BTC Sessions - Goldman Sachs Weak Bitcoin Take, Electrum Shakeup, BTCPay Grant EP063

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

SUPPORT THE SHOW: MY ALL-ENCOMPASSING GUIDE TO GETTING STARTED WITH BITCOIN https://www.btcsessions.ca/post/how-to-buy-sell-and-use-bitcoin-in-canada Buy Bitcoin in Canada on Coinberry and get $20 after your first $50 purchase https://app.coinberry.com/invite/c5d52730857 Get the Ledger Backup Pack – Includes Ledger Nano X & S https://shop.ledger.com/products/ledger-backup-pack?r=faca LEDN offers Bitcoin backed loans – Sign up and get $50 free https://platform.ledn.io/join/0a00cca3dd61dea5909c95cd41f41685 Get Wasabi wallet and enjoy your privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ NordVPN helps with your internet privacy – Get 70% off https://nordvpn.org/btcsessions Buy Bitcoin in Canada using Shakepay and get $10 for free after your first $100 purchase: https://shakepay.me/r/HUQFI60 If you value my work and would like to send me a tip, they are always appreciated! LIGHTNING tips: https://anchor.fm/btcsessions Join my Telegram channel! https://t.me/btc_sessions SHOW RESOURCES: Goldman Sachs’ embarrassing Bitcoin assessment and deck https://twitter.com/OGBTC/status/1265640361239740417 Jill Carlson (former employee) on what and why GS got wrong about Bitcoin https://www.coindesk.com/what-goldman-gets-wrong-about-bitcoin-from-someone-who-used-to-work-there ElectrumX lead maintainer goes off the rails and will only support BSV https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1266033448340389892 Electrum plugin allows users to reference their own full node https://twitter.com/shesek/status/1265660672504999936?s=20 BTCPay receives its 7th grant, this time from OKCoin for $100,000 https://blog.btcpayserver.org/btcpay-server-grant-7-okcoin/ Bitcoin.org is going to change hands, and Roger Ver is interested https://cointelegraph.com/news/roger-ver-wants-to-buy-bitcoinorg BTSE Academy Post on the history of Bitcoin in commerce, and where it may be headed form here https://www.academy.btse.com/post/bitcoin-in-commerce

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up, everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC sessions, and this is your daily session. Hold on their Bitcoin. Before we dive in, I just want to give a big shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a few different services. They've, of course, got their Bitcoin back loans. I've told you guys about these before. This is the first thing I ever used to theirs. It's where you use your Bitcoin as collateral to get a Canadian or US-Discan.

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And secondly, if you want to help with the show in another way and you're not yet holding your Bitcoin on a hardware wallet, number one, you really should do that. If you're just leaving your Bitcoin on your phone or on your computer, just, on an internet-connected device, then that puts you at risk of being hacked and having your coins stolen. So using something like a ledger hardware wallet allows you to store the keys to your money in an offline device that never touches the internet itself and greatly reduces your risk of having your coin stolen. So I happen to have both the Ledger NanoX, the Bluetooth version and the Ledger NanoS, which is cable only. I use both for different reasons. I use the X on the go and

the S with my computer, but both excellent. I do recommend you check them out. If you do check them out using the link down below, of course that will help the show. With that, let's dive into the news. So this is a little bit earlier in the week, a couple days ago now. Goldman Sachs put out a report talking about Bitcoin as is it a currency or an asset class. And man, are they just out to lunch and using arguments from 2004? It is really, really kind of sad some of the arguments that they're making here. Again, it's just a reiteration of all the crap that we heard from 2014, 2015, the same tired arguments that have been debunked a thousand times.

So they go into talking about a few different things. One of them that was the most ridiculous that I found was the manias talking about, first of all, they only allude to the fact that there was one Bitcoin, mania and one bubble in 2017, which clearly is just not the case. It's happened time and time again. And it's happened what, like four, five, six times. It's insane. And they just talk about the last one because the other ones look small in comparison. But in comparing it, they compare it to, of course, tulips. Things, something that we've heard a million times before. The tulip bubble for context lasted. It basically was contained within a single calendar year and most of it was contained

kind of like a few months. Bitcoin's been around for for 11 years now. So at what point does that argument get tired and boring and repetitive? I would say immediately, probably after about a year or two, but they're still using it. They go on to talk about some of the illicit uses for Bitcoin talking about how it can be used for illicit means. And they do very much fail to mention that the US dollar is the number one asset used for illicit means on the planet. So once again, just total non-sequiturs that they're using here to try and, I guess, dismantle Bitcoin. Part of me wonders if this was intentional because it makes me think. think of the big short and where at one point when all of these these credit default swaps that are

