BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: El Salvador Repays Debt ep317

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

El Salvador pays off its $800m debt, bill introduced to make Bitcoin legal tender in Arizona, Pennsylvania nuclear mining and more on today’s show! 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: 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 BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel, protect your hardware with faraday bags and much more! https://privacypros.io/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. It's time for some news roundup. Very happy, of course, to have Nico back again this week to fill us in on what's been going on if you're not so up to Simply Bitcoin for sure. Get over there. Do it. Do it now. I hope you guys are having a good week. I hope everything's been going good. Yeah, lots to talk about some interesting stuff. Some travel plans coming up too. So I may be seeing some of you guys in the coming months with some of the stuff. I'm just kind of solidifying where I'm going to be now. But yeah, we're going to be talking news. We're going to be talking a little bit of El Salvador and Arizona and Pennsylvania and different things happening in different places. I'd say most of it good. Good. Yeah, good-ish.

So we're going to dive into that. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live.

I can. Write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share. All those things help a ton getting more eyeballs on this content. 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?

And now, this is the timechain calendar.com from Mr. TC Meditation Man. We're sitting at 23,022 kuck bucks per dollar. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 4,344 sats. 91.78% of all Bitcoin have been mined, which is 19.27 million of them. And in terms of fees, pretty low across the board. One sat per byte should do you no problem. So do whatever you need to do. Open those lightning channels, do some whirlpool, whatever tickles of your fancy.

Shout out to sponsors of the show, coincite.com. Again, best hardware in the game. I love the Mark 4. Great for securing your stack. Some of the advanced features on this thing are insane. But they've got tons of stuff over here at CoinKite. They've got, of course, their open dimes, they're block clocks, their stats cards and tap signers and backup solutions and all kinds of great stuff.

So head over, check them out, coincite.com, check the store and use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything. Up next, we've got Start 9, your sovereign computing solution. I've done a full video on how to set up your full Bitcoin stack, running Bitcoin core, lightning nodes, things like Mempool and Join Market and all these other peripherals that help you be self-sovereign in your Bitcoin use. But that's not all they're good for. You can take sovereignty over your data as well. Get it out of the hands of corporations.

You can host your passwords, your files, your photos, just everything. and yeah, you can be a sovereign individual with your digital persona. So check them out. Start9.com. You can check out the Embassy 1. And if you're looking for something super beefy to host your life, the Embassy Pro will not do you wrong. If you are stacking stats, you're stacking your Bitcoin, you know, it's still, yeah,

we had a little uptick, but it's still very, very low. If you're doing that, then you may have some priorities. Things like non-KYC. That's an important one to many people, things like peer to peer and things like immediate self-custody. Well, you can tick off all those boxes by checking out hoddlehottle.com. You can sign up in minutes with nothing more than an email address and be trading peer-to-peer back and forth. They've got tons of different ways of paying whatever you see fit. And they've also got a lending platform in which you can lend and have your Bitcoin earning you something without having it ever.

re-hypublicated. So be sure to check them out, hoddlehottle.com. There's a link down below that can help you get set up today. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, make sure you have that backup in a solid form.

You don't want it sitting around on paper because if you have fire damage or if you have water damage from floods and fires, things like that, you don't want that thing disappearing. So get it in solid steel. You can check out the billfottle over at Privacy Pro's This is one of the great ways to be backing up your seed phrase. Again, paper. I cringe. I've heard horror stories. So get that piece of mind. Privacypros.com.com.com.com. I know before we dive into the news, let's take a quick look at some of the streaming sats, some of the boostergrams that we've been getting here. So Camel Weasel was stoked on Bitcoin eggs. Yeah, I found somebody to buy eggs with Bitcoin.

Michael, Bitcoin is hope that the W-E-F will fail at ushering in their dystopian future. Thanks for all the content, Ben. Thanks, man. Cliff, please have these worthless air tokens that have no value. I can't remember what the story was with that. But anyways, thanks, Cliff. And then Owen, Owen Lewis said, the lack of food intelligence is terrifying. I've only just woken up to it.

next time you're at the supermarket, just look at the garbage people are buying. Even if you don't have a local rancher, at least try visiting a local farmer's market and buy some real food. And then Michael drop some bulls at the end there. So thanks, guys. Thanks for streaming stats. I try to read those out every week on the news show. So with that, let's bring in our friend here. Nico, dude, how you doing?

Woo! What's up, man? Happy to be here. Yeah, man. It's been a good week. I imagine you've been busy. I've been busy, a little bit of, you know, always on the grind, right? 100%.

