BTC Sessions - Man DRUGGED On Tinder Date To Steal His BTC ep186

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

In today's news roundup, we cover the new trend of thieves targeting Bitcoiners on dating apps, surging inflation as Central Banks cope, the Paraguay Bitcoin bill, and more! 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Buy Bitcoin In Canada With Bitbuy - after your first $250 purchase get $20 free! https://bitbuy.ca/en/sign-up/?c=BTCSessions LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $25 free https://bit.ly/397rlLN Get Wasabi wallet for Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Keystone Wallet: secure your Bitcoin! http://bit.ly/KeyStoneSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. I hope you're having a good day. We've got lots to talk about today. I'm sure many of you saw the thumbnail in the title. Yes, indeed, there was an individual. I'm just one of, I'm sure, numerous that have encountered things like this,

but somebody was indeed drugged and then coerced into giving up information. that could lead to obtaining their Bitcoin. So we're going to be covering that. We're also going to be talking about inflation, a lot of crazy shit going on in the economy, and central banks coping with said inflation. We're also going to be talking about that bill out of Paraguay and lots more.

There's plenty to talk about. As always, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my good friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it. Live.

Do it live. I can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. Of course, smash that like button. Give this a share. And subscribe if you're not already. All of that really helps get more eyeballs in the room. And let's get this thing rolling.

As always, I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, before we dive in, of course, let's take a look at where we are in. the market. We are sitting at $31,710 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will grab you 3,153 sats. 89.32% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, low, low, my friends, if you want to be moving around some sats, if you want to be opening up lightning channels, anything that you have to do on chain. Not a bad time to do it. Next block fees, 12 sats per byte, if you're willing to wait up to 30. minutes. One sat per bite will do you. The mempool has been clearing regularly, which is nice to see.

But don't expect that to last forever. As price does pick up, then activity on the blockchain tends to pick up. And those fees do tend to pick up. So this is a good time, a good preparation time, to kind of get yourself ready, get some lightning funds, do whatever you need to do, get your stuff into cold storage, maybe get your stuff into a multi-sick. We'll touch on that. in a second. As always, shout out to sponsors of the show, ledden.com, you can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services here. Of course, they have their Bitcoin back loans where you, if you are in a pinch and you need to get your hands on dollars, can deposit Bitcoin and get dollars into your bank account within 24 hours. And when you pay that back, you get back

the same amount of Bitcoin. They also have their Bitcoin in USDC savings accounts, interest rates of up to 9.5% annually paid monthly and their B2X offering, if you're feeling mega bullish and want to use a loan to get more Bitcoin. Links are down below. If you have to get any loan product, they'll give you $25 for free into your savings. I do live on Bitcoin. Bit refill really helps me do this. This can get you pretty much any gift card that you can imagine in most jurisdictions.

There's a drop down of a ton of countries there. And yeah, you can buy via Bitcoin. You can pay main chain, lightning network, whatever you choose. And you do earn stats back as you spend. So be sure to check them out. Bit Buy. If you're in Canada, easy way to stack sats. They have a super easy interface via the web.

They have a dedicated app that you can download. And these guys are no joke when it comes to security. Of course, they've been doing their yearly proof of reserve audits. So be sure to check them out. And after your first $250 purchase, $20 for free, not bad. Keystone, I just did a video tutorial on this. I've been talking about. I got my hands on it.

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So be sure to check them out. Links are below and check out my tutorial on that too. Have you missed it? And of course, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, get it in steel, guys. You know, that paper can be worrisome, fire damage, water damage. You might misplace the thing. Somebody might throw it out, not knowing what it is. Steel gives you a peace of mind around that.

So check out PrivacyPros.io to grab one of those. And let's dive into the news. So first, a little bit regarding kind of price action and the uncertainty in the market right now. To me, it seems relatively reminiscent of kind of 2013. Although not exactly the same. It's kind of rhyming where there was an initial spike and then a big drawdown. And then much later in the year you saw some crazy movement. But some of this may also be centered around grayscale and the Bitcoin trust that they have.

And so how that works is gray scale effectively, they purchase Bitcoin. It sits in this fund. It is never sold out of the fund. But that set amount of Bitcoin that is sitting in there, there's a certain amount of shares that are issued representing that Bitcoin. And because there's a set amount of shares based on the amount of Bitcoin in there, that means that the price of the shares can technically, if there's more demand,

be worth more than the underlying Bitcoin or if there's less demand, be worth less than the underlying Bitcoin. So you can have the price of the share not directly reflect the price of Bitcoin. Unlike an ETF, which we do have in Canada, we have multiples of those. And it basically, more or less, directly reflects the price of, of Bitcoin. So what has happened in the past little bit is initially when people were piling into GBDC, there was a limited number of shares, a limited amount of Bitcoin that they held,

although they did add more over time. And this was one of the only options for institutions to pile into. And so there was a huge premium on the price because it was really the only way some people could get exposure. So you had an instance where the share price of GBC.E's, you had an instance where the share price of GBT was technically, you know, most, you know, oftentimes double digit percentages above the price of Bitcoin. While currently those shares that were initially purchased, they had a shelf life where they were locked up. They could not be resold onto the market.

