BTC Sessions - Japan's $1.5T Pension Strategy Embraces Bitcoin ep404

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

This episode of Simply Sessions covers crucial Bitcoin updates: Japan's $1.5 trillion fund eyeing Bitcoin, Ron Paul's Federal Reserve critique, Jerome Powell on CBDCs, Brian Armstrong's ETF custody insights, Greenpeace's Bitcoin stance, and Oklahoma's pro-Bitcoin legislation. Dive into the global impact of Bitcoin in today's financial landscape. 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've got Nico in the Wings waiting to bring us the latest and greatest in Bitcoin. I've got plenty of tech updates and interesting stuff for you guys to hit on as well. I hope you guys are having a good week. We, you know, we got the first, I'm going to say the most, the deepest dip that we've experienced thus far. And it wasn't even, it's funny because it's like, 10k dip but it like i find it funny that anybody could be bearish and we're sitting at like 65

it's hilarious we're at 50 before i went to madeira so uh yeah anyways uh gareth gareth gallowice i'm sure is just making money hand over fist stacking those pennies um anyways uh of course this is live anything can happen so i defer to my friend bill he Here. Do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. I'll do it live.

I can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you haven't already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things they help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your Simply session. And before we bring in Niko, let's take a look at where we are in. a look at where we are in the market right now. I'm bringing up time chain calendar.com and beside it I'm going to bring up the live chat. Everything you say from here on in will be live

for the world to see for better or worse. So we are currently sitting at $65,851.5 $1.5.1 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will snag you 1,519 sats. In terms of fees, next block, 12 sats per byte, sorry, next, next block 25 sats per bite. Anytime 12 sats. And Bitcoin mine, 19.66 million, that is 93.62% of the total supply. Having, it's 29 days out, 29 days and 19 hours. Very excited. Can't wait to go for the having party down in El Salvador. I guess we'll call it the pre-having party because it's not on the having.

The headaches of trying to schedule a having party when you're unsure what hash rate will be. But, hey, they did their best. If you're sorting through the tutorials on the show and you need some additional assistance, it, you need some handholding. You can head over to my website, bTCsessions.ca, and book me for private one-on-one educational sessions. Shout out to Hottle, hoddle, sponsors of the show. If you are stacking some corn and you have priorities that include peer-to-beard trading, instant self-custusty, no K-YC, this is a great place to be. Sign up with just an email address. Once you're in, choose your currency, your payment method, and your amount, and you can start viewing offers immediately.

And they also have their peer-to-peer lending with no re-hypification. Links are down below. Now, of course, I've been pumping out the tutorials on the cold card queue. That dropped not too long ago, and all those pre-orders are beginning to ship out. In fact, I just dropped another tutorial today. We'll touch on that in the tech updates. But nonetheless, if you do want to grab a cold card queue or any of their other goodies, the mark four, tab signers, block, clock, all of that. Head over to coin kite.com. You can use

code BTC sessions for a nice discount at checkout. Backups, of course, are very important as well. Cidor has one of the most beautifully designed and robust steel backup options on the market. Basically comes in a full kit that gives you everything you need to stamp your seed frays into solid steel and start with their disc and capsule design. Love this setup. I think it's great. and you can even get the top of the capsule laser etched with your own design. So I've got one of the little sessions logo on. It's pretty cool. Anyways, you can check them out. Cdor.io.

There are all specific links down below for the best shipping options for you, depending on where you are on the planet. Nunchuck has you covered with your assisted multi-sig needs. Their HoneyBadger program is absolutely kick-ass. Basically what it is is you can set up a multi-sig quorum on your mobile device using things like tap signer, cold card, and plenty of other hardware options. Once it's set up, you've got a multi-sig volesig. vault in which you have baked in inheritance planning so your Bitcoin gets to your next

of kin, if anything should happen to you. And on top of that, the whole thing can be done with no KYC. You don't need to give up your private information to have it set up and working for you. You can check them out at nunchuk.io. And last shout out to start nine, your sovereign computing solution. These guys have plug and play devices to host not just your Bitcoin stack, but your digital life. So you can host things like your Bitcoin core node, your lightning node, mempel dot space, join market. Also, your files, passwords, photos, Noster relays and clients, AI tools that aren't censored, all kinds of great stuff. So be sure to check them out at start9.com.

They've got everything from entry-level devices all the way up to what I'm running, which is the Start 9 server pure. And if you're looking at the pure on their website, be sure to use the code BTC sessions with a plus sign at the end. It'll get you 18% off that one. Anyways, guys, enough of my rambling. Let's get Nico in here and let's get moving. Yo, man, how's it going? Yo! Dude, you see this, bro?

This is like a, this isn't a tip. This is like a... It's a dusting of, of... It's an accent. I don't know what to call it. This is like a, like, I don't... I mean, we still have communication. It's just a little fuzzy.

That's all. It totally is a little bit fuzzy. Anyways, dude, I asked you, and I want you to say this on the air, but I asked you over the week, I said, what are we going to do when we start getting gray hairs? And you had a fabulous response. I got a full game plan. This is the first time I've been thinking about this.

I had the answer prepped and ready the second it came in as a text. So Nico's like, what are we going to do, man? And I love the context of the question. given that you're clearly in it for the long haul. Dude, what's going to happen when I get gray hair, like fully planning for having a streak years from now? So here's the game plan. Game plan is, okay, there's going to be grays.

I already have some grays, and I'm getting a little bit of gray in the beard. But basically when there's just a noticeable amount of gray, then the streak goes white. Okay? So that's step one. So white streak. Step two.