100%. So after a lot of careful thinking and debate, I've been going through where this streak is going to happen. I'm thinking like right here, this beard, like right here. I love it. I'm ready to go. I love it. Hey, I've got a proposition for you. Let's do it.

Miami. My wife, my wife is responsible for this. She's going to be in Miami. Do you want to have a hair party? It's done and dusty. I feel like it needs to be filmed and we need the like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. As we touch the tips, finally.

I'm down. Okay, let's do it. Let's make it happen. It'll be an event. I feel like we should invite the plebs to be part of it. I don't know. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Will this spur the next bull run?

No, I yellow already did that. We can't take credit for that. Live show? Live show. Oh, yeah. Obviously. Yeah. That's what, you know, I feel like maybe this year, the touching of the tips can be the

equivalent of the beach wedding that took place last time. It's that. I feel it's equally important. I think so. I think so. I think it's going to be a historic moment. It will. It will be something.

Well, yeah. Let's make that happen. I told my wife that I was going to tell you. this and she's like, what do you want me to do? It's like, just trust me. It'll, it'll be great. It's going to work out. It's going to work out.

Yeah. So very excited to have Mrs. Sessions joined down there. It's going to be a good time. But yes, it is. Yeah, let's redecorate and get to the news, man. I'll bring up your, what do you, do you want me to bring up the video first or do you want me to bring up your screen first? Can I give a little bit of context?

of the video. Okay, so let me read this real quick. So it's from Secretary Janet Yellen, Opti's ex-girlfriend. Since 1789, the U.S. has always paid all of its bills, the knowledge that we can be trusted and counting on to do that underlines the foundations of the entire global financial system. Default would cause widespread damage of the U.S. economy. And there is a clip of her on CNN and I've not seen this. I've got to take a peek. Let's go. Just quote that letter that you are referring to just a little bit. Failure to meet the government's obligations would cause irreparable harm to the United States economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability.

So in brief, what kind of irreparable harm, and particularly for American households, how would average American households experience this? The United States is a country that since 1789 has always paid all of its bill. and the knowledge that the U.S. government can be trusted and counted on to do that underlies the foundations really of the entire global financial system. U.S. Treasury securities are the safest investment on the planet, and we would certainly experience at a minimum a downgrading of our debt. If that happened, our borrowing costs would increase, and every American would see that their borrowing costs would increase as well.

On top of that, a failure to make payments that are due, whether it's to bondholders or to Social Security recipients or to our military, would undoubtedly cause a recession in the U.S. economy, and could cause a global financial crisis, it would certainly undermine the role of the dollar as a reserve currency that is used in transactions all over the world. And Americans would, many people would lose their jobs and certainly their borrowing costs would rise. So, dude, so much to unpack there. It's all politics, right?

The fact that the U.S. has always pays its bills. That's a lie. We'll get to that in a second. It comes off like the Lannisters, always pay their debts. The U.S. government could be trusted. But what is all this about? This is all about raising the debt ceiling. And, you know, based on Janet Yellen's own political party, the Democrats, again, you know, not to be political or anything, but this is just what's happening.

Democrats push to eliminate the debt ceiling, allow unlimited government borrowing. And when they say borrowing, right, there's no entity on the planet that can buy those bonds. So who buys them? They put it on the Fed balance sheet, which basically means a very fancy way of saying they're going to have to print that money,

which is absolutely terrifying. They don't want to get rid of the amount of money they could print, the amount of money they could spend. And that's what this is about. So it's all fear, you know, it's fear porn, basically saying, look, like this is going to be catastrophic. And then not to mention also the, you know, and this is why I love Twitter, right? This is the importance of Twitter and the importance of these social media platforms, right? It allows the Pleb to just talk to the tyrants.

Anyways, this Walker, part of the crypto couple false. The U.S. has defaulted four times. 1862. Default on demand notes, 1933, default on gold bonds. 1968 refused to redeem silver certificate paper dollars for silver dollars and the infamous one that we all are familiar with as bitcoiners 1971 refused to redeem gold dollars held by foreign governments for golds under the breden woods agreement if the u.s didn't move the goalpost all those times it would have defaulted so it's not that it hasn't defaulted it's just it's changed the rules so that it won't default and one last thing ben which i thought this was absolutely hilarious. Pierre Richard

actually also commented on this as well. He put the same thing on LinkedIn. And the post was removed for misinformation. Oh my God. I mean, that's going to start happening. I love, by the way,

that he's anybody building a Noster version of LinkedIn. That's hilarious. Again, I got to give a shout out to everybody that's building on Noster because it fixes this. And the minds that brought you Noster are the minds that are working on Bitcoin. And they're solving things without shitcoins and just integrating Bitcoin because it's easy to do so because the Noster protocol is done in a way where it's simple enough to just do that. You don't need a shit coin for it to function.

