BTC Sessions - Is Donald Trump A Bitcoin Believer Now? ep393

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

In this Bitcoin news update, we delve into the intriguing possibility of Donald Trump getting orange-pilled by Vivek Ramaswamy, a significant shift in China as citizens turn to Bitcoin amidst uncertainties, and a bold move by 26 leading Bitcoin companies challenging FinCEN's surveillance overreach. Plus, don't miss Jack Mallers' impactful appearance on mainstream media, bringing Bitcoin's message to the forefront. Stay tuned for these groundbreaking developments in the Bitcoin world. BOOK ME for one-on-one private sessions to learn about wallets, hardware, multisig, privacy, nodes and much more. https://www.btcsessions.ca/ 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions Nunchuk Wallet and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted multisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. 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://www.seedor.io/btcsessions 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

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Thursday, another episode of Simply Sessions. We got Nico in the Wings here waiting to give us the latest and greatest in what's going on in Bitcoin. I hope you're all having a good week. It's finally warmed up here. It was minus 40 for what felt like 17 years. And now it's sunny and nice out. So we had a 50 degree swing in weather over the course Celsius in the course of a week.

It was crazy. Anyways, so I'm feeling warm. I'm feeling happy. I'm ready to go. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So 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. Fibing thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share all those things. They help a time getting this content in front of more eyeballs. Smash that little like button just below the screen right now.

Give this a share on whatever socials you are on. And of course, smash that subscribe button and help me on my quest to 100K in 2024. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your Simply session. Before we bring in, Nico, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. I'm bringing up timechain calendar.com

and simultaneously, I'm going to be bringing up the live chat. Everything that you say in the chat will be live for the world to see now from here on end for better. or worse. But back to timechain calendar.com. We're sitting at $39,952 per coin. A single US dollar will grab you, 2,5003 sats. In terms of fees, oh my God, 24 sats per byte. Are you serious? I can't remember the last time. Very affordable to consolidate your UTXOs or do some coin join or open some lightning channels or any kind of on-chain activity you need to get done. it done. Who knows when the JPEGers will be back. So just be aware, be prepared, and get your

ducks in a row. And of course, in terms of Bitcoin mined 19.61 million of them, that's 93.37% of the entire supply. If you need additional help, if you've gone through the tutorials and all that stuff and all the free stuff on the channel, and you find you're hitting a roadblock, you can't quite make it through, you can head to my website, BTC, sessions.ca and book me for one-on-one private education sessions. Shout out to sponsors of the show, hoddlehottle.com. If you're buying Bitcoin and you have some priorities in mind that include peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custy, and no K-YC.

This is the place to be. You can sign up with just an email address. Once you're in, choose your currency payment method and amount. And you're off to the races and you can view offers right away. They also have peer-to-peer lending with no rehypublication. Thanks are down below. Now, when you do get some Bitcoin, going to want to secure it with the best hardware on the market. I love CoinKite, everything they're

doing. Cold card mark four is my go to. I have all their goodies, tap signers, sats cards, block clocks, and I've pre-ordered the hell out of the cold card queue. Can't wait for that thing to ship. So if you want to do the same or pick up anything else I mentioned, head over to coin kite.com. You can use code BTC sessions at checkout for a hefty discount. Of course, backups are important as well. Cidor has one of the most beautifully designed and robust options on the market for steel backups of your seed phrase. These keep your seed phrase safe from the elements like fire, water, and corrosion.

It comes in a full starter set where you can stamp in your seeds. As a disk and capsule design, you can swap out the disks if you need to change a seed or add additional information. And you can check out my tutorial on them as well. Links are all down below, depending on where you need to ship to. Make sure you get the best rate on the right link.

Uh, shout out to nunchuk.io, they have you covered with your multi-sig needs, namely assisted multi-sig with their Honeybadger program. Basically, on your mobile device, you set up a multi-sig quorum with all kinds of different options for hardware like tap signer, cold card, and plenty of others. Once you're done and they handhold you all the way through, you have a baked in inheritance planning system where your sats will get to your next of kin should anything happen to you. And the whole thing is no K-YC. You don't need to give up your private information to have it set up and be working for you. So check them out nunchawk.

I also have a full tutorial and finally shout it to start nine your sovereign computing solution. Uh, these guys do plug and play devices to host your Bitcoin and digital life. So basically you can run things like Bitcoin core, your lightning node, Mempool. That space, files, passwords, photos, Noster relays and clients and even some AI tools as well. They have everything from entry level all the way up to what I'm running, which is the Start 9 server pure. If you do want to pick up the pure, of course, I have a code, BTC sessions with a little plus sign at the end of it, and you can find it all at start 9.com. With that, enough of my rambling. Let's get Nico in here, and let's see how he's doing, man.

Dude, good to see you. Yo! What's up, man? Good to see you, too. How's your week? Good, dude. Good. You know, just focusing on Simply. I'm going to probably start making more content next week. I've been kind of coasting these last two weeks. I haven't done that in quite a while. So yeah, man. And yeah, just just doing that. So can't complain.

