BTC Sessions - JULIAN ASSANGE FREED! ep422

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

Welcome to Simply Sessions for June 27th, 2024. Today, we discuss the European Central Bank's move towards a digital currency, reactions from Christine Lagarde, Joe Biden, and Elon Musk, Julian Assange's release and its impact on Bitcoin, and the US and Germany selling large amounts of Bitcoin. Stay tuned! BOOK private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted. https://bitcoinmentor.io/ 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: BITCOIN WELL My favorite self custody bitcoin platform in Canada and USA! They offer KYC free accounts, 1% spread, no on-chain fees and tons of other incredible features. Check them out at bitcoinwell.com/btcsessions https://bitcoinwell.com/btcsessions 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 HODLHODL is a NON-CUSTODIAL, ANONYMOUS solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION DEBIFI is a non-custodial Bitcoin backed lending platform with institutional grade liquidity providers and no rehypothecation of your funds. Find them at: https://debifi.com/

Yo, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Thursday, another episode of Simply Sessions. We've got Nico waiting here in the wings to bring us the latest and greatest in everything Bitcoin. I will be following up with, of course, your tech updates. How are you guys? I hope you've been having a good week here. I'm jacked. And you know why?

because my brother from another mother, my other tip, my distant tip will be in town flying into Calgary this Sunday and we're going to have a week chilling out here at the sap market, the Bitcoin rodeo, and maybe even the Calgary Stampede and the Rocky Mountains. It's going to be an absolute blast. We're also going to be chilling with Adam O'Brien from Bitcoin well. plenty more Bitcoinwall.com slash BTC sessions. Don't use the simply link. Anyways, I see Nico live in the background here. Anyways, of course, this is live. We're going to get things rolling. But because it's live,

anything can happen. I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can write it and we'll do it live. And if you have not 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. Before we dive in, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. I am pulling up timechain calendar.com and simultaneously, I'm going to get that live chat on the side of the screen there.

Everything you save into the chat from here on in will be live for the world to see for better or worse. Back to time chain calendar. We're sitting at $61,495 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will snag you 1,626 SATs. Side note. Nice little redesign on time chain calendar. It's looking slick. Thanks, T.C.

Good work. In terms of fees, looks like, where are we sitting? Oh, now I don't know where anything is. Priority, nine stats per byte. Wow. Single SATs per byte. Priority transactions. Not bad. Anytime fee eight Sasse per byte.

In terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.71 million of them, that's 93.89% of the total supply. We'll do a quick shout out to our sponsors here, and then we'll dive right into the news. We'll be back in a sec. It's on a mission to enable independence by being one of the easiest and quickest ways to purchase Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. And the best part about it, every buy goes directly into your own self-custody. They never hold your coins. You can add a Bitcoin address as part of onboarding. There's a transparent 1% spread, no hidden fees, no withdrawal fees, plus they have KYC

free sales and bill payments on their website. They're also a publicly traded company under the ticker BTCW on the TSXV. Check them out over at Bitcoinwell.com. Check out my full tutorial on how to use them. And you can check out the links in these show notes down below and sign up today. Kai.com has some of the best hardware on the market today to see. secure your Bitcoin. The cold card queue is an absolute powerhouse and is my daily driver. And on top of this, they have plenty of other goodies including the Mark 4, the tap signer,

open dimes, the block clock, and much more. If you head over to their website, make sure you use code BTC sessions at checkout to get a nice discount. Links are in the show notes down below. All right, we are back. We're going to bring them in here. Buddy, how you doing? Good to see you. No, I'm so excited, man. Canada 2.0, Canada, second time. Calgary. I'm incredibly excited. I keep saying, you know, like, I was like, I absolutely love this city and the response from every single Canadian is because, like, you haven't seen the winner yet, bro. Which I find absolutely hilarious. But yeah, I'm incredibly excited. And it's going to be, it's going to be a great trip. And it's going to be my daughter's first trip international trip. And really looking forward to it. So much, man, the rodeo, the stampede, you know, the traveling. So I'm really excited for it. And Ben gave me some tips, some fathering tips too. So I appreciate that.

Hell yeah. You know, just have the baby shove that kid on a plane every opportunity to get. They're going to be a nice little world traveler. Our daughter kills it regularly. She knows exactly what's up. Our son is three and a boy. So he's a terror. but you know

such as life such as life but yeah man cool well okay I'm gonna pull up the screen here but we did this last week this is a thing

we're gonna stick with this it was a lot of fun and on top of it I'm gonna after you're done your news segment I've got mine pulled up here too and I'm gonna go ahead

and I'm gonna do a second one of these so can I cue it up and let people know what's going on here hate it brother All right, sweet. So this is Bitcoin well, and they've got like a point system where you can effectively redeem your points to get rewards. And the rewards can be anywhere from 500 sats up to potentially a million sats. And so basically the way that it works is we're going to drop a coin in the well and it's going to bring up a prize, you know, 500 sats,000 sats, whatever it may be. And what's going to come up on the screen. is a QR code. This is an LN URL withdrawal code. So what you need to do is you need to get your lightning wallets ready because the second it's on the screen, you're going to scan that and try and redeem those sats first before anybody else in the show. So we're going to do it now.