But yeah, like it's, I mean, it's super funny to see things like this. But I mean, in the end, the, like, the reason that she's having to say stuff like this is because people are questioning, right? Like, how many times has it been in the news that, oh, the debt ceiling is approaching? There is no ceiling, guys. It's, it's an illusion. They're raising the imaginary ceiling. It will, they'll never get to a debt ceiling and be like, all right, that's it. No more spending.

We got to actually rein this bad boy in. We got to actually start being financially responsible. That's never going to have. You crazy? So whenever I see the debt ceiling thing come up again, it's literally just a way for whatever political party is not in power to maybe get a little bit of negotiation, to get more money printed for the things that they currently want.

So it's all bullshit. smoke and mirrors. There is no ceiling. There is no spoon. Your money is not backed by anything. Amen to that. But look, hey, you got to give them credit. At least, you know, they're saying, you know what, like let's just stop playing the pretend. Like, let's just get rid of it all together, you know, because it's been a horse and pony show. Now it's getting to the point. We're at that point in the movie, we're just like, all right, just who cares? You know, this is stupid anyways. But I just find it absolutely hilarious. that LinkedIn was like, no, that's not true.

The part of that isn't true. Please explain. Oh, man. Yeah. Re-definition of words. Like, just like they changed the CPI, same thing. Same, same thing. You know, Jeff Booth and everyone's taught.

Look, in a world full of, like, Fiaz is based on lies. Like, why else, what, why would we expect truth out of any other institution, if the base layer of society is based on a lie, right? It's, it's absurd. Anyways, big win here. Kind of, we have to go through memory lane, though, first, right? Just kind of bash on the legacy corporate media.

This is all the hit pieces that they started releasing. The IMF had a freak out, basically saying El Salvador is going to default and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this is Naim Bukala's Golden Cage, his article of Washington Post. you have the New York Times. A poor country made Bitcoin a national currency. The bets isn't paying off. And then you have Naim Buckele hitting back. In the past year, almost every legacy international news outlet said that because our Bitcoin bet, El Salvador was going to default on its debt by January 23, 2023, since we had an $800 million bond maturing today.

Literally hundreds of articles. This is just to name a few, by the way. Full page spreads on the New York Times and all creating the narrative. that El Salvador was broke and going to fault. I called them out at the time, but of course, who was going to believe us and not every international news outlet and their, quote, economic geniuses?

I wouldn't say they're economic geniuses. I would say they're fiat propagandists, to be honest. And then it goes on to say, well, we just paid in full $800 million plus interest, but of course almost nobody is covering the story. I just found one, yes, one in Spanish from Colombia. They lie and lie and lie, and when their lies are exposed, they go on silence mode. And I think that's a very strong statement.

It was confirmed by Bloomberg. So this is true. And I also want to kind of remind people as well something about Naim Bucale, right? Because let's put the argument aside. Let's say, let's give them a benefit of the doubt ban. And let's say, look, let's play devil's advocate. Maybe the Bitcoin bed did go astray, right? Because of the reality is that Saylor and Naim Buckele, they're paying their price

situation. This is their first cycle. They are down on their investment, right? But if you actually look at El Salvador, right, if you actually look at El Salvador, because this is the media, this is the narrative spin that the media tried to tell everybody. El Salvador had record GDP growth in 2022. The highest sense they started recording it, 10.3%. And the murder rate has fallen to historic lows. Also to mention that Naimu Kela's popularity rate, is literally depending on the poll that you ask between 80 and 95%. Okay?

So isn't that the job of the politician to do those things in the first space decrease crime, increase GDP, and it makes sense why he would be so popular? So like what is it that exactly that they're talking about? And then I think that really shows that these institutions like the New York Times

are they really actually meant to be reporting the truth? Are they propagandists trying to instill or trying to promote a certain narrative or a certain political goal that they're trying to achieve? Because this is just bad journalism, but it can't be that every giant media institution are just bad journalists. This is just pure propaganda. I can't come to another conclusion. Yeah.