But now those unlockings are happening. And currently, GBTC, because there are other options to buy into Bitcoin, because you can get your hands on ETFs, because you can buy something like micro strategy, which is basically a Bitcoin ETF. GBT at times can be less attractive if there's a huge premium. And so a lot of people sold shares of GBTC. And a lot of those shares over the coming weeks are being unlocked. And so how might this affect the price of Bitcoin?

Well, an excess of around 40,000 Bitcoin worth of GBTC are being. unlocked throughout July, particularly around July 18th, 16,000 Bitcoin worth of these shares are being unlocked. So what does that do? Well, Grayscale cannot just sell those Bitcoin. Those as part of the prospectus remain in the fund indefinitely. So those are basically just like locked there. But what can happen is somebody might be looking at this.

And currently, if we go back to Bitbo here, you can see closed end funds, GBT price the premium, it's at a discount. So an institutional investor that is looking at perhaps putting Bitcoin on its books, maybe looking and saying, look, I could go onto the markets and buy Bitcoin at spot price at whatever it's trading at right now, 317 or something. Or I could buy GBTC, which is currently at a 14.5% discount. I'm still getting exposure to Bitcoin, but this discount is pretty steep. And they may be thinking, I don't think that discount is going to stay.

I don't think it's going to last or I don't think it's going to dip much further than that in terms of discount. And so they may, instead of buying on spot markets and pumping up the price, they may take their capital and purchase GBTC as it becomes unlocked. And so that could basically suck up some of the demand that we would normally see on spot exchanges, which would normally contribute to an upward pressure on the. the price. So this kind of starts to go away at the end of the month or through the month as these shares become unlocked. And so if we see this GBT premium start to close in closer to zero or start to go, you know, into the lower single digits, then that may take some pressure off or contribute back to pressure in the buying side of regular Bitcoin spot markets. This isn't a for sure thing, but it is something that can contribute to the price.

So keep that in mind. Bitbo.io tracks all of this. And you can see like here in Canada, there's QBT, which is also a closed end fund like GBT. And it's only at a six, six and a half percent discount. I mean, we also have a lot of ETFs up here as well. And that's been the case for quite some time. So we shall see.

But over time, who knows? but we also do have a premium on OBTC. I'm not sure which one that one is though. So anyways, worth considering either way, we'll kind of know how that affects the price, especially on the 18th and the following days as all of that like 16,000 Bitcoin worth of GBTC are unlocked. So let's move into more.

This is the story I was talking about. scammers are now stalking dating apps like Tinder for prey in terms of if you're holding Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. So what happens here? Well, this was an individual customer of CASA. And we'll get into that in a second. But effectively, this man was on Tinder and he matched with somebody who claimed to share his interest in crypto assets. So mistake number one here is buddy put that he was into Bitcoin on a Tinder profile. Guys, I mean, you know, I'm as guilty as the next person occasionally wearing like a Bitcoin shirt or something down the street.

But like advertising that you're actively holding Bitcoin on a dating app, I don't know about that. Anyway, so what happened? I'll read a little bit here from this article. by the way, the original blog post from CASA was taken down. Apparently, the guy who agreed for them to post this, he said, yeah, you can share the story. It's a good way to get people not to make the same mistakes. He already made the initial OPSEC mistake of putting himself on Tinder and saying,

hey, I hold Bitcoin. But then after the post, which obviously was going to get a lot, lot of eyeballs went kind of viral. Well, then he again went back to Kassan was like, hey, so I don't, you know, this is getting a lot of tension. Maybe can you take it down, which, you know, total stric and effect now. I think more people are looking. I mean, myself included.

So, yeah, obsec mistakes all around, I suppose. But who am I to judge? I'm on the internet talking about Bitcoin. Anyways, the man began to chat with a woman and the duo event. eventually agreed to meet up in person. On the date, the man's suspicions were briefly peaked when his date appeared to look very different from her profile picture. I mean, is that that different from regular dating on Tinder?

Anyways, she spoke very little bit of crypto, simply mentioning and said that her parents had bought her one Bitcoin for $30k. After spending time at a coffee shop, the client and the woman went for a walk before going back to his place. but while they had drinks at his domicile, that wording, he left to go to the toilet. Returning, he continued to consume his drink. And so Jameson Lomp, co-founder and CTO of CASA said, we suspect the woman laced our client's drink with scopalamine.

I hope I'm saying that, right? Also known as devil's breath or benzodiazepine. These drugs are well known to cause loss of inhibition and memory loss. So this obviously caused the man to lose his inhibitions. His memories are fuzzy at this point, but the client recalls drinking a bit more after returning from the restroom. Sometime later, the woman picked up his phone and asked him to show her how to unlock it and find his passwords. He knew something didn't seem right, but his inhibitions and safeguards have been stripped away.