being sold and have been bought by my Michael Burry played by Christian Bale in the movie, he's calling trying to get his money that they owe him and they're saying no no no no your your credit default swaps have not gone up in value even though the mortgage the mortgage market was was crashing the housing market was crashing and he couldn't understand why. It was because they were leveraging themselves up and making sure that they got the same position as him before paying him out. And I'm wondering if this isn't a little bit more of the same because at this point, 11 years in with a company like Goldman Sachs, you've got to think they've actually been, you know, doing deeper research than just some shitty bullet points from five years ago. You've got to think they'd have a deeper understanding,

in the current economic climate that we're in right now, that they'd have a deeper understanding of this. So part of me wonders if this is them rehashing the same old arguments while they silently in the background start to dabble and learn more and actually understand more than they're saying. But who knows? Maybe it is just pure ignorance. I wanted to touch on this article on Coin Desk from Jill Carlson.

She actually used to work for Goldman Sachs. And I'm just going to kind of skip to the end here where she talks about, about kind of maybe their motivations behind this. She said it would be easy to blame Goldman's poor arguments against Bitcoin on intellectual laziness or a certain strain of stuck in the past thinking. If there is one thing I know from having worked there, however, it's that Goldman Sachs is neither lazy nor slow on the uptake. Rather, I would posit the weakness of Goldman's thesis around Bitcoin is due primarily to the

weakness of the industry around Bitcoin in articulating the defining attributes and uses of this paradigm shifting technology. There are exceptions to be sure. There are voices for which I am immensely grateful that ring out loud and clear in articulating why Bitcoin is valuable. But they have an arduous task breaking through the din of misinformation and jargon.

She goes on to talk a little bit about J.K. Rowling and how we weren't very good at swaying her decision on whether Bitcoin is valuable or not. Anyways, she finishes off here by saying, if we want the likes of Goldman Sachs to buy Bitcoin or even just want it to be able to make coherent arguments as to why not to buy into Bitcoin, then we need as an industry, then we as an industry ought to look at the coherence of our own arguments first, do more to quiet the noise, and work harder to lift up the voices that do make an honest and compelling case. So I'm I kind of agree and disagree here and I'm going to explain

what I mean. Number one, I do agree that there's no, because of Bitcoin not having a CEO, because it's a protocol that is still kind of just growing in the wild and people can take from it what they need and use it as they please. There is no specific narrative of, of what Bitcoin is and what it can do and why it's important. And so you can see how maybe an entity like Goldman Sachs, who is used to actually researching specific numbers and looking at statements from companies and seeing outlines of what the trajectory of various companies are,

they don't have a specific place to look when doing this kind of research. They kind of have to just dig in and decide for the most. themselves what Bitcoin is. But to the point at the end where Jill says, we need to look at the coherence of our own arguments first. I agree that. I definitely agree with that. Everybody should look at their talking points for Bitcoin and try and play devil's advocate and say, well, what would somebody on the other side say about this? How would they counter my argument? And how would I then counter theirs. I do think that we need to, you know, spend some time making sure that ourselves as individuals have sound logic in our beliefs. But where she goes on to say,

do more to quiet the noise. I think that's what's beautiful about Bitcoin in the first place, is that there is noise and the noise is indecipherable from the other people that maybe have better points and that you have to actually not trust anybody but verify for yourself. And so when we get into a situation of trying to quiet the noise and lift up the voices that make an honest and compelling case, I'd argue we're already kind of doing it, but I don't think we need to silence or quiet the noise in any way, shape, or form. That's just kind of the inherent nature of Bitcoin. And it's actually a little bit of a... gift to people that are early enough and have done enough research to understand the value proposition

of Bitcoin itself, you have that extra time ahead of you to perhaps stack a few extra stats, to perhaps build up your little nest egg of Bitcoin a little bit longer because it's going to be a challenge for institutions like Goldman and others and even just other people to understand the value of Bitcoin. and it won't become evident until it's a necessity to use. A lot of people don't understand Bitcoin until they need it. And so we're in a unique position here, and I think the last thing we need is to be actively trying to silence people that are incorrect.