Eventually, the white streak will start to dissolve because there's going to be so much other gray around it. And step two, the important part of the game plan and the final part of the game plan is when that happens, when you start to not notice that it's a streak anymore, it goes black. Yes. Okay. Or other colors. Who knows? We'll just play it by ear, whatever the color. We'll play it by ear.

Bitcoin will be like millions of dollars. Yeah. Well, how about if it's, we'll do it based on year maybe because, what is it? Green, green, green, green, red. That's going to be the color of the. Oh, man, dude, that's hilarious. But yeah, clearly you have this thought out. I was surprised when you sent me that tech.

I'm like, holy shit. Like, you know, this is very well thought out, very well game planned. Oh, yeah. I know what's going down. Well, don't worry. I got you. Okay. All right.

So we have a plan. And just to kind of go back to what you were originally saying. Yeah. So like the first one was like, let me do this for fun. Then I start growing on me. So yeah, I'm down. I'm down. We need we need we need stripes.

And us Bitcoin content creators, we need the stripes. What's, what's Nathan's deal? His is looking a little pitiful too. We need to. He needs to be re-tipped. Yeah. I wonder. Yeah.

Yeah. I won't know the comments. Somebody, somebody unfamiliar with the tips. Are you guys docking? your tips together. Absolutely. Especially when Stacy said something about it during the Christmas special and she got it out in the open. 100%. What a great. We won't even give further context. People are going to have to look back at the Christmas special and find that little nugget there. Exactly. Exactly.

Wait, man. I'll bring up your stuff here. What's been going on this week? What's top of mind? Dude, I mean, I think I've said this before. I want to say it again. Like, you always think you know that you are going to run out of stuff to say is Robert the comet so yeah so you always think you're going to run out of stuff to say during the news cycle but every single time something historic happens at Bitcoin and it's just Bitcoin I think that's just the way it is so uh you know I think Sailor finally hit his goal of owning 1% of the total Bitcoin supply. And that's exactly what happened in, I think, the beginning of the week, actually. But anyways, this is no BS article. Micro Strategy surpasses 1% of total Bitcoin supply,

milestone using proceeds of yet another $600 million convertible note offering. So we talked about this yesterday that, sorry, last week, that Sailor found an infinite money glitch. And essentially, what he's doing is he's taking debt. He's using that that cash from the debt to buy more Bitcoin. That makes the micro strategy stock go up. As the stock goes up, he takes out more debt and he buys more Bitcoin with it. And then the stock goes up and then he takes out more debt. It's like this like speculative attack on the Fiat system, using the Fiat system to just like print money out of thin air to buy more Bitcoin and he's just going absolutely bonkers. Like this is what happens when a Bitcoin maxi has a public company to leverage and they just go full total Dgen.

Right. So yeah, absolutely absolute genius move. Here's a little bit of the details. This is the official announcement, which is during the period of March, between March 11th and March 18th, micro strategy acquired approximately 9,245 Bitcoins for approximately 6th. $630 million in cash, using $592 million of proceeds from the offering and $30.7 million of excess cash. As of March 18, 2024, Microstrategy, together with its subsidies, held an aggregate of approximately $214,000 Bitcoin, which were acquired at an average purchase price of approximately $7.53 billion, and an average purchase price of approximately $35,100,000.

60 per coin, inclusive of fees and expensive. Micro Strategy has recently started calling itself, quote, the world's first Bitcoin development company, but some are pointing out that the company is yet to contribute to Bitcoin code or support Bitcoin network contributors. I mean, that's a really, really good point at the end. What does a Bitcoin, you know, what does a Bitcoin development company mean if they're not, you know, directly donating to Bitcoin core contributor? or contribute code in the first place, right?

What does that mean, right? I don't doubt Sailor. I think Sailor is a Chad, you know, but you know, in Bitcoin, like don't kill your heroes, don't have heroes, you know, put your money with your mouth is. And let's see. It goes on to say this is the official announcement, I think describing what this is, but it basically says micro strategy considers itself the world's first Bitcoin development company where publicly traded operating company committed to the continued development

of Bitcoin network through activities in the financial markets, advocacy and technology, technology innovation. So I guess that means that like they're a Bitcoin development company and pitching other public companies and billionaires to like buy Bitcoin. Like I guess that counts. You know, and then it also talks about AI enterprise like, you know, their old school business. And it says we believe that the combination of our operating structure, Bitcoin strategy and focus on technology innovation provides a unique opportunity. for value creation. So, I mean, are they being a little bit fake when they say they're a Bitcoin development

company, even though they don't exactly, you know, actually develop? Yeah. It's an interesting story. We'll have to see how it develops. I don't know, man. Again, like, it's interesting in that, I mean, he's not. He's obviously done a lot in terms of, like, getting Bitcoin in front of people's eyes, giving people like this perfect example of the glitches in the matrix that are enabled by infinite money printing and infinite debt

when it can be used to purchase hard assets. And that's more or less kind of the speculative attack that you've had on the globe, as a whole in even just like looking at the housing market, right? Like that's that's what people are doing, right? They're getting cheap money and buying property that is is more difficult to, to replicate in desirable areas or buying, you know, parts of companies or, you know, they're taking the thing that is worth less, which is now the money and then buying, just trying to buy stuff that, you know, can't be easily printed.

And so he's found the stuff that is the most easily printed and replicated and has successfully found the thing that is the least easily replicated, aka you can't print it at all. It's just a further extension of people finding the escape valve, and he found the ultimate one. He found the ultimate cheap code, the ultimate escape valve. and, you know, like, I hope he continues his speculative attack on Bitcoin, not on Bitcoin, who on the dollar. And, you know, how long until like the government or something steps in and it's like, you can't do that? Yeah.

