOJ to finish its investigation and consider criminal charges against finance and tether

after reports they served as intermediaries for Hamas and engage in illicit activities. Here is someone who's part of Naïj, who's part of the coin, the lobbying group, it's slipping my mind.

Yes, coin center coin center yeah and he says watching the Senate banking hearing on Hamas financing I must say it's refreshing to see the panel of expert witnesses repeatedly fact check Senator Warren's assertions

that crypto should be the focus in combating Hamas funding here's one of those clips from those panels it's an absolute shalacking let's don't lose sight and focus from the big picture.

Crypto is currently a very small part of the puzzle. The major funding channels are where and remain state funding, Iran and others, those are the major players. Most of the funds are still being transferred by the traditional channels that we all know from the past. Banks, money transmitter, payment system, Hawala, money exchange, trade base tourism, financing, charity, cash, shell companies,

and crypto. The efforts should be global and focus on imposing global sanctions on Hamas and their sponsors, as was the case with ISIS. Let's... So, I mean, Ben, they accuse us of what it is that they are guilty of themselves. Their system was the system of which was used to finance the terrorism. Yeah. The U.S. government is actually responsible for sending millions of dollars to that region which is controlled by the terrorist. Ted Proust pointed out how they had to circumvent terrorism laws to do that. So once again, they're blaming us for what it is they're guilty of doing themselves, and they don't choose to follow specific laws when it's convenient to them.

Yeah. Right? So I love the internet. I love the fact that social media has allowed us to really come together like an immune system and say, that's bullshit. You are lying. This is so blatantly obvious. You're misrepresenting this that even the analytics companies are stepping in and saying,

no, no, no, no, no, no. You're misrepresenting the data. You're lying. When you know it's bad when Bitcoiners are. pointing to like chain alice and being like, hey, these guys are right. They're standing up for us. Like you know shit has gone off the rails really hard when we're celebrating rebuttals by chain alias.

Unbelievable. 100%. 100%. It's it's absolute like it's absolute insanity. Also, um, guys take action. There is if you, if you search it, proposal of. special measures regarding convertible virtual currency mixing. Search it on Google.

You do have an opportunity to leave a comment. Obviously, color within the lines and speak gently. Do not. This is serious. Don't leave a meme. To GFY and have fun staying poor is probably not going to give you the additional runway we're talking about. But going and talking and saying,

I'm concerned for my personal safety. if I go and make a transaction for a, you know, a Coca-Cola or like a candy bar and somebody can see my entire net worth, that to me is dangerous. And somebody could come to my house with a $5 wrench and threaten me to get a hold of my money. So that's a legitimate thing to say. And when they see hundreds or thousands of people commenting, worrying about their own physical safety because of these potential implications of proposed legislation, then at least there'll be some legitimate concerns showing whether or not it works, who knows, but it might buy us a little bit of runway.

100%. Right. It's all about like it's a delaying action. You know, it's about just buying time because the more time we have, they don't have time, right? They're losing time. That's why they're getting as desperate as they are. That's what you're seeing Christine Lagarde like in a Darth Vader's, like basically saying the digital euro is here legislatively, but it's here. We're shoving it down. That's basically like the language and, you know, the emotion that she was saying in that video. And that just tells me that they're worried. This type of action, it's so brash. It's so in your face tells me that they're desperate. They want this thing to go away and it won't go away and they're trying to force it.

And because they're trying to force it, they're making mistakes in the process. I think this is the first simply session show where we covered just one story, but it was the story of the week. And it was a very, very important story. And guys take action, leave a comment. But we're winning.

This backfired on epic proportions for Elizabeth Warren. Yeah, I love it, man. Well, thanks for that. And this is a good one. I'm passionate as fuck about this and everybody else should be too. Learn the tools, but also let's build ourselves a little bit more runway to get the tools to proliferate. 100%. All right, Ben, always an honor.

Guys, this was my favorite part of show. This was your Simply sessions. Please out, everybody. Later, man. Awesome. Everybody. A few more things before we sign off. there's been some exciting updates in the realm of tools.