The last thing he remembers is kissing her. Now, they don't believe that the attack was solely perpetrated by the woman he met. She most likely handed the phone over to someone else, possibly a criminal organization to get to work draining his various accounts as quickly as possible. The woman was most likely acting as a social engineer. Now, the victim incurred very minor memory losses and was unable to function lucidly for an estimated 24 hours, but a small amount of Bitcoin was removed from the client's exchange accounts. Now, he was able to block some of the other requested purchases and withdrawals by contacting those custodians to inform them of the compromise. Since the attacker only had one of the client's five keys in his CASA multi-sig, those funds could not be spent.

So again, Nick Newman, the CEO said no funds were able to be stolen from his CASA account, where he kept the majority of his assets. He had set up a properly distributed three of five multisig, so it was impossible to steal the money. majority of his Bitcoin stack. So let's talk a little bit about this. So he had a multi-sick account. Now, when the person was able to access his phone, what did they get access to? Well, obviously, they would have had access to anything that was immediately on the mobile phone.

Plus, he was drugged up and his inhibitions were gone. So they could have just requested any password for anything right there. So if he had a Bitcoin wallet sitting on his phone and it was like fingerprint unlock or a pin or something like that, they could have just been like, hey, what's your pen? And then taken it and sent it out. So there was that. Secondly, his online exchanges account, exchange accounts.

So this is where they were asking him, hey, where's your passwords? Where do you have exchanges, all that kind of stuff? And so they were able to get into apparently one or more of his online exchange accounts where he had money sitting, which again, not your keys, not your coins. So they were able to log in. And if there was two-factor authentication, that does a lick of good because if a person has the actual access to your, in this instance, access to your phone. And they have the two-factor authentication app. They can just plug that information on the fly.

So effectively, anything that would have been on his phone or in an exchange, gone. Although I think it was just exchanges that he got dinged on. Now, multi-sig. If anybody is unfamiliar with what multi-sig is, effectively it's like creating a digital vault and this digital vault requires multiple keys to open. In this case, he was using a third-party app called CASA. And CASA has options in terms of how you set this up, but they hold either one or two keys depending on your setup where they cannot access the funds themselves,

but if you work in concert with them or on you. your own, you can move the funds. Another company that does this is unchained capital. So what this guy had is he had a vault, a CASA multi-sig vault, and it was three of five. So that means that the vault had five potential keys that could unlock it, and you need at least three of them to unlock it. However, in his direct possession, all he had was a single key. He had one of the five.

And I imagine that would have been his CASA app on his phone. He didn't have any of his actual hardware wallet. So he would have had at least two other hardware devices, I believe. And then if they wanted to access those funds, they would have had to contact CASA and gone through more kind of like identification, verification to get them to use both of their keys if they just wanted to utilize the one key on his phone, in which case they would have needed probably like selfies and other, you know, it would have been a process to do.

So at that point, they effectively had zero access to his funds because he had spread out his other keys enough where it would be impossible to access them without like going and, I don't know, maybe going to a safety deposit box and picking up another key. or going to a relative's house and picking up another key, it just was not possible for them to get a hold of those coins. When he was again kind of all there within 24 hours, he contacted Kassan and said, hey, just in case, lock down my account.

I don't want you guys to utilize my two keys because this other person might have a single one. And at that point, they basically, you know, locked everything down. So in order to move funds, he would have needed all three of his keys. So he was saved by kind of like this mitigated security setup where he couldn't have been screwed in a situation like that. I do like the idea of multi-sig in this way. You should be conscious that there is a privacy tradeoff in that CASA or unchained in these instances would know your balance,

but they would not be able to touch your funds in any way, shape, or form. and if you were worried about like a state level attack, you could always move your funds with your own personal keys out of their custody and CASA or Unchained could do nothing about it. So keep that in mind. Anyways, guys, holy crap, be careful. And don't put I'm into Bitcoin on your dating profiles if you're using some. It's not good practice.

I don't know. Careful out there, guys. Okay, let's move on. Inflation is a bitch. That's a thing that's happening. Yahoo Finance. The Labor Department's headline consumer price index rose 0.9% in June over the prior month, unexpectedly accelerating from May's 0.6% rise.

Over the last year, the CPI or Consumer Price Index, was up 5.4%, also exceeding the 4.9% expected and coming in at the fastest pace since 2008. Excluding more volatile food and energy prices, because we all know we don't need those, CPI was up 4.5%. There's a smaller number for you, I guess, to keep you feeling okay about it. Was only up 4.5% in June over the last month, comprising the biggest jump since 1991. So I guess don't feel too comfortable about that number as prices bounced off last year's pandemic depressed lows.

So what's going on here? I like this tweet from Nick Camp Mine. Consumer prices increase 5.4%. We all know it's really way more. That's why the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has over 107 pages of calculations to jump through loops, to jump through loopholes so they can report a lot, a low enough number to the public so that there is no panic. CPI is bullshit. So there is a 1007. page

long PDF file that details how they come to the CPI numbers. That seems

oddly high. I would prefer something that basically just tracks the top expenses of the average

person month to month and sees how much higher or lower they are. I think that would more accurately

reflect it, right? If the average person spends money on a specific set of things, we should just see what the average person is spending on those things month over month

instead of, wow, this thing is too volatile. And this, I mean, if it's volatile, it could also be that it's just getting way more fucking expensive. So anyways, now that's not the only thing to consider. There is, of course, inflation, but there's shrinkflation. And so this is something that is coming in big time.

