BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: BIS Boss Says Bitcoin Is Over ep325

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

BIS Agustus Carsens says Bitcoin has lost the battle, Blue Wallet winding down LND hub (what should you do?), and much more on today’s show. 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Nunchuk Wallet and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted mutisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Use awesome hardware options like the Tapsigner, Coldcard and others to secure your stack with spending limits, emergency lockdowns and more. Pass on your savings to your loved ones with ease in a simple claiming process with full customer support. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab an Embassy today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/ HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Furthermore, you can check out their Lend platform for p2p loans that are never rehypothecated. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION 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 The Miami Bitcoin Conference is the largest Bitcoin event in the world! Come check it out in Miami Beach Florida on May 18-20th. Use code BTCSESSIONS for 10% off your tickets! https://bm.b.tc/btcsessions Free video tutorials not enough? Need some extra hand-holding when mastering self-custody, multisig, coinjoin, running a node, or other skills? Book me for a private session on my website! https://www.btcsessions.ca/ Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions ⚡[e-mail]

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show. We've got some news to break to you. Plenty of stuff to chat about. We've got our good friend Nico over from Simply Bitcoin. We're going to be talking about the final boss thinking that Bitcoin is over. We're going to have some Canadian spice thrown in there. We're going to be talking about all kinds of stuff. Also, Blue Wallet phasing out there, L&D Hub. What does that mean for you? What do you got to do? We're going to chat about it all. Now, this is live, of course. 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'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things help so, so much. Thank you to all of you that have been doing it

to help get this content in front of more eyeballs. With that, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in Nika, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is timechain calendar.com. We are sitting at 23,876 kucks per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 4,188 sats. 91.91% of all Bitcoin have been mine.

That's 19.3 million of them. And in terms of fees, hey, pretty low. I guess JPEG boys are a little tired right now. a little tired from clicking away putting their JPEGs on the chain anyways two sats per bite next block pretty much the same across the board uh and the mempool only 30 megabytes there so it looks like maybe maybe it was just all it'll it disappeared it disappeared there's uh maybe it's much less of a threat than everybody was worried about uh we'll see i'm sure it'll pick a pick up again in a bull run with all the shit corners jumping on board anyways

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And there is a link down below. Up next, once you get those KYC free sats, you might want to save them and secure them in the best hardware on the market. And that is the cold card. Mark 4 from Coin Kite. God, Coin Kite just knocks it out of the park every time. All of their stuff is so awesome. Of course the Mark 4.

I'm doing a workshop on this in Miami, the way, I'm sure you've heard. But they've got other great things to the tap sign of the block clock, the SATs card, all kinds of awesome stuff. And if you haven't seen the cold card Q1, you can reserve it now. It'll be dropping soon. Thing looks like an absolute beast. And of course I'll be doing a video on it. Anyways, coin kite.com use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything in the store. Up next, we have Nunchuk. If you want to go above and beyond, just regular hardware, well, you can dive into multi-sig. And if you want to limit the single points of failure,

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And the best part, you do not need any KYC, unlike other options on the market, which is awesome because you can set up this. You don't need anybody to have any of their nose in your business about where your next of kin will be receiving their stats from. So it's awesome. I've done a video on it. Check it out, nunchok.io. And then finally, we've got start nine, your sovereign computing solution. You can back up everything I was just talking about by running your own Bitcoin infrastructure, Bitcoin Core, Lightning, notes, things like Mempool. Space, join market for mixing, all kinds of stuff. Plus, you can back up your own data, things like passwords, files, photos, even run a nostril relay, all kinds of awesome stuff. Check out start9.com. You can check out the Embassy

1 or if you're looking for something really, really beefy and high end to run your entire life on. You can check out the Embassy Pro. And before we bring in, Nika, let's take a quick look at a few of the boostograms that have been coming through. Joey says the only. thing I'm more pumped for than getting my cold card Q1 is hashtag Benico touching tips of the conference. We've got Fort Nagamoto saying Wyoming private key law set up a Nevada trust that owns a Wyoming LLC that owns the private keys and store one key in Wyoming and or Swift safety deposit poxes. Me like. Michael says Kumar is cringe. Bitcoin Grandma says Grandma now has a cold card. Yeah. Cliff.

says, can crypto cloaks please make a cold card casing of leather and brand it Mrs. Wong's leather jacket? I'm buying that. Referring to David Wong, fan of the show on Fridays, hates Bitcoin, but here every week to tell us how wrong we are. Thanks, man. Love you. And Joey says, will there be a shirtless wab at the Canadian Bitcoin conference? I mean, assuming it doesn't snow in June, which probably not Toronto, it's always a mixed bag in Calgary. maybe we'll see about that it might still be a little cold but nonetheless thank you all for your boost of grams keep them coming you can listen to this audio only on fountain's uh the fountain app uh and yeah stream sats to your heart's content anyways enough of my rambling let's get an ego in here

let's chat news buddy how you doing i'm doing great bro i can't excite i'm i i've been dreaming about touching the tips in Miami. Yeah, my wife is, I don't want to say excited. Confused, perhaps, is a better description of what is happening. But she'll be there. Jealous?