Yeah. I, I don't know. I mean, I feel like anybody that's not, especially with large amounts of capital, anybody that's not like taking full self-custy of that is walking on eggshells here, right? Because how would it be for the government to be like, all right, Coinbase, here's the deal. 6102, we're going to need all that Bitcoin. I'm so glad that you brought that up because that is literally a perfect segue to the next topic. Yeah, yeah.

Speaking of 6102 in Coinbase, this is Lex Luth, I mean, Brian Armstrong. And he went on Bloomberg TV and he had some kind of like interesting takes and like about, you know, what's going on and, you know, but there's a couple I'd like to focus on. So look, and at the end of the day, I know that we're all Bitcoiners and, you know, we love Bitcoin. We're Bitcoin only. But the reality is that Coinblaze right now plays 8.000. major role in the in the Bitcoin ecosystem in the sense because it's a major player and a lot of people trust them especially with custody so let's check out what Brian Armstrong has to say you're talking so much about other use cases for crypto outside of even just being a store of value here as many

people see it as they're entering this asset class sum for the first time with the advent of these spot Bitcoin ETFs it begs the question how do you see the future of Coinbase there are a lot of questions about the future of crypto exchanges in the world where Bitcoin ETFs have gotten so much share Do you see Coinbase going far and above beyond being simply a crypto exchange? Yeah. So with the, you know, the ETFs that got approved, we've seen a huge influx of capital into the system. About $12 billion of inflow have happened. And, you know, when that happens, sometimes people ask us, well, what does that mean for Coinbase? Well, you know, it's actually incredibly positive for Coinbase.

We're storing, we're the custodian for about 90% of the assets in those Bitcoin ETFs. And so we have monetization opportunities there as a custodian. But it didn't cannibalize any of the opportunity in our direct product. too, our retail app, our institutional product, we actually saw increased inflows there while we saw $12 billion of inflow into the ETFs. So the ATFs were incredibly positive for the industry. They were a regulatory approval. They unlocked new pools of capital. And Coinbase is going to be not just a place where you store crypto. It's a place where you can actually trade crypto. You can use it increasingly in many different applications all of the world. And it's not just Bitcoin either.

We support over 100 different crypto assets. So we want Coinbase to be the most trusted and easiest to use place to store crypto, to trade it, and to actually use it. And we can actually become people's primary financial account in some cases in this new crypto economy. Kind of like a crypto bank? Yeah, one might say that. I don't think we're ever going to go get actually a bank license because banks get licenses to do fractional reserve of the assets. I don't really think that's the right path. I think it's caused all kinds of issues with bank failures and that kind of thing. We don't want to do fractional reserve. We want to store 100% of customers' assets. Or if they prefer, they don't even have to store it with us. They can do self-custody. And if they choose to opt-in

their funds into some product to earn rewards or something like that, they can choose to do that. We're not going to do it on their behalf in the way the banks do with fractional reserve. So it's a new paradigm. I think that there's a new generation of people who are looking at, they want to see crypto update the financial system because 87% of Americans, when you survey them, they say the current financial system doesn't work for them. Fract reserve is just one piece of that. But if you look at credit card fees and overdraft fees and why does it, you know, take two or three

business days to send an ACH transfer. And so our financial system really needs to get updated. And that's what we think is that crypto is this most important. technology to update the financial system globally, bring economic freedom and good financial infrastructure to people all over the world if they just have a smartphone with an internet connection. So, okay, so a couple, a lot of things to impact there. So he, he, he, coin base right now as it stands is the custody for 90% of the US spot Bitcoin ETFs, right? And Ben was talking about the six 102 order. We'll get to that in a second. Another thing that he said was, you know, he kept trying

to put in crypto in there. You know, he's like, crypto's the change. You know, it's like you have the ability to, you know, transact and we want to be the payment platform. Okay, fine, but not too long ago, and we actually covered this on Simply Sessions, Coinbase stopped allowing merchants to accept Bitcoin as payment. Do you remember that? Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's garbage. Like, you can you can accept it as payment if you use their custodial options.

So, like, he's gaslighting the fuck out of that, right? Oh, people can self-custody and then they can use our thing and they can use it for payments and everything. Yeah, so they can use it for payments if you deposit it with us and then use our proprietary, like, app. Like, it's full of shit. Dude, totally full of shit. And again, like, you know, he says self-custody, but don't pay attention to what they do, pay attention to what they say. The reality is that if you're not allowing people to, like, like, if you're not allowing merchants to, accept Bitcoin, like, you know, you could talk all you want about self-custody, but it's just

that. It's talk. Like, you know, like, okay, so the other shit coins, like, okay, we're cool with that. But with Bitcoin, right, of which you guys are custodying all this Bitcoin, of course, the ETS are approved. Oh, no, the on-chain fees are too expensive and we just can't allow that, you know? I think that's, that's a croc of BS in my opinion. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And like, you know, they've been around for how long in the Bitcoin space for how long and they're like the last person on planet fucking earth to establish a way to deposit withdrawal via lightning like yeah i don't i still don't think they added that i think that he literally said he was going to do it but they never did yeah do you remember

the time though when jo joe jow hall joe nakamoto on on x he uh he was like oh can you send me uh he he said he was going to send him some bitcoin and joe dropped his his his lightning address and Brian thought it was a fucking email address didn't know what it was like yeah dude it's crazy man it's it's it's such it's such fiat bullshit and also for anyone doesn't know uh this is the you know this is the 6102 order 90% of the bitcoin custody by the etfs is with coinbase 90% uh and the reason that they were able to get away with the 610 order was because of the centralization of the custody of gold. But that wasn't necessarily like,

it really wasn't anyone's fault. It was gold's physical characteristics that made it convenient to do that. Now if you have a technology, like there is no reason in hell why 90% of the ETFs are custody with Bitcoin. I mean, sorry, with Coinbase. There's no reason for that.

