BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: Gemini VS DCG - Time Running Out ep312

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Gemini offers ultimatum to Barry Silbert/DCG, NOSTR picks up steam, Coinbase to surveil more in wake of fines and much 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/QUEM 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. This is the first live show since the Christmas show. So I'm happy to be back. And I got my buddy Nico back and we're going to be chatting some news. I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year's. And yeah, I'm back in the saddle this week. I already dropped some tutorial stuff. And I'm obviously, I'm not home right now.

I'm in Toronto for an event. I'll tell you guys about that later. But of course, you guys are here for the news. All the stuff that's been going on. We've got plenty to talk about and we'll get into that momentarily. Of course, this is live so anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live.

We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. Of course, if you have not already, do like, subscribe, share all those things. help a ton in getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session.

All right, before we dive in, let's take a look at where we are on the market right now. This is timechain calendar.com. We're sitting at 16,859 kuck bucks per coin. A single US dollar will pick you up 5,932. Sats, 91.68% of all Bitcoin have been mine, which is 19.25 million. And in terms of fees, next block, one sat per byte, if you're looking for any, or sorry, not next block, but low priority, one sat per bite. If you're looking for like next block, immediate priority in and around 16 or so,

sats per bite. Of course, give a quick shout out to sponsors of this show, coin kite.com, whom I'm going to be seeing Rodolfo tomorrow. tomorrow, which will be exciting. I'm excited to see him. But nonetheless, coincite.com, they have the best damn hardware in the game. I love my cold card, Mark 4, to secure my stack. It is a must if you're a hardcore Bitcoiner.

But they've got all kinds of great stuff here. The block clock is incredible. By the way, I convinced my wife to put a block clock micro in the living room. And then the first time it flashed the LED light. She's like, is that going to happen all the time? me thinking. I'm like, well, I said it to five minutes, so technically not all the time. So anyways, it's fun. Anyways, they've got awesome stuff. Be sure to head out to coin kite.com to check out the store

and use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything in the store. Up next, we've got Start 9, your sovereign computing solution. I've done a full tutorial on how to set up your Bitcoin stack. So running Bitcoin Core to be able to connect your external wallets, running your own lightning know how to set up channels, all that good stuff and a bunch of other Bitcoin goodies. But it's not just for Bitcoin. It's to get your data back into your own hands and out of the hands of corporations for great reasons like privacy and owning your data instead of somebody else owning it.

So if you're curious about them, of course, check out my tutorial, but head over to start9.com. You can check out the embassy one or the embassy pro. If you're looking for something beefy to run your entire life on, hoddle, hoddle up next. If you are stacking stats and you have a few priorities, namely peer-to-peer exchange, self-custody, non-KYC, then this is the place to be going because you can sign up with nothing more than an email address and be trading peer-to-peer within minutes. It is a breeze to use. I've done a full tutorial on it.

They've also got their lending platform in which nothing is ever re-hypublicated. Highly recommend. Definitely check out. And if you're a Trezzi user, by the way, it is integrated with Trezor Suite. So you can click directly to it and stack directly to your cold storage there. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, make sure you get it in solid steel. The awesome dudes over at PrivacyPros.io have the bill foddle. And this allows you, again, to get your seed in solid steel.

So you don't have to worry about things like fire damage, water damage, and the rest. This is how I'm backing up my important Bitcoin wallets. And they also have things for the tinfoil hat brood amongst us, like Faraday bags, to store your hardware in. So check them out. Finally, let's give some shout-outs. It's been a while since I did the shout-outs. But shout-outs to all the people that have been streaming sats to the pod. audio via fountain or breeze or what have you.

Of course, thanks for the bullishness or the great year of bullishness. See you in 23. That's from Stu. We've got peanut butter life. Great name. Best show ever from the Christmas show. Awesome episode. Merry Christmas from Justin.

Error message. It's a great show. Amazing show from Cliff. Enjoyed. Looking forward to this every year. Nice moderating, too, from Guapadoo. We got some bulls and Christmas trees from Michael. Mo, BTC, Giac.

You got to say it like that. Dieik. This was so awesome, thanks, Ben. Bitcoin Benito, love your show. Greetings from Germany. Fistful of Sats. Loving the Christmas session, mate, great work. Big thanks to you and your amazing guests.

And then cryosats. Just peppered me with Sats. Merry Christmas brother. Keep trucking baby. Thanks a lot, man. I appreciate it. And then a new one, just 12 minutes ago from Joey. I know I speak for all my sessioners.