I'm, I'm, I'm, you seem, you seem zen. You've got a zen or to you now. You seem like at peace and like ready to, ready to how far into the video. You're ready to fuck shit up as well. what I'm getting at. Oh man, I'm, I'm so excited. Good, good to hear that, man. I felt when you said Zen, you know, I think I felt my tip, you know, vibrate a little bit. Are you coming? Are you coming to

Madeira? Yeah, I am. I am. They, like, so I talked to them like six months ago and they're like, yeah, you're coming. I was like, okay. And then I never heard from it again. And then I, then I saw the Twitter post and I'm like, I guess I'm going. However, um, I, my, my wife is expecting. in the next two or three weeks. So if it's delayed a little bit, I'll probably not be able to make it. Yeah. Well, if you are there,

Mrs. Sessions will be there to touch up the tips for you if you would if you would like to partake in that. But either way, I mean, how exciting another Bitcoiner. Kids going to come out with a streak, I swear. Oh, 100%. It's, I've been telling,

Sophie that and you know she she doesn't believe me denial it's denial awesome man well let's uh let's pull up your your screen here what's been going on what's the top of mind this week dude i mean like you know we live in this like strange reality where you know we were getting like initially when when we were like going through this turbulent time and you know same things happening in canada by the way like just like rise in totalitarianism um you would have like like little snippets of like them hinting at like them being tyrants and them saying the choir part aloud. But we're so far in the movie that now they're just saying it bluntly like the choir part out loud. And here's Christine Lagarde basically admitting that if they don't roll

out these CWDCs, she doesn't believe that, you know, central banks are going to be a thing. Right. So, you know, again, like it's just kind of saying the choir pot out loud. It's pretty crazy. So I'll play the video. There is clearly an aspiration, a desire for digital payments, much more so than it was in the past. And this is growing. We are now in the service that we've conducted across the 19 members of the euro area. We have more than 50% of the respondents who say we want digital payments. Well, less use of cash. Demand for secure and riskless payments. where do we stand? We central bankers.

We have been operating as a monetary anchor in relation to the commercial banks and the private money. If we are not in that game, if we are not involved in experimenting, in innovating in terms of digital central bank money, we risk losing the role of anchor that we have played for many, many decades. And we have historical examples of a period

where the central bank monetary anchor was not there, and that precipitated crisis after crisis, that certainly was the case at the time of the free banking in the 19th century. Do we want to go back to those days? Probably not. I would say certainly not from our vantage point, as a result of which we have to respond to the demand for those digital payment in order to maintain the role of anchor that we have been playing regularly. So I mean like so much sauce and so much things said out loud and the like the thing that I want to focus on is the aspect where she's like we have to innovate because if we don't innovate we risk ourselves from being left behind.

But I see I'm calling BS here because the innovation is the 21 million hard cap. The innovation is the unconfiscatable wealth. And governments and central banks can't help themselves but to betray those two things. Like they're going to want like and you kind of hear this rhetoric coming out of the U.S. too when they're talking about CBDCs. And it's like, yeah, people want digital payments. Digital payments already exist. Like Venmel, Cash app, Zell. and they're very effective and they're smooth.

Like they do have their limits, but for daily payments, they're very seamless, right? So what is the necessity of this CBDC? I don't think it has anything to do with innovation. I think it has to do with like, they're freak the F out because people want an alternative and they're trying to make themselves seem useful. It's like, yeah, you could trust us,

but unless they give up those two things, which I think they'll never be able to give up, you can't out-innovate Bitcoin. Like, the innovation is the 21, million hard cap. The innovation is a deflationary currency. The innovation is unconfiscatable wealth. That is the innovation of which they have nothing to stand for. I mean, they have nothing to gain offering that to the public, in my opinion. And I don't think they can. The innovation is rules without rulers, right? Exactly. And they are the rulers and they don't want to be pushed out.

They don't want rules without rulers. They want rulers without rules. Like they literally want the inverse of it. It's hilarious. And you're right with the digital payment thing. People, yeah, sure, people want digital payments and they use them. But why, why, like, they're clearly worried about the non-institutional digital payments, because everything is already digital. Like, people have digital payments. Why might they migrate to something digital that isn't controlled by a centralized third party. Well, because the centralized third party has put up gates and check stops and limitations and all of these things with the digital payments. People aren't here for digital payments. They're here to tear down all of the walls and the bullshit that has been built around the digital

payments we already have. If you had a sound money that you could send anywhere that worked seamlessly that you could just store your wealth in that nobody could easily confiscate, why would you need anything else? And she's absolutely right. We might, except for she didn't take it to the extreme she needed to. We might lose that position. You will lose that position. In fact, you've already lost it.

You just don't know it yet. Yeah. And the world will be a much better place for it, right? The thing that she brought up, she's like the, you know, the wild cat era of, you know, the 19, like Ron Paul has the best quote. He's like, it's not a coincidence that the bloodiest century in human history was the century of central banking, not to mention the fact that the Great Depression happened with central banks. The 2008 Great Recession happened under the central bank. So she's advocating for like the theoretical stability that central banks, quote unquote,

give, you know, and ignoring all the downsides, right, ignoring the massive wealth inequality created by, you know, the contillionaire effect, like ignoring all the downsides, right? Ignoring the fact that no one can afford anything, right? You know, and you can literally blame that on Fiat money in the printing, right? And she ignores all that. She's like, there's an anchor. Maybe an anchor for you and your cronies. Yeah.

Like, I don't benefit from that anchor. You know, that's what Bitcoin's for in my life. That's Bitcoin's my anchor. Bitcoin's a much better anchor, bro. And not only that, like she, the way she says, oh, the, the age of free banking just there was crisis after crisis. The crises came because, for lack of a better term, people fucked around and found out, right? And so like when there was actually, when there was insolvency and people got wind of it,

they pulled out of a banking institution as they rightfully should because the money wasn't there. In today's day and age, it's not that that isn't happening in the background. It's that there's this entity that will say, ooh, you guys were blatantly committing fraud or you were milking people for all their money and you basically like you didn't have the money there. Don't worry.