And this is the practice of shrinking the size, the size of the products that you're purchasing. I noticed this big time, even just the other day, getting groceries for the family. I mean, this was a few months back, actually, I guess, that I first noticed. But we have a little basket where our bread goes. And normally, it's kind of a squeeze. Like, it awkwardly sits in there.

And then the one day, our grocery has arrived. And I go to put it in expecting that typical, like, crunch as it kind of squeezes in. And it fit perfectly. In fact, there was a little bit of extra room. in there. And so it was like the easiest shrinkflation notice that I've ever seen where it's just like, oh, well, clearly they took off like three or four slices of bread in there. So you're going to see this a lot. And there's a really good book called This Book Will Save You Time. It's very short. And it talks in one of the chapters about shrinkflation. It talks about like even the prices of

candy bars over time. So again, shrink. inflation is utilized by corporations in order to, you know, they've got price pressure from suppliers, from all of the products, from wages, from everything in general, where they have to, in order to remain profitable or not have losses, they need to keep their cost of production down. And so what can they do? Well, I mean, one option is just raise the price. However, if you raise the price and nobody else does, well, the sticker shock from seeing that as consumers go and they look, they're going to say, well, you know, this chocolate bar is more expensive than this one. I'll just grab that one instead. And so what you can do instead is shrink the size, almost imperceivably so, shrink the size of your product or have lower quality products inside to make your product so that your cost is down. and then you can keep the price more or less the same

with an inferior product, either in size or in quality. And so this is the game that a lot of companies play where, okay, how much shrinkflation can we get away with where it's almost imperceptible while still leading like a competitive edge against everybody else? Because we all know everybody else is going to do this. And if we leave our prices rising with inflation, we will be priced out of the market by people that kind of do these deceptive.

practices. So it's kind of almost out of necessity that companies do this. Now, in this particular article that I'm looking here at Global, now most people say that price is the number one factor. They don't actually look at the size of something. They're just looking at price. And so they're more likely, well, this is less expensive. I'll grab that one. So I mean, the corporations are right in this tactic. So this is obviously affecting us more and more. A lot of central banks said that there wouldn't be inflation or there is no inflation. Or as inflation started, that inflation was transitory, that it would just be for a short period

of time because there were supply chain issues and there's less products with more people chasing them. But now we're starting to get the shifting narrative. of going further down the line that inflation is indeed good. And so we see the European Central Bank here saying our new strategy helps break the vicious circle of low inflation. I mean, they got dragged across Twitter for this. There's so many great memes from everybody replying here.

But again, like the vicious cycle, the vicious circle, sorry, of low inflation. I've never heard of inflation as being vicious. And again, we have them talking about inflation here, saying that inflation has been subdued in recent years. Again, the metric through which they're tracking inflation omits specific things if they deem them too volatile things like housing. And so that's been omitted for a long time. And they say in recent years, the cost of housing, which is not fully reflective. in this inflation measure have increased more forcefully. Over the past four years, residential property prices in the euro area increased, on average, on average, at an annual rate above 4%.

And at 6.2% in the first quarter of this year, the fastest pace since 2007. What does that do to one's ability to purchase a home? a goal that I'd say most people in developed nations have and even in, you know, third world nations, home ownership is a lofty goal where you'd like to own your own home, correct? Correct me if I'm wrong. But a lot of people, that's a major goal of them. That's a lifelong goal where they want to own their own home and just have a place that is their own. How does that affect somebody's life goal?

Well, if you, and this, the rule of seven, rule of 72 is a known term, typically to calculate your gains on investment at a particular interest rate. However, if you calculate that out in terms of interest rate or for inflation, it's how long before your purchasing power effectively is cut in half or how long before shit is twice as expensive. and at an interest rate of 4%, about 17 and a half years before housing is twice as expensive as it currently is. So each year, your housing costs are going to be 4% more. And as that aggregates over time, again, 17 and a half years, give or take, before the house is twice as expensive as it should be today. Now, you have the Black Rock CEO, Larry Fink, chiming in in regards to inflation. They don't think that inflation is transitory here. He says, unquestionably, as central banks keep rates low or negative in Europe, the savers are getting hammered.

Think said he believes people are increasingly beginning to put money to work in the stock market instead of keeping it in lower risk investment and savings accounts. people may have to work longer because they're not earning the same returns on their savings. So basically he's saying, you're going to need to work longer and take way bigger risks just to afford retirement. And I think this is true. As the people with the least money get hit the most, the people that live paycheck to paycheck and have very little to save from each one of those, if any, they get hit the worst.

