BTC Sessions - Mining KYC Threat, Hong Kong Bitcoin Ads, Blockchain Wallet Cloud Default EP096

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

SUPPORT THE SHOW: LEDN offers Bitcoin backed loans – Sign up and get $50 free https://bit.ly/2ZuOHpa Get Wasabi wallet and enjoy your Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Buy a Cobo Vault to secure your Bitcoin! https://bit.ly/2GgMFlH Crypto Cloaks: Get the BEST Bitcoin swag out there https://www.cryptocloaks.com/shop/ If you value my work and would like to send me a tip, they are always appreciated! LIGHTNING tips: https://tippin.me/@BTCsessions Join my Telegram channel! https://t.me/btc_sessions SHOW RESOURCES: The FATF is trying to regulate Bitcoin mining and force KYC on users/pools. This will not end well for them https://tftc.io/martys-bent/issue-821/amp/?__twitter_impression=true&s=09 Bitcoin ads emerge around Hong Kong https://decrypt.co/41514/bitcoin-ads-plastered-across-hong-kong-trams-and-near-banks?s=09 Blockchain wallet stupidity abounds, as they enact default cloud backups https://medium.com/blockchain/introducing-cloud-backups-7bad7b35d795 Nym privacy mixnet rewards node operators with BTC https://www.coindesk.com/privacy-nym-pay-bitcoin-mixnet “The Wasteland: A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy” by Yuri De Gaia https://degaia.co/the-wasteland-a-wretched-hive-of-scum-and-villainy/ Check out how to get started with myNode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMovZg_3ERs Bitcoin Magazine “Drinks In Quarantine” episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kiA3xV5aB0

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC sessions and this is your daily session. Hodel their Bitcoin. Before we dive in, of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.io. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services. And I've been using and working with these guys for well over a year now. First thing I ever used was their Bitcoin back loans. In my instance, I was in a pinch.

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instantly buy more Bitcoin, effectively doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. If you want to check them out, there's a link in these show notes down below. And if you click that link and opt to get a loan, they will give you 50 bucks or the Bitcoin for free. And up next, we have some of my favorite guys. We have crypto cloaks. Now, if you have not heard of crypto cloaks, I don't know what you're doing with your life. But these guys make some of the most incredible Bitcoin swag out there. They are tearing it up a bunch of hardcore bitcoinsers that got some 3D printers and started pumping out all of this awesome stuff.

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Happy to work with them now. So what is the COBOLVAL? Well, it is a hardware wallet that is 100% air-gapped, meaning you never actually plug it into your computer, which keeps your seed phrase or your private keys safe. Everything is done through QR codes. They have Bitcoin-only firmware, which I highly recommend you to run. They have, if you get the pro, they have rechargeable batteries. There is a secure element in the thing.

And one of my favorite things here is their interoperability with some of my favorite wallets. You can obviously use it with Bitcoin Core. You can use it with Electrum and Wasabi wallet, both on desktop. I love Wasabi. And, of course, my favorite mobile wallet, Blue Wallet. You can use it in tandem with Blue Wallet. It's just all around excellent. And furthermore,

cobo you can use in a lot of different multi-sig setups. And I've covered some of that before. I'm going to be covering more. And we'll actually touch on it later in the show. So check out Kobo Vault. There's a link in the show notes. And also, if you want to win something from them, we're doing this all the way up to the end of November.

Every show, if you want to win a Kobo Tablet Plus, which is a steel seed plate, so you can save the backup to your wallet in solid, steel, which protects from water and fire. All you need to do is retweet the show on Twitter, tag myself and Kobo in it, and let us know why you want one. Now you have to be in Canada,

the U.S. or the EU to be eligible, but go give it a retweet and let us know why, and I will be picking a winner every show, so be sure to go and do that. And with that, let's dive into the news. The issue of the

Bent today from Marty Bent, by the way, if you're not subscribed to the Bent again, go out, subscribe. He writes this newsletter every single day, every single day. So you better subscribe. Anyways, excellent issue today. He's talking about this group called the SLIC, and they are part of or backed by or enforced through the Financial Action Task Force. And what are they trying to do? Well, they're trying to K-Y-C people in mining pools. Despite the fact that many don't know where all the mining pools are located or how to get a whole. Obviously, some mining pools are very public, but others, not as much. And some miners, you just have no idea where they are.