We'll print it. We'll steal from everyone to make you whole. So it's not that there isn't the underlying, the underlying issue is still there. it's that they socialize the losses every time. And so they privatize the gains. They socialize the losses. And so they smooth it out by slowly robbing from everyone rather than when somebody

pulls that kind of stuff, it's very, very evident very quickly. And those people rightfully go out of business. Some people may get hurt in the process, but it's a check. on that fucking around and finding out. The finding out actually happens when you don't have a backstop with unlimited printing. Of course.

And that incentivizes like running a good business, right? And then we kind of live in a world and I love how you mention that stuff because we live in a world where there's big companies that they're too big to fail. They even tell you like, what does that even mean too big to fail? Like, you know, and it's like, and it, you know, the 2008 financial crisis, which is a great example of that.

And, you know, the consequences of that, you know, specifically on the lower, the lower middle classes, which tends to be the younger generations, right? Yeah. It's, it's, you know, it's, again, it's hubris, completely disconnected from reality. And they can't help but to print. And then they can't help but to be, to want to confiscate, you know, at a moment's notice. Anyways, so in other news, kind of this happened a couple weeks like a month ago, but we never covered it. We never had a chance to cover it. But I thought it was really interesting.

So a couple things about Malay. So I think we spoke about it last week, which was he was in Davos and he said the choir part out loud. He said that governments no longer need to, the state no longer needs to control the means of production. They have a money printer, right? And that's such a strong statement, right? So moving the Overton window, shattering the Overton window. But in other news, here's what's happening in Argentina. So Argentina's Malay wants people to declare their crypto holdings for lower tax rate.

It goes on to say the bill includes provisions for an asset regulation scheme that would allow taxpayers to legalize crypto holdings without having to provide additional documentation about where the assets came from. Like, I get it, right? A lot of people are, you know, are basically saying that. They're fans of this guy. He's an Austrian economist. But now, like, the wording from this is very strange, right? It's like it would allow taxpayers to legalize their crypto holdings. And we're going to get to that whole legalization aspect because, you know, governments have

been used to controlling the money flows, right? Like, for the longest time. But here's the thing. If I'm in Argentina and had a choice between holding Bitcoin and holding pesos, I would hold Bitcoin. Like even with this volatility and like whatever, and I can transact with that Bitcoin. So, you know, and then again, like the more, the worst of the fiat currency, the higher the probability that people are using an alternative in the first place. So what happens when the majority of the population isn't using a currency of which they can't control, therefore they can't determine whether that's legal or not illegal, right?

What happens then, right? the whole facade of, you know, you know, declare it and it's not legal. Like, you know, and we'll get to, and we'll kind of connect the dots with what's happening up, what's happening in China because I think that was major news. Here's Jocamo. I said bad. Besides the fact that crypto is just a use of scam, exposing your public keys to the government is just one step removed from the effectively extracting your private keys from you. Boating accidents are the way. Yeah, I mean, 100%. And again, it's kind of disconnect, a little bit disconnected. from reality. I understand where the Argentine government's coming from, right, because the vast

majority of people haven't, quote, declared their crypto. And now they're just looking for tax revenue because the country's essentially broke. And then you connect it with what's going on in China, right? So if Argentina is having a problem and issue with people not declaring their quote unquote legal crypto, take a look at China. I think China is a great example, historic example, because of what happened during the China ban. The hash rate dropped like 50%. There was a market dump. It's part of the reasons I believe Bitcoin didn't hit 100K last cycle.

But this is such a strong article. Bruised by stock market, Chinese rush into banned Bitcoin. So it goes on to say, Dylan run a Shanghai-based finance sector executive, started moving a bit of his money into cryptocurrencies in early 2023. When he realized that the,

the Chinese economy and its stock markets were going downhill. Crypto trading and mining has been banned in China since 2021. Run used bank cards issued by small rural commercial banks to buy cryptocurrencies through gray market dealers and capped each transaction at $6,978 to escape scrutiny. It goes on to say, quote, Bitcoin is a safe haven like gold. It goes on to say, like run, more and more Chinese investors are using creative ways to own Bitcoin and other crypto assets that they believe are safer than investing. in crumbling stock and property markets at home.

They operate in a gray area. While cryptocurrency is banned in the mainland and mainland China, there are strict capital controls on capital movement across the border. People are still able to trade tokens such as Bitcoin on cryptocurrency exchanges, such as OKX and Binance. Mainland investors can also open overseas bank accounts to buy crypto assets. It goes on to say, and there's a specific statistic, here it is, despite being banned,

the Chinese crypto market recorded an estimate $86.4 billion in raw transaction volume between July 22 and June 2023, dwarfing Hong Kong, which witnessed a 64 billion in crypto trading. So even though, this is a signal here, even though this thing is completely banned, and even though Bitcoin mining was completely banned, there's still $86.4 billion worth of transactions, and it's still estimated that between 10 to 15% of the hash rate is still located in China. This is incentives.

This is Bitcoin's incentive. This is why we're going to win. This is why people like Christine Lagarde and they're talking their nonsense. They don't understand how powerful this technology is. People are not looking for, quote unquote, more efficient payments. What people are looking for is non-state currency that's going to offer them, you know, a cap supply.

an unconfiscatable wealth, right? So whether you're the government of Argentina or the government of China, like even in China, one of the most totalitarian states in the world, people are just like, I don't care. Like, that's what it's telling me. It's like, I don't care.