I was talking about tools here. Cool things that you should be privy to. So let's take a look at them really quick. So, okay, first of all, this is on the opposite and on the spectrum. So this is a little bit more of the not great stuff that we're talking about, the regulatory creep. Light Spark introduced travel rule compliant LN URL for regulated entities. So basically, LightSpark is like a lightning service provider, and they're pretty much creating LN URL links and ways to pay that are compliant and have like KYC and stuff like that baked in. Don't use this.

Go use better tools that are out there. Go use things that afford you your own financial privacy. Now, some things that do fly in the face of people trying to build walled gardens, that people trying to prevent people from having peer-to-peer freedom money. Okay, I'm a little late to the party on this, but this is a new development in and around it. First off, what is Zappel pay? So Zappel pay is a slap in the face to Apple. Apple previously banned the Domus Noster app from the Apple.

store because of the payments related stuff they're in, aka Zaps, being able to tip people SATs via the Lightning Network for their posts. And then Damos ended up having to comply. After jumping through hoops to just like get it to work, they still got banned and basically had to totally remove Zaps. However, the geniuses over as Zappel Pay made a plugin using something called Noster Wallet Connect. And any time that you respond to a post.

with the little hang 10 emoji, it will ping your Noster wallet and auto approve a Zapp and pay that person's sats for the post, basically saying, fuck you Apple, ban emojis, why don't you? Which is fantastic. Well, now Zappel Pay has added something called

auto Zapp subscriptions, and that's where if you see somebody that you really like and they're doing a lot of really good content on Noster, you can set the cadence and the amount that will auto-zap them as almost like a subscription type thing, a support type subscription where you can say, this person's great, and I'm going to, for the time being, continue to zap them on a regular basis because I appreciate them. And that's another awesome thing that can be automated, and Apple can't do a thing about it. Amazing. And this could

be rolled out really for anything now that the precedent has been set. Also, relay, rely. I don't know how to say it. Anyways, they have integrated Lightning using the Breeze SDK and Greenlight. So what this means is that rely, I'm just going to say rely. As of now, you can sign up for the beta test for a non-custodial RELIE Lightning Wallet in cooperation with renowned Lightning startup Breeze. Our goal is to harness the potential of the Lightning Network. Lightning support will initially roll out as a closed invite-only beta program, slowly rolling out to full public access before the end of the year Q4, 2023, starting in early 2024, RELI will expand the integration to direct purchases through their broker service directly into Lightning wallets. So effectively instant self-custody coming from RELI,

which is awesome to see. Moving on, in the realm of lightning, Zeus, the public beta for Zeus version 0.8.0 is here. This is important. This is awesome. This is an away. to non-custodially have a lightning node on your phone. That includes a lightning service provider that automates channels in the background so you can receive so that you can receive payments both on-chain and via the Lightning Network

and easily swap into Lightning and have channels established without you having to do anything, which is awesome. But the big game changer here is that it also hosts your own lightning address. So the little things that look like an email address that anybody can send a lightning transaction to. This was before only available in custodial apps

or if you did a whole lot of technical stuff in the background and hosted your own lightning node or your own lightning address with your own infrastructure, which is, you know, for the average person, a pretty complicated thing to do. No longer. It can now all reside on your phone. And given it's on your phone, of course, the node can be on and offline. But they use something, and I can't, I'm trying to remember the name for Zap Locker.

They leverages something called Zap Locker so that if you receive a lightning payment to your lightning address, but your node is not currently online, If you jump online at any point within 24 hours, you can then claim that payment and it will automatically be deposited. So basically can sit in limbo for a period of time and you can claim that payment as soon as you are online, which is also another cool feature would not be available previously other than with a hosted lightning address. So anyways, I think it's super cool. They also have taproot channels automated if you want to turn it on.

