BTC Sessions - Half Surveyed Trust BTC Over Banks, Coinsquare Wash Trades, Bitcoin Irreversibility EP070

Starting point is 00:00:16 Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC sessions and this is your daily session. Before we dive in, I want to give a show to sponsors of the show. Ledden.com. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a bunch of different things. I've been working with these guys since spring of 2019, so over a year now. And they've got a whole bunch of different stuff that you can use. The first thing I ever used them for was their Bitcoin backed loans. This is where you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to get a Canadian or US dollar loan.

Starting point is 00:01:02 So in my instance, I was in a pinch. I needed some dollars. I did not want to sell my Bitcoin. And I was able to utilize this, get dollars in my bank account within 24 hours. And when I paid back those dollars, I got the exact same Bitcoin back. Now, they've got a few other things here as well. They've got their Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts where you can earn up to 7.5% interest. and they've got B2X, which is using the same loan mechanism to instantly buy more Bitcoin,

Starting point is 00:01:29 effectively doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. So if you want to check them out, there is a link in these show notes down below, and if you use that link to get a loan, they will actually give you $50 worth of Bitcoin for free. And secondly, we have coin guards. I first used these guys six years ago, hard to believe. But I was living on Bitcoin at the time as a bit of an experiment. and yeah, they've been going strong ever since. Really simple, use Bitcoin to buy gift cards.

Starting point is 00:01:57 So if you're trying to make that transition of trying to rely less on banks and a little bit more on Bitcoin as I was at the time, and I continue to be, well, this could be a spot for you to do it. They have pretty much everything that you can need here. And again, they accept Bitcoin on Main Chain and Lightning. Or if you have some shit coins that you want to dump and get something of value, you can always do that here as well. be sure to check them out.

Starting point is 00:02:21 There's a link, as I said, down in the show notes down below. Can't say anything but good things about coin cards. Well, that lets dive into the news. So there was a survey recently asking people who they trust more, Bitcoin or Big Banks. So I'm going to read a little bit of this article from Coin Telegraph. So the survey results are in. There is almost an equal split on the issue of trust, Bitcoin or Big Banks. There has also been an incredible change in attitudes over the last three years on the issue.

Starting point is 00:02:54 So tokenists surveyed just shy of 5,000 respondents in 17 countries about their attitudes towards Bitcoin. It also compared its findings with responses from previous similar surveys. This allowed it to observe how the attitudes have changed over time. So when you look at the changes here, you have total of all respondents, comparing you have as far as who trusts what more now you have in terms of Bitcoin it went up from 40 sorry it went up by 29% across all respondents so it's now at 47% of people basically half trust Bitcoin more than the big banks so there's been a notable change like a third of all people and have suddenly kind of changed their opinions to trust Bitcoin more than banks.

Starting point is 00:03:55 Now, millennials seem to be leading the pack 51%, so just a few points higher than the rest. That's up 24% from 2017. And then when you get into obviously the older age groups like 65 plus, of course, you know, they've grown up with banks their entire lives. They're not particularly in some instances technically savvy. So there's a lot more questioning there. So that's actually dropped by 1%. So 7% of anybody 65 plus trust Bitcoin over big banks,

Starting point is 00:04:29 93% preferring the big banks. And again, they've got some interesting overall kind of macro views of what's happened. They split it male-female as well. Oddly enough, females are growing a little bit, 36 versus 64. as males a little bit more inclined and by a little bit, I mean a lot, 54 to 46 when it comes to Bitcoin versus Big Banks. Anyways, interesting to see mostly, most notably 2017 versus now, given that from 2017, we've had an extended bear market and yet still the trust in Bitcoin has gone up since those all-time highs that we haven't yet revisited. So it just kind of goes to

Starting point is 00:05:15 show you the state of trust in the system. Right now, is incredibly low. So let's move on here. CoinSquare CEO allegedly forced employees to fake exchange volume. So I'm just going to read a little bit here. Cole Diamond CEO of Canadian crypto exchange Coin Square stands accused of wash trading after leak messages allegedly show him commanding employees to falsify exchange volume. DeCript has reached out to CoinSquare about the allegations and will update the story with responses. So those of you that don't know, wash trading is the practice of executing large internal trades to artificially bolster and exchanges volume.