I'm going to do it again when I start my tech update. So Nika, are you ready to throw that thing in the well? Let's do it. Let's throw some coins. By the way, also the way that you earn Bitcoin, Bitcoin well points is by buying Bitcoin on Bitcoin well. Anyways. All right. Let's do it. Whopping. Click the coin in the wishing well and 500sats.

All right. Get scanning. Get scanning, everybody. Should I make it big? I'm going to make a big here. I'll just kind of. We'll see. And if you win, honestly in the chat, let us know who snags these sats.

By the way, I think I used the term, let's see who snipes these sats last time. And the person who actually got them was Bitcoin sniper. I got to look. I got to look. I'm like, I'm wondering, I'm like, it must be, must be, there must be this one guy that's just really fast prepared. Oh, man. Exactly. Awesome. All right. Well, uh, I guess I will, I'm, I'm going to, I'm going to bring that one down. I wonder. I hope somebody got it by now. I hope those lightning wallets were ready

because I'm going to collapse it down now and we're going to move on. But if you got those sets, let us know in the chat. And you can always scrub back through the video to pull up that QR code and claim it. But yeah, man, let's dive in. What's been going on this week?

What is top of mind? I mean, I know what's top of mind, but let's go. Also, also, if you use either promo code BTCC, sessions or Simply BTC, you get three coin tosses for free. Obviously, I recommend Simply BTC and Ben recommends BTC sessions. That's not fair.

But yes, if you use either of our promo codes, of course, Bitcoin Wells sponsors us both. You get three free coin tosses into the Bitcoin wishing well. All right, everybody. So the big news, this is absolutely insane. Next billionaire, I think, to, join the Bitcoin train. Of course you have Michael Dell. Michael Dell is the founder, CEO and chairman of Dell Technologies. It's one of the largest companies in the world. I think his net worth is like $15 billion. It's absolutely huge. And he was dropping some cryptic things and then he just

dropped the meme and just came all out. Of course, like every Fortune 500 company, Dell holds a considerable amount of, you know, of cash or cash equivalents. And, you know, they're, and I'm talking about hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. And they're holding on to melting ice cubes, essentially. So they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars in purchasing power every year for holding those cash equivalents. And they don't even have to hold Bitcoin in totality. They can even just hold, you know, 5% or 10% instead of, in cash equivalence just in Bitcoin, it would actually compensate for the loss of purchasing power due to holding Fiat and cash.

So this is why it's such a big deal. This isn't just a billionaire. This is a billionaire that has a massive corporation behind it. And let's see, let's see the news. Is this like personal stuff? Is he saying that he's personally buying Bitcoin? Is he saying that Dell computers or Dell Technologies is going to follow, you know, a Bitcoin, Michael Saylor's Bitcoin strategy.

Who knows? But let's take a look at some of the hints because they're incredibly exciting. Is this the next domino to fall? I don't know. We shall see. So here's obviously Michael Dell. Michael Dell, CEO of 100 billion plus market cap

Dell Technologies, showed at least some vague interest in Bitcoin recirculating a BTC-friendly post on X from Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor. It started Thursday when Dell posted scarcity creates value that prompted a reply from Sailor the executive chairman of micro strategy saying Bitcoin is digital scarcity which Dell then reposted that is you hear that that's pretty effing crazy right the hint who who says scarcity creates value bitcoins obviously the reply from Sailor Bitcoin is digital

scarcity and then the confirmation is that Dell retweeted that or reposted that here's the image of it here's Michael Dell reposting it and it did it end here. Michael Saylor, sorry, Michael, both Michaels, Michael Sailor, Michael Dell. I guess like the billionaire Bitcoin Club, like, you know how like it's like the team of Ben's. I guess the billionaire Bitcoiners are the team of Michaels, I guess. Can I be a Michael? Yeah, right? Like, let's just change your name to Michael. No, I can't abandon my fellow Benz. Right. I think that I think they might be upset. Anyways, anyways. So let's check this out. Of course, we got Michael Dell, and he says, this is a great account to follow, and he's tacking the cookie monster.

Very entertaining and check this out. Yes, that is a meme of the cookie monster, not eating cookies, but eating Bitcoin cookies. And of course, this came shortly after Michael Dell reposted Michael Saylor. So, I mean, it's not a direct confirmation, bro, but at the same time, like, how, like, you know, like, is something Bitcoin related for sure. Like absolute guarantee. And this would be huge. If this domino were to fall, it would be massive.

It would be a game changer because it's like Michael Sailor has already secured it. Now which other tech company, which other Fortune 500 company is going to fall on his footsteps? And of course, like when that happens, when that happens. And I think it's going to inevitably happen. Yeah, man. Like the sky is the absolute limit, right? I think all other companies that haven't adopted a Bitcoin standard or have put Bitcoin on their treasury, they're going to be at a disadvantage to the companies that have, right?

So whether that's micro strategy or Dell, it becomes a game of survival. The peer pressure starts to mount, right? So anyways, this is incredibly exciting. And maybe Michael Dell and Dell Technologies, Dell computers, are the next domino to fall in terms of the billionaire. in terms of the Fortune 500 companies. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting to see.