Like if there had been, you know, a mixed bag of like some people saying, well, we think he's going to go insolvent for a bad call on this. And then, you know, some people saying like, well, maybe it might work out. Then maybe you could just reason that, okay, opinion pieces. But like when it's blanket, he's going to fail. The country will be insolvent. It will default on its debt. When it's when that's the blanket approach without like digging any deeper and actually

looking at what has happened thus far, I mean, it's pretty clear that, you know, it's been pre-decided, you know, across the board of, okay, well, this is the story we're running with and whether, whether maliciously or just out of sheer laziness and copy pasta opinions, I don't know. Right. But at what point, Ben, do we say, like, you know, is this really, is this really laziness? Because I feel like as Bitcoiners, we've given them the benefit of the doubt so hard. Right. Or it's like, we're at what, point do we say, no, this is malicious. Like, what you're trying to do is malicious. Like, you know exactly what's going on. And you're trying to spin it a certain way because you want a

certain outcome. And then Naimu Keli hit the nail in the head when he said, and when that certain outcome isn't achieved, they just go quiet, right? They just go silent. You know, and they move on to the next thing. Yeah, it's like, oh, we don't want to, we don't want to point out how hideously wrong about this thing we were. We were, we're the media. Yeah, we get to shape the narrative. We control the truth. Exactly. Man, crazy, absolutely crazy, crazy world.

All right. So another piece of, I would say, extremely, extremely bullish news. You guys all know the Bitcoin hash rate. For anyone who doesn't know, a little bit of a, you know, explanation. Bitcoin hash rate is an estimation of the amount of computational power actively mining the Bitcoin network. And you can theoretically say the higher the hash rate,

the higher the, no, not theoretically. the higher it is to become, the higher, the harder it is to attack Bitcoin computationally. So theoretically, the higher the hash rate, the higher the value proposition of Bitcoin, right? So this is the Bitcoin hash rate, you know, goes back, you know, let's take it back all time, right? And these are the infamous Fork Wars. You see that orange line, that was the Bitcoin cash hash rate. And as you could see, it fell off the cliff. The Bitcoin hash rate continues to go up.

and both BSV and Bitcoin Cash are basically dead. Okay, so that being said, clearly Bitcoin won the war there, but a couple of mining updates first. Absolutely crazy. America's first nuclear-powered Bitcoin mining center to open in Pennsylvania. So quick little explanation here with the expansion of the cryptocurrency sector, I just want to add with the expansion of the Bitcoin mining sector, is becoming

the freaking media bro is becoming increasingly increasingly mainstream in the construction of the first nuclear power data center in the United States that is expected to host Bitcoin mining services

has recently been completed indeed a zero carbon data center manufacturer Colmus Data subsidiary of an independent power producer and Taller Energy has completed the power shell for its first data center

powered by a 2.5 gigawatt nuclear power station Holy cow, a little bit of other mining news as well. Again, they did it again, Ben. They did it again. Crypto infrastructure firm. No, Bitcoin infrastructure firm Blockstream raises $125 million. Come on, coin desk.

Get your shit together. Oh, okay. They always do it. It's like crypto. It's a crypto company. He's like, no, but that's not true. Oh, man. Okay.

So also, apparently they raised this money. It was at a lower value. obviously because of the bear market, but they're going to use that $125 million that they just raised. That's a ton of money to invest more into mining infrastructure and also to, apparently to expand their hosting business as well, right? So absolutely, you know, look, look at the hash rate right now. We're at the depths of a bear market. This bad boy continues to go up and this news just dropped. So these miners haven't to be put online yet. And you can, could tell that people are bullish on the future of Bitcoin because if they weren't bullish on the

future of Bitcoin, then they wouldn't be investing in the infrastructure to mine Bitcoin, even after Bitcoin fell off a cliff and went from $69K to $23,000. Yeah. I mean, you love to see it because it means that miners are finding more efficient ways of mining. It means that it also means that the narrative in and around of, you know, like opportunity cost of Bitcoin miners is total BS because they're, again, they're finding waste energy. They're using energy that helps stabilize grids. There's a lot of factors in there. And man, that chart, I love that I looked at it initially. And I saw like that you had the hash rates clicked or you had the hash rates for Bcash and BSB up there too.

And I was like, oh, they must not be clicked. And then I was like, oh, wait, no. They're down there. They're down there. That straight line at the bottom of the chart. Yeah, that's, it's so funny because there was a period of time, a brief period of time in 2017, where it actually got a little worrying. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, because we saw this huge uptick. and it was kind of all this terrifying. Holy shit. Is Bitcoin Cash going to pull it off? But the problem with that type of an attack is you got to keep it up forever. And look how badly it began to fail right away. Like they would do it.