Starting point is 00:05:57 This creates the illusion of liquidity and popularity enticing new customers. So this report last March by Bitwise found that like 95% of trading is falsified globally. And that's not surprising when you look at something like coin market cap and you see the volumes and a lot of the top pop ones are shady ones you've never heard of. But according to a June 13th report from Vice, this is a practice coin square knows all too well. In quote, turn it back on reads a leaked message obtained by Vice. The order apparently issued in March 2019, the month before the Bitwise report broke by a Cole to a Coin Square employee allegedly refers to the exchange's internal wash trading system.

Starting point is 00:06:44 The system was allegedly turned off in preparation for a visit from the Ontario's Securities Commission. The act of wash-riding, however, violates Ontario securities laws. Compliance apparently wasn't the top of Cole's concerns when he learned that an employee switched off the system. And quote, whoever did that took zero steps to ensure that a massive change to how we are viewed externally would be enormous. So yeah, anyways, it just looks like he was more or less saying, yeah, turn it back on. We need to look bigger than we are, which, man, there's been just a string of bad news out of Canadian Bitcoin exchanges or crypto exchanges, I suppose. You know, you had Quadriga before, which was global news.

Starting point is 00:07:35 Then not long after that, you had Einstein, which lost another 20 million. I mean, Quadriga was huge. that was like 180, 190 million. Coin Square, sorry, not Coin Square, but Einstein was, it lost like, I think, between 10 and 20 million, and then you see practices like this from Coin Square, allegedly, where it's wash trading to entice people in, just all around, not a great look. So I guess we'll see if more comes out of this, but we'll see what the OSC says about it, the Ontario Securities Commission as well. But again, come on, Canada.

Starting point is 00:08:16 Let's get your shit together. Let's move on. CASA dropped CASA wallet today. So they say it's a simple secure wallet for Bitcoin. I guess their goal is to help out beginners with just kind of like a simple hot wallet without too much confusion around backups. Okay.

Starting point is 00:08:35 So the goal of this seems to be simplifying the backup process instead of having a 12-word seed, it does things a little bit differently. Okay, so the seed list setup. Here's how it works. Users set up their wallet without needing to write down a seed phrase. The key is created and stored on their phone and an encrypted backup is then split across CASA and the OS-specific cloud provider, either Apple or Google. Neither CASA nor Apple or Google can access the decrypted key.

Starting point is 00:09:07 This means only the user can retrieve the backup using two factors. Those two factors are the credentials for the cloud service and their CASA credentials. In an emergency, users can export their seed phrase from CASA app, even if they're offline, and safely recover their coins with open source software using our recovery guide. And then there's a note here, to open the CASA wallet or send Bitcoin, a second factor is always required, which is typically a fingerprint, face ID, or pin, and to export the recovery. key or the recovery seed you'll also need to reenter your password so again the goal here seems to be a simple bitcoin wallet that takes instead of the 12 word seed something a little bit simpler and more automated