Again, I've always thought that Bitcoin, other than us weirdos, somewhere in the middle of the pack that just kind of discovered it, you know, through our own weird preferences, I think that people at polar ends of the spectrum of, of, I guess, wealth disparity,

those are the ones that will recognize it first. ones that have the least to lose and have been somehow cut off from the legacy system, either by censorship or because their political dissidents or whatever it may be, but they need to use money that can't be censored or their money is so broken that they require an escape from inflation. But there's also the super high net worth people that are beginning to understand it because their entire livelihood is preserving purchasing power and protecting their capital. So they're also uniquely positioned to get it. So it's no surprise to me that we're seeing a little bit of both ends of the spectrum and it's working its way in.

The other thing I want to do is share to last week. I had Scott Deals from Block Rewards podcast on and he was referring to Michael Saylor and Michael Dell and, you know, how much more wealthy Michael Dell is and he was referring to uh he says we're going up by orders of Michaels so uh yes I think that was the quote of the week and yeah you know every cycle will go up another order of Michaels uh in price I 100 percent I'm bullish on the Michaels bro I'm bullish on the Michaels I'm bullish on the Ben's but I got to say that Nico's absolutely scarce because I don't think that i don't i don't have heard of another nico in the space scarcely is a good thing man oh man ben do you mind pulling up that that latest comment from gn the t hr this is really interesting i think

he made a really good point right if dell starts to add btc to their balance sheet they will deny thousands of millioners in the world to become whole coiners i would say not even millionaires just thousands of people you know um bitcoin is absolutely scarce right the math that i always like to do is, Nico can't do math. But this is simple math, is that there's 50 or 60 million millionaires around the world, and there's only 21 million Bitcoin.

So if every millionaire around the world wanted to buy just one, they physically could not, which is incredible, Gunther, appreciate it, bro. They physically couldn't, smiley face. Gunther, smiley face. So I think that's incredibly bullish. Now, if you do the math for the billionaires, it's kind of like, you know,

There's only so much to go around, right? And nation states haven't even got in. Central banks haven't even got in. So, you know, the party hasn't even gotten started. Yeah. Again, like some of the scarcity metrics in and around this stuff is crazy. Like if you were to take the entire supply of Bitcoin completely foregoing all the lost Bitcoin and everything. But like if you had the full 21 million and you divide it up evenly amongst every single person on the planet,

each person would only get like 200-something thousand odd sats. And then when Luke was on the show when we were in El Salvador together, he brought up an even more interesting mechanism to me where he mentioned on the show that if you were to look at the issuance of Bitcoin right now per day at the current mining reward and then you divided that per capita across the globe. Each person per day, if they got an even split of the newly mined Bitcoin, each person on the globe would get five sats per day. That's how scarce it is.

So if you go and you buy, you go buy like a hundred bucks worth of Bitcoin, you're basically claiming like a huge portion of the world's daily allowance of sets. It's crazy, man. It's so, look, the numbers are are so nuts. And I think once people understand, I think we truly get to like a runaway type of moment, like this inflection point and it's going to be insane. I'm just so happy that I have Bitcoin and it's in cold storage, very safe.

100%. All right. So next piece of news, government's doing what governments do best, which is being stupid. Why is it so stupid? It's because they have a money printer. It's like giving an aiming. mex with unlimited, you know, like literally no, no limits whatsoever to a 16, 70 year old kid and say, go ham. That's essentially what, you know, the government is when it comes to printing money.

And what's really moronic, in my opinion, is here you have the U.S. government, which literally has the ability to print money, right, selling Bitcoin, which they do not have the ability to print more of out of thin air, without investing in. miners and getting in line like everybody else. They're literally selling Bitcoin, which every single time they've sold Bitcoin, it's been an absolute terrible trade. You want to talk about the separation of money and state. They are literally separating money in state when they do this, right?

Literally, right? So the headline from Bitcoin magazine is, the US government moves millions in Bitcoin to Coinbase. It goes on to say on June 26, the US government sent 3,940 Bitcoin. to Coinbase Prime. And it goes on to say the transfer Bitcoin was originally confiscated from convicted drug trafficker but meet Singh earlier in 2024. Singh was arrested in London in 2019 on distribution charges and extradited to the United

States in 2023. As part of his conviction, Singh forfeited over 8,100 Bitcoin worth around 150 million at the time. While the recent transfer of nearly 4,000 Bitcoin is substantial, it represents. just a fraction of the government's total Bitcoin holdings, data shows the U.S. government currently possesses around 214,000 Bitcoin worth over $13 billion, making it the largest national holder of Bitcoin globally. Much of the government's Bitcoin comes from seizures related to the shuttered dark web marketplace Silk Road, the infamous BitFinex hack of 2016, also contributed to the

stash. Now, what's really interesting about this latest statement, Ben, is why didn't they give that back to Bitfinex? You know? Like, what's going on there? Well, it's a crime scene, Nico. You can't be just really, nilly, giving back stats to people they were stolen from. Right?

Like, oh, we're the government. We're going to, we're going to seize this back. Can I have it back? Because they stole it for me? Nah. Nah. Okay. Anyways, moving on to the next one.