You know, you can argue with them. You can put forward your ideas, but I don't think we need to really be silencing any of the noise. It's a kind of value that nobody gets to specifically say what Bitcoin is and or isn't. Moving on, and I guess in the same vein here, this was tweeted out by Jameson Lobb. He said, fun development this week for anyone who uses Electrum-compatible wallets, which includes myself. The lead maintainer of the Electrum X server has snapped, and all future releases will be for BSV only Bitcoin

Satoshi's vision I ran a script to hit every publicly available Electrum server I could find 100% are running Electrum X. So basically if you're using Electrum you are you're

now going to eventually be utilizing Bitcoin as V. Now luckily we see that where is it the Electrum Debs are stepping up to fork and do the right thing. So a lot of the developers are stepping in saying, okay, we're just going to fork the project and it will continue to work as expected,

but actually use BTC Bitcoin. And second to that, there was also a plugin created just recently, and you can see it on GitHub as well and it has instructions. What it does, it allows you to run Electrum and instead of having to run an Electrum server, you can actually just install this directly to Electrum wallet and you connect to your Bitcoin full node like Bitcoin Core. And you can just plunk that in right there and you no longer have to run an Electrum server so you can still use Electrum. So good to see that there's already solutions to this. I don't know what happened with the dude at Electrum.

and I don't really particularly care. Again, everybody, as the gift says here on Twitter, fork me. So that's what we shall do. Moving on, love to see this. BTC Pay Server receives another grant. This is their seventh, and this one is from OKCcoin. They received $100,000. Beautiful to see.

Now, I brought up grants to BTC Pay Server before, actually, where I work gave a grant specifically to, developer cucks last time around for $80,000 so that he could focus specifically on BTC pay and not have to worry about where his income was coming from for the next little bit. So again, anything to support this project, BTC pay is so important. It was a direct response to BitPay and their shady practices and their misrepresentation of Bitcoin and their shit cornery, I guess. Yes, their inclination to lean towards things like Bitcoin Cash and their support for Segwit 2X.

And a lot of these just shady practices where they were trying to more or less subvert Bitcoin and tell people what is better and what works and what Bitcoin should be. A lot of people didn't take too kindly to that. Not to mention their service was trash. They added in some changes where regular Bitcoin wallets could not even scan. their codes for merchants. That's been changed since because it was just such an utter failure. But besides the point, they make Bitcoin seem like a negative experience for a lot of people.

And even in utilizing BitPay for certain merchant services, you get charged quite a bit more for Bitcoin. and not even necessarily directly relating to Bitcoin transaction fees. A lot of it just is presented very disingenuously. Anyways, besides the point, this project, BTZ pay, was a direct response to their inaccuracies and their almost malicious misinformation. And creator Nicholas Dorey said, I will make you obsolete. And then went quiet for a while and came out with BTC Pay server,

which is permissionless. There's no middleman. You can become a Bitcoin merchant and set up shop and use BTC Pay server to accept Bitcoin in your shop very, very easily without the need for any third party to take control of your funds or anything. It's just open source software. It's excellent. So to see these developers getting grants, it's wonderful. They do go on to say in their blog that a portion of this grant will be used on funding contributors who improve our document. ease of development, video materials, UI, and UX.

Another part will go towards the new Greenfield API, which will allow enterprises and developers to build on BTCPay server with greater flexibility. So once again, congratulations to BTC pay, and thanks to OKCoyne for making this possible. Now, moving on, bitcoin.org looks like it's going to be changing hands pretty soon. Now, this was originally run by Thamos and Cobra.

They're both anonymous Bitcoiners. Thamos was notable because he got a lot of flack for early, supposed, I would call it moderation, but some would call it censorship on the R-Bitcoin subreddit. And he would essentially anything that was not Bitcoin, he would remove. And Roger Vair took that as censor. censorship, but really, again, it's, it's, if you're running a subreddit and it's a specific topic, like if I have a subreddit on dogs and you're bringing in a bunch of topics on cats, I will probably remove that. So it's not, it's not that you can't say what you want. It's that

particular subreddit is on a specific topic and it doesn't want to talk about something outside of that topic. So besides the point, anyways, bitcoin.org has long, bin, in fact, was the original website probably registered by Satoshi, and it has a lot of great information on Bitcoin itself, where to go, wallets, tutorials, different things, how to use Bitcoin. And the other user is, as I said, goes by the name Cobra. Thamos departed back in April, and Cobra also announced that he will gradually reduce his involvement in the website over the course of 2020, and he's looking to put it in somebody else's hands. Now, he said he's going to be pretty meticulous about who he puts it in.