Starting point is 00:09:51 and a little bit more traditional in just using basic credentials that you would already have to encrypt and decrypt your keys now I also looked and some of the criticism here seems to mostly be around the fact that this wallet is closed source, which for me, yeah, I mean, it's not a great selling point for me when it says it's closed source. I likely, I don't know if I would use this. I'll probably play around with it. At the very least, I wouldn't put much on it, but if it's a hot wallet in the first place, of course I'm not going to put much on it. I don't want to be carrying around thousands of dollars in my pocket. That's not secure. I wouldn't do it with cash either. So I don't know. I get the idea, I don't mind the idea of encrypted backups, but again, on a cloud service, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:10:46 For me, I'm obviously you're seeing I'm conflicted on this one. For some users, this may be an easier option than being trusted to keep their backups safe themselves, but for others, maybe not. So again, I guess you kind of have to use your discretion, but keep in mind, it's closed source and you're going to have an albeit encrypted backup somewhere on a cloud service and whether or not that can be somehow gotten a hold of via your phone if it gets compromised. I do not know. I would have to see a more in-depth analysis of this. But either way, I do appreciate that CASA is trying to streamline things and make it a little bit easier for new users to still self-custody, but to not be overcomplicated. Now, moving on, came across this today.

Starting point is 00:11:41 It's called K-Y-C-not.me. Okay, this is a website, K-Y-C-not.comme. And this is a website that essentially has a whole bunch of non-K-Y-C ways to obtain Bitcoin. Or, well, they have Minero in here as well, but, you know, Bitcoin. Regardless, this is the why. Why are they doing this? And so this is from their GitHub here. They say, why this? They say, cryptocurrencies are meant to make a change on the way we pay and exchange goods.

Starting point is 00:12:17 They are made to untie the dependency between the users, in brackets, customers, and the centralized entities that are in control, law enforced, of our economy, example, banks, Fed, etc. KYC and AML exchanges are the most common nowadays. They act exactly like a bank when using their wallets. Most newbies or traders do so. You usually don't own any private key, so the funds aren't fully yours. They own your keys, if there are any keys that belong to you. They also require you to identify yourself in order to operate, unlike with a photo or ID. And all of this together goes against the most valuable benefits of cryptocurrencies. With KYC, not me. I wanted to, the creator of this website, I wanted to make it easier for people to find

Starting point is 00:13:03 trustworthy ways to buy, exchange, trade, and use cryptos without needing to identify themselves and preserving the decentralized and self-governed essence of cryptocurrencies. That's a lot of use of the word cryptocurrencies. Anyways, I do like, I do like that he's aggregating some of this information here. He does go into why only Bitcoin and Manero. So this is his, description here. Bitcoin because it's the biggest, the most market cap, most adoption, and the most use among all cryptocurrencies. Manaro, because it is true digital money, the only one that preserves privacy by design and brings true fungibility. I can appreciate that of anything, if he was going to add a shit coin, he would add Monero. Again, like of the privacy coins,

Starting point is 00:13:52 I think Bitcoiners are most tolerant of Manero. The one I suppose the one criticism of Monero other than just network effects not being there is that by obfuscating the amounts that you're sending if there was an inflation bug it might be difficult to discover that and thus the value proposition of a capped issuance is not possible also I don't even think that Minero has a cap But anyways, as a means of transacting privately, well, I mean, I understand.

Starting point is 00:14:31 I understand his motivation there, regardless. So on this website here, he's got a number of sites listed. So he's got Trade Oger, Hoddle, Hottle, Bisk. There's a whole bunch of different ones, simple swap, exchange.me, whole bunch. Anyways, there's a legend, and it tells you how and why this works. It has, if it's been tested by him or several trusted users, if the site has a custodial wallet or not, account creation requires personal information, no personal information, whether or not you need an actual account. If you can get refunds without K-Y-C, if the service is actually peer-to-peer, yeah, whether it uses Tor, if you can use cash, all of this different stuff that is all included in the legend there.

Starting point is 00:15:21 and then, yeah, you can basically go through, see what features each site has, and then go to the one that applies to you. Now, I have heard most of Hodel, Hodel, and BISC. I do have BISC downloaded, although I have yet to actually execute any trades on it, but I do find it interesting. It does have a lot of great features.

