BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: El Salvador Bitcoin City + Volcano Bonds ep218

Episode Date: November 26, 2021

El Salvador has announced the plans for the world's first Bitcoin City, a tax free citadel adjacent to a Bitcoin-mining volcano, and funded by Liquid Network issued bonds. This news and more on today's news roundup! 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Shakepay is the easiest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada Sign up now and get $30 free after your first $100 purchase! https://shakepay.me/r/BTCSESSIONS ALSO search/subscribe to Shakepay on YouTube! LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $10 free with a savings balance of $75 or more for 15 consecutive days! https://start.ledn.io/btcsessions Get Wasabi wallet for Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Keystone Wallet: secure your Bitcoin! http://bit.ly/KeyStoneSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. It is Thursday. So we're going to be chatting some news. We're going to be talking about the Bitcoin City. If you've been living under a rock, you may not have heard that El Salvador and President Buckelly announced the soon-to-be-begun Bitcoin City in El Salvador.

And there's supposedly some nice perks. of potentially being there and being part of it. We're going to discuss all that, what exactly it is, how it's being funded, all of that. Plus, we're going to be talking a lot about some current inflationary pressures in the U.S. and Canada around the world, kind of how those are playing out and a couple other fun things. As always, 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'll write it and we'll do it live.

The fucking thing sucks. If you haven't already, make sure you hit like, subscribe, and share all those things super important. They really do help the channel. As always, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session.

Before we dive in, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is the bitbow. Dot-I.O dashboard. We're sitting at $58,584. Dollars per Bitcoin, 58K gang forever, by the way. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 1,707 sats.

89.92% of all Bitcoin have been mined. Again, 90% coming up before the end of the year. And in terms of fees, about seven sats per byte for the next block, if you're willing to wait an hour or more, one sat per bite should do you. in terms of anything else, anything notable, not anything I really want to cover at the moment.

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Much better to have it in solid steel. So check them out. And enough my rambling, guys. Let's get chatting. Let's chat about the Bitcoin city in El Salvador. So they had Bitcoin Week down there recently. There was a Bitcoin conference going on. There's a bunch of stuff going on. I was kind of jealous. I was invited to Le BitConf to speak. Unfortunately, I just couldn't justify the extra travel. I've been kind of out of town fair amount through October.

I needed to kind of sit tight here and relax for a little bit. But it would have been a lot of fun. Anyways, last night of the event, they announced the Bitcoin City. So what is this? What's going on? El Salvador plans to build a... Bitcoin city at the baseball volcano with the cryptocurrency used to fund the project.

Its president has announced the city will be circular to represent the shape of a large coin and will be built in the southeastern region of La Union. According to the president, the site would take advantage of, I don't know how to say this, Conchuga. Conchuguay.

I'm not sure. Volcano's thermal energy to power Bitcoin mining. Al Salvador obviously just announced that Bitcoin is legal tender and made it so in September. And the move led, of course, there have been some protests in and around this, although some of them ill-informed. But I will echo that I see Bitcoin as a technology that's best kind of proliferated through opt-in means, not kind of forcing it upon people.

But the nuance here is that really you don't have to utilize Bitcoin. It utilizes Bitcoin rails within the, country to facilitate faster transaction settlement and you can settle in dollars if you choose to. So, you know, it can be argued both ways. Regardless, they say that the city will have residential areas, commercial areas, services, museums, entertainment, bars, restaurants, airport, rail, everything devoted to Bitcoin. So there's a lot here. There's a nice little infographic regarding some of the specifics that we'll get into.

But one of the things I wanted to touch on is that they're issuing Bitcoin bonds on the liquid side chain. So I'll read a little bit here. El Salvador will issue $1 billion in bonds on Blockstream's liquid network, a federated Bitcoin side chain. According to the statements sent to Bitcoin magazine, the proceedings of the bonds will split between 500 million direct allocation in Bitcoin and an investment in the same amount in building out energy and Bitcoin mining infrastructure in the region. the move seeks to attract capital and investors to the Central American country. Quote, El Salvador also aims to create a government securities law and grant a license to Bitfinex securities to process and list the bond issuance. This could pave the way for other liquid security tokens like Blockstream Mining Note

and Exordium token to be listed on a regulated El Salvadorian securities exchange. So basically what they're doing is they're trying to enable people to hold what accounts amounts to the equivalent of an actual security or a bond like issuing a stock. But in a way that can actually be transferred freely between individuals instead of having to sit them with a third party. So obviously there's still trust involved in any type of a security, right? or a bond, you're trusting the government or the company to basically work and create a return for you. With a bond, there's a coupon rate or a coupon note that allows you a certain percentage per year as long as that government is solvent. And with El Salvador, I mean, there's, it's less likely to, or it's more likely to default than a regular country. But there's some interesting shifting dynamics on a global level when it comes to how currencies are dealt with and who's actually trustworthy here, right?