Now, he has shown some support of Bitcoin cash in the past, and some people have questioned whether this is great that it's going to be changing hands again, and that some undesirable people may get control of it. Roger Vair, in this story on Coin Telegraph, actually expressed interest that he would like to buy. In fact, he responded in a threat. and saying he has cash on hand. Now, he hasn't really done anything outside of that, but it's pretty well known that he would like to acquire it. And I think the interesting thing here is that even if Roger Verre were to get his hands on Bitcoin.org,

it would almost be something that contributes to the anti-fragility of Bitcoin itself. Roger Verre, if you don't know, already owns Bitcoin.com, which more or less directs people to buy Bitcoin cash. He also owns Bitcoin wallet from Bitcoin.com, which is on the app store, is one of the first recommendations when you look up Bitcoin wallet in the app store. And again, if you hit the button buy Bitcoin, by default, it takes you to a window where you're buying Bitcoin cash. And a lot of newcomers don't quite understand what they're buying. So to say that he's been less than forthcoming in a lot of his dealings, it's probably the

understatement of the century. But regardless, even with buying Bitcoin.com and owning that, having one of the top Bitcoin wallet, recommended Bitcoin wallets in the app store being regularly featured on CNBC and other major news sites, Bitcoin Cash is still like two to three. 3% of a Bitcoin at this point. It is clearly not even close to garnering the same kind of support and following as Bitcoin. The network effects are very strong with Bitcoin and nothing has really taken that away. And I would posit that Bitcoin Cash has more or less been a colossal failure at this point. And if he were to obtain Bitcoin.org, I think that would change literally nothing about it.

Just like you don't go to internet.com to find out about the internet, you're not going to go to bitcoin.com or bitcoin.org necessarily and believe everything there. And if people went there and they bought Bitcoincash because Bitcoin.org told them

to, they would quickly find out they don't have Bitcoin. They'd probably be relatively upset, but they would also learn to question things a bit more and actually do more research into what they're buying. So, while I think what he does is shitty, and I think that Roger Verre is incredibly dishonest in the way that he presents his websites and funnels people into Bitcoin cash instead of Bitcoin. In the long run,

it's just contributing to Bitcoin's, I guess, immunity to these social attacks. Finally, I wanted to touch on this article that Emmy over at the Ibiza Academy wrote. Emmy just started working for us just recently. She dropped another article last week, which I brought up. But this one is about Bitcoin in commerce. And so, again, a lot of this also, I guess, beckons back to the previous story regarding Roger Vair and Bitcoin Cash, things like that.

Early on, Bitcoin was touted as like a merchant solution. And a lot of people tried to promote it in that way and push it as, like, hey, let's get more merchants to adopt this first, and then people will adopt Bitcoin, which was a little bit backwards. And now we're seeing the opposite with things like Lolley and things like any sort of SATSback programs like Fold, where you get the asset in the hands of people first, and then they start to learn about it. And so in this instance, some of these new tactics are treating it as almost as if, like,

it's a reward point for spending. And so I think that will be a far more successful tactic and get people questioning and learning about Bitcoin when they see their rewards points, quote unquote, start to go up in value over time. I think that's a far better way to get into the minds and hearts of individuals that haven't dove down the rabbit hole yet. So this article that Emmy has written is about, and I'll quote it here, Bitcoin and Commerce, the bumpy an unapologetic road to merchant adoption. And so it goes through the history of Bitcoin and kind of how it came about the scenario in which it came about, the early uses in commerce.

Of course, there was, you know, the Silk Road and WikiLeaks and some of the more controversial things that originally came up. And then the proliferation of things like BitPay and Coinbase in the early days. And then it does indeed also beckoning back to previous stories, talk about the creation of BTC pay server. and just kind of the use cases and how some of the merchant use cases and consumer use cases are starting to reemerge with things like Lightning Network once again making it easy to do instant and nearly free transactions. So again, it's definitely an in-depth read. I highly recommend

you check it out and then let me know your thoughts about it. Do you think it's a good take? Do you like some of the points? Is there anything that you would disagree with? But all in all, I quite enjoy it. And Emmy, thank you for writing that for us. If you guys do enjoy the fact that I'm really, really pushing for Bitcoin only and Bitcoin specific content on the Academy there, then please do to give it a read and give it a share. Anyways, with that, I am going to wrap up. Thank you so much for watching and or listening.

If you're here on YouTube, do remember to hit like, subscribe, and share. But also, if you're here on YouTube, I can't always trust YouTube. Who knows? I might get taken it down again someday. So check out the other platforms I'm on. I'm on Facebook Live. I do live stream to Twitter via Periscope. I'm also on D-Live.

I'm on Twitch. Just take a look around. You'll find me. I'm also audio only on Apple Podcasts on Spotify and pretty much any other platform that you would like to find me on. Now, if you want to help out the show in another way, you can hit up the sponsorledon.io down below. You can also check out picking up a hardware wallet, a ledger in the show notes. or if you really loved what you saw, you can always drop me a Lightning Network tip at my

tippin.combe page that is tippin.combe slash at BTC sessions. And with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful weekend, I suppose, and I will see you next time for your daily session.