BTC Sessions - Is it happening? ep387

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

In today's explosive Bitcoin news round-up, we're diving into a whirlwind of developments that could reshape the Bitcoin landscape in 2024. The buzz is all about the possible imminent approval of a Bitcoin ETF, a game-changer for investor access and confidence. Meanwhile, experts are hurling wild Bitcoin price predictions for 2024, promising a rollercoaster of potential highs and lows. In a curious twist, Jim Cramer's reputation as the perfect inverse price indicator continues to amuse and mystify. More seriously, Missouri is stepping up with a bill aimed at protecting the right to self-custody, signaling a growing recognition of digital asset rights. The IRS isn't far behind, tightening its grip with a new rule requiring reports for every transaction over $10k. And in a bold move, Michael Saylor announces plans to convert a whopping $216m of MicroStrategy stock options into Bitcoin, further solidifying his stance as a Bitcoin visionary. Stay tuned as we unpack these stories, offering insights and implications for Bitcoin enthusiasts and investors alike. 💪 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 Book me for one-on-one private sessions to learn about wallets, hardware, multisig, privacy, nodes and much more.  https://www.btcsessions.ca/

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. We're back after Christmas holidays. I hope you all had a great holiday season, new year, all of that. But we're back. We're back with another Simply Sessions. Niko here to fill us in on all the latest and greatest. What's going on in Bitcoin? Plenty to cover, but I'm glad to have you all back. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Let me know in that live chat, how you guys have been doing what you've been. up to over holidays, everything. But of course, this is, and by the way, did you guys catch the Christmas special? If not, go back. It was, it was the longest show I've ever done. It clocked in at six hours and 40 some odd minutes. Insane.

Anyways, it was a blast. Go back and watch it a lot of great panels. It was a lot of fun. But of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay.

We'll do it live. Do it live. I can write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things super important. Little like button just below the channel right now. Smash that, share this on whatever socials you may be on. And of course, subscribe. Help me in my mission.

I want to hit 100K subscribers by the end of this year. I was doing the math. If we keep up the same pace, I can do it before the end of the year. So help me get there, hit that subscribe button. Without further ado, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your Simply session. Before we bring in Nika, let's take a look at where we are in the market right. And now I am pulling up.

Timechain Calendar.com. Also, simultaneously, I am pulling up the live chat overlay. Everything from now on that you type into the chat will be live for the world to see for better or worse. So let's dive into it. Timechain Calendar.com. We're sitting at $44,33 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will grab you. 2,256 sats. In terms of fees, we are down a fair amount. Double digits. You don't get to see that very often these days. We're sitting at 57 sats per byte next block. Memple is purging anything south of 23 sats per byte looks like. And in terms of Bitcoin mined, 19.59 million of the

That's 93.29% of the entire supply. Shout out to sponsors of the show hoddlehottle.com if you're stacking sats. And you have some priorities in mind like peer to peer trading, instant self-custy, no KYC. This is the place to be. You can sign up with just an email address. Once you're there, you choose a currency payment method and an amount and you can start browsing offers immediately. Also this year, they're adding both lightning network and liquid network so you can make your choice of how best to transact. We've also got peer-to-peer trading or lending, rather, with no re-hypification.

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So if you want to reserve the cold card queue or pick up anything else that I mentioned, head to coin CoinKite.com. Use code BTC sessions for, I believe, eight or nine percent off. I never know these things. Anyways, you get a discount at checkout with code BTC sessions at coinc.com. Seedore, of course, backups are important. This is a steel option. One of the most robust and beautifully designed on the market to keep your seed phrases secure from the elements like fire, water, corrosion, you name it. They have these full starter sets with mallets. They are robust as hell. And you can, of course, back up your seeds in their capsule and disc design. If you need to swap out a seed, just get some more discs.

Very cheap to replace. Anyways, check them out. Links are down below depending on where you are shipping to. Last couple here, Nunchuk has you covered with your assisted multisig needs. Very easy to set up on your mobile device with things like the tap signer, cold card, and plenty of other hardware options. Once you set up, you hold three keys. Nunchuk holds one.

and you have full baked-in inheritance planning so that your stats get to your next of kin, if anything should happen to you. If you want to check out my full tutorial, you can head over and find it on YouTube and head over to nunchuk.io to check them out. And finally, shout it to start on your sovereign computing solution. These guys have plug-and-play devices

to host your Bitcoin stack and your sovereign computing stack. So things like Bitcoin Core, Lightning nodes, mempool.com, join market. Also, files, passwords, photos, nostriles, and clients, as well as AI tools and plenty more. They have everything running from the server light, which is your entry level, all the way up to what I'm running, which is the server pure or pro. And that thing is an absolute beast. So check them out, start9.com.

