BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: Charlie Munger's Totalitarian Hunger ep319

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

Charlie Munger loves totalitarian rule and wants Bitcoin banned, Strike expands to the Philippines, Avanti Bank rejected by the Fed and 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]

What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Right out of the gate. Before you've been getting started, I've got to pull up this comment. Charlie Munger looks like bubbles from the trailer park boys. I think that's a good way to start the show. So thank you, flat smack for that. Yeah, news show. Lots of stuff to talk about today. Charlie Munger, you know, being his old CCP love and self, we'll be talking about that. Yeah, lots of stuff, you know, strike expanding, regulators trying to regulate, all kinds of fun stuff. We've got our good buddy, Nico here from Simply Bitcoin, to run us all through it. It's going to be a good time. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay.

We'll do it live. Fuck it. Do it live. I can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. And thing sucks. Yeah. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share, all those things help a ton getting this content in front of more eyeballs, so thanks for everybody that's doing it. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your

daily session. Before we dive and let's take a look at where we are on the market right now. This is Timechain Calendar.com. We're sitting at 23,812 cuckbox per coin. A single US dollar will pick you up 4,200 sats. 91.81% of all Bitcoin have been mined. That is 19.8.8% of all Bitcoin have been mined. That is $18.28 million of them. And in terms of fees, around four sats per bite, cross the board. So not too bad.

I guess at the moment, there's no ordinals clogging up the blocks. Anyways, shout out to sponsors of the show, news sponsor of the show. I love these guys so much. Nunchuk. Nunchuk, these guys, if you're unfamiliar,

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never re-hypothicated. So check them out. Who's going to be in Miami, by the way? I know that Nico is. I will be seeing him there. We might even touch the tips. There might be a beard-dyed party. We'll discuss. But anyways, May 18th through 20th, it is the largest Bitcoin event on the planet. This will be my third time, a third, fourth time attending, 2019, 2020 was canceled because the world was crazy. But I went to 21 and 22, 23, fourth time around. It's going to be a blast. B.c.comfense use code BTC sessions for 5% off.

It's going to be a hell of a time. And I'm running a cold card workshop there. There's three tickets left, guys. Three tickets left. Go grab them. I've been tweeting about it. You can find it on my website, BTCSessions.ca. Quick shout out, of course.

Michael with the boostogram. The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. The more Bitcoin seeps into the zeitgeist, the closer we will be to a hyper-bitconized world. Cliff says, I got the sats off Bitslasso just in time.

Zendag says great show. Cliff, again, Nunchuk tutorial, appreciation boost. Thanks, man. Owen says, great takeaways this episode. Very grounding. Take responsibility and stay true to yourself. Bitcoin Grandma, thanks for your good work. Mo BTCDi.

I love saying that name. Have a great show, everyone. Joey, I don't know. I just feel like if Nico gets a golden streak and touches tips with Ben, we might hit 100K, just saying. And then Joey, if someone also gets a golden streak in their hair, can they also touch tips with hashtag Benico asking for a friend?

I don't know. Let's see. Nico, what do you have to say about that? Benico, bro. I love that. So good. So good. I don't know.

Maybe is, are we tempting fate with too many tips touching? Is it like Ghostbusters crossing the streams? Like would the space time continue just combust? Dude, is that what is required? Maybe that's part of the fall of the, part of the prophecy, Ben. That could be. Man, I mean, the prophecy comes from yellow. The streaks are yellow.

It's all coming together. Oh, my God. Realities are colliding. I know. It's insane. How are you doing, man? I'm doing good, man. But now I'm doing better.

Awesome. It always spreads my day reading the light. that whatever the new fashion hashtag in and around touching the tips and the Nico. Oh, man, that's, that's a great one. I like it. It sounds Italian. Yeah, it does. It's like Italian version of what was, what was Ben Affleck and, and, oh, yeah, Benifer.

And then remember when all the, like, all the celebrity names are just combined? Oh, man. For Angelina. Oh, man. Ranjelina. I remember that. I remember that. Awesome.

Well, dude, I'm glad to have you. There's plenty to talk about. I see a couple things down there. Where are we going first? Should we start with the man, the myth, the legend himself? I think, yeah, yeah. Let's pull up that video. Here we go.