It was organized pumps of of hash rate to try. And they couldn't keep it up. Like there's no way they can. And they just bled money. And like, look at Roger Barrow now. Like he's he's in ruins comparatively to like what he could have been had he just like swallowed his pride and been like, listen, I wanted to change Bitcoin. Didn't work out.

But that's kind of what Bitcoin does. If there's no consensus, then it's the status quo. Well, couldn't handle it. Couldn't handle it. He had so much Bitcoin. He thought he had so much power. He allied with the largest mining consortium at the time. basically already is, but they kicked out J-Han.

Allied with Bitmain, largest, you know, ASIC manufacturer at the time, you know, the S-9. This is the era of the S-9. And yeah, they tried to take over the network. And Ben, I remember this day as if it was tomorrow. I was like, holy crap, I think they might have pulled this off. And now, and I know that you read the Fork Wars, right? You know, this was completely artificial. They were just setting money on fire to give the illusion to people that what I mentioned earlier,

that Bitcoin cash is has surpassed Bitcoin, which means that theoretically it was a more secure blockchain. It was more secure network, right? But all we know now that it wasn't incentives driving this, it was just, it was a sci-op, basically. Yeah, yeah. It was, I mean, again, that's the best thing about Bitcoin. Bitcoin, while sometimes it takes a little bit of time, it does decipher the truth at a good pace, right?

You know, it's not just, well, here, again, you couldn't bullshit the hash rate. You have to, you know, that actually has to be held up. And then, like, more recent examples, like FTX, fuck around, find out, right? You go and you re-hypothicate or you like say you have Bitcoin that's not even there. I mean, it's only a matter of time before the obvious truth is revealed. And again, that's what Bitcoin is good at getting down to the crux of the truth. Absolutely. 100%. It exposes incentives.

All right, everybody. So the next one, Ben, look, I was actually talking about this today. I think on the surface, I would really say that this is a big nothing burger. You know, just Senator State Senator Wendy Rogers has introduced a set of bills aimed at making Bitcoin legal tender in Arizona, allowing state agencies to accept Bitcoin. The proposed legislation aims to recognize Bitcoin as a legal form of currency in Arizona, allowing it to be used to pay for debts. So then it gets into the specifics about what Bitcoin is, et cetera, et cetera. But I think the significance of this bent is not necessarily this itself. but the fact that the Overton window is moving, right?

And I actually went into detail about what the Overton window was, but basically just a quick paraphrase is the Overton window is what the mainstream population is okay and accepting, right? The reality is that right now, depending on where you are, right, Bitcoin is seen as a radical idea, right? If you are in New York State, right, it's seen as an extremist idea. Obviously, if you're in Texas and Florida, it's more normalized. And in El Salvador, it's past the popular.

It's become policy, right? So clearly the Overton window is different in different locations. But what I see this doing is it's clearly moving the Overton window from the radical, right? This is absolutely radical to the acceptance phase, which a lot of other states, I think they're already there. But remember that there's an opposing force, which was the Elizabeth Warren bill,

which is trying to move the Overton window to the other side of like, no, this thing is absolutely radical. Like this thing is absolutely radical. So I love this because this is just where we are today. In five years, you can only have an idea of the type of bills that are going to be introducing to, you know, I'm not a big fan of legal tender laws. You know, maybe I agree with the theory of the sovereign individual, Ben, where, you know, the information technology, you know, diminishes the power of the nation state.

But I think during the transition, unfortunately, the Fiat politics are unavoidable. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's going to be plenty of this. There's going to be back and forth of like, ban it, make it legal tender. Like, there's, and it's going to be kind of on the extreme ends of the spectrum. And then because of that, we'll get some watered down like mid-range BS that doesn't really affect much of anything. But you're right, that Overton window shifting is a good thing in the long run. And I think that even in the context of like, oh, we've, you know, we've laid out the rules. Well, I still feel like once people get on Bitcoin and they start using Bitcoin, the the guard rails that have been set up are irrelevant because you become that sovereign individual

and you start learning about how to be that sovereign individual. So I think you're right. Overton window shifting gets people in a different mindset, opens them up to new ideas and shifts them towards a Bitcoin standard. Beautiful. Exactly. Slowly but surely. And I think a lot of Bitcoiners, you know, inherently they're hardcore libertarians and they're

like you know you know F the state yes is whatever and I'm like dude like you tell that to your neighbor and they're literally going to call the FBI you know like what are you doing man like slowly get them a hardware wallet first send them to ptze sessions send them some tutorials what are you doing oh man so uh so yeah but slowly but surely but i think this if you look at it from that lens i think this is a piece of news if you just look on it just on it just on its surface I think it's just noise, in my opinion, because there's no way this passes. Okay, so we are living through the separation of money in state. Let me make sure this video doesn't play.