And with that, enough of my rambling. Let's get Nico in here so we can start chatting news. Dude, it is good to see you. How is your holiday, man? it was terrible because our tips got desynced and you know we had so much to catch up on and talk about and I missed you bro so it was it was very bad because I started getting withdraws I started looking at I would go on a binge of tutorials happens just to get refreshed I know but my holiday was great I got to like actually go to the beach and like I wouldn't wake up

up at three in the morning and check my slack. So that was like a very refreshing. I don't think I've felt that way in years. So yeah, in that sense, it was great. It was really great. That's awesome, man. Well, I'm glad to have you back. We started the show late because we were just catching up with each other backstage. I think more of that's needed. But for everybody that's been waiting, I guess we may as well dive into the news, what's been going on, all of that. So I'll bring up your screen here. But what's been going on, man? What is top of mind as of late? So let me share the correct window. So I apologize about that. So to give a little bit of context, we always talk about this on Simply Sessions. There's this context. There's this concept in political philosophy.

It's called the Overton window. And essentially what it is is the acceptable window of discourse within a population, right? So on the very top, you have unthinkable, you have radical, you have acceptable, you have sensible, you have popular, you have policy. Our goal as Bitcoiners is to shift that overton window. So concepts like ending the central bank or, you know, separating money from state, it isn't so radical anymore. It starts to become acceptable. It starts to become sensible. And this isn't something that is not achievable. This is something that, has been proven in Argentina. I said this as a as a joke tweet. I said now we have a now we have a template guys all we need is for hyperinflation and then barabing barabum you get a libertarian

candidate who is chainsawing central banks down to the ground elected right so anyways I wanted to bring that up before I played this video of Dave Smith he's a very famous comedian and he went on this very popular, Ben, you're a YouTuber like me, so you know what this channel is, valutainment, great content, good podcast as well. And Dave Smith went on valutainment, and he said the quiet part out loud. He said something that we all know in our hearts as bitquiners, but unlike the political parties, right, whether it's the liberals or the conservatives, we actually have a solution and that solution has nothing to do with voting. Maybe it is something to do with voting, but not voting as how people conceptualize voting,

but voting by taking self-custody of your money. That's how you can actually change the system. So anyways, I'll let you guys, let's play the clip and we'll talk about it. What we need today in the United States more than anything is the separation of money and the state, the separation of banking and the state. This is the cause of so many of our problems. right now is that the currency is controlled by the government. This allows us to spend way beyond our means to pull things off that we could never pull off if the government wasn't just printing

money out of thin air. The entire idea that we're going to go around and occupy foreign countries for 20 years in the Middle East with nothing to show for it, try doing that if you had to actually tax the people. Try gaining popular support for that if every month people had to pay for the war in Afghanistan. That thing would have been over by Christmas of 2001. The same thing with the lockdowns. I mean, try maintaining the lockdowns if you couldn't just print up trillions of dollars in 2020. There's no way it could have been done.

The Federal Reserve and the money printing is the lifeblood of the Leviathan. That's what we need to attack. What we need today. So I mean- Damn. Like, okay, fine, he says all these things, but there's no solution. Bitcoiners actually have a solution. That solution is Bitcoin, right?

Yeah. So I don't know, bro, what are your thoughts? I mean, he sounds like a Bitcoin, everybody didn't mention Bitcoin. Yeah. Well, I mean, he's previously mentioned Bitcoin, if I'm not mistaken. I've seen him touch on it plenty of times. It seems like he gets, I mean, he gets the problem, clearly. And I feel like, I feel like he's onto the solution, if not, hasn't already figured it out.

But I guess I haven't seen enough of his like online interaction and tweets about on the subject to really know like how in tune with the solution he is. But like all we need is a lot of people to understand the problem as he described. And you'll have more than the the necessary number to make that shift. 100%. 100%. So yeah. I mean, it also falls down to not only. us content creators, Ben, but really to everyone listening in the audience, like, you are the

frontline soldiers in this information narrative trench warfare. Like, it really falls down to you to educate the masses, to not get people, not allow people to get distracted by the left and the right dichotomy and the liberals and the conservatives. It's because it's just a horse and pony show. It really, like, it really is. And just to really wake people up to like, look, your economic woes are not caused by the liberals. or the conservatives. It is literally caused because of broken money. And I think that if we do this,

if we wake enough people up, I think that liberals, conservatives, communists, the people on the other side, whatever, they're all going to put their differences aside. I really believe that. Maybe it's fucking naive of me to believe that. But I really believe that a lot of the differences are caused because of the unintended consequences

of broken money. So I truly believe in my heart that if we fix the money, we fix the world. Yeah. And it's not that there aren't disagreements. It's that those disagreements are when in the act of trying to resolve them, there are much less dire consequences. And they can go much, not nearly as far as they go today, where it's just perpetual war. And you can just these cataclysms go on forever and people further divide. I think it becomes much more nuanced.

I think it becomes much more, you know, a Bitcoin standard, the interesting part is there's a lot of different people that see Bitcoin is solving different problems. And in fact, there's a lot of different not ideologically aligned people in terms of like on a political spectrum that all see Bitcoin as the solution. So in that instance, I don't care of somebody that has. has completely different ideals than me sees Bitcoin as the solution because them liking it and using it and helping it go further actually helps me and what I view as the problems being solved. So, you know, hooray, if you don't like me and my ideas, but you like Bitcoin, then great. I love that you love it. 100%. It's almost as if you're talking about aligned incentives, you know? And what's crazy

is what happens when you align the incentives all of a sudden these people that you would think would never get along or just like you know what you're different than i am but it's okay we can coexist right um so yeah anyways so in mother nature ben uh there's these laws right like the law of gravity right you can't change it uh and it is impossible you know i can't think of any other laws but there's these law. It's just it is. Gravity is. Right. There's this other law that perhaps a lot of people don't know about this law.