Because what happens? you have people with assets, the richest of the rich that have hard assets, those things appreciate in dollar terms immediately as that money slashes around the economy. However, the people that are getting paid down the line, the people that are getting that newly printed money last as it filters down through the economy and into regular wages, it's already done its thing and pushed up the price as we've just seen in regular consumer goods and in assets like housing. where people aspire to have those things,

and in stock prices where you can escape inflation, it prices those things higher, effectively pricing people out or at least pushing down the road how long it will be able, how long before they're able to acquire said assets. So if you're living paycheck to paycheck, you're getting fucked the hardest out of inflation. If you're sitting on a ton of assets

and you're closest to the money spigot, you're the beneficiary of said printing because your assets are going up and you're probably getting first crack at those cheap loans to purchase more assets. So moving down the line here, again, Jeff Booth, he has a great book, which is right here. Hold on. Let me grab it. The Price of Tomorrow. I love this book.

And so it's called The Price of Tomorrow, why deflation is key to an abundant future. And he's had some great takes on what we've seen lately. So he said, Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve, said that he wants to get unemployment down to previous levels based on the current economy. And he said here, people don't realize that the opposite side of inflation is wage deflation. So when Powell says he believes that unemployment can fall to 3.5%, he is really saying that the Fed will lower labor costs to drive employment higher. and we wonder why civil unrest is rising. Now, if you didn't catch exactly what he meant there, the comment section down below is great. So somebody said, how does the Fed lower labor costs or lower the cost of people working?

And Preston Pish replied here, by debasing the currency or printing the currency faster than you can earn a raise for doing the same level of skilled labor. And another person replied, aren't wages, going up right now, though? And Jeff replied, no, not in real terms, not even close. And so the person then said, ah, so wages up in nominal terms, but continued debasement means purchasing power will go down. Is that what you're saying when you say Fed will lower labor costs to drive employment hiring? And he said, yes. And so what he means here is that when wages go up in nominal terms, it means, hey, you were getting $10 an hour and that increased to $12 an hour. So you got a 2% raise over the course of a year, which a lot of people don't even get.

That's nominal terms. It went up in nominal terms. But when it comes to real terms, it means what is the purchasing power of that hour of work for you? So can you purchase the same amount of stuff for the same. hour of work. And if the previous numbers of 5.4% are real and you didn't get a 5.4% raise, so you were making $10 an hour and now you're making $15.40 an hour, unless you got that raise, you are now at a loss for your labor. Okay. So and how many people, how many people got, and sorry, I'm misstating the percentage, $10 to $10.20 cents.

to $10.54. So, but the percentages, you still need that two and a half, that two percent raise to outpace stated normal inflation of two percent or target inflation. You need a five and a half percent raise every single year just to outpace the current levels of inflation. Otherwise, that hour of work, you are getting less and you can purchase less with it. So your, your purchasing power is being scraped away from you by the printing that is. happening all the while the rich getting richer because their assets are going up in value and they can get cheap loans to purchase more assets. Yeah, it's bad. Now, Jeff Booth continues on here in another tweet. There is no path through an inflationary monetary system that doesn't concentrate all

control in the hands of a few or lead to war or reset. I realized that the system was built on inflation and credit, but it doesn't change the facts. A system change is required. Bitcoin. I like that. And as much as Peter Schiff is totally wrong on Bitcoin, I do appreciate some of his tweets when it comes to the economy in general. And so I'm going to refer to this account, because I like it far better. By the way, it just inverts the caps locks on all of his tweets. So you get the like, that look to all his tweets. But regardless, still a relevant tweet.

This is alternative Peter, by the way, or alternate Peter on Twitter. Last week, the Fed's balance sheet exploded by $103 billion, hitting a new record high of $8.202 trillion. Since the Fed had to print the money to buy those bonds, consumer prices will rise as the newly printed money gets spent into circulation. High inflation is the new normal.

And indeed, I would agree because we're again, we're seeing this being presented as kind of the narrative moving forward. Again, we saw there is no inflation. We saw inflation is transitory. We now see inflation is good. Okay? So it's all just kind of moving down this path. And so now the narrative of, well, these price increases are good,

is what's being present. But I don't know how long you can tell people that this is actually a good thing when they can't afford their groceries. And of course, in the same vein, we have central banks kind of seeing at least a little bit of the writing on the wall that there is an alternative out there.

And so they're trying to figure out how to attack this issue of a sound money that anybody can opt out of traditional currencies into Bitcoin. And so one level of attack is ECB is looking to design a digital Euro more energy efficient than Bitcoin. So maybe if they talk about that Bitcoin requires energy to function, then that they could attack it that way. And that's, you know, we see a lot of that. Bitcoin uses way too much energy. It uses as much energy as countries.

But there's no question as to what it's replacing and the inefficiencies, not just currently in terms of the amount of energy used by legacy finance, but the inefficiencies in terms of capital allocation that happen. And human time theft, as we just saw, if you're working one hour today, the amount of stuff you can get for that one hour worth of work is being whittled away as time goes on. And so is that is the energy consumption not worth it to have a truly decentralized, immutable, unfuckwithable money where your value can't be eroded over time? In my view, absolutely yes. Again, it's just kind of a bunk narrative, I believe, anyways. And then you have another method of attack where it's just straight dismissal. You have the Fed chairman suggests that Bitcoin could become obsolete if a U.S. digital currency existed. And he's talking about this from the perspective of payments, I guess.