Let's do it. Let's see what he had to say. Suppose you could make a lot of money trading freshly harvested baby brands. Would you do it or would you say that? That's immoral. What? You wouldn't trade them, would you? It's too awful a concept.

Well, to me, Bitcoin is almost as bad. Is that? It's not having any desirable social purpose. We've got debit cards. It isn't like we don't have a payment system. We've got WeChat and China, incredibly efficient payment system. China doesn't need Bitcoin. And if you have a we chat, why would you do it in a medium where the value changes enormously?

Nobody's right mind would want a payment system where the very thing you were using went up and down by 20% in the day. Now I regard the thing as a combination of dementia and immorality. And I think the people that are pushing it are a disgrace. I love how he makes the leap from He's like it's volatile It's like trading baby brains What? What? I don't I don't I

Like is this is this the new babies are dying Except for it's like baby brains are being traded Like oh my God Bro projection I guess I'm saying Projection I think And like and like we'll we'll touch on it in a little bit in the Wall Street Journal article. Like the example that he gave, like, if we don't ban Bitcoin, it's going to be this bad.

Like, you know, like, it's, it's. And then like, and then like kind of like, what are the incentive of him being that way? He's a contillionaire, bro. That's why. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, again, I read through this.

And there's, there's so many things to hit on. But I'll let you take it. And I've got a couple of thoughts after. Yeah, there's two minutes, so it's not going to take that long. But it says, there's a Wall Street Journal for any audio listeners. It says, in the U.S. in recent years, privately owned companies have issued thousands of new cryptocurrencies large and small. These have later become publicly traded without any government pre-approval of discourses.

In some cases, a big block of cryptocurrency has been sold to a promoter for almost nothing, after which the public buys in at much higher prices without fully understanding the pre-delusion in favor of the promoter. All this wild and woolly capitalism is much like that described in a remark often attributed to Mark Twain, who was thought to have said that, quote, a mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top. Such wretched excess has gone on because there's a gap in regulation. A cryptocurrency is not a currency, not a commodity and not a security. Instead, it's a gambling contract with a nearly,

100% edge for the house, entered into in a country where gambling contracts are traditionally regulated by stakes that states that complete in laxity. Obviously, the U.S. should now enact a new federal law that prevents this from happening. Two interesting precedents may guide us into sound action. This is the crazy part. In the first president, the first precedent, the communist government of China recently banned cryptocurrencies because it's widely concluded that they would benefit more harm than they would they would provide more harm than benefit and the second precedent from the early 1700s england reacted to a horrible depression that followed the blow up of a promotional plan to get vast profits by using slowly by slow moving sailing ships to trade with very poor people

halfway around the world what the english parliament did and its anguish when this crazy promotion blew up was direct and simple it banned all public trading and in a new a new common stocks and kept this ban in place for about 100 years. And in that 100 years, England made by far the biggest national contribution to the march of civilization as it led strongly in both the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and to boot spawn off a promising little country called the United States. What should the U.S. do after a ban on cryptocurrencies in place? Well, one more action might make sense.

Thank the Chinese communist leader for his splendid example of uncommon sense. Bro, talk about compromised, man. man. Talk about compromise, bro. Like, that is insane. And then there are so many jabs at capitalism there. Like, there are so many jabs that like, you know, like over, over excess, right? I've heard that that description before. And dude, it's just like, it's absolutely crazy. The, like the immorality aspect. And all he needed was the SBF blow up to give him ammunition to say the quiet part out loud, which is we got a ban. It's not just immoral or disgusting anymore. It's not rat poison squared anymore.

No, we got to just ban we got to outright ban this thing just like the communist, the communists in China. We got to do it, you know? Like, dude, absolutely bonkers, bro.

I tweeted out earlier today. I said, I was surprised that he could type this thing out one-handed, giving that he was given such a vigorous hand job to the CCP at the same time. Oh, my God.

Come on. And also, like the part where It's like it spawned off a promising little country called the United States, like the England did. I mean, that wasn't of their own accord. The U.S. came into being because they hated the control of England and they wanted to be out from under that boot. It wasn't like, wow, you guys are so great in what you're doing that we're just going to create a country in honor of you. it was fuck you stop telling us what to do we're making our own country so like even like he's saying

like oh yes let's thank the chimneys communist leader for uh you know leading us towards greatness by banning everything and in the same breath he's saying that oh the united states uh is is a promising wonderful country um yeah that said fuck you to totalitarianism so like i it's like what What kind of cognitive dissonance is going on here? Again, it's just he's incentivized to either not understand it or not understand that what he's saying is completely at odds with his own value. Yeah, 100%, right? He was an American huddle that said it, right? Like, no one's better than incentives.