I'm willing to take the risk of going to jail because I want to benefit from this technology. They already lost. They just don't know it yet. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. I mean, it's,

it's, if China can effectively, ban it, who will, right? Like the U.S., I mean, there might be, I mean, New York State is probably in the running, right? It is funny to see when there's a service and they're like, we cannot serve people in Iran, North Korea, or New York State. Like, there's a number of services like that. But like the country as a whole, there's no, there's no chance. Like if, if this thing can't be effectively banned in China, it can't be effectively banned anywhere, to be honest. 100%. And it's just the like the, the coping and like the coming to terms by governments, like they don't fully understand what is happening. And again, I like, I feel like I'm a repeating

like a broken record here, but the sovereign individual quote, like is so, they hit the nail in the head. New technologies will allow the holders of wealth to bypass national monopolies that have issued and regulated money in the modern period. Their importance for controlling the world's wealth will be transcended by mathematical algorithms that have no physical presence. In the new millennium cyber money controlled by private markets will supersede fiat money issued by governments. And then what are all the consequences that come with that, right? What are all the consequences of that separation of money and state, but you're seeing the old way of states,

like they haven't come to terms with the fact that they can't make this go away. And because they can't make it go away, it becomes a forcing function. Like if you can't make it go away, then you have to compete with it. But if your product, what you're offering is inferior,

then people are not going to be incentivized to use it. Right. And they're like, you know, totalitarianness comes out. There's little slips here and there. Right. Because they're like, oh, we're going to ban it. They realize like,

oh, we can't ban it. So, you know, they kind of go back. forth, right? Yeah. But yeah, man, it's interesting. You know, all their, again, like the, the ban is what proves that they don't have control, right?

If they try, and this, the U.S. is, is trying to go the route of, let's not let on that a ban won't work. Let's try to regulate it and let people basically complacently just comply. And then, and then we'll kind of get, have, have our cake and eat it. too. I think that's the efforts in the states. Yeah, that's where they are 100%. That's where they are in the denial phase, right? You know, they're still in the bargaining phase right now.

They haven't really fully understand or accept it. But I get it. It's a tough pill to swallow. Like if you're an egomaniac and you've been used to using the benefits of the monopoly on violence, and then all of a sudden that, you don't have that anymore. You're just like, there's cognitive dissidents. You don't understand it, right? Anyways, so in other news, here's Jack Mahler's, not only breaking, shattering the Overton window, but just dropping absolute bombs on the legacy media. Here's Dylan Leclair. He posted the video. Let's check it out.

Towards whether we will see an Ethereum or an Ether ETF come forward. Do you believe that that's like the next kind of damn breaking type of moment to really thrust even more institutional knowledge? and even more institutional investment and inflows into crypto as a whole, even though I know you just said that crypto is a load of garbage. Yeah, crypto's loaded garbage. Jamie Diamond was Jeffrey Epstein's banker. Like a lot of this stuff is just noise, pure, unethical, malicious noise. My opinion, guys, again, is that global debt to GDP is 360%. What does that mean?

The governments have piled up so much debt with no way to pay it back. So who's fron that bill? I mean, someone's run up a $36 trillion bill at the bar. Who's paying for that? And the answer is whoever's holding the currencies that they can debase, that they can print more of. They have to issue more debt and print more currency to pay that bill. And so everyone has to find something else to hold. Do I want to hold Ethereum? Ethereum's a tech play. Ethereum's a gamble that Jamie Diamond's going to use it. What do you say in his ski resort, Davos interview, that he's going to use it to flip real estate? What does that even mean? That is it? mean, people don't know history. I was around, I mean, people don't know history. I was around when Ethereum got hacked and that the Ethereum Foundation cherry-picked transactions, they're like, oh, we broke something. So that transaction doesn't exist. We're going to change the monetary policy

here. That's what I'm going to do to hedge the Federal Reserve and the fact that they got a front, a $37 trillion bill. Yeah, no thanks. And no one on Wall Street thinks that either, right? Bitcoin is the actually only innovation that is attractive to solve what is the biggest financial problem ever, which is central banking. So Ethereum is a tech play. And if Ethereum turns into the new Tesla, like a stock, like an equity, great. Sure. People are going to get stimulus checks and they're going to go punt Ethereum and, you know, bet that Vitalik is the new Elon Musk. But it's not a new world reserve currency that everyone can use to escape the fact that we're all going to get debased because over the last 100 years, governments accrued so much debt that were in serious trouble.

I mean, the last thing I'll say, guys, bond market has never been this bad. The 60-40 portfolio that's so safe, bondholders are doing way worse than this guy who just casually owns Bitcoin, right? So this is a massive problem. And no, I don't think Solana, Ethereum, Dogecoin. No, I don't think that that matters. I love how the guy finishes his question and Jack is like, here we go. It's great. Yeah. We need more of this energy constantly.

I would want to see him and Christine Lagarde just debate. Oh. I think she would get up. Oh, yeah. No, no. She wouldn't sit through it. No way. He makes too much sense. And he says it in such a, he would say it to her in such an abrasive way that she would. And like, and not even that bad. Like, it's not like he would just be doing like ad hominums, but he would call out the bullshit exactly verbatim how it has. how it happens and there'd be no response to it because the response would be like, well, that's true.

Dude, it would be, I would pay money for that. I would pay money for that. That would be great. That needs to happen. Like, the fact that that hasn't happened yet, you know, is quite disappointing. They'll never. Anyways, in other news, we've been covering the FinCEN proposal, but essentially to, you know, know, in case anyone hasn't been paying attention,

in case you haven't been tuning into simply sessions, because we cover all this when news breaks. The FinCEN, or really, like, I think it was really Elizabeth Warren and Co. Took advantage of a tragedy happening in Israel to intercept the American public with this idea that terrorists were using, quote-unquote, crypto to raise money, right?