He thinks that just because a digital dollar might exist, it means that Bitcoin can be replaced just because it's more convenient. He did earlier this week say, oh, Bitcoin has failed and, and. digital currencies have failed as payment mechanisms. I mean, have they? Bitcoin settles about $5 billion per day for the past couple of years. Lightning can facilitate millions of transactions per second. I use it personally every single day. You have an entire country of El Salvador that will be integrating Lightning as part of its infrastructure, which it will then be legal tender in the coming months here.

So, I mean, did it? I don't think so. it gets away from the point is why was Bitcoin and created in the first place? Because of shitty bank policy, because of shitty central bank monetary policy where your savings can just be eroded and printed away on a whim, where the onerous hoops that you have to jump through just to send money from place to place, it's exclusionary. And even if you're included, not everybody is included in the same way, i.e., if you're closest to the money spigot, you get to retain your purchasing power and increase it.

And if you're a nine to five worker who lives paycheck to paycheck, well, sorry, but we're extracting value from you and allocating it where we see fit. See, the thing is that I would say that fiat currency, it distracts you from the long term. They bank on you not having long term thinking or also known as low time preference, where if it's just a few percent here or there, then maybe you might not notice that you're getting screwed. You may not fully understand why things are seeing a little, seeming a little bit more difficult month to month year to year. And it forces you to have short term thinking. You always got to be ready.

Well, I got to put my money somewhere. I got to spend it quickly because if I save it, that's not going to do me any good. I can't get a good return on my savings account. I got to speculate on stocks. I got to or I'm just going to go be a consumer. I'm going to just consume as much as possible because why bother? But when you do zoom out, you see, and this is from 1933 executive order 6102. That's when they confiscated all gold from.

US citizens and replace them with dollars and said, hey, every $20 that you have, or sorry, every ounce of gold that you have will give you $20 dollars for. And then a year later, they basically said, well, now we're repricing gold and it's worth $35 per ounce. So basically all of those dollars that they gave people in exchange for their gold were pretty much sliced in half in terms of purchasing power. And so you can see here from 1933 when that initially happened, you see that drop off. And this is kind of like your purchasing power over time per U.S. dollar.

And this is just zoomed in on since 1933. The purchasing power of a single U.S. dollar was even higher before this. So let's compare that to the lifespan of business. Bitcoin, quite a different chart. This is the weekly chart since you could get good exchange data. So it goes back about a decade. And this is also a log chart, meaning that each interval here on the right hand side goes up exponentially. So, you know, as an example, it goes from $1.30 to $220 to $3.60 to $6. And then as you're getting up towards the top of the chart, it goes from $900 to $1,500 to $4,000, $6,500, $1,000, $1,000.18K.

So the intervals get, you know, more and more dollars, more and more dollar jumps in between them. But yes, is volatile as hell. But Bitcoin, again, is focused on you having low time preference of you zooming out and seeing the bigger picture. And when you zoom out and you see the bigger picture, you see dollar go down, number go down. And you see Bitcoin go up, number go up. And I think this trend will continue. Is it volatile as hell? It was 64K a few months ago and it's like 31K right now.

But look at what we're looking at here. This is a decade. This is a decade of price data. Bubbles don't inflate and then pop and then inflate again and then pop and then inflate again. One, two. And this is just like in the first, you know, in the last decade. So one, two, three, four. Could that count?

Maybe five, six, seven, eight. Again, bubbles don't inflate and then pop and re-inflate. They have a blow off top and then they disappear because the scam stops working. This is increased adoption. This is a world onboarding into a new form of money over time. And this is just the first decade and a small single-digit percentage of people piling in. And that single digit percentage still is just dabbling. I think people are greatly underestimating the change that this could bring to the world in another decade, in another two decades.

And I think a couple decades out, it may be difficult and almost ridiculous to think of having monetary policy that hinges on a few in a closed room and that trying to make economic decisions based on the vernacular of somebody holding a press conference will seem like reading the tea leaves versus a well easily definable open source auditable by anybody plan for issuance that cannot be altered by anyone let's move on let's talk about paraguay paraguay paraguay i don't make fun of me Anyways, they're proposing a Bitcoin bill. People were very excited about this. They were excited because it was kind of the first major piece of legislation to come into the public eye since El Salvador. Now, El Salvador passed a bill that will basically have Bitcoin alongside the U.S. dollar be an official currency and be legal tender within the country.

What that means is any merchant will be a, will need. to accept both, but can hold whatever they choose. So if I'm a merchant and I'm running a store, then I need to have the capacity to accept both. Now, there are provisions in their bill where if you literally just do not have the capability of doing so, you're exempted. But if you're kind of on the cusp, then they will help you. Like if you have internet connection and you're just like, I don't know how to do this, then they'll help you. They'll give you the app. And everything is basically done for free on the back end for you. You don't even need a data connection because the state level wallet will be free to use and they've they've worked that

out with all mobile providers where you can just have access. So what this does then is it allows people to live on and use Bitcoin if they choose to or stay with the US dollar if they choose to. There is no national currency. And it also exempts them from capital gains tax, which means if you're sitting on Bitcoin and its purchasing power increases, you don't have to pay taxes on that. unlike other countries in the world, unlike a lot of countries in the world. So people were thinking, oh, man, this might be the same thing for Paraguay.