Here you have the German government also doing something stupid. They also decided to offload 900 Bitcoin and 400 Bitcoin in different trenches, I guess, and they sent it to Coinbase and Cracken. Now, what's really ironic about all of this, and I find absolutely hilarious, is that the U.S. government is also currently suing Coinbase, right? So, you know, they're suing the platform of which they're using to sell Bitcoin. They're literally separating money from state, and the whole thing is just absolutely hilarious

because they could just print money as their heart desires, and they're selling Bitcoin for something they can print more of more of. And I think it's very symbolic. I think it represents the inefficiencies of government. Like, how could it not? Like, it's the perfect representation of what happens in government when they can just print money out of thin air. they start to make really, really dumb decisions.

Like, it's almost as if it's an ideological thing. It's like, we don't want Bitcoin. We want dollars, like, you know, which I find really, really interesting. Yeah. I mean, at some point, and there's people going back in the back and forth in the chat about this, but like at some point, you know, governments through, you know, through whatever smoke and mirrors a roundabout way that they try

to obfuscate the fact that the Fed is basically the government. I would pause to say that the Fed is actually separate from government. Like it's, yeah, but nonetheless, if the government wants more money than they have,

it is then created. Like they're basically, they're able to, create deficits, which create inflation. And yes, they're going to have to pay interest rates and everything like that. But at the end of the day, money creation is through, yes, creation of new currency, but also through creation of debt. And at some point, governments will not even be able to print enough to purchase back

the amount of Bitcoin they once held because the inflation of the current. through printing will happen quicker than they can buy up the sats. And so I think that whatever that inflection point is, when governments actually realize that, oh, this is actually scarce. Maybe we should hold the scarce asset and get rid of the thing that we can print out of nothing. And maybe we should buy stuff with this thing we can print out of nothing and hold those hard assets.

And this is the playbook from, we were talking about. talking about this last week on why are we bullish. This is exactly the playbook from confessions of an economic hitman where, you know, wealthy countries will go in and they'll be like, oh, those are some pretty nice resources there. But it looks like you don't have the infrastructure to extract them. Allow us to create this predatory loan for you so that you can create the necessary infrastructure to extract the resources. Oh, you can't repay the loan. That's okay. They will restructure it and you can give us all your resources. And the play there is, obviously, they're able to take something they have for free, which is issuing debt, and they're able to extract something that is actually scarce, which is the resources.

I don't know why the governments haven't yet figured out that they're playing themselves the exact opposite of the playbook that they've done on all these other countries, but they're doing it on like a global level with currency. It's hilarious. Dude, it's, it's, it's, it's hilarious and it's just an example, like the people in charge, your so-called betters are, are they really, should they really be in charge? You know, there's just like really famous quote, Ben, that like really stuck by me, which is like, if you just took like 50 random people across the country, they would do a better job than like the 50 politicians in charge because there's, There's such ideologues and like, you know, they've been like they're thinking about random things.

And like the 50 random people are just like normal people trying to get by. Right. And I think the role of government is just like it's like an arboree. Like it's like a referee, you know. And I think Fiat has just fueled this experiment where like the expansion of the role of government in people's lives and this is whatever. It's like I don't think a lot of people want those things. Right. And they come up with all these like fancy shan,

shenanigans and all that stuff like you were saying. Separate money from state or this fucking insanity is going to go on. That's what I got to say. And yeah, bro, you're absolutely right. No matter how much money they print, they were never going to be able to buy the amount of Bitcoin they sold, dude. So, yeah, 100% spot on. When people get Bitcoin, when people understand that it's actually scarce,

they're not going to be super keen on accepting dollars for the Bitcoin, maybe at a premium eventually. It would just depend when the government's actually get it right like they they could get away with it right now but down the line there's there's an inflection point where people value bitcoin way about where everybody values bitcoin above printed fiat cash and and they just they have no use for it you're absolutely right yeah man i'm excited for those days it reminds me of the meme with neo and morphius right it's like are you telling me morphius i won't have to sell my bitcoin for dollars on day or like whatever

and it's like morphius looks and it's like no neom i'm telling you we'll never have to do that that. Anyways, in other news, Opti's ex-girlfriend continues to be vindictive against the breakup. Of course, I'm talking about Christine Lagarde. She is the head of the European Central Bank, and nobody wants this. Nobody wants this. This is just, she's admitted it herself. She's like, if we don't quote-unquote innovate and establish a central bank digital currency, you know, the role of the central bank will diminish. And my response to that is exactly. But look, what's really interesting about this, Ben, is the wording in this is fascinating, right? So she says, we've made significant progress towards ensuring we're ready to issue a digital

euro in the future if needed. What's really interesting about that is the bait and switch. What is the bait and switch? She didn't say central bank digital currency. She said digital euro, right? And it continues. It says we look forward to contribute the democratic debate with European legislators on bringing public money, right? Very interesting wording. What do you think is more public? Bitcoin's an open

ledger. Anyone could create more Bitcoin if they invest in the mining infrastructure. We can't audit the Fed. We can't audit the European Central Bank. If you create more of it, you go to jail, right? What is more public, in my opinion, right? So it's interesting that they're playing word games here. And as she goes on to say, to the digital landscape to complement physical cash. She's also letting you know that we're not going to get rid of cash, you know, we're going to keep it around. And here's the official reports. As we publish a report summarizing our progress on the digital euro project since the preparation phase started on November 2020, a digital euro would provide an all-in-one digital payment solution that is accessible to all.