But we are living through the separation of money in state, and this is kind of the state fighting back. EU lawmakers impose prohibitive requirements on banks' crypto holdings. So check it out. The European Parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee voted to impose strict restrictions on banks seeking to hold Bitcoin and shiqcoins. The measures a leaked version of which was reported by CoinDest Monday are a bid to anticipate international norms that would limit the amount of unbacked assets such as Bitcoin. You better lighten up on that cash there then.

Unbacked. Come on. Like what is this then? What is that? What is that? Oh, good Lord. Yeah. Okay. So.

And ether. Lenders can hold before the European... See, they're there they're right, before the European Commission proposes more extensive rules. In the meantime, quote, banks will be required to hold a euro of own capital for every euro that they hold in Bitcoin and shit coin. Marcus Ferber, the economic spokesman for the Parliament's largest political grouping, said in a statement. Quote, such prohibitive capital requirements will help prevent instability in the crypto world from spilling over into the financial system. Over the past couple of years, we have seen the crypto assets are high, high risk environment, high risk investment. So, like, this is talking from a place of financial privilege. You know, like in Argentina, they're not looking at it that way. You know, in Turkey, in Venezuela, in Nigeria, you know, I spoke to Olu.

He came, he, you know, came on my show a couple days ago, Ben. I've never seen that amount of optimism and hope in my entire life. And the statement that stuck with me that he said, Ben, was, and I don't, there's this accent and everything, man. It was so happy. He said, Satoshi created Bitcoin for my country. And I was like, oh my God. Like, this is such a strong statement. Because fine.

You know, Ben, you and I were privileged. We live in countries that have relatively stable fiat currencies, right? We're okay. But imagine in a Nigerian that's dealing with double digit inflation. And you read this and you tear it up and you use it as toilet paper. Like they are the ones that cause the instability with the money printing. They are the ones that cause the instability with the deficit spending. Bitcoin is the solution.

It's not the problem. Yeah. Yeah. It's laughable when you look at like, again, you take the top, you know, dozen or so currencies in the world that have relative stability. And outside of that, it's kind of a cluster fuck, right? Like you're either you're either dealing with like terrible capital controls or you're dealing with double digit inflation or both.

And you don't have access to any sort of banking internationally. Like it's it's a total mess and to to basically label a free and open system like this as as, you know, anything other than a godsend to those. people is I'd say irresponsible. Yeah, yeah, 100%. So that's from the EU perspective on our side of the pond. You know, this is, this is, they're taking advantage. You know what's interesting about this, right?

The DOJ made this huge announcement that they're shutting down Bits Lato, right? You know, and it was like an announcement of an announcement. But it was really interesting is that the Tucker clip played right before And the Tucker clip was just like, I think we played it last week, right? Did we play it last week? Yeah, yeah. And the Tucker clip was basically saying something like the Bitcoin price pumped right after the ransomware thing was paid off. And it just seemed like, okay, that was a couple days after the DOJ announced that they were doing something.

So what about like all the casino exchanges? no, it's some exchange that none of us have ever heard of. I've never heard of. What is that? I don't even know what that is, you know, but I just think it's hilarious. I mean, it was laughable because I saw the announcement of the announcement. I was like, oh, this could be serious because like they're like that's, that's kind of like a, you know, strongly worded. Like they're coming out to swinging.

And then I was like, why even bother announcing it? anything like it had the opposite effect everybody's like oh okay great cool stack some more sets no dude it's so ridiculous and then the framing i think it's really important and then just like keep in mind of the framing and then think about how they framed el salvador like yeah just because it's hidden behind this nice facade of often like you know trust us we're this where we are the new york time like look at the look at the hubris bro look at the text okay yeah we are the New York Times. We like to make our tease weird

AF because we're the New York Times. So sorry, but I just think it's hilarious. So yeah, so, you know, the language and the framing, like money laundering, fraud, tax evasion, real virtual, our risk that won't go away on their own.

So you need the government to get involved and shut down Bits Lobo. That's something that we've never heard of. But hey, you know what? Let's invite SBF you know, on stage, him a round of applause. In fact, not only we're going to give him a round of applause, we're going to invite him to the same event that Janet Yellen was at. Why not? You know, it's so ridiculous. If these people wanted any type of credibility on their stance, the idea of literally welcoming in the guy who's like supposed to be a regulated entity in the United States that is actually welcoming in the guy who's like supposed to be a regulated entity in the United States that is actually, actively committing fraud against all of the users.