Like the technology exists for there to be other custodians. Of course, everyone feels comfortable with Coinbase is because I think it's, it's the only publicly traded, you know, quote unquote crypto exchange of one of which, you know, and has Bitcoin also. So like it's clearly the established player, but I mean, you know, this is opening the door, like wide door open for, you know, the U.S. government to be in a position, which you can make the argument that it's inevitable with the fiscal path that it's on, that this type of thing

happens, that it starts to break. The government can't pay its bills. And it's like, oh, you know, all that Bitcoin, you guys are opting out. to take that for you. You guys are going to have some dollars in return, right? Like, it's just crazy, man. This is, it's funny because we use the same term. We're now regularly using the same term that was used by Nixon to go off the gold standard, a speculative attack on the dollar. I expect that's not the last time we'll hear that term uttered from a politician in the US. 100%. 100%. It's, it's interesting. Anyways.

So on another front, like it looks like on the state level, things are kind of headed in the right direction. And Dennis Porter has played a big role in this and going to individual states to the states pass these laws. So he says the state of Oklahoma with an 81 to one vote in favor passes a bill to protect your fundamental Bitcoin rights out of the state house. This is a huge amendment with sweeping support. Oklahoma moves to protect your freedom for Bitcoin activities in the state. Once passed into law, this bill specifically secures your right to buy and sell Bitcoin, your right to mine Bitcoin, your right to self-custody or digital assets, the liberty to run a full node.

Oklahoma is on the brink of a revolutionary move that champions your Bitcoin rights. Thanks to Representative Brian Hill and the unwavering support of the Oklahoma Bitcoin Association, a landmark bill has sailed through the house promising unprecedented protection for Bitcoin users. imagine a future where your Bitcoin rights are enshrined into law, where Oklahoma leads as a sanctuary for digital currency innovation. That future is within our grasp and it hinges on the next steps, passage to the Senate and the government legislature. The government signature. So that's Dennis's take. Here's David Zell.

David Zell is part of the Bitcoin Policy Institute or Bitcoin Policy Institute. And he says, the Inkin Video Truth. about state bills to protect Bitcoin rights. Bitcoin has a federal government problem and the states can't do anything about it. Over the past year or so, roughly a dozen states have introduced bills to protect one's right to buy, mine, and self-custody Bitcoin and run a note on its network. Public policies that would restrict Americans' ability to use and privately owned Bitcoin loom at the federal level. Recently, I've seen a bad argument around this, around on this site, which is that state bills could protect people against such policies.

To be clear, state bills to codify rights for Bitcoin users cannot insulate anyone from federal policy. At best, state bills do nothing to stop infringement on the rights. I don't even know what that means. How do you say that, Ben? Enumerate. Enumerate? Weird word. Okay.

At worst, these bills of rights for Bitcoin make federal and very real policy threats to American users on the network more likely. A consultation of, do you hear that? That's so interesting. right so it's like because the states are passing these things it makes a federal threat more like that's so interesting a consultation a yeah consultation of the united states constitution is helpful to understand why these bills will have zero impact on the case of conflicting federal policy it goes on to say quote the constitution the laws of the united states which shall be made in pursuance thereof and of and all treaties made or which shall be made under the authority of the united states shall be the supreme law of the land, and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding. From this clause, we get the doctrine of federal preemption. When federal policy and state legislation conflict, federal law overrides state law.

Preemption applies regardless of whether the conflicting laws come from the legislator, the courts, the administrative agencies. In the context of Bitcoin, if the federal government, were to pass legislation contradicting state level protections, the state laws would quickly be moot. It goes on to say you may recall a similar issue from a few years ago when states saw bills introduced to make Bitcoin legal tender. Those efforts were of course unconstitutional and subsequently failed entirely to have any impact.

Make no mistakes, state bills offer no protection against Elizabeth Warren's crypto bill. suggest that state bills could protect the ability to hold and use Bitcoin when federal policy would restrict those abilities is preposterous. So I mean, dude, this is, you know, and David obviously knows what he's talking about, you know, but still shout out to Dennis for like doing this. But again, I think it's an interesting, that's an interesting kind of way of looking at it. And the reason that I say that is because what about the marijuana industry? I was thinking that the entire time you were reading this. Right? Like the marijuana industry.

on a federal level is illegal, but on a state level, the states are just kind of like, you know, F you know, F you, so I mean, I get it. Like, that's how it should be. But the federal government only has so much power in the sense, like they only have so much men with guns. Yeah. And, you know, and they do, by the way, pick on California and growers there for a while. Like, technically the FBI could literally raid like any type of grow house in California and say you're going to jail because of what you're doing is illegal but the state turns a blind eye right so it kind of created a situation

where the federal government is just kind of like yeah it's illegal but you know we'll just kind of like you know look the other not look the other way but kind of be like you know it is what it is it's happening so I understand what David is saying and on paper he's right. The FBI could literally just arrest someone in California for growing weed because it is illegal. But at the same time, you can't say that these local laws don't cause a, like, don't offer some type of protection from the men with guns at the state level, right?