Like the U.S. has really pushed the envelope in terms of what they can do with central bank policy. Record low interest rates artificially held by the Fed buying up treasury notes. You have just 30 to 40 percent of all existing U.S. dollars created in the last calendar year. inflation everywhere, which we'll get into in a little bit. So, yeah, is this trustworthy in terms of how the rest of the world is operating? I don't know. I don't know in terms of will the local entities in El Salvador be able to build a city from scratch is effectively what we're getting at here. I would be more confident if it was effectively a city built by the best entrepreneurs out there and some of the best planners as contractors brought in to do this.

I don't know the specifics of how this will be built, but we'll see. So here's a little breakdown by Arcane Research. So there's going to be no taxes in the city, no income tax, no capital gains tax, anything like that, except for VAT tax or basically like a consumption tax. So if you're buying something, there's going to be a 10% tax on it. Outside of that, no income tax, as I said, no capital gains tax, no taxes effectively for the entire thing. Now, they say ecological. I'm guessing that's in and around the renewable resource of the geothermal in and around the volcano, but pretty broad there.

Anyways, it's going to be in the eastern region, as we said, nearly Union. Energy infrastructure, they say 100% renewable geothermal energy generation from local volcanoes. There are two volcanoes nearby, massive energy potential. Again, I still think that they're going to need more infrastructure than that for a city. But it is nice that it's available there. We'll see, again, we'll see how that plays out. Now, it is promising in terms of mining infrastructure, they say here. Mining rigs, of course, El Salvador is going to generate their own Bitcoin powered by their volcanoes.

I think this is cool. This is really cool in terms of a massive energy resource of typically stranded energy. They're going to try and get the energy from these volcanoes to power this city. So they'll kind of be a push and pull there. But it's kind of nice because they're going to have a certain amount of energy. If the amount of energy from these volcanoes is indeed enough to power a city, then it may be above and beyond what's needed to power. city. And so Bitcoin miners can then eat up the additional energy and basically be a buyer of

last resort. And so this is the interesting dynamic here is that Bitcoin miners could effectively subsidize the creation of the grid, the grid lines to actually power the city. So as they're building out this infrastructure to run that power to the city, they can see. still be utilizing all of that energy, even if the grid isn't built and be paid by the Bitcoin network to do so. So that's pretty cool. Now, in terms of the volcano bond, this is the first government bond in history with Bitcoin booster coupons. And it's the first tokenized government bond in history issued on the liquid network. So there will be a total of $1 billion issued. The coupon rate is 6.5%.

Coupon rate means the rate of return or the interest that you earn annually on the bond. The duration is 10 years. So if you buy the bond, then basically you either hold on to it for 10 years, earning 6.5% every single year. Or you can resell the bond to somebody else that wants to buy it from you in the future. And the minimum amount that you can buy the bond for is $100. So actually, relatively accessible. Now, what are the Bitcoin booster coupons?

So effectively, out of the $1 billion, assuming they earn that much, and from what I'm hearing from some of the people at Blockstream, particularly Samson Mao, he seems to think that there's going to be more than enough interest to sell a billion dollars worth of these bonds. $500 million will go to infrastructure development, particularly in around Bitcoin mining, and $500 million to Bitcoin purchases. Okay. The Bitcoin will be locked up for five years. and then after five years, so halfway through the maturation of the bond, 50% of the Bitcoin upside will be paid out to investors quarterly. So not only do you have the 6.5% interest rate that you're getting, but the appreciation on the price of Bitcoin, half of that will be paid to you every quarter after five years.

So this is interesting. Now, if you think that Bitcoin is going to appreciate it. more than 6.5% yearly, then, I mean, the best bet for you is probably just to hold on to Bitcoin. But there could be some interest from people, and it sounds like there is, in purchasing this, one as a semi, how would you say it? I don't even say a hedge, but like a, and I don't want to say conservative, but kind of a more conservative approach to owning Bitcoin or maybe you couldn't have access to getting exposure to Bitcoin through other vehicles and you might be able to through a government bond.