A couple weeks after that, the Binance press conference, and they literally used the word terrorism 15 times in that press conference. And then you see them, they made two moves, right? So move number one was Elizabeth Warren's bill that's currently in the Senate. She has 20 senators signed up, including two or three Republicans. That would essentially ban self-custing in the United States and it would ban Bitcoin mining, essentially. And then they got away with this one because they used, they took. advantage of using the Patriot Act to kind of circumvent the legislative process.

And this FinCEN proposal would make it so that essentially it demonizes or it goes after single use addresses. It affects the lightning network. It would essentially try to impose a surveillance network on top of Bitcoin, right? So not to mention the fact that it's unenforceable, in my opinion, the amount of paperwork, they would, it's like a giant drag net, right? So clearly I don't think that the terrorism excuse was the right one because it came out after the fact that that article that they used misrepresented the data. They never cared to offer a correction. This FinCEN proposal, even though that article was proved to be debunked, this FinCEN proposal stays. Right?

So clearly it was a political move. And here it looks like some 26 Bitcoin companies came together. to sign a letter to FinCEN against proposed surveillance rules. So there's six key outlines that it proposes. So the first one, and I just want to give a shout out to all the Bitcoin companies. So Samurai Wallet, 1031, River Strike, Ronan Dojo, Swan, Primal, Grid, Zaprite, Peach, Menpool. That space, upstream data, stack, Vita, Voltage, Coin Kite, Mutiny, Standard Bitcoin Company,

Satoshi Energy, Cathedral, Anchor Watch, BitNob. Oshy, battery, fold, start nine. So, and there's six key outlines. So the first one is FinCEN should exercise caution and either withdraw entirely or narrowly tailor the mixing transaction NPRM because if adopted, the mixing transaction NPRM would not only represent the first time FinCEN used its section 311 powers against a class of transactions, but also the first time FinCEN has ever imposed special measure one. Number two, the mixing transaction NPRM proposes a rule that is,

an improper and overbroad application of Section 311, measures to archive transaction surveillance and suppress that FinC send does not otherwise have a lawful basis to undertake. Three, the mixing transaction NPRM should be withdrawn because the proposed definition of CVC mixing is overbroad and targets lawful activity in a way that makes the agency's proposed action arbitrary and capricious. Four, the mixing transaction NPRM should be withdrawn because it's inaccurate depiction of standard security practices as mixing, impermissibly restricts the capacity of users to protect their property so that FinC can conduct a fishing expedition. Number five, the mixing transaction

NPRM should be withdrawn or significantly narrowed in scope because FinC's required statutory analysis fails to adequately value the legitimate uses of CVC mixing services and unduly burdens legitimate users and financial institutions. Number six, the missing transaction NPRM should be withdrawn because it requires covered financial institutions to perform law enforcement function to accomplish FinCEN's AML goals, which FinCEN, DOJ, and law enforcement can achieve using existing tools when they have a proper legal basis to employ those tools. So I mean, like, bro, that is a bunch of legal mumbo-jumble legalese, dude. That is a lot of, you know, high-level writing and all that stuff. But I mean, fine, address all their claims head on and do it in a way that

they can't poke holds and I'm totally for it. But just to simplify it, what they're doing is bullshit, right? What they're doing is bullshit. It doesn't, it shouldn't apply to Bitcoin. Like you can't apply rules that work in the previous system and you can't hope to apply into a new system. And then not to mention the fact that the whole basis of this proposal was based on misrepresented data in the first place, right?

So anyways, my thoughts on everything. What about yours? It honestly, it seems unenforceable. Like the static address thing where they're like, like part of the, part of the proposal targets like, oh, you shouldn't be allowed to have like a new address every single time in a wallet. How are you going to possibly even begin to, like it's literally math. Like somebody could sit and roll dice and like create a key and thus be able to create addresses from that key. Like the whole function of the key is you can create multiple addresses from, again, from your ex-pub. So like I just, I don't know how they would even begin to try to enforce it because at the end of the day, the addresses, once you have ownership of an address, you can easily move to any other address.

So like it just, yeah, I mean, again, this is this is where they, they catch all the law. binding citizens and none like the actual people that that they're they're targeting are of course not going to listen to this. So all you're going to do is you're going to pigeonhole or you're going to basically make all of these people that are going to be that we're always going to be a hundred percent compliant. You're just going to make them do a whole bunch of extra steps. The people that think it's bullshit are probably just not going to do it. And then the actual like criminals that you really wanted to do it. Of course we're never going to do it.

So, like, I just, I don't see how this plays out. It's like as effective as TSA. Yeah. Oh, man, that's hilarious. Yeah, I 100% agree with your statement. And again, the part with the criminals is so spot on because it's like, like, you're going to create this crazy, like, paper record keeping burden for people that do,

follow the law and then criminals were never going to fucking follow this anyways like they were never going to be okay with this so yeah I mean it's just ridiculous but again you know the the passage from the sovereign individual just keeps like repeating in my head over and over and over again right um 20 years from now I'm going to count how many times I read that passage on simply session it's probably going to be like 300 times no like a thousand times um anyway so uh today's big news was really, again, major shift in the Overton window. For anyone who doesn't know what that is, that is the acceptable window of discourse.

In the United States, there is currently not only a presidential candidate, but right now, according to the polls and the betting odds, I always trust the betting odds a little bit more. Donald Trump is the favorite to win the 2024 election, right? And he has brought it on, he has brought it up to the political discourse that central bank digital currencies are a bad thing. He's brought that up. Now, I was talking to Nolan from Bitcoin Magazine.

He came on simply like one or two or three episodes ago. And he was talking about the fact that the country is so divided that essentially, and because so many people hate Donald Trump, that anything he says, the other party just takes another stance on it. Right. So there is a probability in the U.S. right now that essentially that the other political party, just to say the exact opposite of what Trump says, would be advocating for central bank digital currencies.

