BTC Sessions - Musk on Bitcoin Twitter, Russian Cloud Mining, Chinese Crypto Scams EP006

Starting point is 00:00:01 Wasabi wallet. I'm fairly private. What's up everyone? Ben with the BTC sessions here and this is your daily session. Before we dive into the news, of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, ledden.com. This is where you can use your Bitcoin for a few different services. They've got their Bitcoin savings account where you can earn interest on your Bitcoin paid in Bitcoin. They've got their Bitcoin backed loans where you can use your Bitcoin as collateral to obtain a Canadian or U.S. dollar loan. So if you're in a pinch, you need to get your hands on dollars, but you don't want to necessarily sell your Bitcoin because you're worried about price

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Starting point is 00:01:23 I think it's an excellent onboarding mechanism. It's super idiot proof, super easy. The way it works is you head to the store, you pick one of these up, you pay an activation fee, and then you gift it to whoever you want. When the person gets the card, all they have to do is download the app, scratch a code on the back of the card and scan it. It instantly creates them a brand new Bitcoin wallet and sends them an on-chain transaction for the face value of the card. I think it's awesome. I've gifted it a ton already.

Starting point is 00:01:53 And if you want to check them out, you can head over to risewallet.com, click on locations and see where it's available near you. Now, this is currently only available in Canada, but they are looking at expanding. so be sure to keep an eye out for that. And if it happens not to be near a location that you're near in Canada, you can always go to coincards.cai and get one delivered to you. With that, let's dive into the news. It was 11 years ago today that Hal Finney famously tweeted running Bitcoin. It was January 10, 2009 at 833 p.m.

Starting point is 00:02:31 Although that's my time, so we'll see. So those of you unfamiliar with Hal Finney, maybe you're relatively new to Bitcoin or you just haven't heard of him yet, he's a pretty great guy. And so I'm going to read just a quick little bit about him here. Hal Finney was a software engineer and an early member of the Cypherpunks. Finney was a notable advocate of cryptography and digital privacy. He worked for the PGB Corporation where he developed some of the earliest PGB code. He also built the first anonymous remailer, the first proof.

Starting point is 00:03:04 of work-based digital cash system, reusable proofs of work, and received the very first Bitcoin transaction sent by Satoshi Nakamoto. Hal died of ALS, unfortunately in 2014, leaving behind his family, but was cryopreserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. There, of course, has been speculation as to whether or not Hal Finney himself was Satoshi. I myself don't believe so, but if anybody's deserving of a title like that, it would be Hal. He definitely has gone too soon. We didn't deserve him, but we were happy to have him while we did.

Starting point is 00:03:45 So Hal Finney, I do tip my hat to you, and the wonderful work he did, you definitely contribute a lot. So with that, let's dive into the rest. The next story here. The guys over DeCrypt did a little bit of digging in regards to Clive. cloud mining. So what is cloud mining? That's where somebody else does the heavy lifting of obtaining mining hardware, setting it up, running it, maintaining it, and you rent that hardware in order to mine Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Now, most mining is thought of as being heavily concentrated in China because that's where a lot of the ASIC chips are fabricated, though there are companies

Starting point is 00:04:27 starting to pop up outside of China that do it as well. Still, a lot of ASIC manufacturers. Still, happens in China. Also, a lot of mining pools are sent in China. Now, mining pools, of course, are a ton of different miners pooling their resources from around the globe into a central entity and then splitting the rewards because it's too difficult to mine on your own. But, regardless, a lot of those pools are based in China, but comprise of users that are outside of China. Regardless, it would lead one to believe that also cloud mining is likely to be heavily centered in China more so than anywhere else, but that tends not to be the case according to this. So the guys at decrypt went and took a look at unique visitors to cloud mining websites

Starting point is 00:05:20 to kind of decipher who is kind of leading the way, leading the pack in that respect. Now, China tends to get, or Chinese cloud miners tend to get around 80,000 unique visitors to their websites every month, whereas in Russia, oddly enough, 130,000 unique visitors each month. So Russia damn near doubling traffic to cloud mining sites in comparison to China, after China next up was Ukraine with around 56,000 unique monthly users. Now, just to speak to cloud mining itself, I will say that it tends not to be a profitable endeavor. Reason being is obviously the company setting up all the mining equipment. They have to take all their expenses off the top first, and mining profits tend to be razor thin. So to already split that up and divvied up and pay you only a portion of that,

Starting point is 00:06:19 you could barely be breaking even. On top of that, you're buying a certain amount of hash power at a specific time. And with new hash power joining the network all the time, it gets more and competitive so the payout you thought you were going to be getting month after month may end up being less and less and less and there are certainly plenty of instances where people have just not been not even gotten the money back that they initially put in on top of that you also have to navigate some of the scams some of these cloud mining companies say that they have infrastructure in place but really there's no mining equipment and they're just taking people's money so uh all in all cloud mining is definitely not something that's attractive to me, but to each their own.