But it's the law of the inverse Jim Kramer. It's never broken. It's a fact of life. It is something that we must accept. Since the dom of time, I think. Since the dom of time. Right. And Jim Kramer, he said something positive about

Bitcoin. And I think you commented because Ben, you knew what was coming. This is, by the way, Sophie's account my computer broke. But you knew what was coming, Ben. You knew. And I'll play the clip. I'll play it in 1.25 times of speed. And, uh, all right, ahead of the open, which is about two minutes from now. Take a look at Bitcoin. About $45,000. That would be the first time since April of 22. Since April of 22, you can see. And obviously it had a great year last year. Yeah, we got that clearing event of Sandbanking Free going down. And that

seem to make people feel, you know, what, we're saving in the ETF. We continue to wait for ETS. And, yeah, look, it's very rare that I've ever seen that this way it's, it could be a waiting for Godot? I mean, no, there won't be an ETF. But I do think that the people who are in it for that are going to use that as a chance to sell. This thing is, you can't kill it.

Oh, can't. And the late Charlie Munger, who was so brilliant on so many things was blind to this. Now you can say, wait a second, maybe it's all going to come around. Okay. So can't kill it. And what happened? See this giant dump right here? This literally happened the day after he said that.

Now, to be fair, it did recover and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But once again, the law of Inverse Jim Kramer is never broken. Okay. So what actually caused that dip? Because you have to connect the dots with other things. Hold on. Can I interject with one? You can interject whenever you want, Ben.

All right, I got it. I got to, I have to, I, I started off the year with a fucking banger of a tweet. Because I made this meme and, and I can't not share it on the show. So it's Jim Kramer. And he said, that's a nice asset you've got there. It would be a shame if I were to speak positively about it. So anyways, I, this thing. I got 411,000 views.

Dude. Because the Inverse Kramer, it's like the new it's going to be May. Like it's equally as prolific in my, in my opinion, inverse Kramer is just universally accepted as like the next big meme. So anyways, shut out to everybody that came out. Dude, it is just, it's so effing crazy, man. It's so crazy. Okay. So what actually caused this? Like, what was the deal? Like, why did this drop? And like, what's the significance of it if the price of Bitcoin recovered the way it did? And we'll get to all that. So there's this publication called Matrix Port. We'll get to who owns it in a little bit. But dig on to say Matrix on Target has been bullish against consensus expectations in 2020. predicted earlier in the year that Bitcoin could reach $45,000 by Christmas. We expected that if all the SEC requirements for Bitcoin Spot, ETS were fulfilled, Bitcoin could rally towards 50,000 by the end of January 2024.

While we have seen frequent meetings between the ETF applicants and staff from the SEC, which resulted in the applicants refiling their applications, we believe all applications fall short of a critical requirement that must be met before the SEC approves. This might be fulfilled by Q2 2024, but we expect the SEC to reject all proposals in January. The current five-person voting commissioners leadership critical for the ETF approval of the SEC is dominated by Democrats. SEC Chair Gensler is not embracing crypto in the U.S. and it might even be a very long shot to expect that he would vote to approve Bitcoin

spot ETFs. An ETF would certainly enable crypto overall to take off, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, etc. architecture. Okay. So this was the article that was released. This is the FUD that made the price drop. It was either that or the law of the inverse Jim Kramer.

Who knows? I personally believe it was the law of the inverse Jim Kramer. versus Jim Kramer. But hot or not, the space cat, did some digging. And it seems like they A-B tested these goddamn articles, which is absolutely hilarious, right? So here it's like Bitcoin Spot ETF approval, Imminent Bitcoin to Jump to 50,000. Why the SEC will reject Bitcoin Spot ETFs again. Same publication on the same day.

Same day. And then Nick Can't Mind, who's head of news and the genius behind the Bitcoin magazine, Twitter, by the way, a massive. amazing meme, coin Telegraph intern, Matrix, for an intern. So absolutely hilarious. For anyone who's not in the know, Coin Telegraph released a fake article that it was approved, and that actually was the catalyst for the recent Bitcoin price run-up.

Now, of course, all this turned out to be complete and utter BS. Here's Eleanor Tourette. She works for Fox Business, and I just clicked on her profile. And she said, the SEC is holding meetings today with the exchanges, NASDAQ, CBOE, New York Stock Exchange, to finalize comments on the 19B4Fs submitted by the Bitcoin spot ETF issuers. Nick, again, once again, is trolling, MatrixPort, in turn, in disbelief. Absolutely hilarious. And here's Joe Colossari.