So that's my take. We're starting to get a similar thing here in Alberta with, with, and again, our provinces in Canada have way less sovereignty compared to the states in the U.S. versus the federal. But, you know, we're getting similar things where in Canada there's certain, they're passing like laws to further restrict firearms ownership and everything like that. And the Alberta government is more or less like telling the local police not to enforce those laws. You know, we're seeing push on, you know, federal carbon taxes and the province next to us is basically saying, well, you know, we kind of manage our energy infrastructure and we're just not going to add in that

tax. We're not going to pay it. And so that like, when you have stuff on a local level, especially in the U.S. where there's so many different states, imagine with so many different states guaranteeing those, these rights, I think you would see a similar situation to California with their laws on weed, where it'd be like, sure, I guess it's illegal at a federal level, but like, I mean, what are you going to do? We've got a state with X number of millions of people and there's a bunch of people running nodes and there's people self-cussing Bitcoin and there's people doing whatever and we're not going to actively enforce it. It's even, I'd say it's even more difficult to enforce for Bitcoin than it is for like,

grow operations in California because that you've got like a place that is like providing for for everybody whereas with Bitcoin it's like some dude in his basement with an a node humming away on a shelf I mean maybe for the miners that might be a bit more of an issue but like that's a pretty global phenomenon anyways yeah I I beg to differ with David Zell not in the way it's written that's very clear that federal supersedes all of that. But in practice, I think you're going to see a further fracturing of things where states exercise their ability to be more sovereign, even if it's not in line with the constitution.

It seems to be the way we're headed. And we're seeing it in Canada already. Like my province is very much pushing back on a lot of stuff. And I think that's only going to continue because people are realizing that you're getting these governments that maybe would have been able to govern a certain amount of people. But now it's these countries like with population growth and everything, it's the views are so disparate and you're trying to have one rule of law for like a very different groups of people across many different local local governments. You need more local governance. You need to be in

tune with the people you're governing if there is a structure in place. And it just seems like it's it's collapsing under its own weight. 100% 100% man. And yeah, because that that's all it takes is for essentially just what you said about Alberta and you just people like are just not paying it like they're just not listening to some of them. Like all it takes is just government's just this is local governments to say no. The men with guns here are not going to adhere to that.

And then what are they going to send? They're going to send like federal. I know they've done that in the past. Were they going to say like federal agents? Like in Canada, it's called the they're not. It's federal, right? RCMP. The Mounties.

The Mounties are going to come with the horse and the hats. I'm kidding. They don't actually wear that. But I think they do like that's like their formal wear, right? Yeah, it's like special events and stuff like that. But that would be hilarious. So yeah. I mean, dude, so, so interesting, so interesting.

Anyways, I did someone, I did see someone in the chat put Japan question mark. So let's talk about that. This is a big deal. And the reason it's a big deal is because I think the devil's in the details. And there's very, very, there's two very significant pieces in this article that really made my eyes open. So the headline for the audio listeners is Japan's $1.5 trillion. government fund seeks info on illiquid assets including bitcoin for portfolio diversification now the reason that this is such a big deal is 1.5 trillion is larger than the entire bitcoin market cap just to

kind of give you an idea of how much money they're managing so it goes on to say japan's government pension investment fund is seeking information regarding the option to potentially include bitcoin in its investment portfolio the fund announced on tuesday that it officially request the public to submit information on low liquidity assets such as Bitcoin, gold, and farmland. Okay, that's important part number one. The reason that's important is because look at, think about that for a second. A pension is equating Bitcoin gold in real estate. They're basically saying, oh, those things are kind of in the same category. That's a massive deal. It goes on to say this is part of its five year research to

innovate investment strategies in response to economic and social changes and the rapid development of technology, the fund stated. However, it is difficult to view the latest announcement as indicative of the pension fund's inclination towards Bitcoin as it is in the stages of collecting data prior to a proper discussion. As of Q3, 2023, the fund managed about $224 trillion, about you at one point, that at one point $5 trillion US dollars. And it goes on to say,

this comes as the price of Bitcoin fell 5.43% in the past 24 hours. That's dated. However, it remains up from up more than 50% year to date. Now, another key aspect of this is it is the world's largest known pension fund, right? So the world's largest known pension fund, pension fund literally just said that Bitcoin in their eyes is equal to gold and farmland.

That is massive. And if you connect this with something that we were covering a couple weeks ago on Simpley Sessions, Fidelity has a 1 to 3% Bitcoin allocation in their quote, all in one asset allocation funds in Canada using spot Bitcoin ETFs. The quote conservative version is posted below. That's right. And an all in one conservative ETF, 1% is in Bitcoin. So this is a big deal.

This is the C's changing, completely, the attitude to Bitcoin changing completely from very, very large pensions. And also the all in one ETF in Canada. Bitcoin has to be added in the mix, right? This is the further legitimization of Bitcoin that I think was

started with Larry Fink and BlackRock and them getting the ETF approved in the U.S. Yeah. Well, again, and you said the word over and over, the conservative fund, right? Like, think of some of these growth funds, what they might look at and say, like, well, geez, look at historically what Bitcoin has done over a 5, 10, and 15-year time horizon. Maybe we're going to allocate 5%, 5% or something like that. Like you're going to see some variation in that over time. We're just kind of seeing the initial, the initial stages of this again.

But hearkening back to, you know, the earlier story, let's hope that some of that is not with fucking Coinbase. I hope not. I don't think so. Maybe. I've, I've hope. Do they even have Coinbase in Japan? I think we might be in luck. Yeah, well, you know what I'd love to see is I'd love to see like a, well, number one,

I'd love to see companies, but also nation states start to be like, yeah, no, we're not doing custodians. We're doing like a distributed multi-sig with checks and balances, regular key checks and and like proof of reserves. And like, you know, we're going to sign our addresses publicly at certain cadences to say like, hey, you know, we still have the keys to this. Like, I would love to see absolute transparency on the nation state front when it comes to Bitcoin treasuries.

