BTC Sessions - Hodlers Moving Off Exchanges, CME Eyes Bitcoin Mining, Stimulus Bill Includes Fed Secrecy and Phone Surveillance EP035

Starting point is 00:00:01 Wasabi wallet. I'm fairly private. What's up, everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC sessions, and this is your daily session. It's also my birthday. Hodel their Bitcoin. Before we jump into the show, of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, ledden.com. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a few different services. They've got their Bitcoin same as accounts where you can earn interest on your Bitcoin. They've got Bitcoin. back loans, this is where you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to obtain a Canadian or US dollar loan. And this is actually the first service I ever used for them. I was in a pinch around this time last year, kind of early March. And I needed to get my hands on dollars, but I didn't want to sell my

Starting point is 00:00:50 Bitcoin because I was worried I wouldn't be able to buy back the same amount for dollars later, which would have been the case had I sold. So what I did is I utilized their loan program. I was able to plunk my Bitcoin into a dedicated Bitcoin address that I was able to audit. it 24-7 and upon repayment of my loan, I got back all of my Bitcoin, which was super awesome. And then finally, they've got their B2X offering. This essentially uses your Bitcoin-ass collateral to get a loan and then buy more Bitcoin, essentially doubling your Bitcoin on the spot and allows you to ride the waves of volatility that comes with doing that.

Starting point is 00:01:26 If you want to check out any of these services, there's a link down below. And if you use that link to get a Bitcoin back loan, they'll actually give you 50 bucks worth. of Bitcoin. And secondly, there is PaxFull.com. This is a peer-to-peer online Bitcoin marketplace where you can buy and or sell Bitcoin. They've got a ton of different payment methods here. So actually well over 300 of them. They've got your typical bank transfers, e-transfers, all of that kind of stuff. They've got popular payment apps like PayPal and cash app. And they've also got ways of buying Bitcoin using gift cards. So on the flip side of that they've got your merchant program where you can actually make some money by buying and selling bitcoin and earning money on the spread they've got a killer affiliate program which you can sign up for and they are actually championing a pretty cool cause here called built with bitcoin and this is their mission to build 100 schools entirely paid for with bitcoin so really cool be sure to check all that out both paxville.com and built with bitcoin

Starting point is 00:02:34 And with that, we're going to jump into the news. So it's been an incredibly volatile few weeks, month, even year or so far. It's been pretty wild, the ups and downs that we've seen. And there has been a lot of cell pressure lately, but that may be changing according to some analytics that people have been looking at. And that has to do with the outflows of Bitcoin coming off of exchanges instead of going on to. And so an analytics firm GlassNode has noted that exchange liquidity has been declining since February. In recent days, this transfer of funds to private wallets has accelerated. Exchange customers have withdrawn more than 20,000 Bitcoin over the past five days alone.

Starting point is 00:03:24 So despite, this is a tweet from GlassNode, despite volatility, Bitcoin holders appear to be withdrawing their funds from exchanges. Outflow has been increasing daily since March 18th. According to our labels, Bitcoin exchange balances are the lowest they've been in around eight months. Now, it should be noted that this decrease reverses a month's long trend of increasing deposits. Exchanges still do hold more than 2.3 million Bitcoin. This is more than double what they held in January 2018 when price was at an all-time high. Of course, in relation to that, you also have to realize that the number of Bitcoin, in terms of dollars, also varies quite a bit too, right? When Bitcoin was $20,000, it takes a lot less Bitcoin to make that amount.

Starting point is 00:04:17 So people may be sensitive to the dollar amounts that they're leaving on exchanges as opposed to the Bitcoin or Satoshi amounts that could account for some of it as well. Either way, a positive thing to see people taking self-custody of their Bitcoin more often. If you don't have a reason for keeping your Bitcoin with a service, if you're not actively trading or actually obtaining some sort of a service, be sure to get it into your own custody. And even if you are using a service temporarily for custody, please do mitigate your risk. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket because you don't want to be out all of it. your Bitcoin ever. Now, moving on from there, I did want to highlight this really awesome quick tutorial video that highlights Breeze Wallet. So I did a video on Breeze Wallet a tutorial. It is an easy