He contributes, he's a lawyer, and he contributes a lot to legal input on Bitcoin Twitter. And he said, just a reminder, folks, the comment period doesn't end for some spot from ETF applicants until midnight on January 5th. Although the ETF applicants may know earlier, very unlikely the public knows anything before next week. And then, then we have a tech crunch reporter. Shout out Swan Media. And she said, quote, heard from sources extremely close to the matter that the Bitcoin

Spot ETF is going to be approved by the SEC for multiple firms applications expecting something tomorrow. So after everything that we just went through, I could tell you this. No one has any idea what the fuck is going on. 100%. But the market is really excited. And just depending on a FUD article

or a bullish article, it literally moves the price like 10, 15%. And that just tells me for a fact that no one has any idea what's going on and this is all speculation. But this doesn't affect you if you just stay humble, stack,

and stay solid. I mean, that's exactly it. Like, it's, sure, it's fun to talk about everything that's going on

because it's like, it is kind of, like, it, for individuals that are just stacking sats, staying humble, you know, putting your DCA away over time,

like, this does not materially affect your behaviors. I would hope it does not, to affect your behaviors because you've got a longer time horizon than shit that's going to happen next week and trying to speculate on it. But it is super fun to kind of look at it because in the grand scheme of things, it is kind of like a seminal moment in Bitcoin that the suits are like, oh, shit, this has value. We better pile in. So at the end of the day, though, like, you know, don't buy the ETF, like, stay X-Sat, stay humble.

do what you were doing. And nobody has a real clue as to what's going to happen because the number of times that people have said like, this is for sure happening on this day or this is never going to happen or whatever. I mean, we just went through four different examples of people, two of them from the same source telling you what's going to happen in either direction. Yeah. I mean, anybody who tells you anything about what's going to happen in the future is

likely pulling it out of their ass. So I don't know. Nothing has really changed. But depending on the yes or no that we get in the coming days, there will likely be a temporary move of Bitcoin rapidly in one direction. And that will not matter at all because in general, the direction over a longer time frame is up into the right. Yep, exactly. So I think you hit the nail on the head, dude. Like, this is entertainment. If you're saying humble stacking sats, like, this doesn't affect you, right? Like, you're just looking at this and you're like, oh, this is, this is crazy. This is the Bitcoin world, you know? But again, like, no one has any idea what's going on. But it's sure, boy, does get people to click on videos and click on tweets and get likes and get engagement and all this stuff. Everyone's waiting for this to get approved. And I just don't think anyone, I don't even, like, I

just like I don't think anyone actually knows. Like I just don't believe that, right? Um, like I would say, okay, it's around the corner, but like, I don't believe that either. Right. Let's see, let's see. When it happens, it happens. Anyways, so this is the first episode of the year. And because it's the first episode of the year, we never speculate on Simply sessions, but we have people that are going to speculate for us. Um, and then, uh, Ben, I'm going to put you in the hot seat. So, and again, I just want to preface this with, no one has any idea where the price of Bitcoin's going to be tomorrow, the day after or a year from now. All we know is that historically it has gone up and to the right, like Ben said. That disclaimer being said, a lot of people are throwing their price predictions for 2024 what they expect.

And at the top of the list, we have the Chad sailor, which is crazy. like he's even fallen into all this. And he put out a poll. And he said in 2024, how high do you expect Bitcoin's price to soar? 34% of the poll said 100,000. 27% of the poll said 200,000. Simply put out a poll about three days ago. I typoed this.

I meant to put 2025. But the question was, what will be the next cycle peak in 2024, 2025? 26% voted 300K. and 26% voted 150K. Now, moving on to this, because I think this is like a common theme that we're hearing this cycle,

and I think American Hoddle really hit the nail on the head, which is, dude, what are you thinking when you say Bitcoin can go to a million this cycle? Don't you know what you're, don't you know you were just wrong? You said 500K last cycle. Why should anyone take you seriously? What makes you think it's going to a million?

What indicators are you seeing? And it's squirtle, the Pokemon, playing a saxophone. So absolutely hilarious. And then I'll end it with this, which is cycle theory isn't backed by anything. This isn't enough data to infer anything from these patterns. And, you know, you have the 80, you have the left of the bell curve, three greens, one red. And then you have the super smart people saying three greens, one red. So anyways, to start off the year with a little bit of spice, Ben, I am a big believer of the cycle theory.

And, you know, those are some crazy predictions, bro. You know, I think 10x from here, 20x from here is just fucking inconceivable. So, yeah, I mean, look, not to put any words in our mouth because we don't do that. But according to this poll by Sailor 100K, and according to this poll by Simply Bitcoin, either 300k or 150K. So what are your thoughts on all this? I honestly, so now after years of being around Bitcoin,

I like the idea of under promise and over-deliver. So I like the idea of expecting less and being pleasantly surprised with more. And so I do think that there's a number of things that are culminating that we haven't had culminating before. Number one, having number two, ETF probably like even if it's not now, it's going to be at some point this year. Number three, the fact that we're coming out of fiscal tightening into, you know, rate cuts and easing and probably more money printer go burr. There's all these things that are kind of happening simultaneously.