Starting point is 00:07:06 Moving on to this garbage story, I don't want to spend too much time on this. We've talked about Craig Wright before. He's the guy pretending to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. He was sued by the Kleinman estate, so Dave Clyman's brother. Dave Clyman reportedly worked with Craig Wright early on in Bitcoin. And the case was saying that Craig Wright had stolen Bitcoin from Dave Clyman early on, fraudulently. And so the court found and demanded that Craig Wright pay 550,000 Bitcoin to the climate estate, which is in the billions of dollars. However, throughout that case, the legal team from Craig Wright submitted tons of documents that were clearly either doctored or falsified.

Starting point is 00:08:00 in some way, shape, or form. And the judge himself said that the whole testimony was just more or less trash. It was just completely dishonest and in some cases malicious. So what's happening here, there was a massive pump in the price of Bitcoin SV, which Craig Wright, you know, created and said as the real Bitcoin. And I was wondering what the hell was going on. It looks like he's now dumped a ton of dossiers, like 400-something dossiers on the plaintiff saying, hey, here's all this information about the new information about the Tulip Trust, which is where these supposedly missing bitcoins or locked bitcoins have been locked away for, you know, the past number of years. He said that he was going to gain access to them as of January 1st from a bonded courier.

Starting point is 00:08:58 Well, there's been no movement of coins or anything like that. And I'm guessing that all these dossiers are going to be more of the same doctored and misleading documents that just kind of kick the can down the road until the inevitable happens when it's proven that clearly he's not Satoshi, although he can keep claiming it all he wants and hand wave it away. And I mean, if you still believe him at this point, then not much can be said. I guess I'll sum it up by this tweet by Nunea Business on Twitter here. He says it better than I could have ever. Talk about opium, for fuck's sakes, people. How many times do you get lied to before you figure this shit out? Yeah, that's about it.

Starting point is 00:09:46 Okay, moving on, Chinese crypto users lost a massive 20K per capita in scams last year. So there's a report here. Cryptocurrency scams were the most common type of online financial fraud reported in China last year. The average person reporting a cryptocurrency scam lost 134,000 yuan, which is almost 20,000 US dollars. According to the 2019 Cyber Fraud Trend Research Report, an annual study issued by China's leading security services provider and the 360 Enterprise Security Group. The study published on Tuesday provides a. fascinating snapshot of China's online crime epidemic. A fall in reports of cybercrime as a whole, coupled with a high per capita losses, indicate that China's online scammers are targeting

Starting point is 00:10:36 wealthier individuals and becoming increasingly sophisticated, according to the analysis. Now, it's worth noting, as they said there, that actual reports of fraud, of online fraud, have dropped. So in 2017, there were 24,260 reports of online fraud, whereas in 2019, it was 15,505. So a substantial drop there, but it does indeed seem like they're just refocusing their efforts on more wealthy individuals to get more bang for their buck. And it seems to be working. I'm inclined to believe that this kind of stuff will continue to happen until people become more privy to Bitcoin how it works, that it's irreversible, and people will be less likely to fall for this kind of thing. But scammers are always going to be out there and they're

Starting point is 00:11:26 always going to be looking for the next easiest way to scam you. So, you know, the best way to deal with this, I believe, is just education and prevention. And one last thing to touch on today, it's not much of a story, even though some people are making it a story. Elon Musk tweeted out Bitcoin is not my safe word. And of course, Bitcoiners on Twitter are always happy to see Elon Musk mention anything about Bitcoin and, yeah, I don't know, Twitter kind of blew up. At the time of looking at this, it has like 86,000 likes and around 7,000 retweets. But anyways, is there any significance to this? What could he mean? There's plenty of articles speculating on all that kind of stuff and people on Twitter and having a heyday over it.

Starting point is 00:12:20 I think it's just Elon Musk being himself and just stirring the pot and having some fun. It wouldn't be the first time. Anyways, I'm going to leave it there, guys. Thank you very much for watching. Of course, always hit like, subscribe, and share whether you're on YouTube or listening to this on the podcast platform of your choice. It's always great to have you guys here and listening and joining you. be sure to share this out.

Starting point is 00:12:46 It's always great to have new people watching and listening. Secondly, if you want to help with the show in another way, you can always hit up the sponsors as I mentioned down below, Leden and Rise Wallet and check out Wasabi Wallet to add some privacy to your Bitcoin. And finally, of course, you can check out NordVPN. I use this on my computer and my phone all the time. It hides your IP address.

Starting point is 00:13:08 It encrypts your browsing data and has some other added benefits like unlocking geo-blocked content. If you click the link or if you head to NordvPN.com and use the code BTC sessions, all one word, then you get a special deal where it ends up only being $3.49 a month, which is pretty damn good, in my opinion. With that, I will wrap up. Again, thank you guys. Always awesome having you here. And I will see you after the weekend for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Musk on Bitcoin Twitter, Russian Cloud Mining, Chinese Crypto Scams EP006

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