Should it be issued, it would make our payment market more innovative, resilient, and less dependent on non-European schemes. Okay. Now, if I just showed you this picture and I took away the digital euro, wouldn't you think that this is shit coin marketing? Like, what is the difference, right? It looks like an ad for like a discount sale at like bargain bin or something. Like it's like really really poorly designed. It literally looks like some trashy store is having a sale and you should come and pick up all all of their stuff that they're trying to get off. shelves absolutely yeah total disaster shame on christine legard and another thing also kind of drop balls by government uh here's joe biden president of the united states absolutely gaslighting the populace on inflation right so they find hilarious right like you have the european the head of the european central bank lying through her teeth right here's the president of the united states saying inflation was zero on a monthly basis in may this is welcome progress but prices are still too high that's why i'm

fighting to lower costs by increasing rental assistance, taking on big pharma, and investing affordable clean energy. Now, what's hilarious about this is at the end, he's literally saying, we're going to print more money so we can get clean energy. And at the top, this is kind of insidious. This is kind of malicious. And the reason I'm saying that is like, inflation is cumulative. So just because it was quote unquote zero, it just means that it hasn't increased that fast.

And here, again, this is the importance of Twitter. is that you just see people responding back. And it's interesting about this post, too. It's not showing all of it. But someone is saying, like Paul, I can't pronounce your last name. Because Joe Biden is gasoline again. Inflation is cumulative. It's 3.3% higher from last year has averaged over 5% under Biden.

Now, it gets political at the end. But the point I'm trying to make is even if they get it back to 2%, even when they say, oh, we lowered inflation, that doesn't mean that prices are going to go back to where they were before. It just means the rate at which the currency debasing is slowing down, right? But that, of course, is not explained whatsoever. This is just pure political, oh, inflation is zero. Inflation is down.

Like, that is gaslighting to its finest. And at the very end, he's actually saying, we're actually going to print more money, which is the cause of inflation. This was actually fuels everything. Yeah. Like if somebody was intellectually honest with simplistic wording in and around this, you know, when they say that inflation has come down, the correct way of saying it in layman's terms would be things are getting more expensive, but less fast than they got expensive

over the past month. Like that's more or less, or things didn't get more expensive this month and then patting yourself on the back for that shit. Yeah, well, things are up like 40% like in the past two years or more. And side note, did you see that video of the dude who had the Walmart cart from two years ago saved? And it was basically like a rundown of like 40 something items that he had done for a grocery cart. And he had paid it before. And it was $120 something.

And then there was a button that says reorder all. And his order was from 2022. And he hit the reorder all button to see what it would cost. and it was $414 for the same items. My God. Insane. But here's Biden patting himself on the bag. Yo, guys, don't worry.

In May, shit didn't get more expensive for one month. Also, we've got some projects on the go that are going to require a lot more cash. Dude, that's so, and it's crazy. I'm glad that you brought that up because that means that the inflation rates that they've been giving us are bullshit. right it's almost as if the books are cooked like that's so crazy man um but we still got a lot of work to do because people are still not awake to this reality like people are still not awakened to the reality of the scam of fiat currency anyways uh headline news of today of course julian assange now let's talk a little bit about this right there's a separation of money in state

the way that i see it there's many more other martyrs but i would say there's three big martyrs in Bitcoin. Julian Assange. Julian Assange in WikiLeaks, their history with Bitcoin goes almost back to the inception. And I'll get more into detail of what I mean about that. But Julian Assange represents the beginning of independent journalism. And this is what you've seen rise over, you know, really since, you know, the inception

of the internet, but it really started to take off. And we're really seeing it seep into mainstream now. where mainstream journalist, sorry, independent journalism is actually getting more traction than legacy media. And that becomes a big issue for governments because before there was only a handful of institutions that governments would have to knock on the door and say, actually, you can't run that story. So what Julian Assange did was he obviously founded this website called WikiLeaks, which obviously leaked stuff. Now, supposedly when you leak something, if it came from a legacy media outlet, it would be protected.

It would be protected under the First Amendment. But because it came from an independent journalist, they did the same thing that they did to Ross Ulberg and they tried to make an example out of it. I believe something is coming to a head. We're reaching a culmination point. We're reaching an inflection point because two out of the three martyrs of Bitcoin, right?

And there's been many more. But I would say the three most popular ones, they have, Julian has already been freed, So one out of three. And Ross Ulbert could potentially be free if Donald Trump gets elected. And of course, the third one is Edward Snowden. I think we're going to free him too as our freedom movement and the Bitcoin movement gets more and more influential and more powerful.

Now, what did Julian Assange do? He leaked a video of an Apache gunship mowing down journalists in Iraq. Now, it's a tragic situation overall because, of course, the U.S. military didn't want that to happen. It was a terrible situation overall. They mistaken that the journalists were holding AK-47s, where in reality they were holding cameras. It was a horrible scene. And Julian Assange released this, and that's what journalists do. They do that so that the government is held accountable for their actions. And remember, the war in Iraq was caused by this journalist from the New York Times getting information from the intelligence agencies

and actually telling the American public, selling the American public that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Right. So here you actually have a journalist who's actually journaling, right? I don't know if that's the correct word, versus the propaganda media,

aka the legacy media, and they put them in a box for it, right? Now, I did say that Julian Assange and Bitcoin's history is intertwined, and it's super intertwined, because actually Satoshi's last post on Bitcoin talk, December 11, 2010, was it would have been nice to get this attention in any other context. WikiLeaks has kicked the Hornets nest and the swarm is headed towards us. He disappeared after that post.