100%. 100%. And, you know, El Salvador is setting the example for the rest of the world. And I swear to God, you know, if we get one more lecture from another country talking about El Salvador, I'm just going to say, shut the F up. Anyways, Ben, do we have time for one more story? Yeah, we got it. We got it.

Awesome. All right, so I did want to show this because I thought it was really, really interesting. Again, the little bit of, a little bit of kind of contradictions, like they've kind of been going back and forth. And I'll play you guys the video. Researching or hiring personnel to study the implications of the CBDC. Can you give us any clarity on what the Fed is doing right now on a digital dollar? Sure. So I think we've been pretty transparent on this, but I will try harder. So we are not getting ready to, we haven't proposed, we haven't come to a conclusion that we should propose or anything like that, that Congress consider legislation to authorize a digital dollar.

And it would take legislation by Congress signed by the president to give us the ability to do the, what we think of as a CBDC, which is really a retail CBDC with the public of it. So we're just a long, long way from that. What we are doing, and I think what every major central bank is doing is we're trying to stay in the frontiers of what's going on in digital finance, and it has many, many different areas. You know, it has applications in wholesale finance, in the payment system. And so we need, to serve the public, these issues have become very front burner in the last, five or six years. We need to be knowledgeable about all that. So we actually do have people

trying to understand things that are, but it's wrong to say that we're working on a CBDC and then we've got secretly got a lab here where we've got one and we're just going to spring it on Congress at the right moment. We don't. I haven't at all in my own mind made a decision that I think this is something the U.S. should be doing. You know, I just think it's something we need to be, we need to understand. who are keeping up with that as part of the broader payments landscape. That's how I would characterize it. Okay. So he says that, right?

But take a look at this. This is like the Fed literally gave Tom Emmer, who is a congressman, part of the House of Representatives. They gave him a like a presentation. and in that presentation says key duties of the Fed. At the very bottom, is it key duties, right? Like key duties. Currency, check collection, automatic clearinghouse, wholesale payments.

At the bottom, it literally says central bank digital currency. So I mean, like, why the mixed signals, man? Like, we know the White House wants someone. We know Elizabeth Warren wants one. They're literally telling you, hey, this is one of the key duties. And then when you ask him, they're like, nah, what do you talk?

How can you say that? I haven't even thought of it. It hasn't even dawned on me. We're just looking into it. We want to stay competitive. And it literally says in that paper, key duties of the Fed, central bank digital currency.

So they're lying. Like, it's bullshit, you know? Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. They're never going to, whatever they're saying publicly, it's like, you know, go the,

opposite direction and the more strongly they're saying it, the further you go in the opposite direction, I would say. Yeah, 100%. 100%. Total effing bullshit. But yeah, man, it's Bitcoin or slavery, dude. It's Bitcoin or slavery. Anyways, ladies gentlemen, this was your Simply Sessions, Ben.

I will see you next week, brother. See you later, man. Awesome. And everybody stick around. We got some tech updates. I got a few things to show your way. First of all, also, go follow Simply Sessions, simply Bitcoin, and hit up their news every day of the week.

They're killing it. And Opti and Nico and the whole team over there, tons of awesome content coming out of them. So make sure you're subscribed. But into the news in and around, what's new? what's what's coming up in terms of devices apps all that kind of stuff so something arrived on the doorstep today this is the bit key uh so this is blocks uh hardware device um i have not it's literally

just out the box it arrived like an hour ago so i'm going to be playing with that soon probably doing a video on it um looking for it to playing with that uh also uh actually i'll leave that one for a sec because I'm going to go through some browser windows here. But yeah, so I'll be probably covering that. It's interesting. It's going to be some type of like a multi-sig setup. It comes with a native app. And there's going to be something in and around.

I think it'll be like Block has a key online. You have a key on your phone. And then you have that rock, which is NFC and fingerprint. And effectively, you'll be able to, you'll, you'll be able to spend within a small threshold for your spending amount just with the phone app and blocks key as like the two of two, sorry, two of three. And then I think you'll need your fingerprint with the device as well as your phone key in order to spend otherwise or the block in combination with blocks key online in order to spend above a set threshold. So yeah,

should be interesting. Anyways, let's dive into some of the other things. stuff here. Wackamol, Samurai launches stage one of their Whirlpool decentralization. So the announcement here, we're pleased to announce the first step of decentralizing whirlpool coin join is now live. We have launched simultaneous updates for Samurai Wallet, World Pool, GUI, and CLI, and Dojo. Update your clients today to begin making use of decentralized whirlpool. Going forward, Whirlpool clients and coordinator communication is now well on the road to being purely decentralized run over Soraban, the app agnostic Tor-based communication protocol. As of today, there's no longer a single hard-coded coordinator

server that your mixing clients are looking for. Instead, coordinator server discovery is automatic through the encrypted Soraban network. This means that even if a coordinator goes offline, unexpectedly, downtime and disruption will be minimal as clients use Soraban Network to find a replacement coordinator server. We call this stage of the decentralization whackamol. Yeah. So more or less, when you're doing coin join, what you're doing is you are sending coins to yourself. But you're doing that in combination with other people all at the same time for all the same amounts. So what ends up happening is from the outside looking in, it's more or less impossible to link together who currently holds what coins.

It would be like if everybody in the room threw a $20 bill onto the table and you all grabbed a different one, but there were no serial numbers on the bills. And so it becomes like, who has what 20? We're not quite sure. You require a coordinator to set that up. You basically need some infrastructure running

that will pair up people altogether and coordinate those spans all at the same time. And so that's what Samurai and Whirlpool has been doing as a single centralized coordinator. However, there will now be more than one, more than a single coordinator, and it will swap between them depending on availability and all of that. And so you can kind of manually switch, I think, was my understanding. But it'll just automatically kind of choose one for you by default.