Starting point is 00:05:12 online, or not online, it's an easy mobile Bitcoin Lightning Wallet app. And they just launched something that is a point of sale terminal within the app. Really, really awesome. It looks super easy and essentially you can accept lightning payments on the go and actually even have pre-made products that you can click on and you can see here in the demo video where you can add and remove things from a checkout and then create an actual invoice for whatever the total price of that is and then upon payment it will show that the payment was approved and then you can go back and actually go through your list. You can even export all of your, all of your transactions. It's, it looks pretty sleek and I'm excited to play around with it. So be sure to check that. I'll link to this thread

Starting point is 00:06:04 from Breeze down below. Moving on from there, I'm going to move quick today. Canada's tax authority, the CRA, is demanding personal data on 115,000 Quadriga CX users. So Quadriga CX was the exchange that famously went down and lost around $190 million for people that were keeping their funds on that exchange. I guess, hearkening back to the story we just covered, get your shit off exchanges if you don't absolutely need to have it there. Anyways, the data there is now potentially going to be in the hands of the CRA. And so what's happening? I'll read through a little bit of this coin telegraph article here. So the court appointed bankruptcy trustee for the defunct Canadian crypto exchange Quadriga CX has been asked to submit all of the exchanges user information to the Canada Revenue Agency.

Starting point is 00:07:04 Yeah, so this would be around 750,000 documents on the exchange's 115,000 customers. Now, the trustee has advised CRA that its intention is to simply produce a copy of the full e-discovery database redacted, for the privilege in response to the CRA production demand. Wow. So it looks like that data is going to the CRA. Now, I'm not sure about this redacted part. What exactly is being redacted, but I guess we'll soon find out. Now, the thing is that there's a committee, the creditors committee, and one of the members, well, a number of members, it seems to be pretty split about what is wanted, because if you were to fight this, then it would further push off any sort of compensation that the people involved, that the victims of the Quadriga exit scam would be entitled to.

Starting point is 00:08:09 However, committee member Magdalena Grunowska tweeted that the demand is an unprecedented affront on individual privacy, expressing skepticism that the data is being collected by CRA to calculate Quadriga's tax liability. So it's important to note that the CRA has said that they just want the data to know what Quadriga owes. But the actual, the trustee and the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee has said that it would be nearly impossible to discern Quadriga's. tax liability. So it seems that there may be other intentions with that data. I would not be surprised by that. But it does go to show that there are very real consequences with using any exchange that identifies you, that that data is not specifically yours and could be demanded by others or could be hacked and stolen by others. And so what's the solution? I mean, peer to peer.

Starting point is 00:09:18 maybe, but a lot of those solutions are not super easy, especially if you want to buy any sizable amount of Bitcoin, there's always tradeoffs. So what can you do? I mean, you can make purchases. You can use things like coin join, whirlpool, wasabi, all of that kind of stuff and try to break those links. But that still means there is a record at the point of sale of you having purchased those Bitcoin. So keep that in mind and decide tradeoffs for yourself. But do be aware that just because you bought some Bitcoin and you moved it around to a wallet doesn't mean that you're completely anonymous, all right? Now, let's move on here. CME Group is potentially looking at Bitcoin mining. So, CME, they have their futures contracts, but a potential

Starting point is 00:10:09 appointee to the board of trustees, yeah, a nominee, sorry, for the CME group's board. of directors. He is suggesting that they start mining Bitcoin. So a couple of his quotes here. He said, some of our largest investors like BlackRock are shifting investments to companies focused on creating value for all their stakeholders. The CME group needs to get in front of this trend by building solar, wind, and hydro energy plants to power our global operations. Then divert the excess energy to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency. While this seems outside of our core competencies, I'd argue this is our business. We, like the miners, match and clear trades.

Starting point is 00:10:57 We'd immediately convert any newly minted crypto into fiat. The net net is another new revenue stream for shareholders. Deep knowledge in new technology is changing the global exchange landscape for the CME and increased allocation to ESG-focused businesses by investors. That's a win, win, win. So the guy is essentially saying, hey, we should be in the mining space. We should be converting everything we mine. Or rather, he's saying that we should be first building renewable energy sources to power their operations than any additional electricity.