Now, WikiLeaks was actually using Bitcoin to stay alive because all the traditional financial system, they cut WikiLeaks off. Does that sound familiar? Like five, 10 years later, Canadian truckers protest, political dissidents, getting their accounts hack. So this was like the beginning of all this stuff. But back then, the mainstream wasn't awakened as it is now, right? Now people are no longer consuming an handful of legacy media outlets. Now people are seeking their own information and consuming the content that they wish, like what we're doing right now, independent media. So Julian Assange is a martyr.

the big news is that he got freed and checked this out. The person who paid for his private jet travel, you know, after his release, was an anonymous Bitcoin donor. I don't think it was so anonymous. Actually, this is a big coincidence. Check this out by Bitcoin magazine. This is Jack Dorsey tweeting literally safe passage through at 4.03 p.m. and check this out. At 403 p.m. was the anonymous $500,000 Bitcoin donation, right? So absolutely crazy. And now the last thing that I'll say is this thing was bullshit. Why do I mean that?

Because he had to admit that he committed a crime. So it was essentially it was a struggle session. Struggle session is where like they make you admit it's very common in like highly collectivist countries, right? Where they put you in a room and they tell you, you did this. You were wrong, kind of like 1984-style thing. So essentially, he had to admit that he committed a crime for him to be let free. I also don't think it's a coincidence that this happened, because this would have never happened

without the approval of the U.S. government, if it wasn't for Donald Trump promising at the Libertarian Convention, that he would free Ross Ulberg if he was elected. So I believe that the motivation behind this was also political. as well. So the Biden administration could say, hey, you know what? We did something too. Drop mic, right? So yeah, I'm really glad that Julian Assange was freed. This is incredible news. This is a guy who has supported, you know, not only Bitcoin, but freedom of speech, transparency, so governments could be held accountable for their actions. Cough, cough, the Joe Biden tweet, complete gaslighting. And this is incredibly important.

I think the fight for free speech is the front line for the battle for Bitcoin. I think that if we lose a fight for free speech, if they're not okay with you speaking freely, what makes you think they're going to be okay with you transacting freely? There's incredibly bullish news. And of course, you see Bitcoin's fingerprints all over this story. And I think that's a representation. It's a symbolism. It's symbolism of what Bitcoin is.

It's freedom money to its core. this this was my heart i really love this it makes me so happy you know watching the clips of him being reunited with his family and his family have been present at you know the bitcoin conferences and all of this um i was just in prague and his uh his sister stella was speaking on stage about what was going on and again, to see her, you know, documenting the entire ordeal as he left and, you know, finally got to fly out of there and fly home was incredible. You know, I was lucky enough last year, the Human Rights Foundation did a summit in Nashville in the fall, and I was lucky enough to sit down and chat with Gabriel Shepton, who is his brother,

as well. And yeah, just kind of just had a general conversation with him and everything. And they must be so relieved again to like have him back home. You know, they never knew if they were ever going to actually get to see him again in person. And, you know, he's got he's got kids too. Yeah, he hasn't seen in how long. And so he's being reunited with them, you know, right now. And so it makes me happy. The glimmers of hope that we're seeing, the possibility of of Ross being freed, and I hope that comes to fruition. I truly do. And if that's the trajectory that we're on and we see that happen, then I've got to believe that Snowden could be potentially on that list too. And so I think that it's a breath of fresh air given what we've seen over the

past number of years. And yeah, let's keep this train rolling because it's going in the right direction. 100%. And speaking of Ross, too, I, mining disrupt. So Ted Cruz was doing a thing right before, and I actually got to spend time with his mother. And we spoke for about 35 minutes backstage. And I asked her, I said, you know, like,

how do you feel? Right? Because the Donald Trump stuff. And like, I could just see the look on her face. Like it was like, you know, she was so, she's like, this is like, we're almost there, right? And it was, it was insane. It was surreal, right? So, you know, this means that freedom is winning.

This means that the Bitcoin movement continues to grow and influence. This means that the freedom movement continues to grow in influence. And hopefully we continue winning, man, because I think the world would be much better place with more freedom in it. Anyways, this was your Simply Sessions. Ben, I will literally see you in the flesh next week, and I'm excited to do this in person. Be sorry, everybody. Cheers.

I'll talk to you soon. And yeah, thanks, man. All right, everybody, stick around. We are going to keep going. We've, of course, got your tech updates, and we're going to do another drop into the well so that you can claim more SaaS. Get those lightning wallets ready.

Get ready to scan because we're going to do another drop into the Bitcoin well. But before we do, we're going to do a quick shout out to our sponsors, so we will be right back. It allows you to borrow against your Bitcoin in a non-custodial way. Collateral is held in a three of four distributed multi-sig with trusted parties. It provides institutional liquidity providers, loan periods of up to five years with flexible conditions and the best rates. And best of all, no rehypification of your funds. If you want to check them out today, head over to debify.com or hit the link in the show notes down below. All right. Let's dive into it. For side note, I'm going to bring up my screen here, by the way. We found the winner of the Sats for the first round. And that went to Chris Constable, who snagged them over on X there. So good job on the quick scan. But we're going to jump over in Bitcoin well here. We're going to go ahead. We're going to redeem 500 points. I hope you have those lightning wall. It's ready. And we'll drop a coin in the well.