Yeah, she might be jealous. I mean, she is all blonde, so maybe she'll just get a dark streak. I'll convince her to do that. I think that might be a good option. But, you know, I'm getting more and more excited for Miami as time goes on. Yeah, yeah.

I'm super pumped. you know my my girlfriend is is uh i i'm forcing her to to come to uh the next uh workshop that you're doing and uh she has to learn you know yeah yeah exactly maybe i'll maybe i mean maybe she actually absorbed enough at the last one that she can be a a little helper a teacher's hand to go out and help all the plebs that are just uh getting their toes wet oh man oh man i'm excited miami's be great. Looking forward to getting to see you in the flesh again. Yeah, it'll be a good time, man. Well, let's, let's redecorate here. Let's dive into Simply Sessions. And what's going on, man? What am I, again, I see, I see a video queued up. Do we want to start with that or do, are we going to go

somewhere else first? Let's start hot, man. Let's start hot. This is going to get me hot and like not hot in a good way, like angry hot. All right. So, oh, man, Canada. We can do. better. Let's go. Yeah. So look, when it comes to the financial measures, I think the most important thing to start with is, as the Prime Minister just said, Justice Rullo's conclusion, which was, and I'm going to read it. It was a powerful tool to discourage participation and to incentivize protesters to leave. I am satisfied that it played a meaningful role in shrinking the footprint of the protests and in doing so made a meaningful contribution to resolving the public order emergency.

That is his broad conclusion on the economic measures. It's what we believed at the time, and I'm really glad that having looked at this so carefully, Justice Rullo agrees. I would also add that what was so important for us in putting in place these economic measures was our overriding objective, of course, was to end the illegal blockades in occupation. It was to do so without violence, without anyone being hurt. And the economic measures were a tool that really helped make that happen. On the specific question about unfreezing accounts, Justice Rulow also points out a couple of things. He points out that on February 21st, an order issued a statement from the RCMP effectively instructed that all accounts be unfrozen. Of course, when the measures

were lifted on February 23rd, they were unfrozen. And he also pointed out in his own report that work was done urgently at the time and was being done between the government, and law enforcement bodies and banks to ensure that there was a process in place to unfreeze the accounts. So all of that was happening. As the prime minister said, in the very horrible event

that this ever has to happen again, for sure, there are some lessons for us. Thank you. That is disgusting. That makes me so angry. And by the way, anybody listening to that, that was the deputy prime minister of Canada, which is effectively like our vice president, Christia Freeland.

I can't, I can't, I look at that and I think like, at first of all, she said it was supposed to be a tool for stopping the blockades. The blockades were gone. But like, so that people put up blockades at a couple of borders in Canada as like, I guess, I don't know, satellite events from the main protests. I don't know how to say it. But nonetheless,

the blockades were already gone by then. And for them to basically say that they didn't say that they're trying to stop violence because there was none. They effectively are saying like,

if there's ever a protest that we don't like, we're going to possibly use economic measures, meaning we're just going to freeze your money until you're starving and then you'll stop doing what you're doing, which probably would work. Yeah, it's, it's awful. I don't know, man. What's your take watching that? Yeah, man, I mean, like, I'm just, I was like paying attention to, you know, your facial expressions and your body language, specifically because I know that this hits very close to home, Ben, I can't even imagine. And then them just being so nonchalant about

Freezing Account economic measures like economic like what is like the language there But at the very end you could tell that she was walking it back just a bit She's like we would do things slightly differently But taking absolutely no responsibility and then if you contrast that with Bitcoin like dude You can't even with Noster really There is no one, like this concept where a bureaucratic elite, right, get to just pick and choose who is entitled to use money. This is your hard-earned money. This isn't something that you've stolen.

This is something that you've worked for. Yeah. And this is a peaceful protest. The trucker protest was a peaceful protest, right? They had kids in bouncy castles. And then think about that incentive of now you're not allowed to protest against. against your government, isn't that a staple of a so-called liberal democracy that, you know, the, you know, that country that that Canada calls itself? Like this is a country. It's like,

yes, we support, you know, human rights. As long as they don't go against the government, if they go against the government, we're going to have economic measures to make sure that you don't protest against the guy. Like, so absolutely observed, no one deserves that much power. Yeah. I again, like the the one bit of solace that I had when all that shit was going on. Because like I didn't know if I was going to be like I didn't end up getting any bank accounts frozen. But the nice thing about it was I was sorting through like, okay, so what happens if that happens to me? And like it's I'm living more or less on a Bitcoin standard, but I still need to utilize credit cards and a bank account in some capacity.

I have a mortgage. I have all that kind of crap. So I'm sorting through. I'm like, okay, what, what would I have to do? And like the, I had the solace of knowing that if they froze my accounts, obviously, they're not going to get the majority of my wealth, right? Like I have, I keep as few dollars as possible. And I also knew that in a roundabout way, it would be a pain in the ass, but I would still be able to make ends meet and actually cover all of my expenses. So just being totally unprepared.

for that eventuality and it being thrust upon me, I was still thinking going, this is going to be a pain, but I can do it, even if it happens. So that's that's kind of the assurance that you get with Bitcoin, where like even being ill prepared, if shit hits the fan, you're still infinitely better off than if you're not using Bitcoin. Yeah, 100%. And this is the, this is the ultimate Trump card. This is the, this is where the fundamental relationship between the state.

and the individual changes completely, right? Because they don't have that power anymore. And I never forget that response by Numchuck, right? Which is like, yeah, we can't do this. Even if you asked us to, when the Canadian dollar fails, we'll be here to serve you too. And that's the power of Bitcoin. And I think that's what we're all here.