Can you imagine? Absolutely nuts. And how long until Trump brings up Bitcoin, right? Or if he doesn't bring up Bitcoin, what I said was having an anti-Bitcoin stance will be politically unviable by 2028. Now, you say, Nico, that's bullshit. Well, no, let's take a look at the candidates, right? You had Vivek Ramoswami, you had Ron DeSantis, you had RFK Jr. on the other side. All of them stood for Bitcoin and against central bank digital currencies. And you could say, yeah, but Nico, they didn't have a chance of winning. And I'd say, okay, you're right.

But Donald Trump has a big chance of winning. And he has now vocally gone. against CBDCs. Now, why did this happen? I said this in January 17th. I said he definitely talked to Vivek. And then a couple days later, that's exactly what happened. Vivek, he reposted this video of Trump and I'll play it for you guys. But essentially, it was Vivek that alerted Trump. And Vivek's a huge fan of Bitcoin, I might add, that CBDCs are dangerous. And I remember the first time that Trump brought it up to a to a speech, which was this one, he was surprised by the reaction from the crowd. He was like, holy crowd, holy cap, the crowd knows what this is, number one.

And number two, the crowd feels really passionate about this issue. So, of course, he's a politician. What he does, he's bringing it, like, he's like, okay, this is a good talking point. I'm going to keep using this. So anyways, I'll play this clip. And this I do for Vivek. I big into it. I happen to agree with him, but he said, could you mention this?

I will never. He said, I love Vivek. We, I love him too now. I didn't love him when he was running, but I like him now. It's amazing the way you can like somebody when you win, right? But Vivek is great. He's really great. But he wanted this and I'll give him full credit for it.

It is very important, actually. I will never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency. So I mean, that, look, I know a lot of people are like Nico. He didn't advocate for Bitcoin. And I agree with that. Yeah. But again, we've been talking about CBDCs for a long time. And the fact that a candidate that is the favorite, according to the betters and the pollsters right now,

is the favorite to win the 2024 election has just said that if he gets elected president, he is not going to allow the creation of a central bank to do currency. You can hear Christina, or you can see Christine Lagarde shutting a tear right now. This is like major shift in the discourse. This is a big effing win in my opinion, even if he doesn't say Bitcoin directly. And Nolan was predicting that he will say Bitcoin in the next couple months. Right. So anyways, that's my take on that, on all that.

So what I'm curious is, do you think that there could possibly be an instance? Like, okay, let's say it comes down to the actual presidential debates. This gets brought up. What do you think Biden or the puppet representing Biden Biden or the replacement for Biden will respond to? Do you think that they're going to take the opposite stance? Or do you think that they will be like, actually, I agree with Mr. Trump. Like, is that? I think that they're absolutely going to take the opposite stance.

the problem is that there is no freaking argument that is digestible in a short amount of time. Like you have to explain why central banks are a good thing. Right. And like that is not like a, you know, that's not like a powerful stance. Like it's like when Christine Lagarde is like, yeah, we're effed without these CBDCs.

Do we really want to go back to the Wildcat era? It's like, I don't know. Christine Lagarde, I grew up in the central bank era and this has been pretty fucking shitty, right? So what are you talking about, right? I just have to highlight this comment. I already know what Biden will say, Bitcoin, little, little, bad. Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, like, again, it's, it's, it's wild to me that this has actually become a front and center

contentious issue. It was one thing. I was already kind of dumbfounded when it was becoming a presidential issue with like the second, third, and fourth stringers. But now that it's like in the mouths of the frontrunner, it's kind of like, oh, shit, this is actually being thrust on like the entire populace of the U.S. And whether or not Trump is president, it's mostly that the topic is being discussed. And all of a sudden, there's going to be an entire country of people that see that represented as an actual issue.

And there's going to be an entire country of people that begin kind of maybe looking online and saying, okay, well, what the hell is? I need to figure out what the hell this is. And once you start looking, you're going to be seeing a whole lot of shit that's going to make you go, oh, wow, maybe that's not something that I want. And the only people speaking positively about CBDCs are the ones that have, one, destroyed the global economy and two, love power. Yep. And I hope and pray that the average person can just do a quick Google on CBDCs and be like, oh shit, yeah, maybe no, this is not a thing that I would like. Yeah. Like I said, dude, like Ben, like, how do you defend that?

Like, like, think about how do you defend the CBDC? Like, you know, it's like, how do what benefit more than, and then you hear it in their arguments, more efficient. payments. Like that's their argument. It's like more efficient payments. You can Bitcoin is bad. It uses too much energy. But it's like no one believe like no one believes that at this point. So like they don't really have a good reason as to why they the populace should swallow this pill. And then that's like and I think that's an issue for them. Like I think they're really trapped into a corner. Because if not, they would have used the argument by now. Yeah. They would have gone openly and say the CBDC is a good thing because of this, this, and that.

But there is no argument for it. I can't think of one off the top of my head. Like an easily digestible one. You can come up with a whole paragraph as to why CBDC is good. But no, like you need little bullet points for politicians. That's how people remember stuff. Yeah, again, like to come out and say digital payments to the US, you're like everybody's got fucking, like it's like, it's like the height of digital payments in the US. You can do anything you want with anybody and send money to any.

Like, that is not, like, people will see right through that. Oh, it's to make digital payments easy. Everybody's like, I got fucking Venmo and PayPal and like all these different. Like, what do you, what do you mean? No, it's true. It's true, dude. It's true. And, you know, I think, I think they're going to have an uphill battle.