So like the person that's trying to be conservative in my head is like, you know, brace yourself for a disappointing upside and diminishing returns. But the bulltard in me is like LFG, multiple hundreds of K all that kind of so so I don't really know what to expect and and honestly like

whatever I see more sentiment of I'm inclined to believe the opposite the opposite right and what are we seeing the sentiment of this this cycle Ben it's bearish it's bearish yeah and and keep it that way great if yeah if people like in my opinion people saying like 100k 150k top

is that That's basically like diminishing returns kind of cycle theory, right? Yeah. Like 2017 was insane. We went from $1,000 to $20 in a calendar year. 2021 was really not. I mean, we went from 20 to 68, 69, right? It was the China ban.

It was the China ban. They just ended the party. And the diminished actual, the removal of demand by FTX as well. Yeah, exactly. Like money was flooding in that was meant to buy Bitcoin and they were just like, it was it real Bitcoin. Checkmark.

Here's your, here's your ledger entry. So I don't know if this is Canute, Svenholm, in the chat, but he did say something. And, you know, when Canute speaks, what are these predictions for ants? I'm sorry, I can't do the accent, but that is absolutely effing hilarious. I'm trying to find it now. Shit. Oh, there we go.

There you go. There we go. Hey, Canute. It's good to see you, man. Hey, Canute. So, okay, so we now know where Canute stands. Okay. All right.

So we won't do that for the rest of the year. You know, we like to stick to the news and not the price prediction. Like the rest of a lot of content creators focus on. that. Okay. Anyways, so this is another big deal. So just to kind of give everyone a bit of context, because without context, I think this is just a big nothing burger. We have the attack on self-custody. That's what's happening in the United States. That's what's happening in Europe. You're hearing these terms like unhosted wallet. Just I've never seen that word in the Bitcoin white paper. So it's made up. It's made by politicians that are really, really scared of individuals taking self-custody.

because if you take self-custody, the state can't just confiscate your wealth either via a currency de-basement or straight-up confiscation easily. It makes it actually pretty difficult for them. So in the United States, Elizabeth Warren has gotten 20 senators to co-sign her bill that would effectively kill Bitcoin in the United States. It would kill your right to self-custody. it would make it illegal for you to write down 12 words, as crazy as it sounds. It would make it, it would force miners to K-Y-C the transactions, which is impossible. Elizabeth Warren knows that, so it would be a de facto ban on mining. And she has 20 senators.

There's 100 senators in the U.S. Senate. She's gotten 20% of senators to sign on, and she's got in both Democrats and Republicans. So I just want to preface it with that. But here's the thing about the U.S. The states have sovereignty. So just because something becomes law on a federal level, on a state level, that's not necessarily the case. A great example of this is the marijuana industry. So marijuana remains illegal on a federal level, but on a state level, it's actually legal in certain states like California, like Colorado.

And those states have giant industries. They have, there's very, very big marijuana. marijuana companies. And they exist, even though something is illegal on a federal level. So how do you protect the right to self-custody? What do you do? You put the right to self-custody into law. So I know Wyoming has passed this. And I know that, you know, Dennis Porter with the Satoshi Action Fund, he's been pushing this really, really hard on multiple states. So this is Missouri State Representative, Phil. I'm not even going to pronounce that last name Crystal Finnelli introduce a groundbreaking bill as the digital bill of rights.

The legislation ensures individuals have the right to self-custody Bitcoin and eliminate state capital gains tax for Bitcoin transactions under $200. Now here's the thing, guys, like, why, like the whole idea of paying capital gains tax on your Bitcoin when you're using Bitcoin as money, like if you think about it, it's like, wait a second. So I'm being penalized because I'm choosing to use a better money. Like, and now I have to pay the difference because your money is designed to lose purchasing. Like, it kind of exposes the racket, right? Here is into the details. I'm going to try not to read the entire thing because it's very long. But Dennis Porter breaks it down. He says, pro-Bitcoin bill protecting your rights to self-custody mine

and access Bitcoin has officially been introduced in the state of Missouri. As promised, Satoshi Action Fund is winning political battles for Bitcoin adoption and state legislators across the United States. What does this bill do to advance Bitcoin in the U.S.? Prohibits the state from borrowing you from using self-custody secure Bitcoin? Prohibits the state from borrowing you from purchasing saving or transacting Bitcoin. Prohibits the state from borrowing you from mining Bitcoin. Prevents the state from discriminating against Bitcoin miners. Eliminates state capital gains tax applied to $200 Bitcoin transactions.

Protects your ability to use Lightning Network and other layer two solutions. guarantees your sovereign ability to run a note. Once Missouri passes this bill into law, it will lead the nation in protecting Bitcoin rights. Now, here's the thing. DeSantis in Florida passed a bill that made CBDCs illegal. So you have to understand, like, from the political perspective,

the more these laws get passed on a state level, even if the federal government is done, enough to pass like an anti-Bitcoin legislation, that doesn't necessarily mean that an individual states they're going to enforce that law because it's against their laws themselves, right? And the marijuana industry is an example of that, right? And I'm sure there's other industries as well as well, examples of that as well. So this is just very, this is very interesting how this is playing out. It's almost as if the smaller jurisdictions are standing up for Bitcoin. And the big centralized jurisdictions that most benefit from fiat money are the enemies of bitcoin but