Yeah, I love those guys too. They're absolute legends. Nunchuk team killing it. Best guy. And that's why I'm so, again, I'm, I'm so happy that they're now sponsoring the show. Like the, our, our trajectories having collided through all of the stuff that happened last year. Like, I, I think those guys are incredible. And like they very much, sorry, I'm getting derailing us from the, the news here.

But like, you know, they had an internal discussion around like, we've, you know, they may come after us. Nunchuk may be under massive scrutiny. We may you know, who knows if Nunchuk exists as a company after this and they had that internal discussion of like, but we're

still going to do it. We're going to go forward. We're going to support this. We're going to do what we can. And they they're like, we're all fucking in baby. We're standing up for what we believe in. So hats off to them. Hugo over there is awesome. So yeah.

Yeah, 100%. So Ben, exclusively to Simply Sessions, I was actually able to get Mr. Augustine to read this headline. So if you don't mind, we could bring them on stage. Yes, absolutely. Crypto has lost the battle against fiat currency. Sir, are you okay? You sound like you're choking on a cheese dog. Oh, man.

What's that famous saying, if they were winning the propaganda, the propaganda wouldn't be necessary. And I think that this is an example. This article is just so ridiculous. And you can really tell that the central planning aspect of their belief system just bleeds out of them. You know, it's like Bitcoin is not money.

It's lost the battle, but you can clearly tell that these central bankers, they don't believe in the free market. They can't even have a, they can't even conceptualize it. They've been so used to operating in this world where they are the determining factor. And boy, have they not learned yet. But they sure will. Anyways, so let's check it out. He goes on to say, the argument that crypto is an alternative to fiat currency has been settled following last year's turmoil. in the digital asset sector, according to Augustine Carson's, the head of the bank for international

settlements. The battle has been won, Carson said in a Bloomberg TV interview on Wednesday, a technology doesn't make for trusted money. And again, like, what about the people in Argentina? What about the people in Turkey? What about the people in Venezuela? Their state money failed them. And even in the West, bro, like, are we supposed to be okay with, in specifically the United

States? point five percent, if you were to believe the government numbers, are you supposed to be okay with 6.5 percent theft? Like, is that what we call trust? You know, so it's so disconnected from reality. Goes on to say the digital asset sector is still licking the wounds of the $2 trillion route and November collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTS Exchange. Quote, only the legal historical infrastructure behind central banks can give great credibility to money, Carson said, adding he, anticipates a strong, and I think that says a lot, Ben, what is coming, adding he anticipates a strong statement from the group of 20 for strengthened regulation of the digital asset sector. And this, if you combine this with the, and we're going to get to this later on Simply sessions, if you combine this by the recent hostility by the Biden administration, trying to cut out the industry from the traditional financial system, at least here in the United States.

You have the regulations in Europe talking about making, to use their vocabulary, unhosted wallets, illegal. Yeah, man, this is the separation of money in state. We are living through it. This is, this is it. We're experiencing it. Yep. And they're trying to throw, there's a, Jeff Booth talks about this a little bit. And he says that, like, you've got to imagine that if you're creating an alternative system that necessarily,

obsolete and ruins the previous system. And they've got unlimited Fiat printing to throw at this thing. They will throw every possible thing they can at Bitcoin to stop it from proliferating. So like, we haven't even begun to see the pushback that we're going to get on this, especially when Fiat actually begins to fail in at, while at the same time Bitcoin begins. to actually decisively succeed. When Bitcoin is no longer traded as a risk asset, and it actually is that safe haven versus inflation and versus all of this other Fiat printing that's happening,

that's when they, I think, and then it happens quickly, right? Because they just, they print and print and print and print to try and ruin Bitcoin, and it just does the exact opposite. You are wrong, Ben. You're wrong. You don't know what to talking about. You need the central bank. It's almost like a little bit of like an Arnold Schwarzenegger. But like way less fit. But yes, no, in all seriousness, I completely agree.

Their only option is to print. That's their only solution to anything. And boy, do these people, whether it's Christine Lagarde, Erica Friedlin, you know, Janet Yellen, you know, Augustin Carson. You know, you know what, Jerome Powell isn't so, I wouldn't put him in the category of those people. And that's a very surprise. And I know I'm going to get beat up for saying this. But anyways, for those specific people, boy, are they in for a surprise, you know. I think, I think Powell is still in a state of like, we're the U.S. dollar.

Yes. Nothing's going to happen to us. Whereas, like, people in the Eurozone, they're like, oh, we're fucked. They're like, man, shit's really falling apart quick. We got to make sure people don't go to Bitcoin or something. Yeah, they're feeling the pinch more than the U.S. Well, the U.S. will feel it last. But it'll be too late by then.