But there is a question on whether or not certain entities would be able to gain exposure to this vehicle given that it has direct Bitcoin exposure and that it's issued on the Liquid Network, which is if first, I imagine there's got to be some regulatory hurdles there. So I don't know Some people some Bitcoiners may just want to buy this just to say hey I partook in the first Bitcoin like volcano bond I mean I could see myself buying a couple volcano bonds for a hundred bucks just to just to say hey I took part in it If it didn't pan out whatever I guess but I don't know what do you guys think let me know

Let me know what you think of these volcano bonds. And also, if you're curious, because this has obviously brought some more attention to the liquid network. If you've never utilized the liquid network, you don't know how to. I've done some videos on it. I've got about four videos on it right now. How to utilize liquid using Blockstream Green, using liquidity, the Jade Wallet. I've also done side swap. There's another app called T-Dex that I'm going to be covering soon.

So you can check out on the channel here. I've got a few videos in and around Liquid Network that you can check out just and play around with and try sending Liquid Bitcoin and see how you can hold, you know, dollars or something in a liquid wallet. Yeah, worth playing around with. Okay. Now, last thing to tag on here. And this will be kind of our segue, I guess, a little bit.

into the inflationary and macro stuff. Anyways, the U.S. official says El Salvador relations paused for lack of interest, not lack of interest on the U.S. part, actually. So they say that relationships, relations between El Salvador and the United States are temporarily on hold due to the Salvadoran government's apparent lack of interest in dialogue. And this is from a U.S. official in the central American country. quote, obviously, we're on a bit of a pause because the government in El Salvador is not giving a signal. It has interest in our relationship.

Again, it's impossible to think that someone has an interest in our relationship when they're using their paid media machine to attack the United States every day. So, Buckelly does criticize the U.S. and politicians on social media. He hasn't responded for comment. Yeah. And they basically say, on behalf of the White House, the State Department, we've offered a breckle of Ridge and the Salvador and government decided not to take it. As far as we're concerned, we're interested in having the best relationship with El Salvador. So they're basically saying, well, you know, we'll work with you, but I guess they don't want to.

I mean, here's the thing. El Salvador seems to be kind of doing shit on their own now. They've kind of stepped out and decided, hey, we're going to, we're going to try and be self-sufficient here. we're going to stop leaning on on these other entities for help. And it kind of seems to be working so far. Now, they're not the only ones kind of given El Salvador some flack. The IMF. They said that Bitcoin should not be legal tender in El Salvador.

And they talk here. They say the IMF for the international monetary funds said Bitcoin should not be used as legal tender in El Salvador and urge the Central American country to strengthen and the regulation and supervision of its newly established payment ecosystem. They published this statement on Monday. They recommended that El Salvador narrow the scope of its Bitcoin law and mentioned significant risks that Bitcoin has for consumer protection, financial integrity, and financial stability.

This corresponds with official IMF visit to El Salvador, conducted in accordance with its constitutive agreement, which annually overviews the fiscal monarchy, monetary and external situation of its members. Obviously, they said that the announcement of the Bitcoin-backed bond was not discussed in the joint meetings between government officials and the agency. The IMF's technical analysis did not include the bond announcement. The financial institution said El Salvador's plan to buy more Bitcoin following the bond

issuance, along with increasing its Bitcoin exposure, quote, will require a very careful analysis of implications for and potential risk to financial stability. Here, here's the best part. According to the IMF, El Salvador's public debt could escalate beyond 95% of its GDP by 2026. If the country does not implement strong policy measures to correct fiscal imbalance and ease constraints on growth, the debt figure did not include the Bitcoin bond recently announced the IMF added. Beyond that, here's the measure. Here's the measures that they recommended. They recommended El Salvador consider winding down the $150 million trust fund created to

facilitate the exchange between Bitcoin and U.S. dollars. It also recommended withdrawing public subsidies for Chevochivo wallet, which is the digital wallet to entice people to get on a Bitcoin standard. Yeah. They just talk about stronger regulation and oversight. Now, here's the thing. Here's that number. Public debt could escalate beyond 95% of GDP by 2026.