Anyways, they're trying to basically clamp down and KYC and put undue regulations on all of these different miners and mining pools. and it's just not going to go well for them, I think, in the long run regardless, but Marty has some strong words here. He says, groups like SLIC and the scumbags that will come after them want to attempt to kill the Bitcoin network in this fashion. We cannot let them, and fortunately, their efforts will be in vain. We cannot let them because they are attempting to appease a supranational regulatory body known as the FATF or Financial Action Task Force.

We've written them about them before in this rag, but you freaks can never be reminded too often why you should oppose this horrid organization. It is a regulatory body that supersedes local authorities. No one voted for it, no one asked for it, and no one is better off for it existing. The FATF exists to make moving money around this planet as hard as possible for the common man

under the guise of protecting from terrorist financing and money laundering. In reality, they force companies that deal with money to collect as much personal information as possible on their users so they can be tracked, taxed, and censored. Making the masses worse off and forcing companies to expend an innumerable amount of capital on compliance. This is madness and must end. As you freaks can tell, corporate losers want to extend the power of the FATF and bring it to Bitcoin mining. Luckily for us, they're off, they're efforts will be in vain due to the permissionless nature of Bitcoin that they hate so much. The most they will be able to accomplish will be bifurcating the mining pools into

whitelisted and blacklisted pools. This will be made possible by the jurisdictional arbitrage that exists throughout the world. If this bifurcation ever comes to fruition, the blacklisted pools will win out in the end because they will be more profitable. People who the FATF deemed as blacklisted will simply use mining pools in jurisdictions rightfully tell the FATF to fuck themselves to get their transactions included in blocks. These transactions, unfortunately for users, will come with larger fees so that they have higher probability of being included in the ledger. This will make the blacklisted pools considerably more profitable. Over time, the miners on the whitelisted pools will not be able to put up with the fact that their profits are being throttled by the FATF,

and they will find ways via creativity or via the legal system to act as the blacklisted pools do. That, or they simply shut down, and the only pools that remain are those outside of the jurisdictions of the FATF has any undue power in. So, yeah, solid article. Again, I couldn't get through all of it. Obviously, it would have been taken a long time, but do recommend you read it, do recommend you look into the FACF.

FATF because again, what a sham of an organization. And I just, I don't see this panning out for them. I think it's just, if anything, it slows down progress a little bit, but Bitcoin is resilient and anti-fragile and it routes around bullshit like this. Let's move on here. Bitcoin ads plastered across Hong Kong, trams, and near banks. I enjoy this story here. So trams and major landmarks near Hong Kong.

Hong Kong's famed banks will feature Bitcoin ads until October 8th, courtesy of an initiative by a local Bitcoin non-profit. The Bitcoin Association of Hong Kong, or B-A-H-K, a nonprofit that holds meetups and promotes the use of Bitcoin in the city is using community donations to advertise the risks and merits of Bitcoin via billboard ads at some areas with high footfall in Hong Kong. The quote here, more U.S. dollars have been printed in 2020 than were in existence in 2009. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin, reads one ad, pointing to the incessant money printing in the U.S. that has led to fears of widespread inflation in the country. You can see there's some right in front of HSBC, literally HSBC right behind it and then be your own bank on these big billboards right across from it. That's pretty great.

Yeah, there's a whole bunch of these around the city and a few of those trams Where are that right here? Yeah, those are going to be going around the city too for the next month or so So kudos and again the nice thing about this is there's literally no other like corporate messaging There's no company messaging on it. It's just straight up hey Take a look at Bitcoin and they're in no way profiting from this. They're just using community donations to do this to raise awareness of Bitcoin. Yeah, where else do you see some? something like that. That's great. Let's move on here. Creator of Blue Wall, I was just saying how Blue Wallet is super awesome. You know what's not awesome? Blockchain wallet. That shit sucks.