100%. 100%. All right. So let's see what else we got. Interesting, very interesting development then. So Hong Kong to establish, as an article from Bloomberg, Hong Kong to establish task force to help develop Crypto Hub. Hong Kong will set up a task force to provide recommendations on how it could achieve a recently adopted goal of becoming a crypto hub.

Quote, over the past few months, a large number of innovative enterprises with potential have been considering setting up business in Hong Kong. For the next step, I will establish and lead a task force on virtual asset development with members from relevant policy, Burex, financial regulators, and market participants to provide recommendations on the sustainable and responsible. responsible development of the sector. Now, if I just read this news on its face, you'd think it's a big nothing burger. But remember, Hong Kong is part of China. It's part of, you know, they say it's two, it's one country, two systems. But we all remember the protests in Hong Kong, right? The CCP has moved in there.

So this had to happen with the CCP approval. And check this out is an article that followed that up. And it confirmed that. It says in October, Hong Kong rolled out the red carpet for crypto businesses to help revitalize the embattled financial hub. Signs are now emerging. The push has under the radar backing from Beijing, providing importers from mainland Chinese firms to return. Representatives from China's liaison office and other officials have been frequent guests as the city's crypto gatherings over the past months. Swapping business cards and we chat details said people familiar with the matter who asked not to,

to be named discussing private information. The encounters have been friendly with officials checking on developments, asking for reports, and in some cases making follow-up calls. The people said the liaison office, the top mainland body base in Hong Kong, didn't respond to request for comment. So, interesting. Goes on to say local crypto operators say their presence is clearing up any doubts about Beijing's attitude towards Hong Kong's efforts to become a crypto hub.

The low-key support shows that officials are keen on using LESA Fair City as a testing ground for digital assets. They keep a tight rain on any such activity in the mainland. You cannot resist Bitcoin's incentives. And remember that news that came out from China and a lot too long ago, even after the CCP banned Bitcoin mining within its borders, it's still estimated. According to this report, it is quite dated, though, that 21% of the hash rate is still located in China. You cannot resist Bitcoin's incentive. And I think it's fascinating how the CCP is trying to play both sides here. So I'm trying to figure out the play here.

And I'm wondering if it has to do with the fact that they're getting pretty buddy, buddy with Russia right now. And Russia is obviously recognizing that in a world where they can have a big portion of their reserves, basically sanctioned and stolen, what gets around that. The easiest is a network like Bitcoin. And like I think that China might make the mistake of assuming that they can keep a handle on it. Like they can use it at the top and prevent the little guy from using it. But that's not going to be the case. And Russia seemed to try with that stance too.

But like it's the whole Alex Gladstein, Bitcoin is a Trojan horse for freedom. It's exactly that. Like you have these kind of totalitarian government saying like, all right, this is great for us because the world's trying to stop us from doing something. We just won't let our citizens use it because that would be disastrous. And what ends up happening is their citizens are like, well, I mean, fuck you. We're definitely using this. So I think that's how it plays out. But in the in the interim, I think we're going to be faced with like this onslaught of different types of ways this is represented in the media where it's going to be like Russia is using it.

It's bad. China's using its. It's bad while also Chinese citizens and Russian citizens that are being oppressed by their government are using it. It's good. And I feel like the media won't be able to make up their mind. but the the interests at the top will take precedent. And if Biden says bad, bad, if Western governments, if, you know, Europe says it's bad, I think that will take precedent and it'll take longer for the message of, well, what about the little guy?

That will take much longer to proliferate. 100%. And that Alex Gladstein reference so spot on. And I never forget in the article, he says that Bitcoin and freedom, the NGU technology and the freedom enabling technology are inextricably linked. And I don't think the China exactly said, I don't think the Russian government realizes this. And I don't think the CCP realizes this as well. But once again, cannot resist Bitcoin's incentives. Anyways, all right, moving on to Ben, this is quite a.

bit of a read. So I want to propose something a little bit differently so it's not just me reading. Would you be so kind as to read this legendary post by the one, the only legendary Hal Finney? He predicted this Bitcoin price prediction back in 2009. I hate speculative things. But the reason I wanted to cover this, Ben, is because Michael Saylor, and we have to remember who Michael Saylor is. Michael Saylor is the chairman of a public company. So he can't just go out and be tweeting hopium. Okay. He could be legally liable, right? But he made, he linked a, a substack post to Jesse Myers and it goes into the details of why this, he goes into the details of why the potential for Bitcoin's price target could be eventually $10 million.

And what I find fascinating is, again, this isn't just a regular person tweeting this. This isn't just some random YouTube account. This is Michael Saylor, but not also Michael Saylor. You have Adam back as well, very similar numbers. And of course, absolutely fascinating. Back in 2009, how Finney was making this case. So 2009, imagine like the, how people must have looked at that, like especially non-bitcoiners, if they had read that and been like the hubris of this person.

And still people would read this and think it's just other than, you know, probably you and me and a bunch of people in the room watching this right now. But like the average person would look at this and be this is absolutely insane. But I, you know, I knew people that thought the same thing about $10,000 Bitcoin or $1,000 Bitcoin. Like people were losing their minds when they hit a dollar like the parody of. one Bitcoin and $1 was an insane thing. Okay, so from Hal Finney in 2009. Right here. Right here.