Is that the thing now? Is that what it's going to be? When I say, Ben, you are the reason why I'm bullish. Join the session. Also, nice is niece is a boss. Nice is a boss. He's just missing a gold streak in his voluptuous locks. Awesome.

Well, Nico, I think, is what he meant to. Nice. I'm going to call him nice, though. Nees, nice. Either way, yes, he just, maybe I'll do some convincing. Let's get him in here and we can chat about hair, hair, thoughts. Thoughts, Nico, or nice, should I put it. Are you going to be streaking it up anytime soon? By the end of this year, most likely. But instead of, you know, what your side, I'll go on the opposite side so that we can kind of like go like this and we'll have a full streak. Yeah, well, touch the tips. I didn't want to go there, but I'm down. Why not? We got to try things. Let's give this some decoration here. Boom.

I'm glad to have you back, man. I hope you had a very Merry Christmas, a happy New Year and all the rest. And it's been too long. So, yeah, it's really good to have you. I was having withdrawals, to be honest. I need my session. Yeah, it happens. It happens. Well, dude, we've got plenty to talk about. There's been lots going on.

I'll grab your screen up here. But let us know what's what's top of mind? What's important in your eyes? What's been going on? Dude, like, so I'm surprised this didn't make more of a more of a ruckus. Like, I'm very surprised. So Michael Saylor went on his spaces a couple days before the new year. And he basically announced that micro strategy was going to throw their hat in the ring in terms of lightning, which is absolutely freaking crazy.

I'm surprised it's like you could say it's noise, but I mean, I think it's a pretty big deal, right? What's the current lightning network capacity is around 85 million, you know, cuck bucks, right? If we do want hyper-bitonization, right? We do know that a lot of the transactions, global money, a lot of these transactions can't happen on the main chain. So 85 million US dollar capacity is not enough. And I suspect this is the logic behind Michael Saylor going in that direction, right? Of course, lightning's come a long way.

Five years ago was basically non-existent. So it's definitely headed in the right direction. But what I'm trying to say is that we do need to keep up the pressure. Right. And I believe that this is kind of like the reasoning behind Michael Saylor. stepping in this direction. Yeah. Yeah.

It's interesting because when he first came to Bitcoin, he was very much in the camp of like, at least it came off as like solely store value, transfer value across time. But now he seems to be honing in a little bit more on the transactional nature of it as well with the, you know, layer two, lightning, all that kind of stuff.

He seems to be focusing on, oh, this can actually help people. and in other economies and places where they've been, you know, not kind of disenfranchised by legacy finance. Yeah, 100%. So let's check out some of this article, get into the details. The headline for audio listeners, Microstrategor to offer Bitcoin Lightning Solutions in 2023. Micro Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor has shared his firm's plans to release Bitcoin Lightning Network powered software and solutions in 2020. Dude, that is big, sorry, that is big news.

Big, big fudging news. In a Twitter Spaces event on December 28, Saylor shared that the company is exploring software and solutions that utilize the Lightning Network, such as solutions that support enterprise marketing, as well as a cybersecurity solution aimed at corporate websites. The Lightning Network is a layer two, but you guys know that.

A business intelligent, no, you guys know that. During the Twitter Spaces conversation, Sealer explained that the chief marketing officers could potentially use Lightning Network to incentivize customers, such as giving out Satoshi reward for engaging in activities, such as posting good reviews or competing in surveys.

The company also wants to make it possible for enterprise to spin up lightning infrastructure in an afternoon. And I think that's a very important component. And I know that the company, I'm sure you know them, Ben Voltage is kind of, you know, they're trying to make the adoption of lightning or incorporating lightning into your business stack. They're trying to make it turnkey.

Right. And it looks like I think sailors seeing it on the wall because the reality is that legacy finance things are turnkey. Like, think about how easy it is to incorporate something like PayPal into your business, right? If you ever spun an e-commerce website, it's extremely easy, right? Shopify, all that stuff. But Bitcoin isn't quite there. Sorry, Bitcoin and Lightning Network aren't quite there. So I think this is definitely a step in the right direction. And, you know, it's the Chad sailor behind it, which, you know, freaking awesome. Yeah, I think it's a huge positive. And you're right. Like,

it's if you want to incorporate lightning into your business, there's, you know, there's some solutions out there, but it's definitely not as easy right now for those that just wanted as a payment option. Yeah, there's there's there's room to grow and I'm glad to see people deciding to jump in there. A hundred percent. It's definitely, it's definitely a step in the right direction. So the big news, I think, and I'm going to kind of connect the dots for you guys. And, Because if it was just by itself, you know, you could make the argument that like, oh, Nico, like, this is noise and whatever. But Jeff Booth recently on my show. And Ben, what he was talking about was we're heading from this like peak centralized world into this decentralized world.