And basically just like stealing money and buying up real estate in the Bahamas. They literally had them right there, you know, chumming it up with them, buying off a third of Congress. Like it's it's hilarious to me how you get messaging like this as if they didn't like, they weren't, you know, getting getting handy. in the back from SBF like to give favorable legislation and he would have gotten it had it not blown up so soon right he would have been able to do do enough you know monetary and sexual favors to have FTX in the clear for the foreseeable future what was happening in that penthouse in the

Bahamas I'm yelling must have been there oh my God Yes, she was. I hope Opti had broken up. I was about to mention that I was like, Opti, have you been to the Bahamas lately? Let me see your passport. All right, last story is this. And it's a story as old as time.

Not your keys, not your Bitcoin. Binance acknowledges storing user funds with collateral and error. Exchange just to bullet points. Exchange wallet held both customer assets and reserve tokens. Binance is aware of a mistake and in the process of correcting it. How do you know they're correcting it? You just have to take their word for it, I guess. So I mean, look, I don't know,

Ben, we've we've beat this dead horse a million times, you know, not your keys, not your Bitcoin, stop trusting other people, especially now that you have the technology not to do so. This doesn't surprise me whatsoever. Yeah. And I mean, again, this is just a tiny example. Like, who knows, what other fuckery happens in the background in any of these places. Like just because Binance has been around the, around the block for a few years doesn't mean that they're insulated from this type of behavior. They're equally,

uh, you know, there's an equal chance that they've, they've done many of the same things that all the other bad actors that have since imploded, uh, have done. Uh,

they've just done a good job at literally letting no one look at their balance sheet since 2018, because that's the last time they took money from anybody. So yeah, not your keys, not your coins, learn self-custody. I will say it time and again. It is not more difficult than legacy banking. You had to learn that at some point as well. And that is antiquated as fuck.

If you can download an app and you can write down 12 words, you can self-custody. And I know that's an oversimplification of what goes on there. but you can self-custody with those basic skills. It's not too much of an additional step once you get into hardware. 100%. And like I would, I would, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said the, like, writing down 12, 24 words, 12 or 24 words is a hundred times easier than open a bank account. Like opening a bank account right now takes like an hour and a half.

You know, they, you know, they do every change. check known to man. You know, they make you open your mouth like, you know, what are you doing? Yeah. Do you like the like circle. Do you like Bitcoin? Get out of here. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Learn about all our unregistered securities and earn underregistered securities. Oh, man. So, but what a crazy time to be alive. Yeah. Well, I mean, if people are here and they're watching, even if they're not Bitcoin only yet, even if they don't have self-custody yet, they're in the right place to start down that pathway. So if you haven't yet, take that first step, download a wallet, learn how to back it up, do a test transaction, put 20 bucks,

50 bucks in it, and just start that learning progression and you will get there. Amen to that, brother. Amen to that. Awesome. Well, dude, thank you so much. I appreciate you. I'm excited to gingerly touch our tips in Miami. We will plan that more. And yeah, man, it should be a good time. That's right. We will touch tips in Miami. If you took that out of context, you know,

you know, but it's for Bitcoin guys. It's for the culture. Yeah, it's the internet. We'll see some sort of, out of context clip or meme or something about it at some point. Oh, man. I'm so excited. Anyways, Ben, this is always a blast.

Guys, this was your Simply sessions. Thanks, man. See you later. All right, everybody. How was that? Go on, make sure you got to follow Nico. You got to subscribe to Simply Bitcoin. You got to follow everything they're doing.

They cover the news six days a week. They got you covered. This is just a taste. A few things I want to touch on before we wrap up a new series coming out. Thanks to Bitcoin Magazine. Matt O'Dell will be the host and interviewer on Freedom Money. There's going to be a series that's starting February 1st. They just dropped the trailer on the Bitcoin Magazine YouTube page.

And yeah, it looks pretty good. He's got a lot of people that he speaks to about how Bitcoin has helped them in their situation, and it looks really well produced. So hats off to them. I've got to say I'm very excited to see this series. If you haven't already, hop over, check out the Freedom Money official trailer. Looks like a banger. I've been touching on this lately.

We talked about it in this show. But yeah, head over to Noster. Go and give me a follow. BTC Sessions, my at Nosterplebs.com. You can find me just by searching that. VTCSessions at Nosterplubs.com. If you're not on Noster, but you are on Twitter, go check on my tutorial on it and get playing because it's pretty badass.