Right here. Right here. Which, oh, okay, that one. Okay. As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth

in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have, have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion, with 20 million coins that gives each coin a value of about $10 million. Dude, absolutely legendary. And then, guess what, Adam back. Very interesting, very interesting logic. He says earlier this year, I was curious of the claim, Bitcoin's 2x per year on average. It checks the decade January 2013 to December 2022. Bitcoin went up roughly two to two X per year. If that continues, we'll cross the 10 million dollar Bitcoin and 200 trillion dollar

market cap by the end of the next two havings about nine years. 200 trillion is how is a how fin 2000 Bitcoin market cap prediction number. It's a lot. This place is a significant part of the store of value premiums and bonds, real estate monetary premium, gold, 6040 stock portfolios, etc. I'm not sure about the adoption slowing nor the volatility reducing. There are some other factors the new cycle people learn to hoddle slash stack who over time make it their mission to buy and cold store as much Bitcoin as possible, even resorting to leverage. Adoption could have hyper-bitquinization spurts where rapid viral adoption nukes a weak currency and a weak currency and a

a hyper-inflationary frenzy and domino crash 20 bottom-tier currencies people get pragmatic adapt fast if they see fiat melting a rush of others protecting savings via bitcoin also bear in mind bitcoin does not have to absorb anywhere near a hundred trillion to reach that market cap due to the relative thin trading and hoddle slash cold store investors if bitcoin really gets moving it will become harder to get anyone to sell given volatility i think bitcoin can overshoot wildly and tap one of these 100 to 300 trillion market caps correct and then regain a steadier adoption over time i suspect people will average entry points relative to the current price won't have much incentive to sell in size it's true there is some in effect bitcoin rehypothecation

via side contracts like perpetual futures however reality reality is there's not really much naked short interest so much of the shorts are delta neutral collecting fund rate on USDA and by matching physical Bitcoin collateral. The market in Bitcoin native financialization is immature, almost untouched, Bitcoin structure products, mortgages backed by real estate, but interest guaranteed by Bitcoin. Other products make Bitcoin easier to use for more people and match risk profiles, which creates more growth. So I think things will get interesting over the next two havings and fast. We don't need, we don't have much time to scale tech. We need, we need somewhere for the next billion users to own their own UTXOs, their own keys with censorship

resistant cold storage. That probably means side chains, drive chains as a tradeoff, more lightning optimization, et cetera, et cetera. So you guys get the point. Adam Back is bullish. And he, again, Adam Back is a public figure and he is the CEO of Blockstream. Of course, though, Blockstream is not a public company. So he doesn't have the responsibility that someone like Michael Saylor has.

You could make the argument if you want to play, you know, the devil's advocate, right, that Hal Finney, incredibly bullish is part of the Bitcoin, you know, project and, and everything that's going on very early. Of course, we know Adam Back is a, you know, is a huge bull. But what I find really interesting is Michael Saylor retweeting this. And he goes on to say, Bitcoin is competing against gold, collectibles, art, equities, real estate, bonds, and money as a store value in the 21st century, Jesse Myers, analyzes the opportunity and makes a compelling case for $10 million Bitcoin.

We don't have time to go through the entire thing, but I really want to focus on the very end because it kind of breaks it down. Bitcoin enthusiasts often make the mistake of concluding that Bitcoin's potential value is infinite. This is true in dollar terms since there is no limit to the amount of dollar debasement that can occur into the future. The truth is that Bitcoin stands in relative competition with other store of value assets, all of which have unique value propositions. A wealthy individual is not very likely to sell their mansion or their prize Rambarts to buy Bitcoin, but is instead more likely to sell some of their bond portfolio because they believe Bitcoin fulfills the intended purpose of holding bonds.

Even if Bitcoin is the best asset out there, it is foolish to expect that everyone would eventually decide to be 100% Bitcoin, but it is also unrealistic to expect that Bitcoin will remain 0.05% allocation of the world's balance sheet. By assessing each store of value asset bucket, it's possible to estimate what percentage of value stored in each will be reallocated to Bitcoin once the world collectively understands Bitcoin's unparalleled properties. This exercise ultimately yields a full potential valuation for Bitcoin in today's dollar, and here's what I think is reasonable. So he goes on to break what percentage of the total addressable market.

Bitcoin captures. So he makes the assumption that Bitcoin will capture 50% of gold. That's a $6 trillion market cap. Five percent of cars and other collectibles. That's 0.3 trillion. So 300 billion, fine art, 900 billion. Stock market, 15% of that, 17 trillion. Real estate, 15% of that, 50 trillion. Bonds, 30% of that, 90 trillion and money, 30% of that is 36 trillion. And That puts Bitcoin at a $200 trillion market cap, not even capturing a majority of the total addressable market of those stores of value. And that puts Bitcoin at a price of $10 million each. Again, if it was just one of these things by itself, Ben, I would think this is pure hopium. But the fact that it's Hal Finney, the fact that it's Adam back, and then the fact that it's Michael Saylor retweeting it, I think this is something that potentially.