Here's the U.S. Public debt to GDP ratio. It's 133.46% projected by 2026. It's currently, as of last year, 133%. Also. Now, there is some nuance here because the debt of the U.S. is denominated in U.S. dollars, which they can literally print and pay off easily. However, if you look globally in terms of debt to GDP ratio, I mean, El Salvador is like nowhere near the top of the list. There's like 20 to 30 countries ahead of them on that list in terms of debt to GDP ratio.

Japan is like 230 percent or something like that. It's insane. And so the question is, what's more sustainable? And so in this instance where you have the U.S., I mean, they're not going to default on their debt, right? Because they can just print more of it. But isn't that a ticking time bomb in and of itself in that as as the minimum payments on that debt come due and continue to increase, given that the size of the debt is now over 130%. Keep in mind that of every nation that has gone above 130% debt to GDP ratio, only one has not defaulted. And there have been many, many, like dozens and dozens of countries that have done this.

And all of them have eventually basically crumbled in terms of actual defaults, either through just regular default or through hyperinflationary, destroying their country, destroying their natural national currency default. So keep that in mind. So what's what's the bigger risk here? That or a nation issuing debt set in dollars, but then having assets in a having their funds and their capital allocated to assets that are hard. So they've got they're issuing a bond for a billion dollars. They're taking half of that money and parking it and locking it in a hard asset for five years that year over year. If you go back long enough, yes, it's 200% annual return on average.

But, you know, that includes some of the earlier years. So if you're a bit more conservative and you cut out some of those early crazy appreciations, it's closer to 60, 70, maybe 75% per year. and also an asset that in the history of its existence, over any four-year period, at any point in time, after four years, it has never gone down. The 200-week moving average has never pointed downwards. So what is given the historical precedent, what is riskier there? having something that annually, if you're being conservative, maybe you'll get 50, 60, 70% per year on average, or continuing down the road of just perpetually printing money to pay off your debt. And not only that, but when you inject hard assets that can't be debased, it also kind of encourages you to actually create something of value. So we will see

Again, I don't know if the Salvadoran government will be efficient enough to pull this off but if they defer to entrepreneurs

that are good at building useful things, then perhaps. I will caveat and say aesthetically speaking, I don't know if I would want Bitcoins building a city.

I think if Bitcoiners were to defer to to the best of the best in that specialization. And the reason I say that is I think of some of the UI in like Bitcoin wallets, where it's like, oh, it's easy and so clean. And you look at it and you're like, Jesus Christ, guys, get some good UI designers in here, get some people to make it pretty because there's not a lot of pretty when it comes to Bitcoin wallets off the hop. It takes allocating money to people who know how to make an application

user friendly. So, I'm just playing devil's advocate here, guys. I just want us to make sure that we have the best people in the room to build the Bitcoin city. Anyways,

let's chat inflation. Since we're kind of down that road already, here's President Joe Biden tweeting out, Two of the leading ratings agencies on Wall Street have confirmed the bipartisan infrastructure law, which, by the way, is for $1.75 trillion, I believe, along with my build back better act, will not add to inflationary pressures. As 17 Nobel Prize winning economists have declared, my plans will ease inflationary pressures.

There was literally just an article in the economy. saying that every single economists out there did not see inflation coming when we printed fucking 30% of all existing dollars in the past year. And these are the people he's deferring to. Furthermore, has anybody here seen the big short? Do you remember this scene where they go into the ratings agencies and everything was rigged? They're like, why are the rating agencies giving AAA ratings to all of these bonds that we know are fucking juries?

junk. And it was because everybody was telling them, hey, you better rate these AAA while we get all of the credit default swaps on the back end so that we can hedge ourselves first before you drop these ratings. So they were basically paid off. These are the same ratings agencies that he's talking about. And if they're going to cave to the fact that, oh, well, somebody will go down the street and pay the next ratings agency to give them a AAA, if they're going to cave to just regular. pressures of market given that there's a conflict of interest there of course they're going to cave to the president and the entire U.S. government being like, hey,

can you guys let everybody know that we won't cause inflation when clearly we are actively right now. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Oh my God. Anyways,

Yeah, so here's pure research. Inflation has risen around the world, but the U.S. has seen one of the biggest increases. Of course, this report only covers 46 countries examined here. Again, U.S. was only behind Brazil and Turkey, and we'll talk about Turkey in a minute, at 5.3% increase in inflation, like from where it was. in 2019. So there's that. But they curiously, like, if you look at the map here,

they seem to have excluded a lot of places that have some pretty high inflation. And so there was a good, let's, maybe I'll pull this one forward. Oh man, there's so much, there's so much crap here. I got a, where is it? Oh my God, there's so much. Okay, here we go.