Starting point is 00:15:40 Hoddle, Hodel, again, a good, like, peer-to-peer way of transacting, but it depends on what you're looking for. Definitely worth taking a look at if you have yet to do any peer-to-peer, transacting. Just be careful. Again, look at people's trading history, whether or not they've got good ratings. And if somebody has no ratings, tread lightly. Be careful. Moving on, Wasabi Wallet's advisory for treasurer users. So I'll just read from this and then I'll fill in the blanks for

Starting point is 00:16:12 any of you that may not be privy to what is going on here. So too long didn't read. If you're a Wasabi Wallet user with a Treasurer device, please don't update your Wasabi wallet installation and Treasor devices to version 2.3.1 for the Treasor Model T and version 1.9.1 for the Treasur 1 yet, or you may get locked out of your Bitcoin until we fix the issue. Please update both when we published a new version of Wasabi Wallet with our official channels. So preamble here. Last Wednesday, Satoshi Labs, the makers of Trezer, disclosed a security vulnerability in the partially signed Bitcoin transaction specification, which is called BIP 174. Long and short of it, this potentially steal some of your Bitcoins by purposely forcing you to pay higher minor fees without you realizing it. That's if it's exploited. So the odds of this happening, I'm not quite sure.

Starting point is 00:17:16 but who would benefit from this would likely be a minor themselves trying to execute this en masse. Anyways, the vulnerability was fixed on Treasurer devices, but this unfortunately broke the compatibility with hardware interfaces for third-party software. So things like Wasabi, BTC Pay Server, even Electrum. As a result, Treasurer devices updated with the newest firmware are not working with Wasabi and other software wallet. So if you're using a treasur with Wasabi, which I do, basically don't update until you see something from Wasabi saying, hey, we've fixed this, it's all good. And at that point, you have to update both, is my understanding, in order to have it work. A little bit about the exploit. Essentially what it does is it will, when you're trying to send Bitcoin out, typically

Starting point is 00:18:10 what you're signing for is you're signing a transaction that says you want Bitcoin to go to, a designated address and then you're signing saying that I want some other Bitcoin to go back to myself in change. What it will do in this instance is it will get you to sign the outgoing transactions and then it'll give you a fake error and by the way you have to have malware on your computer in order to have this executed on you but it gets you to sign a couple transactions as if you are about to do it, then it feeds you an error and says, oh, we need you to do that again. And it looks as if everything's all fine. And you go to sign again quickly without investigating what's going on.

Starting point is 00:18:54 And it changes the fee that you're paying on your Bitcoin transaction to include quite a bit, although it will look like the same amounts. And that massive minor fee will go. So you could potentially lose, you know, however much is in your wallet, depending on, you know, the UTXOs that are sitting there. So either way, the long and the short of it is, please be careful. Do not update either one if you haven't done so already. If you have done so, don't panic.

Starting point is 00:19:24 Yes, you're temporarily locked out. But just wait. There will be an update for both Wasabi and Trezer has already been updated. But when you update the two in tandem, once that fixes there, it should be fine. But for now, sit tight. Don't do a thing. Moving on. In the same vein of privacy, kind of, we were just on Wasabi, there's a good article on

Starting point is 00:19:49 Bitcoin Q&A.com. It's talking about dealing with coin join, particularly the change outputs. And so those of you that haven't partook in coin join, essentially you're co-mingling your coins with other individuals and sending back yourself the same amount. And by doing so, you're breaking the links between you and the coins that you own. So people can't necessarily trace what you have and where you have it, which could potentially protect you from prying eyes and individuals targeting you for the Bitcoin that you have. But in doing so, you have to be aware of how you're dealing with the post mix, which means the coins that have been mixed and the coins that have not. Usually when you're using coin join, you'll get very specific set

Starting point is 00:20:40 amounts of Bitcoin at the end of a coin join. And you'll have some change from that that has not been mixed and is in some ways still linked to you, especially if you bought it through a KYC exchange. What you do with this change is important. If you combine it with something that's already mixed, well, you've just undone the coin join, right? Because you've linked coins that you own with coins that have not yet been linked to you. And so you don't want to do that. So what do you do with what's known as doxic change, change that can identify you. And this article goes through what doxic change is and how to deal with it. So things like mixing it in a smaller pool, if you're using samurai wallet, you can mark it as do not spend. So it's in the wallet, you still control it,