you know, is a good thought experiment, to say the least. Yeah, I think the numbers that we'll see in a decade's time, even by today's standards, will be unfathomable to most regular people. Like, they'll look at it and not understand how it could have happened. But then, you know, there's always the overton win. shifts. And right now, again, like we're, you know, we're in the mid-20s and we're still getting articles that Bitcoin's dead. So I think, you know, it shifts and there's that initial phase of, oh, my God, what is happening? And then it draws back even a little bit. And

people just say, oh, it's dead again. Nobody has the low time preference to think long term. everybody's everybody's just looking at kind of well what's it going to do next month and and i mean bitcoiners have have grown beyond that where it's i don't i don't care what it does next month i don't care what it does next year i care that i can save in a vehicle that will you know help me through retirement that will help my kids begin their lives uh and and and perhaps my grandchildren as well and beyond, you know, building, building dynasties through time. Absolutely. Amen to that. All right. Let's move on to, let's move on to this because I think this is the, this is a big deal. And kind of connect this with what Augustin Carson's, his attitude, how he was approaching it with like, look, like this is what it is.

There's nothing you could do about it. This is an article that we've covered on the show recently. but it gives context to the Wall Street Journal article that I'm about to read, which is, this is Operation Choke Point 2.0 is underway. It's an article by Nick Carter. He goes on to say, what began as a trickle is now a flood. The U.S. government is using the banking sector to organize a sophisticated, widespread crackdown against the crypto industry, and the administration's efforts are no secret. They're expressed plainly in memos, regulatory guidance, and blog post. And that's the key part in this passage, is that they haven't been They haven't been obfuscating this.

They're telling you exactly how they feel about Bitcoin, exactly how they feel about crypto. And the next thing that's in their target is stable coins. And that's what they're going after next. And it's a good lesson for everybody to understand that stable coins provide a false sense of financial sovereignty. They're inherently centralized. There's a metaphorical head to chop off. So it makes it easy for governments to capture. Of course, we were talking about Augustine Carlin.

This is his doubt on it. He says, Augustin Carson casts doubts on stable coins claiming tokens do not benefit from regulations or central planning. But I think here is really the smoking gun in this article by the Wall Street Journal. Stable coins attract scrutiny and SEC's drive to control crypto. It goes on to say an SEC lawsuit over BUSD, the third largest stable coin by market value, would be a significant jolt to an industry that has suffered. series of shocks in recent weeks after the failure of crypto exchange FDX. A lawsuit over stable coins might not be easy for the SEC to win according to security lawyers because stable coins users don't expect profits from owning the tokens. That motivation is one of the crucial prongs of a 1946 Supreme Court test, we all know this, known as the Howie test, that regulators use

to spot which cryptocurrencies are securities. So it's interesting. So stable, coins they don't offer a profit they don't offer a return right so they don't really you know they don't really pass the how we test so this goes to the theory of the case that we've been making over time and the theory of the case that nick carter has been making over time is that there's a shadow war going on behind the scenes and they see stable coins as a threat and again that's not just speculation this is a report by the U.S. Treasury, the name of the report, and we've mentioned it many times on Simply Sessions, is called the Future of Money and Payments. And this entire report, in the eyes of the U.S. Treasury, the future of money is central bank digital currencies, stable coins of which

they bash on, and payment platforms like Venmo and cash app. Bitcoin is not mentioned in this report. Why is it not mentioned in this report? Because then they would give, they would justify They would basically put their stamp of approval that a money can exist without inflation. And if that happens, the cat is out of the bag. Now, when they mention stable coins in this document, they say the speed and efficiency of stable coins relative to CBDCs will depend largely on the stable coin system for transferring ownership. As discussed in sections two, stable coins rely in a variety of different intermediaries and ledger systems, certain features may make stable coins prone to congestion and high and unpredictable transaction fees further.

If not subject to appropriate regulation, sounds very familiar, doesn't it? And oversight, stable coins present other risks, including the risks of runs. And what is their solution to this? CBDCs would provide a foundation for further innovations and payments by providing a safe asset from a trusted source that can be used reliably in digital context. That sounds awfully familiar. If we go back to what Augustin was saying, you know, it's a lot of coincidences here, Ben. A lot of things coming together. What do you think? I mean, it's funny because the, I mean, there's part of me where I'm like, they're only attacking, they're coming at it saying like, well, look how risky these stable

coins are because there's counterparty risk. And yes, you're trusting an entity that's holding your dollars for you and giving you the speed of being able to send around a stable coin instead. So there is counterparty risk there. However, they're not attacking the other reason why Bitcoin exists in the first place or why the stable coins exist in the first place is the regulations around one that you can't move your money because they say, know. So people like go to these other options and use stable coins. And two, they're not attacking the risk of, well, yeah, you might get rugged on your stable coin in that the back, the dollars backing it will be removed. But you might get rugged on your CBDC when they

double the money supply overnight. So like there's there's buckets of risk here. And in general, if you're dealing with a fiat currency, there's always the risk of debasement, which is exactly why Bitcoin was started in the first place. So yeah, I don't know. It's funny. They want more control. Obviously, they're trying to, they're worried about the stable coins in the sense of how do we control people and what they do with their money. How do we basically take our monetary policy and get so granular with it that we can induce. it upon the individual instead of try to blanket do it through the economy and through the banking system. Yeah, 100, 100%. But isn't it interesting that all these people, all these very, these people in these very powerful positions, they keep saying the same words, the same vocabulary, keep trying to hammer it home. And it's interesting. It's interesting. It's almost as if they're working together.