And hopefully somebody snags those sats. I'm going to enlarge it here. Again, if you're unfamiliar, all you need is a lightning wallet. You hit receive, you scan the QR code, and you'll be able to redeem 500 sats this time around. So get scanning. If you claim those sats and you're in the chat, please do let us know.

And if you're at it, you can always shoot a thank you off to at Bitcoin. Well, if you're on. if you're on X and tweeting it too. But there you go. 500 sats. If you're not able to scan it in time, you can scrub back through the video afterwards and claim, or you're probably going to want to do it sooner rather than later.

But nonetheless, let's dive into the tech updates. Number one, open sats announces long-term support for Calais and William Casserin. and this is for Kashi and for Damos and a Noster app for iPhone. And so Kale is recognized for his ongoing work with Kashi, a free and open source, Xiaomi, an eCash protocol that greatly improves user transaction privacy and efficiency. He has also been instrumental in development and maintenance of popular mint implementation, nutshell, and cashew.me wallet, which supports offline eCash transactions.

The grant will support Cali in improving the cashier protocols robustness and performance, including introducing a fee structure to prevent denial of service attacks, implementing a proof-of-liability scheme for auditing mince, and enhancing the multi-nut payment concept. Will's prolific contributions to the Noster ecosystem highlighted by his development of Damos have advanced Bitcoin integration into social network through pioneers. ZAPS, peer-to-peer micropayments between users or the Lightning Network, added open-sats.

JV will focus on further developing NostraDB, upgrading D-S-IOS, Node-DEC, and Note Crumbs. So congratulations to both gentlemen for the grants. Okay, so let's chat about what has been going on with Fetamins here. So there was a DNS attack on a COMPLINDS. couple different Fedomint servers. And so the way this works is, effectively, it's a big, and sorry for that scrolling mark key, I forgot to drop that there. Anyways, there is, so Phetamint is basically a big multi-sick. And you can set them up however you please. Anybody can set up a mint. And once funds are in the mint, people can transact using an e-cash system on top of it.

You can also link it through lightning and have lightning gateways so you can send into and out the mint via lightning. However, some of the key holders and some of these multi-sigs were using domains that end in rather than dot com or dot whatever AI or dot IO or dot XYZ was a commonly used DNS or domain name server for Fetamance. And some of those dot XYZ servers were being randomly shut down or attacked or censored in some form, which caused a couple of Mints to have some issues in being able to properly relay transactions. This caused a mutiny wallet. So if you were using Mutiny Wallet and you were part of either of, I believe it was Freedom One or Bitcoin principles, those two Mints experienced some major outages because of this

this attack. Now, this tweet from the Fediment handle says, we are implementing API endpoint rotation for the next Fediment release, which will allow bringing back guardians whose domains have been lost. So they go on to say we've seen two federations recently affected by having their domains placed on server hold by the registrar. While this showcased Fedomint's resilience and users did not experience downtime due to a single guardian offline, The Federation's resilience was reduced. In the meantime, we advise to avoid using dot XYZ domains for the Fed of MENT Guardians. Their domain suspension policies are quite aggressive and random.

So nonetheless, basically, mutiny and those mints are functioning as expected now. There is a mitigation tool that will be in the next release. And more or less, these are early stages of a new protocol. and discovering where the attack vectors are. And luckily with this one, it seems that it's been mitigated. I will say that so Mutiny got a little worried. They thought that this was going to be worse than it was. And so then they took the onboarding process, which included adding a mint,

if you so chose, and they buried it in the settings instead. I kind of wish they hadn't jumped the gun there and done that so quickly. And I'd love to see it back. So hopefully they change that around and they re-ad it to the onboarding process because I still do think it's very valuable to have an easy onboarding process to be able to send and receive your first couple dollars without obfuscating that option away. The whole point of having it is that ease of onboarding to test your first transactions and then move to self-custody down the line. I just think that it'll be a harder flow for the average person to test their first pathway to self-custody by changing that. But nonetheless, we'll see what happens. Either way, I figured I'd fill you guys in.

Now, in the same realm as that, and what I mean by that is federations and multi-sig setups as an abstraction of Bitcoin to be able to enable cheaper transactions in the interim for smaller amounts. Liquid is another thing that uses that model, that federated model in the background. However, Liquid's been running for like seven years. So it's a lot more battle tested. It's not widely used, but I use it for day-to-day stuff all the time. Bull Bitcoin has integrated it. I know Bitcoin well has it as their drop-down as soon-to-be-added integration. And wallets like Aqua have been just super useful.

Bull Bitcoin has a wallet that does the same. where they do lightning and liquid swaps in the background. So you have a spending section, and you can spend to either lightning or liquid independently, and it's just a singular balance. And now Blitz wallet is another one doing the same idea. So we're beginning to see the creation of these wallets, which are using liquid as an onboarding mechanism for lightning,

which is kind of cool to see. I quite enjoy it. So now you've got three options for lightning slash liquid, wallets that are all singular balances. Moving on, I did do a tutorial on Speedwallet at the beginning of the week. So feel free to check that out. It's another lightning option for you if you're so inclined. And I'm working on Keeper.