I'll pull this over. Sorry, there's a lot of stuff. to touch on when it comes to inflation. Okay. So here's something Robert Breedlove tweeted out from block data. And this is countries with confirmed double-digit inflation, representing 1.1 billion people in the world. And so it's just, let's see, some of the ones mentioned Haiti, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Sierra

Leone, Guinea, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria. Burundi, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Sudan, Ethiopia, I don't know how to say this, Seychelles, Shichelz, Yemen, Iran, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, North Korea, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Belarus, Turkey, Libya, Sudan. So there's a fuck down the countries that are double-digit inflation, just double, like, just anything over 10% basically. So looking at it, ranging anywhere in between, I'm seeing like 10.9, 10.6, all the way up to you get as crazy as Venezuela where it's like 15, 575%. But there's a lot of like 50%, 30%, 30%, 40%, 10, 13, 166%. Like, there's a lot of high inflation. And this is, and this is using their stated numbers. This is not, this is like government approved numbers that you're seeing here,

not even like super accurate stuff. So, yeah, it's pretty wild. And so I just wanted to show you guys a couple of the crazy things that we've seen. So this is NBC. It was a clip there. And they're giving tips on saving money for Thanksgiving because inflation has gone up so much. they one of the tips was consider not buying a turkey and then they said well hey hey hold on stay with me here if you say that you're not buying a turkey you may actually have people not show up and that means

you don't even have to buy as much food this is this is where we're at um and then and and like you could be dismissive and say well that's an anchor on c on NBC you know like you should whatever. It's it's mainstream news. They're trash. Yeah, but also the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank is saying the same thing. I shit you not. This is a real tweet from the St. Louis Fed. Yes, the people that create monetary policy are tweeting and telling you about the best way to save money for your Thanksgiving. So this is from their blog, a Thanksgiving dinner, serving of poultry costs $1.42. A soybean-based dinner,

serving with the same amount of calories, costs 66 cents and provides almost twice as much protein. The Fed is saying, guys, if shit's expensive, just don't buy it. Don't buy turkey. I guess try some soybeans.

The St. Louis Fed is telling you to eat soy. This is what I'm getting at here. Meanwhile, Jerome Powell was reinstful. stated as the head of the Federal Reserve. And here's the quality, uh, the quality journalist at Vox saying that Biden made one of the best decisions of his

presidency this week by reinstating Jerome Powell with his knock it out of the park monetary policy that is definitely not screwed a lot of people. Um, now I will say that there was a good, uh, clip here in McLean's magazine. They're talking about inflate. in Canada.

They also say they're likely to get way worse in 2022. Everyone in Canada will feel the pinch. But they did, they did at least on one point, make a pretty good point. There's no debate, however, about who gets hurt in such times. Canadians who already struggle to make ends meet.

The 20% of families with the lowest income spend about one third of total earnings on shelter, while the top 20% spend one fifth. those in the lowest rungs spend 15% of their incomes on food compared with the highest rungs 8%. And the less wealthy bear the brunt of rising energy costs as they tend to live in less energy efficient homes. So more low income families will face a dilemma, pay down energy bills or spend on the other necessities of life. which is the sad reality of it is that, yeah, those that have the least disposable income are disproportionately hurt by inflation.

And you get the argument, well, yeah, but those people have a lot of debt, and that makes their debt cheaper to pay back, which I think is a fucking lazy, terrible argument. And let me tell you why. Yes, if you have debt denominated in dollars and all of a sudden those dollars are worth less to pay it back, it would be beneficial for you in an inflationary environment. But that's making some big assumptions. That's making the assumption that one, perhaps that debt was temporary and it's just a matter of you paying that. that little bit of debt back and then you'll be done with debt. And potentially too, well, and this is the big one, that your wage is actually keeping pace

or outpacing inflation, which is really, really not the case for just about everybody. Wages lag inflation. Wages lag inflation again. When everything goes up across the board, the last thing to go up is going to be your wage. You actually, if you're in a position where you have a job and you're finding it harder and harder to make ends meet, it's typically left up to the worker to go in and argue that you need a raise, that you deserve a raise when really your standard of living is going down and it's not keeping pace with the cost of today's items because of the increase in the money supply, because everything

is more expensive for everyone. So it's hitting your pocketbook and you have to argue just to stand still. And so I hate that argument when people say, well, no, it's inflation is good because then you can eat more easily pay back the boatloads of debt so that you can get more debt to pay off the stuff that you can't afford that's now more expensive. It's the worst argument I've ever heard. Anyways, one more a little point here from Pierre Paulyere. I can never say his last name, whatever.