They're a lightning service provider. Now, the trade-off for ZAPs, if you're getting paid via your lightning address, they do take a fee. If it's a larger payment, then it's a flat 100 SATs. Who cares about that? But for the smaller payments that are 200 sats or below, there's, you know, it's still 100 sats when you get a 200-sat Zab. And then if it starts going below that, they basically, take 50%. So if you get a 20 SAT zap, you're losing 10 sats. Only if it goes to your lightning

address because the hosting and all the lightning service provider stuff. But if you're getting like, you know, 50 bucks, 100 sats is nothing. But if you're looking at zaps, it's a little disheartening when you see like 10.5 zats and you know it was supposed to be 21. Nonetheless, hopefully there'll be adjustments and fine-tuning there over time. It would be cool to not see it as exorbitant for the lower end of stuff. But nonetheless, this is a big step forward. Also, Mutiny Wallet. I've talking about Mutiny Wallet before. I played around with it a bunch. Also, this is a Lightning Wallet where everything is automated in the background for you, much easier to use than setting up your full Lightning Node because you are establishing channels yourself. But,

But this one is also stepping around app stores entirely because it's a progressive web app. So you can go to a website. You can save it as an app on your phone from the URL. And then you can run it from there. I got experimenting with this. And I'm going to tell you what I did. And it was kind of cool. I'm super excited about it.

I thought it was sweet. You tell me. Nonetheless. Okay. So I took my cold cart. There's something called BIP 85. This means that you have a master cold card. You can spit off all these child seed phrases, you know, 12 or 24 words.

All of these seed phrases are independent from the original cold card, meaning that if one of them is compromised, nobody can work backwards from that seed to get the master cold card. Also, if you ever lose the app or lose the wallet, then you can just go back to your cold card and say, hey, what was account number one? And it'll give you back those 12 words. So I used my cold card to create 12 words for mutiny. I then imported them, and that is now my mutiny wallet. Then I funded Mutiny wallet from Phoenix. I just sent a regular lightning transaction. It auto set up a channel for me and sent the funds directly into the wallet.

After that, I then linked my NPUB, my Noster public key, so that all of my Nostr contacts become contacts within Mutiny wallet that I can now send payments to. Furthermore, I go into my Noster client on my phone and I use Noster Wallet Connect to connect my Noster client to Mutiny Wallet so that any time I hit the Zapp button, it comes automatically from my Mutiny wallet. I don't have to approve anything. It'll just go. I set a budget and then I'm set.

And then I can go about zapping my contacts and my feed non-custodially from a progressive web app on my phone. I know that's a whole lot there. But I was very excited about it, a whole bunch of cool stuff. And again, like, it's pretty easy to use, pretty intuitive. And it's cool. You can see, like, all the contacts there on Noster and you can see Zaps happen and back and forth. I think it's pretty sweet.

Anyways. And last thing I wanted to toss out here is check out tip, tip NZ, if you're unfamiliar with her. She's awesome. She does, we'll say, educational Bitcoin wraps. Anyways, go follow her on X at. Tip underscore NZ. She has a new video, and it's called, God, what is it called? If you haven't heard her before, go check her out.

She's awesome. Tip underscore NZ on X. She's also, of course, on Nostra. You can follow her there. But, yeah, highly recommend. And share it around. She's awesome. Nonetheless, we're also doing YouTube tomorrow.

we're going to be doing our, why are we bullish? We've got a whole bunch. We've got Raphael Kordong. He's involved in basically using Bitcoin timestamps to prevent election fraud, which is super cool. Peter Dunworth, Portland Hottle. We're going to be having a nice little chat tomorrow evening. It's going to be a lot of fun. Don't miss it tomorrow. 6 p.m. Eastern time. It should be a good time. Hope you guys enjoyed that. Of course, thank you guys all for being here. I really appreciate it. I hope you're having a good week. Learn the tools, guys.

Learn the tools. Level up and be prepared, we'll say. If you want to help the show, like, subscribe, share, hit that little like button below the screen. I saw a whole bunch of you do it already. But if you haven't, please do. It helps a ton. You can also hit up the previously mentioned sponsors, which are in the show notes. Those are hoddle, hoddle, coin kite, ced, or nunchuck, and start nine.

and if you really liked what you saw and you need some handholding in the midst of your Bitcoin journey, maybe the free tutorials are not enough and you need some one-on-one. There is a QR code on the screen right now it leads to my website, BTCSessions.ca,

where you can book one-on-ones with me. I've been doing a lot of them, people curious about hardware, privacy, all that stuff. And I'm happy to help if you do need it. So be sure to check that out. Anyways, guys, I'm going to wrap my stuff up now. Thank you so much for being here as usual. I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.