Right. And I think that this is where Noster, which is a protocol, fits into this. and for you guys to like type it like if you guys want to like think about it so like if you if you look at twitter twitter is this centralized entity it's an app it's everything right and if you look at what noster is think about what bitcoin is right this is bitcoin protocol works right but think about how many wallet softwares are built on top of bitcoin because it's an open protocol right i know ben's a sparrow junkie i'm an electron junkie right but you know it's it's software's built on top of that so this is what Noster is. Noster is an open source communications protocol. And the reason that it's

important is it's decentralized, meaning it's very difficult to censor people's ideas. And ideas in today's world, there is a lot of governments, to put it nicely, that would prefer you not saying or speaking your mind on the interwebs, right? Which is why something like this is so important. So this is Walker. He is a member of the crypto couple. Shout out to Carla as well. And he does this great write-up on the BTC Times and he describes what Noster is. This has probably seen a lot of folks on Twitter talking about Noster recently.

Jack like Knoxor so much, he donated 14 Bitcoin to Noster, open source development. Noster stands for notes and other stuff transmitted by relays. Think of Noster like a social network built similar to Twitter where you can create posts and notes like post, follow and follow people, boost posts. You may see posts and note use interchangeably on Noster. An event in Noster can be any one of these previously mentioned actions. One thing to make abundantly clear, Nostr is a protocol. It's a set of rules that servers and clients use to communicate, just like Bitcoin email or BitTorrent.

Noster is not an app nor a platform. Unlike Twitter, Noster is decentralized. There are no central servers or corporations who can control what you can post and what others can see. Right. So, you know, and then the thing that I wanted to show you guys, guys as well is this app called DOSMUS, which is the iOS version of it. So I don't have it pulled up. Anyways, so the reason I want to talk about this, Ben, right, is this idea of centralization versus decentralization. And I think it's much needed in today's world. He's Jordan Peterson,

very, very famous, you know, Canadian, I don't want to say influencer, but broadcaster, he was a psychologist, right? Super famous. Now he has this huge podcast. And basically he's going through a struggle session. It's absolutely crazy this is happening in Canada. And he tweeted this out the other day. He said, the Ontario College of Psychologists has amended that I submit myself to mandatory social media communications retaining with their experts for among other things, retweeting Pierre Polivar and criticizing Justin Trudeau. In the past, Jordan Peterson has been the platform. He has been centered on Twitter already. And more importantly, I think this also highlights, right, that it's not only, you know, the Canadian government, also the U.S. government,

as well. These are the infamous Twitter files that have been being released. Matt Taibi is one of the people that Elon Musk is using to release them. And all these, right, there's just kind of like summaries about what happens. If you put the politics aside, here is the information about the FBI, which is a government agency, getting involved in the censoring and the deplatforming of American citizens. So this is why protocols are so important. And I'm not only talking about Noster, I'm talking about Bitcoin, right? So if they don't want you, if they're not okay with things that you can say, what makes you think that they would be okay with you transacting with anybody? These are the same people that want you to trust them with central bank digital currencies. Are you absolutely

freaking crazy, right? If you can't even be okay with me posting something, speaking my mind on the internet, what makes you think I will trust you with the power of money, basically, you know? And look, this isn't even a theory anymore. This happened during the Canadian Truckers protest. They froze people's accounts because of political beliefs. And I think this is why protocols are so important. This is why something like Noster is so important. And this is why something like Bitcoin is so important.

And I think eventually, Ben, what's going to happen is this is going to fundamentally change the behavior of governments because if they can't censor your money, if they can't censor your speech, they're going to be forced to actually debate the idea. And I think if they can't, if their idea can't stand on its own, right? Something's got to give. My two cents. Yeah. I mean, I've been, I feel like I'm lagging in the Noster department in terms of having actually played around with it myself. I just haven't had the time to do. So other than, you know, I got like a kind of like a throwaway private key and, you know, did a few messages and just kind of like tinkered.

But from my understanding of it, like it's, again, because it's a protocol and it's not, you know, not an app, it's not specifically an app. It's not, there's no centralized anything to be shut down. It's just leaps and bounds above anything else that you could have. And the idea of, you know, yes, you can have an app like, like Domas is an app that you can download that interacts with the Nostra protocol. But again, much like any Bitcoin wallet, you'd have any app. What I'm wondering, because I did see something earlier that Domas was submitted to the iOS app store.