And I think that this is like a case. Like this is a contillionaire completely benefited from the system. And now he's just seeing the writing on the wall. And he's like, no, like, he can't even conceive that there could be another system. He thought that the moat was so big. He thought it. He had it all figured out. But then came Bitcoin, this sly roundabout way.

And, dude, they freak out. It exposes the tyrant's incentives beautifully. Yeah, 100%. Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. All right. So some good news real quick.

I think this was absolutely awesome, Ben. The amount of Bitcoin addresses with one Bitcoin or more has just, it's about to break the one million addresses mark. We're currently at 979,000 addresses with one Bitcoin or more, right? You could, I know like a lot of people are going to be like, no, Nico, you know, like, doesn't mean like, you know, like that doesn't mean people could use multiple addresses. Fine. But you could say a percentage of those are definitely brand new whole coiners.

And this is what adoption looks like in my opinion. opinion. Yeah. Well, it's a beautiful example of the opposite of what Munger was saying, right? Um, he says it's immoral and it's, you know, it's volatile and it, but what you're seeing is a, a money that can't be debased that is naturally actually being spread out across a populace as an allocated in a way where it's going to people that are, you know, either good savers or, or providing, you know, value. And so it's it's the opposite of this concentration of wealth in the Fiat system where the elites print and allocate as they see fit. It's no, we have a, you know, we have a limited supply. You can only get your hands on it by paying for it or by proof of work by expending energy.

There's no work around to that. So yeah. It's, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. It's almost as if things are working out. Anyways, maybe it's too early to say that. Bullish news. coming out from Jack Mahler's company, Jack Ballers, like that anchor lady said. Strike expands remittance feature to the Philippines. Americans send over a billion dollars to the country every month. That's crazy. I'm just going to read the quotes real quickly. It says, quote, the Philippines is one of the biggest remitting markets in the world,

especially from the United States. Jack Mahler's CEO of Strike said to TechCrunch in 2021, about $12.7 billion in cash remittances was sent from the U.S.-based Filipinos to the Philippines. For example, if a customer wants to take $5 and send it to a country like the Philippines, the Bitcoin is converted over the Lightning Network and reconverted into the local currency in the order of seconds to minutes as opposed to days or weeks. Aside from the Philippines, strike plans on expanding further in the Latin American and African regions, as well due to the extreme amount of demand.

Mahler shared, quote, were seeing partners pop up all over the world. Now strike is gaining demand and partners seeking out integrations from anywhere between the UK and throughout Europe all the way to 20 new countries will potentially add in February in Africa. Now, the last paragraph, obviously, you know, it's his company. He's the CEO. He wants to hype it. I'm cautious because I think I got tricked last Bitcoin conference. I'm sure he ran into some regulatory hurdles, but he did say that all these companies were going to add the ability to pay. with Bitcoin and it just never, never came to be. So, and I don't know how much that's regulatory pushback, right? I don't think that's his fault in particular.

But, you know, I think a lot of people are incentive, like Charlie Munger, for example, are incentivized for Bitcoin not to succeed. So, but I mean, I think this is a step in the right direction, I guess. I don't know what your thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the fact that this is available and like, again, as it describes here, like people don't need to have like they don't even need to have a strike account or a lightning wallet that like literally a strike user in the US would just be like I'm sending it to this person here's their bank info or their phone number and it just goes to them and they handle the rest of the back end and I know so there's a lot of bitcoins that I've seen like kind of shitting on strike oh it's it's a KYC um you know service

I think a lot of people don't realize that, yeah, obviously in an ideal world, everybody just shifts to Bitcoin and they can just natively use, you know, lightning, whatever. But there's still, we're still kind of like at this interim spot where, you know, people aren't going to just jump directly to Bitcoin in a lot of cases. They're going to need to be kind of gradually coaxed in there, right? It's like meeting somebody for the first time and being like, oh, yeah. there's this thing called Bitcoin and they start to be interested. Then you're like, all right, you got to run a node and then you got a coin join. And then they're going to be like, holy shit, no, I, no, too much. But if you just say like, hey, I'm going to send you money and now it's not going to take 30% of it every time I do it,

they'll be like, oh, wow, how's that possible? And so I think, you know, we can get into a place where, again, to quote Alex Gladstein, we need to check our financial privilege. And there's a ton of people that are going to benefit a fuckload from Bitcoin and not even know it. They'll be dealing with Fiat, but they will be benefiting from Bitcoin. And I think eventually those very same people that benefit from it will just fully move to it. Right. They'll actually be on a Bitcoin standard eventually.