Yeah. There's a playbook. So last story of the day is kind of sad, to be honest. The Blue Wallet, they're announcing that the Lightning Node, LND Hub.io, where Blue Wallet provides lightning wallets to its users, is sunseting. They're closing it down. While you could still withdraw your Sats, creating new or refilling existing Lightning Wallets on L&D Hub node will no longer. be possible. Yeah.

I mean, it sucks because, again, that's, that's an easy first experience for a lightning for a lot of people. Now, from what I've, what I've heard, they're making, they're, and they say it at the end of the article, they're basically making a push towards self-custody solutions. So you'll probably see updates in the future. future where it's like, hey, I want to open a lightning wallet and it'll be some sort of an automated, easy to use self-custody solution or you can link your own node, which takes a little bit more know-how you've got to set up your own channels and everything. But there's

great options. And like the long and the short of it is if you have a custodial blue wallet for lightning, specifically for lightning, if you have a if you have a regular Bitcoin wallet in there on chain, you don't have to do anything because you have the keys. You you own the keys and you have a, you know, you have your seat phrase backed up. It doesn't matter to you. But if you have custodial lightning,

like you just hit add a lightning wallet and then you just started funding it with, you know, lightning funds, then yes, you have a custodial account. You need to move those funds anywhere else. I would recommend there's a good handful of them. Phoenix wallet is good.

Bree's wallet is good. Moon wallet. I use all that's like my day-to-day wallet. Some people are iffy about moon. because they say, well, it's not real lightning. Honestly, I don't really give a shit what they're doing in the background. It's non-custodial, and there's a single unified balance that you can interact with on-chain addresses and lightning. They're using submarine swaps in the background to kind of achieve all this.

And so it's kind of obfuscated away from the user. But in the end, you have the keys to the money that's in your wallet. So, yeah, again, and they recommend at the end of the article, they say, well, you can do L. in bits, Phoenix, Breeze, but I think Moon is also an easy option too. So nonetheless, move your sats out of your blue lightning wallet, unless it is a self-custodial link to your own node. And yeah, just start using something else. And I'm actually excited to see the self-custy custody option that they roll out for lightning

in the future. 100%. And check out BTC sessions for tutorials on how to do all that. I'm sure as soon as they drop that, I will all be making a new blue wallet video. But yeah, man. Yeah, good stuff. Dude, thank you for all this. There's a whole bunch that we got to cover in here.

So I appreciate you. Shall we do it again next week? Absolutely. Sorry for running a little bit late today. But, dude, there was a ton to cover. There's a ton of, there's a lot of signal. Thank you so much, Ben. Guys, this was your Simply sessions.

Later, man. Awesome. Everybody, thank you for being here. Of course, I've got a few more things I want to throw at you before we wrap up. But be sure to go follow Nico. Subscribe to Simply Bitcoin. They do the news six days a week. They're always crushing it. Lots of great content coming from them if you have not seen it already. A few things I wanted to touch on. This out of voltage, they're launching a new product called Flow 2.0. So I've done a tutorial on how to do use flow to get inbound. liquidity to your lightning node. Well, this will effectively automate all of that. So what you could do is you can host something with them like BTC pay server. For instance, I use this when I'm doing tickets to events. Like if I'm hosting a workshop, I'll go on voltage. I'll spin up BTC pay server and I basically direct people to a link where they can buy

tickets to the event with Bitcoin, either on chain or via lighting network. Well, the lightning node, you do currently. have to establish inbound channels so that you can actually receive payments via lightning, while no more. With Flow 2.0, effectively, any time you need inbound liquidity, like if somebody's trying to pay you with lightning at your BTC pay server via voltage, it will automatically establish a new inbound channel for you. So you don't need to think about any of your channels.

You just say, hey, pay me in lightning, and then it'll establish it for you, which is super awesome. So kudos to Graham and the team over at Voltage for rolling this out. Very excited to give it a try. The other thing I wanted to talk about is Tab Siner. Tap Siner, I tweeted out a short one minute video of me doing this, but Tab Siner now you can use on Sparrow Wallet, which is like my go-to wallet that I use on desktop.

And so if you get, and I'll see if I can hold it up here, I have like a little, there it is. Okay, that's an NFC scanner. that's plugged into my computer. And so basically I can just tap my card to it and it will be recognized in Sparrow wallet. I can use my tap signer to sign transactions. It's super smooth.

Again, in the video, I had a tap signer that's already set up, like it works with Nunchuk, which I use all the time on mobile. But in this instance, to just import the tap signer, it was a minute-long video. And I just showed how to do it super simple.

So kudos to Sparrow and CoinCom for rolling this out and to Nunchuk for being the first ones to integrate it. Very excited for more people to integrate this. I mean, we were just talking about Blue Wallet. We'd love to see it there. Blockstream Green would be really cool if they integrated NFC. And now that it's available on desktop, Spector, that'd be fantastic to see it on there. Yeah, nonetheless, kudos to them for rolling this out.

And then another thing I wanted to show you, if you guys are familiar with the Orange Pill app, which is a lot of fun actually. So it's kind of like location-based. You can find plebs in your area. And then you can link up with them, go to meetups, all that kind of stuff. You probably see a lot of it in Miami if you're there, people linking up and meeting other Bitcoiners.