Sorry, friends, not so. What is this? Effectively, this imposes a license if you want to mine Bitcoin within the country. Not fucking great. It would not recognize Bitcoin as, it would recognize Bitcoin as property and not legal tender, meaning capital gains tax. So it's basically a licensing and taxing mechanism for cryptocurrency within the country. It sounds pretty shitty. I don't really like it. Now, I will say there is one good thing here. They say that, okay, those providing sales of Bitcoin

are prohibited from selling, assigning, or transferring their property, giving as a loan or guarantee or affecting the use of enjoyment of the virtual assets that they manage or guard for third parties without the express authorization of the owner. And in layman's terms, that basically means if you have Bitcoin with a third party with an exchange or something, they can't go and loan it out or fractional reserve it without your explicit consent. So I think that's a positive thing in general. but outside of that, this bill is just garbage.

Like, I don't even know this has a chance in hell of passing because the guys that put this together, their party has two seats in their parliament and their parliament is 80 seats. So unless there's like widespread support and want to even introduce this in the first place, then it's unlikely to pass. So, I mean, take it for what it is,

but I mean the guy I can't remember the guy's name but he was like pumping this up like yeah this is the next big thing we're following El Salvador no you fucking aren't this is like the opposite of what they did down there and it seems like he was just

bandwagon hopping and he also used a lot of like shit coin references too so it seems like it was like this total tone deaf let's jump on the buzzword of the day and try and get some attention and hey it fucking worked because everybody just saw Bitcoin and a country and thought it might be favorable.

Too bad it was trash. I'm not going to touch on this one for very long, but this from reason.com. They did a little interview with a guy heading the project for Ion, which Ion is part of Microsoft, and they are working on digital identity. It's a concept of not, I'm kind of torn on. I don't know how I feel about it,

but the interesting thing here is that they're building it on top of Bitcoin. And the reason they're doing so and anchoring it to Bitcoin is because they looked across the entire ecosystem. They said, what can we do? We need something that is effectively immutable so that it can't be screwed with. So people's identity can't be stripped from them. And so that you could have different identities for different purposes.

And if you want to utilize one or the other, keep some private or keep some public, you can do so, but nobody can take those away from you. So it's the equivalent of let's contrast. compare. Right now, you don't have like a singular digital identity on the internet. You have profiles on centralized hubs, right? You might have a Twitter profile. You might have a Facebook profile. You might have LinkedIn profile. You might have all these different social. You might have a Google account, all these different things. Those are all separate, right? And as soon as, let's say you have a a Twitter account that is you and it's public,

if you get cut off from Twitter, then that digital identity of yours effectively kind of disappears. It's not explicitly linked to anything else. That could still be possible with the digital identification in terms of your hosted content on a third party, but your identification would remain intact. And so people could still see, hey, this is still indeed you

and you're connected to these other services if you wanted to make that information public. So that's one aspect of it. But again, I find it interesting that they looked across the gamut and a lot of other companies have the practice of saying, we'll just build our own blockchain because blockchain is a silver bullet, which it's not. We know that you can change a blockchain or a distributed ledger if you deem fit, if it's not truly decentralized and backed up by proof of work. And so what Microsoft honed in on is, hey, like looking across the space,

the only thing that is that is truly immutable seems to be Bitcoin. So we need to anchor our data in some way, shape, or form to that. So again, I'm not fully, I don't know how I feel about the digital identity, identity thing and the use cases for it yet. But I do recognize the fact that Microsoft kind of looked and said, well, I guess this is the most immutable. I'm just appreciating their notice of the fact that Bitcoin is actually immutable versus everything else out there.

Let's move on a little bit. Okay, I was very excited to see this. Katie, or known as Katie the Russian on Twitter, she's super awesome, but she got CNBC covering her company, which is called Plan B passport. So what she does is effectively, if you're in a jurisdiction that's not particularly favorable in terms of tax when it comes to Bitcoin, then she helps you obtain a passport for a second country, which could be more favorable. Now, it's important to note in this article, and they do note it here in the segment, that

if you're within the U.S., the long arm of the IRS will just hunt you down regardless as long as you are a U.S. citizen. So until you renounce your U.S. citizenship, even if you obtain a secondary passport, you are still subject to any income or taxable gains that you have, regardless of where you are on the planet. That's just crazy. But I digress. I was just really happy to see her get covered here.

Katie is awesome. She hosted a fantastic event the day prior to the Bitcoin Miami conference. And a lot of great speakers there. So my hats off to you, Katie. Congratulations. And I do recommend you guys seeking out Plan B passports or looking up Katie the Russian on Twitter. She is fantastic. Quick note here, New York Giants running back number 26 will receive all of his endorsement money in Bitcoin. Kudos to him. More athletes jumping on the Bitcoin train, realizing that they don't want to hold dollars at least entirely with their incoming revenue.