They just, in that interim, they're going to be like, I'm just getting my money that I'm used to faster. And this is great. And then they'll start to see, oh, Bitcoin. then, you know, it'll snowball from there. So anyways, yeah, I think, I think this is actually quite huge. I'm, I'm such a fan of what Jack's doing. And to be honest, I don't really care that people won't know that it's Bitcoin right now. I'm just happy to see Bitcoin helping people that weren't, you know, that that had a shitty

experience in the first place. Yeah, 100%. 100%. And I think that, that thing that you said about the people not even realizing. And then I think Jack says this himself too, Ben, right? Which is like they're using the Bitcoin network over lightning, but they're just dealing with their local Fiat car. So they're getting the benefits of it without going through, you know, the problem.

Like, learn how to take so. Of course, we advocate for that. But it's like, you know, it's like they're still benefiting from it without even realizing it's there in the first place. It's exactly what you said. Yeah. 100%. All right.

So this is the thing that I think made the big splash and you were covering it. I actually did a little bit of a little bit more research on it, which was the DOSmos. It was finally accepted to the Apple to the Apple store and it's being rolled out. Apparently made it to the top 10 and more popularity in the most popular. Dasmos is the second most popular social network in Hong Kong, China. And then that quickly led to this announcement, which was that that was fast. and they say, hello, we are writing to notify you that your application per demand from the CAC, cyberspace administration of China will be removed from the China App Store because it includes

content that is illegal in China, which is not in compliance with the App Store review guidelines. Right. So they acted upon that very quickly. Now, Hong Kong is technically separate from China, but over the years that, what is it, it's two countries, two policies, I forget what the name was. Yeah, yeah, two, I can't remember like two, yeah, two countries, one, I don't know, or two, or two policies or two governments, one country or something like that. Yeah. Exactly. And they were supposed to be different, right? But, you know, so they acted on this very quickly. Also, I saw this. It was apparently it was retweeted by Beauty on. And I saw this for the first time. And apparently these are the things that Dasmus agreed to. And the reason I wanted to cover this, is because I think this highlights the vulnerability of app stores, specifically for like if you have an iOS device, you're completely, you're very vulnerable to that because iOS devices don't allow

third party installation of apps, right? So you're very kind of like constrained there. And that could potentially be a very easy vulnerability for governments to exploit. But these are a lot of the things that they agreed to, which is you agree not to use our application to create upload, post send or store any content that is illegal and it gets into like all the specifications. But my point is, isn't DOSMA supposed to be decentralized? Isn't it the whole point for like nobody to know for nobody to have the ability to remove you in the first place?

Yeah. So this was I was kind of reading as it came out. So in order to obviously even have an app in the app store, you have to agree to whatever the terms that Apple says. Um, so, uh, Will, the guy who created, uh, Damas, the, the, the, the client. Um, he went to chat, chat, GPT3 or whatever, the, the, the like AI chat bot. And he was like, here's, here's, uh, here's the limitations that Apple has given us. Can you write us an, uh, whatever this end user license agreement? Can you write one of these based on these contingencies? And so that was written by by GBT3. Um, and that's

what he submitted. So the way that Noster works, though, is that there's users that have like a public and private key pair. Your public key is like you, how people find you and identify you and link with you. Your private key is what signs, messages, and posts, notes that are verified to be done by you. Then there's relays and relays are things that host the data. So you can run a relay. anybody can run a relay. They're starting to be incentivized by, you know,

because it can, it probably will get expensive to run a relay. So you can gate that with integrated lightning payments. So you link up with a relay and you maybe pay at X number of SATs a month or whatever to be on a good relay. So the only thing that they can do here is they can't, they can't censor the network at all. They could potentially,

prevent somebody from downloading the app again or like, I don't even know if they could boot them from the app. But nonetheless, the second you get into Damos and you make connections and you have a private key, all of your connections, all of like your friends and everything are linked to your public key. So when you migrate to any other app, any other browser-based app, any other like side-loaded Android app, whatever. all of your connections are still there.