Starting point is 00:11:37 Because if you're relying on renewables to power any operation, you need to reliably produce more energy than you're consuming, otherwise suffer blackouts or have to rely on alternative power sources. So what do you do when you're creating excess energy and that energy ends up wasted if you're not using it? While you divert it into mining Bitcoin and when you're using 100% of your capacity, well, then you can just shut off the miners temporarily. But at least when the energy isn't being used for something, it's being used to generate revenue in the way. In the way, way of mining Bitcoin, hopefully Bitcoin, but, and potentially other cryptocurrencies and converting them. And then he goes on to argue that essentially since we're already involved in things like

Starting point is 00:12:29 futures for Bitcoin, it's easy for us to trade that out because it's already a core portion of our business. And he's, he's not wrong. Now, the interesting thing here is this bullish for Bitcoin? Well, in general, when you see a group like this that, essentially wants to dump it all, I would argue that it does have a downward pressure on price, but that's always the case with Bitcoin mining because those miners need to sell a fair portion of what they mine in order to pay for their expenses. And the same is true, the same is always going to be true moving forward. It's just that the Bitcoin mining reward gradually gets reduced. In fact, it's happening, as we know, in mid-May.

Starting point is 00:13:16 that selling pressure will be reduced. But I think in the future down the road, as Bitcoin gains more traction, the reduction of the block reward will be subsidized by minor fees. So you'll still get some sell pressure from that. Now, I want to move on here to some of the craziness that has happened with the fallout in the markets. And so we talked the other day about the stimulus bill, how the Fed's money printers are going wild. They did just approve a $2 trillion, I think it's $2.2 trillion stimulus bill that partially goes directly to the American people

Starting point is 00:14:00 and partially goes to more or less bailing out companies and buying up equities and all kinds of other craziness. So this, in the bill, there was a lot of bullshit crammed in there. And because they were able to pass it so quickly, given a crisis as they did with the Patriot Act back in the day when it came to basically curtailing all of your online privacy. Yeah, this is no different.

Starting point is 00:14:28 You essentially got Patriot acted again. And so this allows the Federal Reserve to conduct meetings in secret and gave the Fed a $454 billion slush fund for Wall Street bailouts. And so there's a good tweet thread on. on here. I'm not going to go too deep into it, but let's read just a couple of things that stuck out to me. The text of the final bill was breathtaking in the breadth of new powers it bestowed on the Federal Reserve, including the Fed's ability to conduct secret meetings with no minutes provided to the American people. So more or less, what's happening here is the Fed normally has its monthly

Starting point is 00:15:10 meetings and it can it creates a record of those and those records are provided to all American people and anybody can read it well that's now secret you can't see any of that now not only do you not get to vote on what monetary policy is enacted you don't even get to know what the hell's going on um furthermore decisions by the secretary pursuant to the authority of this act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency. So not only can you not know what the hell is going on, they can never be up to the scrutiny of any court of law. Unbelievable. And then I'll touch on one more thing here. So they created a $450 billion fund for the Fed, which you may be

Starting point is 00:16:04 wondering, why the hell do they need money? Don't they make the money? Good point. So the quote here says, why does the Federal Reserve need $454 billion from the U.S. taxpayer to bail out Wall Street when it has the power to create money out of thin air and has already dumped more than $9 trillion cumulatively in revolving loans to prop up Wall Street's trading houses since September? The Fed needs that money to create more special purpose vehicles. The same device used by Enron to hide its toxic debt off its balance sheet before it went belly up. With the taxpayers' money taking a 10% stake in the various Wall Street bailout programs offered by the Fed, structured as SBVs, the Fed can keep these dark pools off its balance sheet while levering them up tenfold. We got screwed here, man. Like, this isn't Canada. Obviously, I'm in Canada, but you've got to imagine that these kinds of things are happening globally right now. It's pretty unbelievable.