Starting point is 00:21:29 but it is not spent until you designate a way to spend it. You can merge it with other doxic change outputs and then mix it, which not as recommended, but still, you could do worse things. You could use something called Stowaway, which is a, what is that, pay to end point. This is where you combine coins with another person who is in front of you, also using samurai wallet. And it, again, it doesn't show where the coins are going and you're allowed to essentially send a transaction to somebody, but anybody on the outside looking in doesn't know exactly how much was sent because the other person contributes coins to that as well. You can use swap services,

Starting point is 00:22:15 you can buy gift cards, you can go to coin cards. You could go fund a lightning channel, you could give donations, you could do a lot of different things with it, but basically it goes through what your options are in dealing with coin join change outputs. So if you're getting into Bitcoin privacy, it's worth a read. I definitely encourage you to do so. I've done videos on both Wasabu Wallet and Samurai Wallet, so feel free to check those out. It should be easy to search them up on YouTube, and hopefully that'll get you down that path. And last, I want to touch on a new Bitsie Academy post that came out today from Emmy. Thank you, Emmy, for writing this. Thank you very much. I was very happy with this. I digress. Let's talk about what the article is. So the article is

Starting point is 00:23:03 Bitcoin irreversibility in a league of its own. And it goes through the irreversibility of Bitcoin transactions and how that stacks up against traditional payment methods as well as altcoins. What it takes to reverse a Bitcoin transaction, when it becomes final, if ever, and how that, again, how that stacks up. I really, really like it. One of the things I really loved is that she, instead of using the term blockchain, which is just used to death, she used the term time chain, which, funny enough, this is the original term that Satoshi actually used in the early days in some of the Bitcoin talk forums. He never said the word blockchain. Blockchain is not even in the white paper whatsoever. That came afterwards, but it was not penned by him. He said time chain, long time chain,

Starting point is 00:23:55 Short blockchain. Anyways, lots of fun. If you're unsure of what makes a transaction irreversible, of if Bitcoin is irreversible, of if altcoins are irreversible. Spoiler alert. They are. Anyways, if you want to learn about that, go check out this. And if you enjoy it, please do share it around.

Starting point is 00:24:17 But I was quite happy about this article. So again, thank you, Emmy, for writing this. Really enjoyed it. I'm going to wrap up, you guys. Thank you so much for. watching. If you're here on YouTube, please do remember to hit like, subscribe, and share, but also go find me on another platform because I don't want to rely entirely on YouTube. I'm on Facebook Live. I stream live to Twitter. I'm on Twitch. I'm on D-Live. I'm also audio

Starting point is 00:24:41 only on pretty much everywhere, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google, just wherever. If you want to help out the show in another way, you can head up the sponsors I mentioned down below. That was Leden and Coin Cards. You can also help the show if you aren't already using a hardware wallet and you need one. If you have Bitcoin and it's a meaningful amount, you probably do. It's a good idea to get it on a hardware device instead of just sitting on your phone or computer. You can pick up a ledger device. I use the Ledger NanoS and the Ledger NanoX, both for different purposes.

Starting point is 00:25:15 I do use other hardware wallets as well. Regardless of whether or not you use the affiliate link down below, do get yourself on a hardware wallet. It is very important in the long run. But if you do use the link down below to pick up either of those, you will help the show. And then finally, if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Lightning Network tip at my tippin.me page. That is tippen.me slash at BTC sessions. Once again, thank you guys so much for watching,

Starting point is 00:25:45 and I will see you next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Half Surveyed Trust BTC Over Banks, Coinsquare Wash Trades, Bitcoin Irreversibility EP070

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.