But I think this is a big win for Bitcoiners. Like, I think even if you didn't say Bitcoin directly, I still think that it's a big shit. in the discourse and it's a it's a positive shift anyways Ben I know I'm getting to the top of the hour but it's been an honor like always guys this was your simple sessions I'll see you next week Ben dude good to see you have a good one awesome everybody stick around we got a few quick updates before we round out the show I wanted to give a quick shout out to orange pill app they just dropped something new if you're unfamiliar with orange pill app basically it's a inherently location-based Bitcoin.

I want to say Bitcoin meetup type app where you can go waltz into any city in the globe and say what Bitcoiners are near and basically have a friend anywhere. I use it all the time, especially when I'm traveling. And again, you can just kind of waltz into a city and be like, oh, is there any Bitcoiners here and just be able to have a coffee with them

If you are unaware of a local meetup, it's very handy to plug it in and say like, oh, are there Bitcoiners around me? Anyways, the whole point is they just dropped a new section for merchants. So if you're a Bitcoin merchant, if you have a business that accepts Bitcoin, you can list yourself in the Orange Pill app. And so I've been kind of, you know, I had my local market here that we set up in December. we're doing it again in March. And so I've been trying to share this with everybody that was part of the market to see if they can list themselves there. I've seen a good handful. Some of the farmers and the ranches and the people that sell like eggs and beef and stuff have been signing up there, which is super awesome to see.

So yeah, if you're a merchant and you haven't listed yourself on Orange Pill app, then go do it. In fact, even if you're not on Orange Bill app, number one, I think it's worth it to sign your business up there. But number two, you should also use the other listing sites where you can list yourself. So BTCMap.org and satmap.app.app.app. App. App. So, S-A-T-Map.AP.a-P-P. So OrangePill app, BTCMap.org, and sat-map.app. And so you can list the first two are brick and mortar. So you've got to have a physical location, whereas Sat-Map is more like you can be regional. You can say like, oh, I'm in this area, but I'm kind of, I don't, there's no like fixed address. So you can hire me out or whatever.

So yeah, anyways, I think that's really cool. I'm going to be using it a ton. I'm going to definitely try to frequent the people around me. And I highly encourage any business to list themselves because it's just a super easy way to find nearby places that you can go spend your Bitcoin. Okay. Also, big, big congrats to Peter McCormick. This straight from his Twitter, my lawyers have just confirmed that Craig,

right, has had his final appeal denied by the Supreme Court. It is over. I won. Welcome to law motherfucker. I love it. And he said, I'm going to read a little bit more from his tweet here. Permission to appeal was refused by three Supreme Court justices on the grounds of the appeal did not raise an arguable question of law. This is the end of the line for rights substantive claim against me. Five years of hell over, small amount of hell to deal with on costs, but still we did it. I have so many people to thank my lawyers, my brother, Hodlenot, all the people who reached out with support, the people who helps with some of the costs, you know who you are. Now we turn to our brothers, Hodlanaut and Cobra Bitcoin, and the businesses and developers still under attack.

No mercy. Let's finish them. Fuck. Yeah. Again, this, they tried to settle the COPA case, which is coming up in a couple weeks. Copa, basically, said, no, we are taking this all the way to the end. We're putting it through court. And from my understanding, this trial that's going to happen in the next couple of weeks is basically diving into the, is this person actually Satoshi? Like, where's the proof? Give me sauce. And so that's going to be super exciting to see him try to navigate that. And they're already just poking massive of amounts of holes through all of the documents submitted by Craig. And I can't wait to see this go through because it feels like shit is finally hitting the fan and good.

It's deserved. Moving on. Heads up. If you use a treasurer or have purchased treasurer or use their support or whatever, there is some unauthorized access to their email. So you probably might have received some sort of a. fishing email that reads, dear customer, this email is to let you know that your wallet assets are undergoing an upgrade an effort to upgrade our infrastructure where you temporarily

disabling the following networks, and it lists Bitcoin and a bunch of shitcoins. We are requiring action from our users to reenable the networks. Important failure to upgrade your networks could result in full funds loss and then it hyperlinks to some fishing site or whatever. Anyways, that's unfortunate. It's also very unfortunate that the person had actually access to their main email account. And it says, Zach XPT said, fishing emails currently being sent out that appeared to be from CoinTelegraph, Wallet Connect, token terminal, and defy team emails. It's 580K stolen so far.

So yeah, just as a Bitcoin, be vigilant. Don't go and just click links and give up your seed phrase. It's like all of these things are trying to fish from you. So again, as always, don't trust, verify. Moving on, seed hammer. If you're unfamiliar, this thing's really cool. Basically, it's like it can engrave a seed plate. So it puts your seed in, but also does like a scanable QR code for your private key.

And then on the other side, it can have like a public key and a bunch of other information. You can also do like a multi-sig setup where the quorum is actually. actually split into three pieces, like a two of three as well. So you can reconstitute the wallet and sign with any two of the three pieces. Anyways, they just had an update that allows you to fiddle with the order of which you do things. So we've now released version 1.2.0 of the Seed Hammer software. This has many good updates, a rather big change in workflow in order to support highly anticipated feature requests.

Basically, you can invert the interface to seed first. Up till now, they've always required the descriptor of the wallet first, and then the seed second when backing up multi-sig wallets. This release inverse the interface flow to ask for the seed first. Anyways, awesome. I'm going to be playing around with this. I have it. It's like a big-ass machine.