Up next, Breeze, they had a medium post. I was excited to see this because this is a kayaking company in Victoria, BC. And they gave me a little shout out here, which I found was really nice. But effectively, it's a kayaking company. They fell down the Bitcoin rabbit hole over the past year and a half. They had an employee request to be paid in Bitcoin that made them start reading. They started diving in. They started running their own nodes.

They started accepting lightning. And then they gave me a nice little shout out down here where they said, where was it? Now I'm not going to be able to find it. Anyways, they gave me a shout out where they talked about. There we go. From there, they learned about Breeze and this point of sale mode from BTZ sessions. and they gave me a nice little blurb there. So anyways, if you're in Victoria

and you're looking to spend some sats and go on a kayaking tour, check out Victoria Kayak. Good for them. And if you haven't seen my Breeze video, you can check that out if you choose. Last couple of things here, Jack Dorsey,

he was talking about creating a Bitcoin hardware wallet that's open source and everything. He further iterated on that. He said, Square is creating a new business joining seller, cash app and title focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services.

Our primary focus is Bitcoin. Its name is TBD to be decided. Like our new Bitcoin hardware wallet, we're going to do this completely in the open, open roadmap, open development, and open source. Brock M on Twitter here, Mike Brock, is leading the, And building this team. And we have some ideas around the initial platform primitives. We want to build. How is this different from Square Crypto?

Well, Square Crypto, which is another offshoot of Square, sorry, of Square, is Square doesn't give direction to Square Crypto, only funding. So they choose to work on whatever they choose and are doing an incredible job. TVD will be focused on creative. a platform business and will be open source and will open source our work along the way. We'll set up a Twitter and GitHub account soon and update this thread on where to find them. So kudos to Jack for doing this. Again, with Jack Dorsey, I feel like some of his initial goals with Twitter were kind of dashed

as the company kind of fell into the hands of others where he doesn't really have full control over his company anymore. And I think he's, it seems like he's trying to make amends with that by doing work on things that can't be touched by outsiders, can't be overtaken. So I hope this pans out for him. I like the open source, total open roadmap ethos of what he's doing here. So let's see if it pans out. I'm hopeful. And just a few things in the last little bit.

I released the Keystone Wallet tutorial on Monday. check that out if you haven't seen it already. Also, last week, if you missed it, I did a wallet on Blue Wallet Mobile Multisig. I also put out a call to anybody that is Spanish and translating to translate Bitcoin content. I basically open sourced a good handful of my tutorial videos, anything that I think would be relevant for people in El Salvador, Central, South America, North America, any Spanish-speaking places. I have like 17 videos currently that are just uploaded to a Google Drive. I did a thread on it on Twitter and you can just go and search it out and effectively

anybody that wants to overdub something in Spanish, download the video, overdub it and then put it wherever you want. The most important thing is access. You don't have to give me a copy if you don't want to. If you do opt to give me a copy, I will create a Spanish playlist on my own channel for people to reference as well. But I've already had a few people volunteering. I've had a few people do initial translations of the show notes and everything

and are working on video overdubs or at least video transcripts in Spanish. So if that's something you'd like to do, feel free to reach out or find that thread and you'll see, you'll actually just see the link to the Google Drive right there and you can dive in. And finally, tomorrow, killer, killer panel for Wob for Why Are We bullish? We've got Jeff Booth, who we've been talking about today. We've got Elise Colleen who nailed it at the Miami and Miami conference when you had some defy jerk off on stage. She basically eviscerated him and said that Bitcoin, if it succeeds, will be in spite of all of the shitcoins out there.

And if shitcoins succeed, it will be because of Bitcoin. We also have Vijay Boyapati, author of The Bullish Case for Bitcoin, which I, did his go fund, not go fund me. What's the other one? Anyways, the one where you can pay to get a project off the ground.

Anyways, I've got his book arriving ASAP. And we've got Marty Bent from Tales from the Crypt and from Great American Mining. So stacked panel for tomorrow. Don't miss it tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern. That is 3 p.m.

Pacific and very much looking forward to that one. It's going to be awesome. And with that, I'm going to wrap up. Damn. This one was like an hour today. My news ones have been just, I mean, they don't feel like they're dragging,

but they're definitely longer than they used to be. Anyways, thank you guys so much for watching. Like, sub, share, all those things, help so much. They get more eyeballs on this content. If you're going to help in another way, you can hit up the sponsors I mentioned down below. Ledon, BitRefil, BitBit by Bill Fottle at Privacy Pros

and Keystone. All of those are linked down below. And if you really liked what you saw, You can always hit me up with a Bitcoin tip via my strike page. That is strike. Dot me slash BTC sessions. When you hit that link, you can type in any amount you want. Hit the tip button.

You'll be presented with a lightning invoice or if you click to the right, a regular Bitcoin address. And that's that. Thank you guys so much for watching. And I hope you have a great evening or day wherever you may be. And I will see you next time for your daily session. by Bitcoin.