this political battle is just fascinating like how this is playing out is really really interesting i i love the fracturing of this i love the um move towards i mean and and the united states was built on the premise of more local governance like state by state um but i love seeing a bit of a reclaiming of that and a push to to kind of get out from under the boot of the feds. And I mean, we're seeing not, I mean, not in this context, but we're seeing similar things kind of play out in Canada with various provinces here as well. But again, the marijuana industry is a perfect example in the states. even such that, I mean, Jack Mallors, his impetus for creating Zab and then subsequently

strike was to solve the problem of his parents running a dispensary in Colorado, but not being able to have banking, having to deal with cash all the time, and the excessive cost of having to secure it because they could have no bank account for the business. So he basically incentivized people to in store have something that where they could be exposed to dollars, but then the business could receive Bitcoin on their end. Like what, what more impetus could you need for that? Right. Like it's, it's such a great thing to see.

So yeah, I'm all for this individual states saying, fuck you, you know, we're going to protect ourselves. 100% and it's beautiful to see and it's it's what you said about how the the US is structured like it's it's it's really cool how this is playing out and uh we'll see we'll see how it turns out anyways i do want to end it with this uh michael sailor uh absolutely just michael sailoring um and uh said michael sailor commences plan to sell 216 million dollars with the micro strategy shares goes on to say the executive chairman Michael Saylor began to sell $260 million worth of company shares on Tuesday according to regulatory filing with the SEC. The document shows that

Saylor intends to sell 310,000 shares. These shares were awarded as stock options in 2014 and were set to expire in April 2024. The sales plan was disclosed was the sales plan was disclosed a couple months ago with sailors saying during micro strategy's third quarter earnings that, oh no, I clicked on the thing. Holy cow. A lot of the thing. Anyways, that he plans to sell 5,000 shares per trading day commencing on January 2nd and continuing over four months subject to a minimum price condition, et cetera, et cetera. Now, but here's the video, okay? And you have to understand something about the video. This is a very serious interview, okay? Like, this isn't just, like, Nico

Ben, you could be serious when you try, but this isn't like Nico or Opti or like just going in there and just like a Bitcoin or fucking slavery and blah blah, blah, no, no, no. He has to remain like calm, collected. This is how things are. You know, things are very serious.

This is a very serious question that I'm being asked. But boy, dude, does he put his giant shlong on the table when he responds. and it's such a badass response. So let's check it out. And the first question is for Michael.

The 10-Q discloses that Michael entered into a 10B-5-1 plan to exercise micro-strategy stock options. Can you please provide further color on the plan and the thought process? Sure. Yeah, thanks for that question. I was granted a stock option in 2014 with respect to 400,000 shares, which is going to expire next April if I don't exercise it by then. For almost a decade now, at my request, the company has only paid me a $1 salary, and I have chosen not to be eligible for any cash bonuses. Exercising this option will allow me to address

some financial obligations as well as to acquire additional Bitcoin for my personal account. under my trading plan i plan to exercise and sell 5,000 shares on each trading day beginning on january second 2024 and ending on april 25th subject to a minimum price condition this means the sale will take place over almost four months if you'd like more details about the plan i would refer you to the 10q i continue to be optimistic about micro strategy's prospect and should note that my equity stake in the company after these sales will remain very significant. So the key there is, I'm going to buy Bitcoin, fiat. For my personal position, I just want I have some financial obligations. And also, I'm just going to buy a fuckload of Bitcoin.

That's what he said. Like, that's what he said in corporate speak. Literally, that's, that's what he said in corporate speak. I'm just letting you know, gentlemen, I'm going to buy an F ton of Bitcoin with the shares. And then like he just backed to seriousness. But dude, that was just like the biggest boss move I've ever seen. And, uh, you know, shout out to the Chad sailor. But anyways, uh, that was today's news, Ben. Uh, I hope we, we covered a lot, man. A lot, a lot of stuff happening this week in, in Bitcoin land. And, uh, happy to be happy to see you. Uh, the Christmas show was amazing. Bro, thank you so much for, inviting me. It was great.

Guys, if you haven't seen it, check it out. And subscribe to Sessions channel so he can break 100K in 2024. And love you, Ben. Thank you so much for having me. Guys, this was your Simply Sessions. I'll see you next week, Ben. See you, man. Awesome.

And everybody, stick around because we are going to blast through a few tech updates here. Of course, if you're here and you're not subscribed to Simply Bitcoin, please do. They cover the news six days a week, and they're killing it every single day. But with that, let's dive into what's been going on. I wanted to highlight this. It's actually from Jameson Lopp. He created a tool, but I'll give context with a quote here from

James and Lop. Since Bitcoin transaction fees are based not on the value being transacted, but upon data size of the transaction, it can become very important to ensure that your wallet balance has not been composed of many low-value UTXOs, given the recent rise in transaction fees. An economically unspendable UTXO is a UTXO that costs more to spend than it is worth. To this end, I'm releasing a new tool for calculating the cost of spending a given UTXO,

which is really cool. So this tool here, basically you choose what is the script type that you're using, So things like taproot or legacy addresses, whatever, you select it. You select how many signatures required as in like, you know, is it a multi-sig, so and so forth. And then you calculate based on this. So this is like a one-of-one transaction. Okay.