So, I mean, this is great. I love to see stuff like this, and we'll see how it goes moving forward. But side note, I know that obviously people aren't always super keen on Wasabi, but mainly because of their move to add in like a coin, like on chain analysis prior to being able to enter into a coin join. However, technically speaking, you can use the software and use a different coordinator with Wasabi that wouldn't have those. things in place. So yeah, basically this is kind of following. I mean, I won't say following, but like it's in the same vein, same idea. You can have different coordinators. And so if one gets shut off, then you still have the functionality. Moving on. So I was just in Madeira not too long ago. And this is a really cool video put together a case study. Bitcoin as a medium of

exchange at Bitcoin Atlantis. Throughout the entire conference, Since every single merchant there was onboarded and was able to accept Lightning. And it was a partnership between BTC Pay server, Blink the Lightning wallet from Glew and Bitcoin Eyes, which is a point of sale terminal. Q, cue the show and tell that I was going to do prior, but here it is. So this is basically your run-of-the-mill point-sale terminal. However, you have the functionality of being able to effectively run a Bitcoin point of sale terminal. So it's not just, it's not just, you know, like tap your card or whatever, but it has like full functionality of having whatever app that you want to use as your point of sale.

It also allows you, and I'm going to see if I can get the point of sale up on the screen just so you can kind of see what it looks. looks like. But nonetheless, it also has the ability to take bolt cards, which are preloaded lightning cards. You can tap it via NFC and be able to pay. And then on top that, you can also print out receipts and do all that kind of stuff. So it's kind of cool. I'm going to bring this down to the Sat Market on Saturday here in Calgary to play around with it. It should be kind of cool. But yeah, anyways, what they did is they onboarded all of these merchants, basically over the course of a few days, they had 8,750 transactions with a volume of 2.029 Bitcoin or in and around 115,000 euros at 60 different point of sale devices and 18 merchants over three days.

And so they basically had a few different things. For the newcomers who didn't have Bitcoin, you could go and you could pay with your card and buy a bolt card and load it with Bitcoin from some of these other terminals, and then you could use that to spend within the conference so that you could kind of learn about how to use it, which was really cool. And anyways, they did a cool video about it. It looks awesome.

It was seamless. I've got to say, I used it the whole time. Everything that I bought there, I was paying with Bitcoin, and I was using a mixture. I tried a whole bunch of different wallets. I, of course, used my Phoenix. I used blink. I used Strike.

I used Aqua. and every single time, it just worked and went through. So, yeah, it was really, really cool to see. And kudos to ETC Pay server, kudos to blink and to Bitcoin eyes for putting this all together. I want to see this shit moving forward at every single event. I think what they did there worked seamlessly and they should be commended for what they were able to put together.

And let's see it again. Let's see it happen again. Anyways, we're going to move on from here. And this is Bitcoin Eyes, by the way. If you want to check them out, Bitcoinize.com, this is the point-of-sale terminal. Pretty cool. I've actually got a couple now, and I'm going to be playing around. I will do a video on one of these pretty quick here as well.

I'm just in the midst of also trying out BTC pay server on Luna node and plugging into blank and doing all the backend stuff. So anyways, experimentation is happening. tutorials will be happening soon. Moving on, Human Rights Foundation donates 500K to 14 different Bitcoin projects. One of the cool ones that I liked is

eCash with Cali for the cashier protocol. Side note, he's doing some funky thing with the back end being Bitcoin, Blank is like a funding source, which is interesting. And then he has something called Stable Nuts, which is like a

stable coin, US dollar value, being able to be used with cashew. And if you're unfamiliar with cashew, the idea is there's trust tradeoffs, of course, in using this. Although I'm going to say that the trust tradeoff with Blink as a back end is probably better than just a random mint. But what this enables you to do is have peer-to-peer transactions, which are

instant, nearly free, and have near-perfect privacy. And you can also do offline transactions. And now it looks like you'll be able to have like a stable coin value on there too, if that's what you desire. But really cool. Anyways, that's just one of the grants. Of course, you got BTC Pay, Bob Space, a few others, Bitcoin Data. Domus got another grant, which is great to see LNBits, Bitcoin Policy Summit.

There's a bunch in here. But congrats to all the people that received grants and all the projects well deserved. Moving on, Umbrol, big update version 1.0. If you're running an Umbro home, you can just hit the update button, and you You've got the nice new shiny interface and a few new features. If you're on like an old Raspberry Pi you're still running, there's a bit more of a, you've got to go through a few extra steps to update that. But looking clean, looking good guys.

Congrats. Yeah, so this is what I was talking about before I should have pulled that back. But anyways, Blink as a lightning funding source introduces Blink as a lightning back end for the mint and includes various other house keymate items for smaller bug fixes. So anyways, you can check that out over at No BS Bitcoin. Blockstrom Green desktop. They've got a new update for their new desktop app. They kind of did an overhaul of everything.

I'll probably do an updated video on that eventually as well. But you now have coin control for liquid Bitcoin as well, which is cool to see. I mentioned that the big key arrived. Anyways, this is it in action. I'll be playing with that later on. But looks interesting. I'm excited to see how this thing works in practice.

I had to bring this up, but oh my God, Steve Lubka, he said, dog, is that BSV sessions? I don't know, I'd never heard of this guy before, but like, he took my hair, but like backwards. I mean, I guess if you're interviewing Craig Wright, then everything in your world has to be backwards, right?