It's like if Twitter banned you and you were on a different website and you were still connected to all the same people, able to see the same feed and still able to tweet and people could still see your tweets. So it's kind of like just the app has to abide by that, but the app is agnostic to what's actually going through the relays. Totally makes sense. Yeah. It's like kind of like the like basically like like Bitcoin, right?

It's like the, you know, there's there's the thing that's underneath and then there's like wallets that different types of wallets that connect to it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just your client is your window into the Noster protocol just as your Bitcoin wallet is your window into the Bitcoin protocol. Absolutely. So I think we've talked about this many times on on Simply Sessions, Ben, which is this idea that like we're living through this tumultuous time

where we're seeing the disintermediation of information, which is, I think the Noster is a great example of that. Obviously, the resistance back to that. And of course, there's a disintermediation of money. And it's kind of like overlapping. Like I would say the disintermediation of information happened first because of the internet. And then we're seeing the money aspect as well.

And it's just creating all this chaos. But we're seeing the powers at be at least attempt to slow this down. This is absolutely crazy. Dude, EU is totalitarian, bro. because a lot of the stuff. It's crazy, dude. It's crazy. So this came out.

It says EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems, including all Linux distros. It says the proposed chat control EU will not only seize totalitarian control of all private communication. It will also ban open source operating systems as an unintended consequence. The EU is currently in the process of enacting the chat control law. It has been criticized for creating an EU-wide centralized mass surveillance and communications. system and enabling government eavesdropping on all private communications. But one little talked about consequence

of the proposed law is that it makes practically all existing open source systems illegal, including all major Linux distributions, and it will also effectively ban the F-Droid open-source Android app archive, right? And I'm assuming that because it's a chat

control, you know, applications like applications like Damos might be potentially affected, but kind of tying this in with the Charlie Munger aspect, it absolutely blows my mind that the so-called Western democracies and very powerful elites that live in Western democracies have fallen in love with the China model completely. What do you mean chat control?

That is crazy, bro. It's absurd, you know? I mean, it makes me happy that at the time, I'm seeing this, I'm also seeing Nostor. At the time I'm seeing this, I'm also seeing Keat. At the time I'm seeing this, I'm also seeing, again, the proliferation of integration of lightning into both the things I just mentioned. Noster has native lightning payments. Kite, you can link up your own, you can link your own lightning note to that, send payments through that. And people are finding ways around all of this. And I think that,

that this type of regulation is going to be fucking impossible to deal with. Now, the choke points, as you alluded to, are the app stores. Everybody's used to getting stuff on an app store. But I think what we're going to see is we're going to see the Google Play Store and the Apple iOS App Store. They're going to have their AOL moment with, I think specifically with Noster. I think they're going to have their AOL moment where all the sudden, like the, first of all, the number of people creating keys and jumping on a Noster, the pace at which it's happening is

staggering. But I think you're going to get a whole bunch of people that jump on, they get a taste of it, and then it gets banned, and then they realize, well, I can just like, I can actually get an app without needing it, and I still have all my connections, and they're all there, and it's fine. I think as soon as they say you can't be on Noster and that continues to grow the way it has even without an app, I think they're in trouble. And that's great. That's great for humanity because people will begin to go, geez, this walled garden, I can't do what I want to do. And I see people outside the walled garden. They're doing all kinds of the fun stuff that I wish I could do.

And that's, again, that's the exodus from AOL and Comcast to the open internet. Again, I think this becomes the impetus potentially for the exodus from the Apple and Google app stores into just, again, open source software. Absolutely beautiful. I hope you're right, Ben. I hope you're right. I hope you're right. All right. So to talk about a rigged game, this is.

we've covered this on the show before, but this is kind of like an update. So Custodia Bank. Custodia Bank is this bank that was founded by Caitlin Long, right? And it took advantage of the Wyoming, like, Bitcoin bill. And it would be a full-fledged bank. But what they were missing is something called the Fed Banking Charter, which would allow the bank to deal directly with the Fed. So usually if banks don't have that, they have to rely on intermediaries.

therefore they can't get the best deals. They can't get the best fees. Now what's interesting about this, though, is that they slow walked. Remember we covered this, Ben? They slow walked them, and then they changed the goal post. Right?