Starting point is 00:17:12 And with the craziness of what's happening and what's being passed suddenly and with the same bill, well, phone surveillance is about to get a whole lot worse. And this was also thrown into the stimulus package. The U.S. plans to roll out a $500 million surveillance system designed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC. The system will track the spread of COVID-19. so far, not much has been divulged about the project. However, clandestine talks between the government, Google, and Facebook imply the system will trace social media and smartphone data. Yeah, so basically, your movements will be tracked.

Starting point is 00:17:56 Not that they aren't already, but this just removes even, will likely remove even more hoops for them to spy on your data, track your daily movements without too much. discretionary oversight from really any other agencies. So what do you do? What do you do at this point? Well, one thing is just to not have a phone. The other thing is to get a dumb phone, so like a flip phone, if you're really worried about that. The other thing is to utilize software that is not Apple or Google. And this is something that I'm very much considering myself. And luckily, excellently, the guys over at T. FTC, Tales from the Crypt, got your shit covered. Matt O'Dell, got to give him a shout out. He just made a walkthrough of how to get a Google Pixel, oddly enough, a Google phone, but you can wipe the device and flash it with something called Graphene OS, which is an Android build, but it basically

Starting point is 00:19:00 removes all of the Google-related tracking bullshit in it and affords you a lot better privacy. Now, this is not a currently a super easy thing to do. There is some command line involved. He does walk you through literally everything you have to do, but if you're a little scared about that, you may have to take your time and go very slowly, but it is an option for you if you want to still have the functionality of using an actual smartphone, but you don't want your shit tracked 24-7. Be aware that you're going to have to do without a lot of the conveniences of tracked Google apps and it knowing your whereabouts and all of your preferences because with that comes tracking. So anyways, I will link to this video down below. Once again, shout out to the guys at TFDC and to Matt Odell for making this because I think

Starting point is 00:19:56 I'm in the market for a new phone and maybe this is going to be the road that I go. Yeah, It's going to have to be a project of mine regardless. So anyways, I did want to say, because it's my birthday, I wanted to see something very positive in my news stream. And so I tweeted this out. I said, did you set up a node using my recent MyNode tutorial video? For my birthday today, I would love nothing more than to see a picture of your setup. Seeing people claim self-sovereignty makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, reply to this tweet with a pick. and I did this not long ago

Starting point is 00:20:35 and I haven't refreshed this but anyways there's been some awesome responses so far I love seeing this I love seeing all of the setups a lot of people also I like that a lot of people went with my clear choices of

Starting point is 00:20:50 setup and really cool to see so many people diving into nodes just from this one video that I threw together so thank you guys so much for sending those pictures my way, it does make me feel really nice seeing that a single video like this had so much impact on people making that leap to decide to run their own node. And shout out huge to the guys over

Starting point is 00:21:16 at my node. You guys are doing incredible work. The frequency with which you guys are releasing new features and updates is unbelievable. And you've been super helpful in the telegram chat. so I can't give these guys enough credit for how much hard work and incredible stuff they're doing. Be sure to give them a shout out and give it a try if you haven't because if you're locked down, you don't have a lot to do. Maybe the time is right to spin up a note and start playing around. Anyways, guys, I'm going to wrap it up there. Thank you so much for joining me on my birthday today for the show.

Starting point is 00:21:57 As always, please do hit like, subscribe. and share if you're watching this on YouTube. If you're listening to this in audio only on the pod, then of course do share it on your social media, give it a like or subscribe, and of course do leave a review. It helps a lot for visibility on any platform. If you want to help with the show in another way,

Starting point is 00:22:19 you can hit up the sponsors that I mentioned down below. That was Lennon and Paxville, as well as Wasabi Wallet, to help with your privacy as we've been discussing. And if you want to drop me some birthday, and you really liked what you saw, you can head over to my tippin.me page. That is tippin.m.me slash at BTC sessions. There's no way to celebrate a birthday than stacking a few extra sets.

Starting point is 00:22:41 So thank you guys very much. Have a wonderful rest of your day and your evening. And I will see you next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Hodlers Moving Off Exchanges, CME Eyes Bitcoin Mining, Stimulus Bill Includes Fed Secrecy and Phone Surveillance EP035

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