So anyways, mistakes remain. Some of the memes under there were fantastic. I quite enjoyed them. Anyways, moving on. I'm sure some of you have seen the fun tweet storms in and around Maidex this past week.

I'm not going to go into the details there. Anyways, very talented dude, awesome art. I just picked myself up a piece. So if you want to support him, head over to madex. And this is the one that I ordered. So this is like laser engraved on wood and then hand painted. And yeah, I like this one, mathematical purity.

There's a reason that I got this one. So I'm going to tell the story. Basically, I like it because of the Rubik's Cube. And the story was I went to Riga in 2019 with Bull Bitcoin and I shared a room with Madex and Bull Bitcoin hosted this big dinner after the conference in this really cool underground area. And it was this restaurant that the, I guess like the politicians from like hundreds and hundreds of years ago used to meet down there and do all their scheming and everything and blah, blah, blah. But like it's basically like an underground cave kind of feel. And there's like a full

roasted pig and like all of this meat and everything. Anyways, we're having dinner. and like the room was insane. Like you had like, Giacomo Zucco and Safedine and Adam Back and Francis Pugliott. Like all of these people just like sitting in a room and it was really cool. But one of my favorite moments was Madex just like saunter's in, sits his ass beside Adam back, starts chatting. And then Adam back casually just had a Rubik's cube with him as you do when you go out to dinner.

And he basically taught Madex how to solve a Rubik's cube there. during the dinner. And it was just a funny moment to see. So anyways, that's why I grabbed this piece because it just reminds me of that trip. But yeah, if you want to support Eric, if you want to support MaidX, then you can head over to Maidex.art and check out his stuff. Awesome, dude. Anyways, a couple other things. I just dropped a new tutorial on the cold card cue, namely how to clone your old Mark 4 to migrate to the queue. So what this does is you put an SD card into the new device and say, I want to clone my old cold card.

What this does is it takes some information from the queue and makes it so that when you go to clone your old cold card, it will take all of the information from your Mark 4 and it will encrypt it in a way where if somebody gets a hold of that SD card is totally useless. They can't read it or whatever. and only the new cold card that you've specified will be able to decrypt it and unlock that information and import it onto the new device. So basically you're able to not just pour over your seed, but every bit of information.

If you've got stuff in the seed vault, if you've got special settings, if you've turned on certain functions and other, you know, every single setting on the cold card will be ported over and it will function exactly the same plus the new features of the queue. So if you want to check that out, if you just got a queue or it's on the way and you want to not start from scratch with a new seed and you want to port it all over, it takes a few minutes. It's awesome. And then I kind of showed how to repair it with Sparrow, make sure that it still functions. And then I show that indeed both cold cards then can function as signers if you want to keep them both up and running and have the Mark 4 as like a duplicate. it. Anyways, guys, very excited for this. On Saturday, we have the second sat market here in Calgary. It's going to be a good time. Looking forward to it. Also, my birthday coming up, this will be like the birthday celebration. My birthday's next week. But it's going to be a good time. If you're in

Calgary, please do come down. If you're in and around Calgary or you want to make the trip in, please do come down. It's going to be a lot of fun. A lot of good merchants are coming. And if you haven't yet, please do go an RSVP so you can find it on Meetup Saturday Market. You can also share this on your socials. That would be greatly appreciated. We'd love to get a bunch of people out. And we'll have some learning opportunities. Also, if you've got your normie friends that aren't yet orange pilt, that's okay because we're telling the merchants that it's totally fine to accept cash as well. of course. And so we can use that opportunity for people to be kind of exposed to a place where people just value the freedom to transact with each other. And then we can maybe give them a little

nudge towards Bitcoin as a tool for freedom as well. Anyways, so the sat market, be sure to come down and be sure to tell other people about it. And speaking of events, tons of stuff on the horizon. Of course, the sat market coming up. But the halving party, I'm going to be heading down to El Salvador. I'll be flying in on the first. I'm going to a graduation ceremony for me, Premier Bitcoin. I'm going to be at the having party itself, and I'm hoping to check out Elzonte for a day or a bit as well. Short trip, but it's my first time down there,

looking forward to it. And then a few other things coming up soon. Canadian Bitcoin Conference in Montreal and May, also Freedom Forum and BTC Prague in June. And then it's not listed here yet, but I will be returning for the first. time in a few years here to Riga for Baltic Honey Badger. Really, really can't wait for that one.

And as of now, those are the only places I'll be going. I don't think I'm, at this point in time, I don't think I'm going to be making it down to Nashville. Yeah. And I'll kind of just leave that there. It's looking like that's not going to work out. So I'm not going to be down for that one. But if you want to see me at some of these other ones, again, Canadian Bitcoin Conference,

Oslo Freedom Forum, BTC Prague, and of course, Balticani Badger is an absolute blast. You can hit up those sites to check them out. I should have Riga added here in short order. So keep an eye out for that, and that'll give you links. But you should be able to find it online. No problem. Anyways. And then, of course, tomorrow, why are we bullish?

And speaking of Prague, we've got Mattias, one of the organizers of the BTC Prague conference. He's going to be there. We got John from me, Premier Bitcoin coming. And we got, I'm sure you guys have seen him blasted it all over the internet lately with some of the viral stuff that came up. But Ben Hart, the oldest practicing break dancer, who's also an awesome bitcoiner, is going to be on the show as well. So this is going to be a good one. I'm looking forward to this chat. You can never go wrong when you get another Ben on the show as well.

So anyways, with that, I will round it out. Be sure to hit up the show tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern time. And it'll be an absolute blast. Anyways, with that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. I'll see you guys next time for your Simply session.