Anyways, they added Noster verifications there. So basically you can go on to the Orange Pill app. It's a subscription app. So I think it's a few bucks a month or something like that to be on there, which cuts down on like you don't get any spam messages or anything. But nonetheless, you go on there, you can add your Noster Pub key to your Orange Pill app profile. And then you basically take your username of OrangePel app and then add at Noster. Dot the OrangePill app.com and then enter it into the verification field on Noster.

And that'll be like your identifier. If you don't know what a Nip 05 identifier is for Noster, basically the way it normally worked is is you have this long string of digits known as your NPUB, and that's like your public persona where people can search you up. Well, you can get something that looks more like an email address that's easier for somebody to find you. So like, here's me over on Iris. And you can see, so my identifier, people can search me up at BTC sessions at

Noster. Dot the orange pill app.com. And so, yeah, just an easy way to verify yourself. You don't have to pay for it. Like if you're already a member on Orange Pill app, then you can just plug that in. It's not like an additional cost. It just works.

So yeah, anyway, super awesome. If you're on OPA, then go do that. I wanted to give a shout out to the Bitcoin Standard Podcast. I just finished this episode today, a guy named Cali Means. And it's on Fiat Food, Science, NPR. Man, that was a good listen. It just goes through the absolute state of corruption of the food industry and the scientific, quote unquote, scientific studies in and around it and

the government guidance around nutrition in specifically in the U.S., but I'm sure we get flavors of it in every other country as well, especially Western countries, where it's just, it's so detached from reality. The incentives are so misaligned. The science has gotten to a point where you have one of the points that Callie brings up is you have a Coca-Cola funding scientific studies to the tune of 11 times more any other source of funding to ensure that we get studies that question whether or not sugar has to do with obesity. And to continue to categorize Coca-Cola's products as healthy

so that they can continue to be part of the food stamp program in the U.S., which is a massive boon for them. So just some of the tidbits that you get from this listen are insane. I would love it if he would come on a Friday show for Why Are We Bullish? This guy is awesome. So I'm going to be listened to a ton more of him. And again, safe, thanks for having him on. This guy was awesome.

And then obviously tomorrow, speaking of, why are we bullish? We got another rip and we've got Luke Broyles. This guy's been making the rounds. I asked him to come on like a while back because he had a few really good tweet threads out there on his like projections for Bitcoin. Why he's so excited about it? And then everybody got super excited and he's been doing the rounds. He's been on Press and Pish.

He's been on a whole bunch of others. Anyways, he's coming on tomorrow. Very excited. I'm also having Cypher Punk cinema, a relative Bitcoin noob, like a newcomer. a newcomer in the past year making awesome videos on the topic. So we'll be chatting to him. And we're also having CJ Constantinos on as well. If you're unfamiliar with him, you can check out his Twitter and see what he's up to.

It's going to be a lot of fun. Be sure to come and check it out. And with that, let's start rounding things out. First off, like, subscribe, share. Those things all help a ton. You can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Hoddle, Hoddle, Hoyle, Coin Kite, Nunchuk, Start 9. They're all linked down below.

You can also check out if you're going to be in Miami. Very excited for the Bitcoin Conference there. This is my fourth time attending. It's going to be awesome. 150 speakers, 15,000 attendees, 2,000 plus companies. It's going to be a blast. If you want to grab tickets, b.tc slash conference. And you can use code BTC sessions for 10% off.

They bump ticket up, ticket prices up every. I don't even know how often it is. But the sooner you have tickets, the better. because it gets more and more expensive as the date looms. So check them out. And then also, if you're going to be in Miami, I've got my cold card deep dive tutorial. That is happening on May 17th.

So it's the day before everything kicks off in Miami. So come a little bit early. Again, four-hour deep dive. We're going to go starting from the basics all the way up to some of the advanced features. So you can expect to leave this workshop being fully, basically being way above and beyond your average cold card user and miles and miles beyond other people

and their understanding of what their hardware can do. So be sure to check it out. Just a few tickets left. And if you need to grab a bundle on the same page, you can actually grab like a full cold card, SD card, cables, cold power, being able to power with a 9-volt battery. Basically, you get a whole package with it.

You can grab as well. if you need it, or you can bring your own, whatever works for you. Anyways, you can hit that up on my website, which is btc sessions.ca. And over on the right-hand side, you'll see the in-person workshop link. You can get to it through there. I also have my one-on-one Zoom private sessions if you need some handholding with some other stuff, too. Anyways, guys, I'm going to finish up there. If you really like the show, you can always drop me a tip at my strike page.

Strike.combe. You don't need strike to use it. Just get there. Type in any amount you want. Hit the tip button. you'll see a lightning invoice or if you prefer tap the right you'll see a regular bitcoin QR code with that i'm out have yourselves a wonderful day or evening see you guys next time for your daily session we have btc sessions bitcoin is every money you can't stop it get yourself

some bitcoin and hold it yourself pure to pure exchange you know people are going to organically come to it and gravitate towards it especially in the world we're living in now it's incredible It's a great tool, and I can't wait to see it proliferate everywhere.