And this is just another example of why blockchain just put 50 million Bitcoin wallets from users automatically on the cloud. And he said, this is fine. And he's got the great gift to go along with it. So let's look at their, the actual blockchain post, the medium post that paints this as a positive thing. We're pleased to announce the integration of cloud backups for the blockchain.com wallet solving the age-old catch-22, how to make controlling your money both easy and secure. They go into talking about wallets have always been a unique feature and if you lose access or you log out of your account, which again, they are a web wallet so you have like an account, but it's encrypted and you, um, if you, um, if you, you, um, if you, you, um, if you, you, you, um, if you,

If you lose your password, then you can't decrypt it. And obviously, they don't keep a copy of your password. So that's the idea behind blockchain wallet. Anyways, what they've done is, oh, God, let me read this. When you log into your wallet, we created an encrypted backup of your wallet on your personal iCloud or Google Drive account to make recovery easier. This feature is available only on our mobile apps and is turned on by default. So a lot of people won't even realize that this is there.

Check that you have device backups turned on and an Apple or Google account to ensure that you can recover your wallet if you lose your backup phrase or device. If you delete your wallet app to, this is the kicker, if you delete your wallet app or get a new device and want to regain access to your funds, all you have to do is re-download the app and input your pin to restore your wallet. It's a pin code to restore. So if somebody gets access, if somebody gets access to your Google account, and again, or ICloud account, and this is turned on by default.

So a lot of people are just, it's just going to be in the cloud and not going to realize it. All somebody has to do, if you're not locked down on these Apple or Google accounts with two-factor authentication, somebody gets in there, all they need to do is get your wallet file and they need to figure out your pin. And like how many people have the simple pins? they could easily just brute force a pin for sure for sure uh this is insane to me this is insane this is like the least secure thing you can opt out of it but the important thing in is here

it's by default by default like 50 million wallets are now in the cloud anyways i did a video a while back on blockchain wallet and i it's almost like a I tried to do it as like a Trojan horse to get people to download better wallets. And so I did it as a how to use blockchain wallet. And I showed the app and I started going through it. And then I was like, oh, this about it, this about it, this about it, all these things suck. I would recommend that instead you go to this or this or this.

And it's gotten a decent number of views so far. So hopefully through a bull market that can at least in part help funnel some people away from crap like this. Moving on here, Privacy startup NIM will pay you in Bitcoin to run its MixNet. So NIM now allows Bitcoin transactions and has an incentive program for people running its nodes. It is also enabling plugins that will allow users to plug in wallets and applications to run their traffic through its MixNet. So what is MixNet? NIM is a startup software project working to obscure metadata tracking at a network level via the mixnet it enables. The mixnet itself is hosted by a decentralized network of volunteers.

On a normal internet network, most traffic can be tracked. Browsers like Tor offer a degree of protection against network surveillance by running traffic through a number of relays to obscure a user's location and usage. Such networks are still susceptible to metadata observation, however, meaning highly capable adversaries like the NSA in the US are able to see the timing of the data packages being sent across the network to get an idea of what's going on, even if they can't see the actual contents of the packages. So, yeah, what this does is essentially it takes the data packages that are being sent through the network and actually just kind of like shuffles them around so that the timing of everything

is really obfuscated and you can't tell even like who's doing what, even though the person can't, with Tor, you can't see what the data is. You can still say, okay, well, this went from here to here. And it's, yeah, so it's interesting. And again, the incentives being paid in Bitcoin, like that's the big thing with something like Tor. There's not a lot of incentive for people to run Tor nodes. Whereas with this, they're trying to incentivize people to run this by paying in Bitcoin,

which is really cool. The other thing here is they're actually partnering with Blockstream, with the liquid side chain. So NIM has largely been focusing on its test net with node operators hosting them as a labor of love. Now NIM will compensate operators using Bitcoin. One way it offers rewards is through the LBT on the liquid side chain using Blockstream Green Wallet.

Liquid offers on-chain privacy using confidential transactions, which obscure the amounts being paid. For those who don't have or want Blockstream Green Wallet, NIM will also reward operators with BP. because NIM doesn't want to force anyone to adopt a particular wallet. It will also be launching an incentivized bounty program to test the network's strength. So pretty cool here. A lot of this is it is pretty technical when you get further into the article.

But if you want to get into that, then I encourage you to check out the link down below. I wanted to highlight this little piece of writing here. This was actually, it was written over a month ago, but I was written by a guy named named Yuri Degaya. And I believe I met him in Riga when I was there for the Hoddle-Hoddle-sponsored Baltic Honey Badger conference in September of last year. Yeah. Anyways, I really like this.