Anyways, yesterday the Bank of Canada published a graph showing a, quote, sudden burst in mortgage lending in spring 2020. The cause, I helpfully added a line showing when the bank began flooding the debt and mortgage system with $400 billion in cheap cash. Cause effect. And basically, if you're listening and not watching, it's a chart. it shows home purchases by investors increased more during the pandemic than those by other homebuyers. So there's three lines.

One is first time home buyers. Two is repeat home buyers. And three is investors. And it shows the percentage that they've grown. It was relatively steady kind of from 2015 all the way to 2020. It took a big dip in early 2020 as obviously everybody was kind of locked away in their homes. wasn't a lot going on. And then the easy money came. A ton of money was printed. And because of where that money was allocated, more of that money, it disproportionately went to those at the top.

And thus, they were able to invest it in more areas, knowing that they don't want to hold on to dollars. And while you see, again, if you're looking at the chart, investors, the number of people investing and buying investment homes has gone through the roof. comparatively to repeat homebuyers and first time home buyers. But they have all gone up across the board. So anyways, that's why houses are expensive too. Again,

when you have cheap money, people are going to put it in something. And one way that people do that and try to preserve their purchasing power is buying homes. Okay. One last thing here. I said I was going to touch on Turkey as well in terms of in terms of inflation.

This is crazy. Bitcoin has an all-time high against the Turkish lira as it collapses. So, I mean, yeah, as if you're looking at it from a Bitcoin standpoint, Bitcoin here is actually tends to be the constant versus the Turkish lira losing value. It's not that Bitcoin gained necessary value because you would have seen that across all currencies. This is the lira tanking. So the Turkish lira has been in freefall after President Erdogan demanded the central bank of Turkey cut rates for a third consecutive month from 19% to 15%. Turkish lira against the U.S. dollar has been weakening over the past decade.

But yesterday, the currency saw rapid deceleration losing 10% of its value in one day, an all-time low. It's a historic event for a G20 country, a G20 country. How long do you think before we see that in one of the G7? How long do you think before we see that in Canada? US would be the last to go, right? The US is the, they've got the dollar that's most in demand. They've got the reserve currency. That would be the last currency to really lose that kind of purchasing power.

Because people will flow into that out of their other currencies. so U.S. will probably get stronger versus these other smaller currencies. Regardless, what makes the economic situation worse is that Turkey's consumer price index has been accelerating over the past years, now well above its central bank's rate, and 19.89%, 20% inflation.

Damn. With domestic inflation rising, real rates will collapse incentivizing investment capital to flee for foreign investments. The collapse in currency will now only accelerate this trend of inflation, negative real rates. It's not clear how Turkey can stabilize its currency without a lack of foreign exchange

reserves to lean on. Additionally, 13 billion in Turkish external debt is set to mature this month and next month. The repayments on the debt increases demand for foreign currencies, adding more self-pressure to the lira. Basically, if you're in Turkey, you're pretty much fucked. Like, get out of the lira. Hold anything else you can buy Bitcoin.

Yeah, that's sad. That really sucks. Okay, some lighter stuff to wrap up here. A new website, Rodolfo, is on a roll. Do that created a cold card over at Coin Kite. He has Bitcoin. Holiday, the website. Basically, it's all notable events in Bitcoin. So you have a calendar.

Like this month, we had the Bitcoin, well, October 31st, we had the Bitcoin white paper day. This is Gentleman from 2014. That was a short-lived meme. I wish that had lasted longer. Those that were around in 2014, This is Gentleman was a good meme. BitConnect, failure to launch,

Segwit 2X day. Lots of great ones. You can kind of flip through and see what's coming up. Hoddle Day. Hoddle Day is coming. December 18th. That's a fitting one. Hoddle day in the Hoddle days.

December 18, that's the day when a drunk user on Reddit misspelled hold in his title of his Reddit post and people just ran with it and Hoddle became a meme. It does not mean mean hold on for dear life. That was explained away by somebody who didn't know the context of the original post. It was a drunk Reddit user who misspelled hold and they couldn't edit the name of their post. That's it. Anyways, I really like this website.