So the size of this transaction would be 158 bytes. what would the fee rate be or what would the cost be based on certain fee rates? And it says right now, you know, 100, sometimes it can exceed 100 bytes. 100 sats per byte would be the recommended fee. So like right now, recommended fee, next block once it loads, give it a second. Okay, 46 sats per byte. Okay. So how do I look at that on this chart?

Well, basically, I just roll up here and I can see, while in and around 50 sats per byte, any UTXO below 7,900 sats is effectively unspendable, meaning that I will spend more in fees to send it than I would. And actually, like, I'll spend more in fees than the thing is worth. So I'm basically just giving away sats to miners with no economic impact anywhere else. Now, as these fees move on up, let's take a look. You can see that once we get north of 100 sats per byte as a base fee, any UTXO below almost 16,000 sats is effectively unspendable, or you're going to spend the entirety of it to minors. we've seen fees as high as 600 and some odd sats per byte earlier this year when we've had crazy like, you know, when the JPEG people were getting a little wild here. What's that going to cost you?

That's basically a UTXO of almost 95,000 sets is no longer spendable in that environment at that time. So that means that you need to be cognizant of the size of pieces of Bitcoin sitting in your wallet. It wouldn't matter if you had a million sats sitting in your wallet if each one of those pieces of Bitcoin was comprised of 100,000 sats and you had 10 of them because the data that each UTXO adds in that transaction makes it unspendable. So you'd send a million sats of 10 UTXOs of 100K each, but each. UTXO is effectively costing you 95,000 worth of fees. And on the other end, you're not going to get very much of that. So consolidation becomes a factor and then using things like lightning and liquid

come into play depending on what you need and what your tradeoffs are and what you're going to use it for moving forward. So that's why I was kind of excited to see the drop of this, which is Aqua Wallet. This is an on-chain, and I'm going to call it layered Bitcoin wallet. And what that means is by default, you're dealing with when you're not dealing with on-chain Bitcoin, by default, you're dealing with liquid. But you can receive and send both liquid and lightning transactions. They just auto get swapped if you're dealing with lightning.

And so what this allows you to do is you're utilizing the confidential transactions, the one-a-minute blocks, and the much lower fee rates, especially in current time, on liquid. And so you're maybe sending a couple hundred, spending a couple hundred sats for every transaction that you do instead of potentially, you know, when fees get up to 600 sats per V-byte, you know, 95,000 sats for a transaction. That would be insane. So it allows you to interact with that. And then also, if you load in there, you can swap from on-chain to liquid natively in the wallet.

And there's a whole bunch of different stuff there. For me, it makes things a lot easier because I'm using liquid right now as kind of my interim layer where I try to default there and then decide what to do next. Do I want to swap into lightning for my spending wallet? or do I want to build a bit of a balance in liquid until it's above, say, a million sats and then peg out on-chain into my cold storage? So it gives me that kind of moment of like, okay, I'm in a form that is cheap to deal with and then I decide where I'm going next.

So for me, super awesome. It's just came out the other day. There's a ton of things that still need to be added. There's a ton of features that I would love to see. It is not yet open source, though, that is the intention. attention here. So, you know, limit your exposure. But the automation and the integration of all of these features that I was using through alternative apps and hopping around into a single place for me is very promising because it makes a hell of a lot more sense for me to be in a single

place and do all the things that I need to do in one app than to hop around. And this seems to be what this wallet is looking to do. And I'm excited about that. So anyways, play around. It is on the iOS store, and you can download the APK file on Android. It should be on the Google Play Store soon. And then just look for updates as they come. So, yeah, very excited about it.

Also, in the same realm, Francis Pouliot, this is an old tweet, well, not the top one. You said, under construction with rapid progress. But this is an old tweet from November of last year. He said, in a high fee environment, it makes no economic sense to have a lightning channel with less than 1 million sets. A non-custodial way to solve this would be have a liquid Bitcoin wallet to accumulate small transactions with an LN swap service, which is what Aqua does, and convert to self-custodial lightning wallet once you reach 1 million sets. And yeah, so he's basically building the exact. same thing at the same time. Now, on the other side of different scaling solutions, given what we have right now, Fedament just had a new update. They said they're excited to announce

Fetiment 0.2 has landed. Huge milestone for Fetamint is now mostly feature complete. Federated eCash system. Development will be focused on backwards compatible improvements in bug fixes from now on. So that's super awesome. And coinciding with this, you had Mutiny Wallet, say that they've now updated Fedament and multi-LSP initial support. So Mutiny is open source, non-custodial. Of course, the Fedomint part of Mutiny is like a federated model so people can onboard to Lightning without needing initial liquidity for small amounts until again, you can then hopefully offboard onto your own dedicated Lightning channel with enough