That was the initial thing. Well, it looks like they waited until the FTX blow up, right? To, again, just like Charlie Munger, just like Elizabeth Warren. They used that as a justification to just deny the bank outright. And now, Canela Long has a ton of experience, and she took her time on this. So, like, you know, and then it goes back to something that we've said many times on the show,

which is the people that are responsible for regulating Bitcoin, a lot of them have a lot to lose if they regulate, they can't regulate Bitcoin, but they could regulate the industry, have a lot to lose if the industry succeeds, right? So it's misaligned incentives. Anyways, says the Federal Reserve has denied cryptocurrency firm custodia banks' application to access its payment system as ties between the digital asset space and traditional lending face tougher scrutiny in the face of the fallout from FTX. Cheyenne Wyoming-based Custodia, formerly known as Avanti Financial Group, is a charter

that offers digital asset-focused financial services to various businesses. The firm was said to have sued the Federal Reserve Board and the Kansas City Fed over a long-standing processing of its application for a master account at the U.S. Central Bank that's still pending. Quote, custodia's risk management framework was insufficient to address concerns, regarding the heightened risks associated with its proposed crypto activities, including its ability to mitigate money laundering and terrorism financing risks. And I think those two things at the very end, Ben, say a lot, right? Because we know current U.S. sanctioned policy, in my opinion, is just incompatible with an open monetary network.

Right? They're not, governments are just, and central banks, they're not going to have the ability to control money flows. the way they control them today, right, on a Bitcoin standard. So, I mean, I think it says a lot. I think that last part, we're going to keep hearing that battle drum over and over and over again, right? As they try to slow down the adoption of it, we can't allow it to be adopted because we can't mitigate money laundering and we can't mitigate terrorism financing risk and then kind of connect this with the Noster thing, right?

The same excuses, right? We must be able to control people's information. We must be able to control people's speech. And this is just the same with money. Right. So it's this great disintermediation that we're watching. And we're watching the established players say, no, wait a second, but no. It's a perfect example of there's a good old boys club.

And even if you try to play by their rules, they will, again, shift those goalposts to make sure that you don't get in. And it's, I think it kind of shows that. In the end, you don't win by playing by their rules. You win by creating a different game. And unfortunately, I love Caitlin Long. I think she's fantastic. I think she should continue fighting and pointing out the hypocrisy here. But am I confident she's going to win with that?

Not at all. Because these guys, like you said, the incentives are misaligned. They're going to keep fighting tooth and nail. And if they can't win with the current rule set, they'll just change the rules on her and she'll be fucked. And so what's the answer? You build an alternative system and you migrate away and the people can either, you know, stay in their walled garden as people begin to, you know, as there's a mass exodus or

they can come join everybody in a world of open communication and finance. Yep. And I think that's how. happening with money and it's happening with with the the the the the the the the the the example right it's like this like I think human beings innately like freedom like I think that's what it is I think innately you're just attracted to it and it's like these people are like trying to convince us that somehow without them kind of being in the middle without acting as these intermediaries these gatekeepers so to speak the world's going to

burn down I would make the argument that that's a complete lie you know um anyways yeah yeah yeah It's, again, it's encouraging. Like as much as news like this, you're like, oh, come on. It drives home the point. It makes people build alternatives. And, you know, if they kind of, if we had kind of gotten a mediocre approach of like, well, we'll let you do some stuff kind of. Then maybe we wouldn't have these builders that are doing what they're doing. maybe we wouldn't have all these people that are so driven to implode the existing system

so that we can have something new and better and open to all. 100%. Yeah. 100%. All right. So we got, let me see. Yes, I'm really curious what your thoughts are on this. We got a little bit of time.

Bitcoin community erupts in the existential debate over NFT project ordnals. I'm going to give a little bit of context. So this month, this month's debut of the Ordnals Protocol, which stores NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain, is driving a wedge between Bitcoin Purious who say the blockchain should be restricted to financial transactions and those who see the network as large and versatile enough to host a range of use cases, even if that memes themed art.

Right? And we had some crazy responses, dude. You know, Adam back, like absolutely nuts. you know, dude, it's, it's just like, you know what I'm saying, Ben. Like a lot of people were very, very vocal about this. And, you know, what I got to say about this, Ben, is like everyone was so quick to jump on taproot. This is one of the unintended consequences that people did not foresee. Yeah. So my view on this is evolving.