You can get order plates and everything. I put up a little teaser video on it, but I plan on doing a video on it in the coming weeks. It should be fun. Either way, congrats on the update. Looking forward to future updates from my. them as well. I just wanted to mention that there's an update to Primal on Android for Nostr. And this falls in line with what they were doing on iPhone as well. And it has like an actual

native integrated lightning wallet, which is actually really cool. So I think of Primal as like a super awesome and easy way for a newcomer to onboard not only to Noster, but also to Bitcoin. And reason being is it's just kind of all automated. You get in there, you generate your key. And then you can also just from the actual app, you hit, there's like a little zap button in the middle. And that takes you to your native wallet. And you can just hit buy. And it'll default to, like I'm in Canada. So I don't know what the defaults in the US would be. But it gave me, basically said, buy $599 worth of Bitcoin. And it just goes through either your, uh, Apple Pay or your Google Pay account and we'll just use the credit card on file and buy you like five bucks worth five or six bucks worth of Bitcoin and it'll go directly into your primal wallet, which you can then use to zap people. And you can also send to any external lightning wallet that you want in the background. So keep in mind that the wallet in primal is a custodial lightning wallet, which again, the default is you're buying five bucks worth of Bitcoin. So you're not, don't worry. You're not.

losing your life savings there. It's meant just for like tiny little tips. But it's a nice kind of inroads for somebody to just open an app, create a profile, have it already linked to a payment method and get five bucks with a Bitcoin that they can then zap around and go, oh, geez, I can like pay people on social media. Cool. It worked very well for me, super simple. Like a couple of taps. I didn't have to do any sort of K. YC or anything. It just worked. Obviously, like, it's linked to a credit card that's associated with me. So there's that. But it just kind of seamlessly seemed to work very, very well. Zapp seemed really easy. I sent externally to a different lightning wallet. You can also, of course, if somebody obtains Bitcoin can send into the wallet. But yeah, and then you

also do have the option to switch the native wallet and use an external wallet if you so choose. And so I imagine a lot of people watching this will be like, well, I have my own. preference of wallet. I'll link that one instead. So either way, uh, congrats to primal on that update. Uh, also this one's big. I'm, I'm very excited about this. I held off on doing a video on Aqua until they open sourced it and it is now open source code as of two days ago. And so if you're unfamiliar, Aqua basically is a new Bitcoin wallet. It has on-chain Bitcoin and then it has, um, a cohesive, they call it like layer two Bitcoin, but it's kind of a mix of liquid and lightning in one. What's actually happening in the

background is it defaults to liquid and then it swaps in and out. But at the end of the day, what you have capabilities of doing is sending and receiving both lightning and liquid with a single unified balance. So I'm very excited about that. And they also added dark mode, which is really cool. and iPhone now has the functionality so that you can swap between on-chain Bitcoin and liquid and liquid and vice versa. So that's awesome. And I'm going to be playing around with this and I'm going to be doing a tutorial next week. So keep your eyes open for that. But either way, I mean, this is kind of becoming, I think it's kind of becoming my day-to-day, just like spending wallet. Yeah, it's kind of taken that place. I, of course, like Phoenix, it's that and Phoenix. It's that and

Phoenix side by side. If I need to be a bit more nimble, then I'll send from Aqua to Phoenix. And Phoenix is kind of like my main lightning wallet. So that's kind of where I'm at with that right now. Anyways, check it out and keep your eyes peeled next week. Also, I dropped a tutorial earlier this week for CoinOS. It's cool.

Works, works easily. Again, I like the unified balance and you can also onboard really quickly. I consider this one more of like a brand newbie just playing around for the first time, just trying to get your head around transactions because, of course, it is, it's fully open source, but it's also custodial. So take that for what it is. But nonetheless, very easy to set up.

And the thing that was appealing is that it, again, also in a single unified balance, on chain, lightning, and liquid, all three, all in one. you can deposit or accept payments in all forms, and then you can withdraw in whatever form you want. So it's just kind of all seamless altogether. The other thing I was going to say is it has kind of like a merchant point of sale type screen. So it's really easy to have on like a tablet or just a phone and type in an amount and have somebody pay the equivalent amount in your local currency. It's also, it's not on the app store, but it would be a progressive web app.

So if you go onto it on your phone from your browser and you hit the little buttons in the top right of your browser, you can hit, I think on iPhone, it's saved a home screen on Android. It's install app. But it basically gives a little logo and everything, clickable logo on your home screen. And then it'll also open up without the address bar and all that stuff. So, yeah, worth playing around with. Don't put any meaningful amount of funds in there. If you were using it as a merchant, I would say that would be okay over the course of the day

and then withdraw every single day into a wallet you use self-control. Yeah, that's kind of my take on that one. And then finally, tomorrow, why are we bullish? Daniel Batten, Michelle Weekly, Rob Wallace from BitcoinNews.com. Very excited to have them all on. It should be a lot of fun. That is tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. Do not miss it.

Go, go set a reminder. And that's it. Anyways, guys, I'm going to finish up here. Thank you so much for joining myself and Nico. If you're not subscribed to Simply, of course, please go do that. They are awesome. If you want to help with the show, like, subscribe, share, all those things super important. They help get this show in front of more eyeballs.

If you want to help in another way, hit up the sponsors I mentioned down below. And finally, again, if you need any additional help, you've been working through some tutorials, and maybe you just need that actual handholding and that reciprocal, am I doing this right? Or being able to ask little questions as you're learning something, wallets, hardware, multi-sig, privacy, running a note, whatever it may be. Feel free to reach out to me. There's a QR code on the screen that you can scan. It'll take you right to a spot where you can book me for private one-on-one education sessions

or you can just head to my website, btccessions.ca. C.A. Anyways, with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. And I'll see you guys next time for your simply session.