liquidity with a large enough size. So anyways, ending the year off strong. Over the last few months, we've been preparing our wallet for Fetamint integrations. Today marks the first release of Fetamint support, ready for alpha testing. The way we've gone about integration is so seamless and smooth over the edges. It is to seamlessly smooth over the edges that exist in self-custodial lightning. Our hybrid approach will use a configured federation when needed. Otherwise, it uses self-custodial lightning if it exist for the user. This helps things like channel reserves, channel minimums, high chain fees to get started, et cetera. Basically, they're attacking the issue of onboarding initially to lightning

and having to rely on just a singular custodian like wallet of Satoshi. Well, now you can mitigate that rugpole risk by at least taking that single custodian risk and pushing it out to multiple custodians all in a multi-sig fedament setup so that it would require multiple entities to rug pull you simultaneously and collude rather than just wallet of Satoshi one day being like yoinck arse. So, you know, it's again, it's not perfect, but it's miles better than having a single point of failure. You now require collusion amongst multiple entities. to be rugged and if you're minimally exposed and just building a balance until doing self-custody, I mean, to me, that's an acceptable tradeoff until something better comes along. And I hope

even better solutions do come along. But for right now, this is a meaningful improvement versus what most people were using on Lightning, which is wallet of Satoshi. Okay, moving on. This cool, whirlpool, unspent capacity surpasses 10,000 Bitcoin. This is, the total amount sloshing around in Whirlpool using CoinJoint to help give yourself privacy on Bitcoin. So that is super awesome. From there, another privacy update. Mercury layer is now code complete and available for testing. What is Mercury Layer? It is a new implementation of fully blinded state chains.

And they have set up a public test server and invite anybody to try it out. State chains. I've done a video on this previously. They used to have something called Mercury Wallet. Basically, the way you can think about it is creating like a digital open dime. So like maybe you know those little USB sticks from from Coin Kite where you can load up a specific amount. Nobody has the private key and you can physically hand somebody Bitcoin without being able to scrape it back later. Imagine a digital version of that and then being able to swap your.

digital open dimes between another person without any indication that it has happened on chain, effectively breaking the link between you and that Bitcoin, obtaining privacy on that Bitcoin, because nobody knows who owns it or that any transaction has even taken place. And that's what this does. But now it does it in a censorship-resistant way. So I'm very excited to see that. I'm going to have to play around a little with it, which I have not done as of yet. Okay, moving on.

Try and blast through these. Oh, yeah, I already did that. Also, if you missed it, just prior to the Christmas show, myself and Nat, we did an air-gapped tutorial of the cold cards. So I've done that before on my channel, but we did a joint tutorial together. We chatted all about how to air-gap your cold cards. So if you're a fan of the first joint tutorial with Nat, where we did the plugged-in, directly connected version, go check out this one because I was very happy to do it. It was a lot of fun.

And I think from the feedback I've gotten, a lot of people found it very helpful. Rounding out here, I'm going to take this. I just wanted to give a shout out to Consensus Network and their bookshop because I just received my copy of 21 Futures, which is very exciting. It's basically a bunch of fiction stories of potential futures in and around a Bitcoin standard. And I love the idea. I think we need more fiction stories in Bitcoin because it's such a unique idea to be living in, let alone speculating of where it could take us in the future. So I'll let you know how it is excited for the read.

And then tomorrow we will be doing, we're back. for why are we bullish? So I've got Rob Johnson, who's doing a film called Bitcoins. He's been filming it for the last two years. And it is releasing this month, if I'm not mistaken. There's going to be some showings and everything, and you'll be able to find it and buy it online. I'm also having Samson Mao.

I reached out because, again, Aqua, people have questions. So he was able to jump on along with Andrew Howard, who is also with Jan 3. And we're all just going to be getting bullish together in the new year. So very excited for that. So yeah, come and check it out. This is tomorrow at 6pm Eastern Time. First, why are we bullish of 2024?

And hey, maybe we'll have some news by then. Maybe we'll have another interesting tidbit to chat about. And then besides that, I wanted to say I retooled my website. I've updated it. So I've kind of done a whole new slew of things here. updated events, put in various tools that I use, set up a whole new learning track that basically takes you through, hey, like, best Bitcoin books to read, getting Bitcoin, all the different options that you may have, suggested first wallets, hardware wallets, multi-sig, running

a node, additional skills, like lowering your fees and adding privacy. So you can check through all of that and everything else that I've added on the website. And you can also sign up for the newsletter. And this is also where you can book me for one-on-one sessions. And if you want to do so, actually, I'll add this on the main screen here. There's a QR code that will take you directly to the website where you can book me for one-on-one sessions. So what would you use those for?

That would be like, okay, well, I'm needing to get through. Maybe you've looked at the tutorials and you just need that one-on-one hand-holding experience of like, walk me through this wallet, walk me through setting up a question. cold card, walk me through migrating from ledger to cold card. Not saying that you need to do that, but maybe do that. Walk me through multi-sac or lightning or running a node or whatever it may be here to help. So if you would like to book me for one of ones, I don't have time for a lot of them, but you may be able to squeak in for a time if you take a peek.

Either way, thank you guys for being here. Of course, tune in tomorrow 6 p.m. Eastern time. Smash that like button. hit subscribe help me on my way to 100k and of course share this episode if you found it useful anyways guys that is it for me i am out have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be see you guys next time for your simply session