And I don't know if this has been updated since, but they basically said like, I know it's in test flight right. now but they basically said like oh to officially be in the app store um you're going to have to comply with these things which is basically saying like the ability to um to uh like prevent users from posting certain things or like take down whatever and they're like i don't think you know the the devs are like i don't think you understand what this is it's not like we don't run the Domus does not run the protocol. Domus is a browser, like effectively. So you're, you know, like, it's the equivalent of saying like,

ooh, we don't know if we can allow Firefox into the app store. Because if you use Firefox to browse the internet, how is Firefox going to prevent bad things from being on the internet? Like, it's such a stupid concept. So I'm wondering what kind of, it's almost like, the protocol itself is sound, but there's going to be hurdles, and those hurdles are the app stores. And I wonder how that shakes out in the long... I hope that what ends up happening is that we get more choice of app stores and we get more people

just natively downloading apps directly to their phone. I don't know, man. It's... Ben, like, you gave me an idea when you were talking about it, right? which is so you have to have the ability for certain things to be taken down you can hear that same rhetoric saying you have to have the ability to not allow certain types of transactions right so it's like the old world is clashing with the new world at full you know full speed and you can see like dude the sovereign individual holy cry i know i bring it up all the time on this show but

man did they get things right holy cow um that's what what I got to say. Anyway, so moving on to this, dude, I mean, look, the lesson from, you know, the lesson of this cycle is not your keys, not your Bitcoin, right? You know, and unfortunately, a lot of people have to get burnt because of it. But let's check out this report by Reuters. I also, you know, to give the shit coin exchange a little bit of credit, okay? And I usually don't do this. Royters has been extremely hostile. towards this whole movement, right? So not only are they hostile to shit coins,

they've also been extremely hostile to El Salvador and Naimbukele. So clearly this is to create a narrative, right? But that doesn't mean that a lot of the things, a lot of the information they're pointing out is wrong, right? When they create the narrative with El Salvador, they pick and choose what things to mention and what not to mention. Right?

They don't mention the lowering in crime. They don't mention the record GDP growth. They don't mention any of that. Right? They mention these little cases here and there, it's not necessarily that they're false, but there's a lot more nuance to that. So saying that caveat, check out the special report. Binance books are a black box filing show as it tries to rally confidence.

And the signal here, right, and I'll go through it, but the signal here is the fact that Binance.us, when you deposit something to Binance. US, it's not deposited with Binance.us, therefore, protections from the Binance.us exchange. It's actually deposited with Binance International. And that's exactly what FTX did. Remember, FtX had FtX.U.S and FTX international. And in the beginning, SBF was trying to spin up the narrative that, hey, if your funds on FtX.U.S, they're protected. In the grand scheme of things, no, they weren't. It was all commingled. And I suspect this is really, the case here. Anyways, it goes on to say the world's biggest crypto exchange finance is battling

to shore up confidence against a surge in customer withdraws and a steep trap in the value of its token. The exchange said it dealt with net outflows of around $6 billion over 72 hours last week without breaking stride because its finances are solid, quote, and we are taking our responsibility as custodian seriously. After the collapse of FTX exchange FTX last month, finance founder, CZ promised his company would lead by example in break. seeing transparency. Okay. All that being said, Ben, okay? How about you just stop trusting other people with your money? Crazy idea. Absolutely radical. I know, but like it's a story oldest time, right? It happened with the banks, happened with Bernie Madoff, it happened with Stanford, happened with SBF.

Now that we have the technology that allows you to take millions, trillions, billions, billions of dollars into your own hands by writing down a 12 word seed phrase and storing it. After what happened with Luke Dash, I have no shame, storing it on a hardware wallet. People are still seen to be making the same mistake, and I think it's an absolute tragedy. Stop trusting CZ, even if he's the most transparent in the world. Start trusting yourself. Yeah, 100%. Like, it's, it blows my mind, like, reading through some of the details there on this article,

which everybody should maybe give it a read because it's pretty interesting, like, how little anybody knows about anything on the books of Binance. They haven't taken any outside investment since 2008. And because they're not a publicly listed company, they basically haven't had to disclose anything about their finances to anyone since 2018. So like five years basically, nobody has had any insight into the books of finance and what the fuck's actually going on there. Furthermore, in the article there,