Of course, the initial, like, oh, people are putting JPEGs on the blockchain. It's like, oh, what a waste. What a stupid thing. To which my initial reaction as well was like, this is going to be a rehash of previous things that filled up blocks, right? People will do it until the economics dictates that is too expensive. And so we had very early on, there was a seduce. Satoshi Dice, which was a gambling site entirely settled on the Bitcoin blockchain for every single transaction, every single game. And it got quite busy and it filled up Bitcoin blocks and things got more expensive.

And then it became uneconomical to do it anymore in that fashion. Then, of course, there was kind of like the 2017 as things started filling up. The blocks got busy. And exchanges weren't batching transactions by and large, you know, weren't upgrading the Segwit. And all of a sudden, withdrawals were taking forever. It was expensive to send trans. I remember spending like $150 on a Bitcoin transaction in late 2017. Yeah, it was insane.

But people weren't familiar with like how transactions were even priced, you know, like how it's data-based. And if you have many UTXOs and you're doing it inefficiently, it can be expensive. And so people migrated to better wallets. exchanges started batching. Things got more efficient. We had Segwit on the main chain and things shifted to accommodate more space and people started using it more efficiently. I think the same thing's going to happen here.

The only reason that anybody is saying, oh, I'm going to put a, I'm going to fill an entire block, a four megabyte block with a JPEG is because the blocks are not super busy all the time right now. So they can afford to do dumb shit like that. And so it happens. And I think as they like all of a sudden, if a bunch of people start doing that, guess what happens?

Fees go up. And then people say, do I want to actually spend 50 bucks putting this JPEG on the blockchain right now? That's a lot of stats. I don't think so. Now there's one thing that I saw in Odell retweeted it. And it made me kind of reevaluate,

if it's used in a certain way, it could be interesting. It at least shifts things a little bit in my head. So, obviously putting a JPEG of, you know, dick butt on the blockchain, I'm like, well, what a stupid waste.

But at the same time, I'm like, well, it's, I don't know. If you want to spend money on that, then it's your loss. It's your sats. And it's a valid transaction. And it's fee-based. So who am I to say what's a valid transaction?

An instance where I thought it maybe all of a sudden wasn't stupid. Matt O'Dell tweeted something about, I can't remember the name of the people that are doing like the 3D printed guns. And how difficult it is to get the documents, the documentation in and around that because it keeps on getting banned and moved. And you have to like really dig. And the guys that are doing that project said, if somebody were to take an ordinal and actually put the blueprints for 3D printed guns on the Bitcoin blockchain, there would be 50,000 immutable copies of that information on the internet that can never be taken down. And is that then worth the fees required to do that to keep that information completely censorship? resistant. Maybe. And then I, you know, you get to things, instances of China banning Bitcoin and hiding some of its history from its own people. What if you were to, what if you were to make an

ordinal of an image of Tiananmen Square and put that on the Bitcoin blockchain and is there forever? And that someone can always find it, always forever. China can't go and like block different websites like they would, like, are they going to block the entire Bitcoin blockchain? They can, you know, there's ways that they can try and do that. But the second somebody gets a copy of the blockchains, the second somebody's running a node and another person connects to it, that data's there. So, you know, when it's something incredibly important to human freedom or freedom of information where it kind of needs to be censorship resistant, perhaps that's,

worth the block space and the fee to some people. And in those instances, I'm much more inclined to be like, okay, like, you know, I'm less likely to say, well, that's stupid. And I'm more inclined to say, well, if you're willing to pay for the block space for that purpose, sure. It's your money. Yeah. So I don't know.

I'm still, I'm mulling it over. But at the end, the economics will do their thing. and people will decide what's what is worth using those inscriptions absolutely and wow now now it's not only money laundering and tariffs no it's 3d printed models oh man yeah yeah yeah but i mean again to to the guy that was on your spaces earlier the point isn't whether or not we win or lose the debate in the public eye the point is whether or not we win or lose the debate in the public eye the point is whether or not that debate is even valid because it's still going to happen. Yep.