So there's a lot of talk in Bitcoin of Citadel's, which is just like another expression for more localization and local governments. opposed to, you know, vast reaching or overreaching larger governments that has no way of interpreting the needs and the nuance, the nuance needs of local people in a very granular way. And so the idea is that Bitcoin will kind of usher in an era of citadels or more localization over time. So this article that he wrote here, or I guess kind of like a peek into a possible future, The Wasteland, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. In a world based on natural order, prisons will be few.

How will criminals be treated? Where will they go? It turns out there is a special place for them. I'm just going to read the little intro here, and then I encourage you to check it out because I love stuff like this. It reminds me of like fallout. It reminds me of playing fallout. Okay, so the new map.

Imagine a world of thousands of citadels. Nation states, for the most part, have finally broken apart. Cities and communities have seated to create their own autonomous zones and sovereign states. With ever-growing competition, people have a vast array of options where to live. Citadel's literally compete for citizens by offering increasing living standards and catering to various preferences in terms of economic, cultural, and spiritual, life. As most countries have collectively lost control of vast amounts of territory, there has appeared an abundance of no man's land. Natural appropriation through homesteading, ranching,

industrial and recreational use has become the default way of acquiring this unoccupied territory. A myriad of new developments have popped up all around. The population of the planet, however, is nowhere near as high as to cover the whole globe, leaving vast areas completely unpleased. populated for many more centuries to come. Due to their lawless nature, some of these territories are known as the wasteland. Yeah, I really love this. Yuri, thanks for writing this. I'm sorry it took me so long to stumble across this, but do check it out.

I'll link it down below. I think you'll have a fun read of it. A couple other things here. My note, my note just dropped a new release today, which I've already upgraded to. So a few things that added. So I did a video on Caravan, which is from Multisig. They upgraded that to version 0.3.3. They upgraded Join Market to 0.7.0.

They upgraded Spectre. This is the one I'm excited about. They upgraded Spector also for Easy Multisag to 0.7.2, which this upgrade now makes it easy to work with the Kobo Vault in the creation of multi-sig. So just peeking over here at Spector, you can see I've already loaded up a cold card, a Kobo, and a Ledger Nano X here into a multi-sig scheme. I'm still messing around a little bit. There's a couple little buggy things with creating new wallets currently in this release on My Node. But one of the guys over at Spector is investigating, and there should be a fix for that shortly.

So anyways, as soon as I can get that up and going, that's going to be one of my next big. tutorial videos is is multi-sig via Spectre and I'm very excited for that. But what else is in there? They upgraded Thunder Hub to version 0.9.8, upgraded Ride the Lightning to 0.9.0 and upgraded Whirlpool to 0.10.8. And they also have a little breakdown of apps where you can actually upgrade individual ones. So they're starting to kind of separate stuff out a little bit so you have more play with how you interact with the apps and how you reinstall them and everything. It's nice. I like it. And the other last thing I wanted to touch on here is last night, I was on Bitcoin Magazine's YouTube channel. We had the Bitcoin YouTuber

Takeover, some great guests there. I was stoked to see Keep It Simple Bitcoin. Nico and Coin Icarus were there. Max, Kaiser, of course, CK and Brand BTC hosting it. So it was really great to have a chat with these guys. I had a lot of fun. I got a little sauced. Again, the title of the show is drinks in quarantine, so I had some Canadian rye whiskey, like a 17-year-old Canadian

rye whiskey that I was blowing through glasses of. I was hurting this morning. I'm not going to lie. I was a little rough, but it made for some fun conversation during the show. So I will link to that down below, too, if you want to check that out. It was a good, like, two-hour chat.

So, yeah, so if you're pining for more after this show, Do go watch it. Anyways, guys, I am going to wrap it up there. Thank you so much for watching and or listening. Of course, if you're here on YouTube, remember my favorite things for you to do. Like, subscribe, and share. That's very important.

Please, please do that. Also, if you want that Kobo Tablet Plus that we were talking about, be sure to get on Twitter, retweet it, tag myself and Kobo. Let us know why you want one, and you could have that seed plate for you. be sure to hit up the sponsors of course hit up leaden hit up crypto cloaks hit up cobo all links for that down below and if you really loved what you saw

you can always hit me up with a Bitcoin Lightning Network tip at my tipin.me page that is tipin.m.m. slash at BTC sessions with that I'm out have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you are and I will see you next time

for your daily session Thank you.