So Keeper is a multi-sig vault. Well, I mean, it's more of a key management system. So you can create hot wallets, multiple accounts, all backed up with a single seed phrase. You can also use things like tap signer and cold card and plenty of other hardware options with it to create multi-sig vaults. They also have baked in inheritance planning. They have baked in assisted multi-sig. They have a whole bunch of different stuff.

But I'm going to be doing a tutorial on that one. And I believe that will be dropping Monday, but I've been working on it throughout the week. And it's pretty cool. In particular, the way that backups are done is very unique from what I've seen. Anyways, look forward to that in the coming week. And one last thing I wanted to mention here. I've been living on Bitcoin for quite some time. And Cheap Air was one of the pioneers in the early days of Bitcoin for accepting Bitcoin

when it came to flights and hotels. They were very early to the game. And what I'll, in terms of a tip of the hat to them, is they didn't just capitulate late after a while, you know, a lot of merchants came on and said, oh, yeah, we'll accept Bitcoin and then just changed their mind later when it wasn't, you know, the cash count they thought it would be. But Cheap Air, they held it down for years and years accepting Bitcoin for flights and hotels. And sadly, they put up today with a little sadness, a lot of memories and more gratitude than we can possibly express. We've decided to stop selling tickets on Cheapair.com so we

can fully focus on our core business, building travel solutions for businesses. So sadly, that option is off the market. I did ask online to see if people had other suggestions. And within a minute, I was put on to travala.com. And they, of course, accept Bitcoin. So, hey, if you're booking travel and you need to pay in Bitcoin, I found my option now. There's a couple others out there, too. I did a search and I found a few. which is pretty cool. So thanks, Travala. I'll be trying you out in the near future.

Anyways, rounding out here, as Nico was saying, he's going to be in Calgary very shortly for the Bitcoin Rodeo. I'm so excited, you guys, you have no idea. It's going to be so fun to have people coming to my home down here in Calgary. We had JP Sears. He was on Why Are We Bullish last week, and we are very excited to have him as well as all of the other guests. So we've got all kinds of great people coming out.

Preston, of course, Nico will be here, Francis Pooley, Dave Bradley, Madex, JP, as I mentioned, Graham Wardle, Harry Suttock, Adam O'Brien, Scott Dietels, Steve Barbara, Colin Sullivan, Brad Mills, Flo from Love is Bitcoin, Ben Harper, Dale from Quickbit, C-Funk, Derek Filderent, Simon, Raven, Noah Kramer. Yellow is going to be partaking in the roast of me,

which should be good. BJ Dichter, Seb Bunny, Brett Olney, David Hartman, Sebastian, Ilani. It's going to be a lot of fun. So if you're in the Calgary area, if you have not grabbed tickets yet, head over to BitcoinRodio.com. Code BTC sessions will get you a nice discount there.

And of course, if you're in town a day early, come to the sat market. It's going to be a blast. By the way, on the Bitcoin Rodeo website, if you scroll down a little bit, the sat market, the meetup info is right there. You can click. It'll take you to the meetup page.

And you can say that you are coming. We've got a ton of vendors. of vendors partaking. It's going to be at the Deerfoot Inn and Casino on July 1st from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Make sure you follow the handle, by the way, at BTC Sat Market. And we'll add a Nostra handle and NPRPub pretty soon as well. But yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. I just really can't wait. It's super exciting for me. And in terms of other events, the next Bitcoin event I'm going to be hitting is Baltic Honeybadger. first time in five years. I was there in 2019 heading back. Very excited for it. It's going to be a lot of fun. August 24th and 5th. They also have Nostriga heading it up just two days before that,

which should also be a blast. I'm going to try and be present at that as well. But yeah, this conference, I have fond, fond memories of Baltic Honey Badger in 2019. So I really can't wait to be back. There's going to be a lot of great people there. But if you're in the area, if you're in Europe and you want to hit it up, head over to baltic honeybadder.com. And you can again use code VTC sessions for a discount on your tickets as well. And I hope I'll see you there. And with that, I'm going to start rounding this out. Of course, if you're checking out the channel, you've been sorting through the tutorials, need a little bit of extra handholding. Be sure to hit up my team over at Bitcoin Mentor.io. They can help you.

through with anything you need, whether it just be key management, learning hardware, multi-sig, running a node, whatever it may be, you can reach out to them and they'll help you. And if you're a Bitcoin or you've been around for a while and you've just kind of become a Bitcoin Luddite, maybe you're set in your ways and you're too afraid to ask, you're, you know, I've encountered a few people where they kind of just get stuck in their ways and they're afraid to level up and move on and try. try new things. I mean, this can be a good way to do it. Of course, I have tons of free material on the channel. I encourage you to play and learn. But if you need a little bit extra handholding,

these guys at Bitcoin Mentor will absolutely nail it. And they will help you through with all your questions, anything that you need. So please do reach out. Anyways, guys, with that, I'm going to round it out. Thank you guys so much for being here. Don't forget to hit us up tomorrow at 6pm Eastern Time. Why are we bullish? A little bit of an announcement on that one as well. So that one should be fun. So make sure you join in for the show tomorrow. It's going to be a lot of fun. And like, subscribe, share all those things. They help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs. Have a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. I'll see you guys next time for your Simply session.