I've got to say, it's pretty awesome. I thoroughly enjoy it. The experience keeps on getting better, the feed and everything that you can. Oh, somebody even said, intuitive guy, shared the show earlier. Thanks, man. And yeah, there's a ton of stuff to check out, and it cannot be censored. So, yeah, head to Noster.

Get your awesome, awesome memes. Also, shout out to Rabinstein, who gave me my awesome GIF profile picture. You can have GIF profile pictures, and you can tip in lightning on there. So it's awesome. A few other things that dropped this week, number one, just this morning, I dropped a full tutorial on the Nunchuk Bitcoin Inheritance assisted multi-sig setup. So Nunchuk, if you're unfamiliar with the wallet, it's awesome.

And just from like a regular wallet perspective, you can run hot wallets, you can manage your cold wallets, and you can create your own multi-sig quorums within. You can connect your own node. You can do a whole bunch of different things. Well, they now have a number. assisted multi-sig setup. So what's assisted multisig? It's something like what you would get from CASA or Unchained. So where another entity holds one key in your multi-sig quorum and they're kind of like your backup signer. Now the difference here is if you sign up for CASA are unchained, they are KYCed.

So you have to provide like KYC information ID, all that kind of stuff. But Nunchuk is non-KYC. and they do so because you can provide nothing more than an email address to sign up, so that could be a dummy email address, but also they're working on support for this particular product with nothing more than just signing in with a private key, and that is your identifier. You can then set up an inheritance program through this, and I did it with the tap signer, the cold card mark four,

and the blocks from Jade for the multi-sig quorum, and the tap signer acts as the inheritance key. And it extracts a file, which is encrypted. And then it also provides a decryption key for that, as well as a three-word identifier so that they can locate the particular file on their servers at the time of redemption, whatever you set it for. And so you give the beneficiary or a trustee, the decryption key, and the identifier words. And then they get a notification via email when,

it's time to claim the inheritance and they provide that information. They get access to their key and then they can allow Nunchuk to co-sign for them with a second key to remove the funds. I went through it all. I went into detail on how to basically do everything in it. So it's a good detailed in-depth video. It's like an hour and a half. Of course, some of it's like the more advanced stuff.

But nonetheless, check it out. I've got to say I'm pretty stoked because the tradeoff always was for collaborative multi-sig was the KYC, was the fact that you're giving up your information. And so does that become a honeypot? Like if somebody, you know, gets access to their systems, even though they, you know, they couldn't technically, they wouldn't have access to your funds. They'd still be able to say, oh, this person who's KYC'd and is from here or whatever has this much Bitcoin in a multi-sig. Huh. Maybe it's a good time to kidnap that person.

So, you know, there's there's that degree of risk there. Whereas with Nunchuk, you can keep it anonymous. You can still have that peace of mind that, okay, well, there's support. There's a just in case key. There is an inheritance plan in place if something happens to me. And then I still have full access with my other keys to move funds around as I see fit, change the date of the inheritance, change the allocation, change all of that. It's, I'm pretty impressed with what they've done.

And yeah, so kudos to them. Check it out if you're interested. It seems to be like a pretty decent offering. And it's kind of like, I'd say the offering is kind of like on par with what Kasa was doing with its like 305. But a little bit of a different setup, a different quorum, different kind of threat vector. But yeah, also cheaper than like Kasa is quite expensive, right? So cheaper than Kasa in terms of the type of quorum you're doing. And then tomorrow, why are we bullish?

6 p.m. I've got Jaime from El Salvador. He's going to be talking to us a little bit. Jaime Garcia. We've got Max Demako, a.k.a. pleb music, awesome filmmaker. And we've got Madex, aka Space Bowl on Twitter, awesome Bitcoin artist. We're going to be chat about a whole bunch of stuff. So make sure you don't miss it.

We're going to be live tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern time. So that's it. We're going to round up. Thank you guys so much for watching. Like, sub, share. That all helps a ton. By the way, if you're looking for one-on-one education sessions, if the tutorials are not enough for you, you can book me for one-on-ones via my website, BTCSessions.ca. If you want to help the show in another way, hit up the sponsors down below. Coin Kite, Start 9, Hottle, Hodel, and Privacy Pros.

And if you really liked what you saw, you can drop me a Bitcoin tip on my strike page. You don't need strike to do it. you just head to strike.me slash BTC sessions, type in any amount you want, hit the tip button, you'll see a lightning invoice or if you tap to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. I'll see you guys next time for your daily session. Toddled by Bitcoin.