And I think that concept, what you just brought up, is very, very difficult for people of asserted worldview that, you know, in this, Mark Moss calls it the peak centralization type of governments. They look extremely powerful, like godlike in a way, you know? And I think that this, this is a radical concept where there's this technology and there's this money that no matter what they do, they can't make it go away. And I think that in itself is very scary to some people. And it's an extremely radical concept, especially for the world that we've been living in, you know, for the last hundred, hundred years, really.

Yeah. It's, yeah, things are about to get interesting. There's a lot of stuff happening all at once and all at a time when government control is is coming to a fever pitch it are the technologies that are most resistant to that coming into fruition uh i don't i don't think it's going to it's not going to be a ride without bumps absolutely not and that reminds me let's uh there we go more appropriate. In the Gulek. I mean, it's not nice digs, I guess.

It's not, it's not the worst background. You know, you get some fresh air, some space to do some push-ups and run some sprints. It's all good. They treat me good here, bro. They let me stream.

Yeah. Oh, dude. Well, yeah, thanks, man. That was great. again, never a shortage of interesting stuff going on in the space.

So I'm sure we'll be back to discuss it some more. And I'm sure that things are like I think that things are going to accelerate. I don't think things are going to decelerate. But like always, Ben, it's awesome, you know, doing this with you. Guys, this was your Simply sessions. Thanks, man. I'll see you soon. All right, everybody.

I got a few things that I want to go through really quick before we sign off. Of course, go follow Nico. Go follow Simply Bitcoin. They do the news six days a week. This is just a taste. A couple of things I want to draw attention to. Number one, there was the first episode of Freedom Money dropped on the Bitcoin magazine YouTube. And it features Matt O'Dell speaking with Gigi.

If you have not seen it, go check it out. Gigi is always awesome. I love everything that he does. So, yeah, be sure to go and check out that video. I also dropped a new tutorial this week on Entropia. So the guys behind Seed Signer, they put this out. Effectively, it's just a big thing of 3D printed pills with the BIP 39 word list printed on them. And so you mix it up really well.

and then you dump out your 12 or 24 words. And actually you do your 11 or 23 words. And then you use the seed signer to help you calculate the final word, which is the check sum. And so again, just another example of like should legislation come into play where self-custody is made illegal. I mean, what? You go and ban words now. That bottle of words written, you know, in a certain order is going to be illegal. I don't know how that's going to go over.

Nonetheless, check it out. It's a lot of fun. And if you want to dive deeper down that rabbit hole, I make a lot of reference to another video I made on how to create a seed phrase with nothing but dice and a pen and math. And that one's super interesting too. So be sure to check those out. And then tomorrow, we've got, Why Are We Bullish? should be a good one. I've got Mickey Koss, Nizomi Hayase. I think I'm saying that last name, right?

And we've got the Bitcoin Explorers, a couple Italians that are globe-trotting and going where Bitcoin is and documenting their experience as they go to Bitcoin Mecca's around the world. So be sure to check that at 6 p.m. Eastern time tomorrow. Of course, I mentioned before, but I've got a workshop coming up for the Miami-M-Core. conference. It is the day before Bitcoin 2023 in Miami Beach, Florida kicks off. So it will be Wednesday, May 17th, 1 to 5 p.m. We're doing a cold card deep dive. If you are new to cold card, if you haven't played yet, and you want to be going from zero to hero in an afternoon with a four hour intense deep dive, we'll cover it all. You'll have the basics down pat, and you'll get to try a bunch of the advanced features that a lot of people never touch just because they're so unfamiliar.

cover it all. Come, check it out. There's three tickets left. Three tickets left. You can go to BTCsessions.ca and go to the events tab. And that's where you'll find it. But yeah, three tickets left for that, which is awesome. And then finally, you can hit me up for one-on-ones if you need a little bit of help with your Bitcoin, cold storage, lightning, whatever it may be, BTCSessions.C. Sessions.C. Same for that. Thank you so much for watching you guys. Like, subscribe, share.

All those things help a ton. You can also hit up the sponsors I mentioned down below, Nunchuk, coin kites, start nine, hoddle, hoddle, and then the Bitcoin conference tickets are down there too. And if you really liked what you saw, you can drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. Strike.m.me slash BTC Sessions. Type in any amount you want, hit the tip button. You will see a lightning invoice, or if you tap to the right,

a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful date or evening. See you guys next time for your daily session. We have BTC sessions. Bitcoin is after your money. You can't stop it. Get yourself some Bitcoin and hold it yourself.

Pure to peer 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.