They've got a ton of different stuff. Bitcoin's birthday, Lightning Pay Day, Genesis Transaction Day, all interesting stuff. I'm going to be using this on the regular. Always take a look at important dates coming up. Hey, if we make Bitcoin a religion, could we get statutory holidays on all these? It's a lot of free time. We shall see. Anyways, check out Bitcoin.

Holiday, if you want to see, if you want to see all the important Bitcoin dates. Also, the other day on Monday, I made a video called The Next Bitcoin is, spoiler alert, there is no next Bitcoin. It's literally a 30-minute video as I explained SATs as if they're a new currency. Yes, I kept a straight face the entire time. But basically, I just talk about Bitcoin, but I refer to it as SATs the entire time. So I deal with the unit bias that people get and say, well, you can get 1,700 of these things for a dollar. And it's got all of the network effects of Bitcoin. And it works with all the hardware wallets.

And it's accepted everywhere that Bitcoin is. And it has this great network called a lightning network. You can send it instantly for low fees. It uses proof of work, which encourages people to find more energy efficient uses. and so it will likely spur a boon in efficient energy harnessing technologies. So I cover the gamut of it. But if you have normy friends that are stubborn and need to shit coin, get them on stats. And I show them how to instantly convert their Bitcoin to sats.

It's tricky to get sats. You got to go to a place that sells Bitcoin typically. Then you send it to a special wallet and you hit in the set. You can convert them instantly to sats for no fees. It's crazy guys. Anyways, check out the video. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people, the number of Bitcoin's that got the joke. I was expecting like everybody in the comments to be like, this is Bitcoin, like, you know, the typical like ruin a joke kind of guy.

But pleasantly surprised the comments were good there. And then also tomorrow, why are we bullish? make sure you tune in. I've got Glenn Hoddle, got Mr. Peter McCormick making an appearance. We've got Bitcoin Gandalf and we've got Galaxy Hoddle or Go, sorry Galaxy, Galactic Hoddle. Sorry,

Galactic. My bad. It's going to be a good one. I thoroughly enjoy that Peter is the only one with a real name and maybe the only one who shows his full face. I love working in Bitcoin that literally three of four guests tomorrow

are just memes and yeah I'm excited about that oh other thing I wanted to bring up I got sent this today hold on I'm going to I'll just remove this for a second I got sent this today

the Bitcoin machine shout out to my pals at Umbrel they sent me over one of the pre-built plug-and-play nodes. Now, I'm running an umbrella. I've got what side of? There we go. Over here. To behind me on the shelf, I've of course got my

crypto cloaks, Triton, running umbrella already. But they sent me one of these to check it out. Same thing. It's an umbrella. But it does have this little window on the front. It's like a display. It shows the Bitcoin price when it's on as well as the SATs per dollar.

It's also made a solid metal. which I thought it was going to be plastic, but no, it's, it's metal. It feels pretty robust. Yeah, it's pretty cool looking. I'm excited to play around with this. So yeah, anyways, thanks. Thanks, umbral friends. I appreciate that being sent over.

I also just got the new, I got a few new things to the house. I'm just excited to share. I got the newest, um, uh, magazine from Citadel 21. I'm subscribed there. Love Citadel 21. If you don't know them, just Google Citadel 21.

Tons of Bitcoin plebs, write pieces for them, and they're excellent. Also, I've got the new print issues of Bitcoin magazine on the way, which I'm very, very excited for.

So anyways, lots of fun things. I'll bring back in my screen here. Anyways, guys, thank you so much for spending your time here with me on this fine Thursday. I hope to see you again.

tomorrow, of course, for why are we bullish? Be sure to check it out. As always, like, subscribe, share. All those things help so, so much. You have no idea. If you want to help with the show in another way, check out the sponsors down below. Shake pay, leaden, bit refill, Keystone, Bill Fottle,

all those are down below. Remember, Keystone's still 20% off right now. Shake pay, they got the $30 deal, and you should probably get one of those cards if you're in Canada. You know, everybody's got stuff going on. So check them all out. And, of course, if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page.

That is strike. Dot me slash BTC sessions. Head there, hit type in any amount you like. You hit the tip button. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice. Or if you tap to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code, and you can send over some stats there, if you so please. With that, I'm out.

Have yourselves a wonderful evening, day or evening, wherever you may be. I'll see you guys hopefully tomorrow for your daily session. I