the thing I found interesting was that they don't even disclose now where where Binance is based, like in what jurisdiction it's based. Like they don't specifically say. And then they also have gone out of their way to say, oh, you know, we're doing all these things and these jurisdictions and we're fully regulated and they listed off like 14 different jurisdictions. Meanwhile, the people from those jurisdictions are like, no like you're not you're not what you say you are you're you're kind of and and he's kind of

using if uh i was about to say f tx Freudian slip he's kind of using he's kind of he's using binance us to get the legitimacy of being based in the u.s and and use the language around what pertains to being in the u.s to the rest of binance and using terminology and guarantees that are meant for the U.S. version for everything else. So, yeah, to me, it just sounds, it sounds shady as fuck. And I think that the only reason that, that, you know, if anything is a rye in the background here, which there's got to be, there's got to be some stuff going on. I think it, the only reason it hasn't been worse is because nobody really has.

any insight into the books whatsoever. And so they're able to kind of like push it along further than perhaps it would have gone. Yeah, I don't know. Is Binet's going to collapse? No idea. But I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them. Yeah, 100%. Like I would even go.

I would say, I would say, Ben, like, why trust anybody at this point? You know, it's like, like, why you don't have to trust people? Better said, okay, because I know I'm going to beat up. Trust to minimize. Okay, trust minimize. You can trust minimize it. And I think that giving your custody of your Bitcoin to anybody, anybody, right? I think at this point is absolutely reckless, especially with everything that's happened.

So I completely agree. And yeah, definitely check out this article if you have it. Anyways, Ben, I think this is the Big Kahuna today. This is the big Kahuna. This is the moment that everybody's been waiting for. So Cameron Winklevye. So he wrote an open letter to Barry Silbert. Barry Silbert, for anybody doesn't know,

he is the founder CEO of the parent group of Grace Scale. Also, Coindex, I might add. And they have a lot of Bitcoin. They have a lot of Bitcoin. But anyways, Gemini Earn was the yield product that the Gemini Exchange offered. right and here is Cameron Winklewey in the open basically writing a letter so that you know obviously this is going to put pressure public pressure on Barry Silbert

I'm not going to read you the whole thing because it's very long but I am going to read you the first part and then I'm going to check out some of the comments because they went back and forth and then a lot of the plebs just went ham which is absolutely hilarious this Barry today marks 47 days since Genesis halted withdrawals I think I don't know about you Ben I think Cameron was definitely paying attention to Matt Odell tweets, keeping track in the days. I think so. I think so.

Oh, man. Okay, so this is the first paragraph says Barry. Today marks 47 days since Genesis Holted withdraws. I'm writing on behalf of more than 340,000 earn users. We're looking for answers. These users aren't just numbers on a spreadsheet. They are real people. A single mom who sent her son's education money to you.

A father who sent his son's bar mitzo money to you. A husband and wife who lent their life savings to you. A school teacher who lent his children. Children's college funds to you, a policeman, and so many more. Altogether, these people entrusted more than $900 million of their assets to you. They deserve concrete answers, and we're here to get them. Cameron, shame on you because I think you're smart enough to realize what you are offering your clients. Okay, so obviously trying to push the blame.

Barry Silver says DCG did not borrow $1.67 million from Genesis. And then Cameron says, there you go again. Stop trying to pretend that you and DCG are an opponent. And then, Ben, it all goes full circle. And I'm going to say this to you, stop trusting other people with your money and you wouldn't be in this position, right? Yeah, it's crazy. And you know what?

I'm going to add one further thing to this for just a second. I got to throw up this guy's face because, remember, this is Alex Machinsky from Celsius. anyways, just from earlier today, judge rules that Celsius users, like if you didn't read that fine print, gave up legal rights to their Bitcoin by using the platform. And all $4.2 billion of crypto deposits are now property of Celsius. Yeah.

I mean, that really sucks. But again, like to what you keep saying, stop giving people, your Bitcoin. Like if you purchase Bitcoin from someone, take it. Don't leave it there. Don't give it to somebody else. Take it.

Keep it safe. Unbelievable. Unbelievable, right? It's so ridiculous. They're putting the blame game while everybody gets stuck. Like, do you think Cameron Winklevi? Do you think in the grand scheme of his net worth? Do you think he's affected?

No. Right. It's the people that entrusted Gemini, shame on Cameron. and then Gemini entrusted Barry Silver. Stop trusting other people with your money. I think is the moral of the story with finance and Gemini. And those are massive exchanges, right? Just some of the biggest in the industry.

So speaking of meltdowns, Silvergate, massive bank in the industry, raised to cover $8.1 billion in withdraws during crypto meltdown. And here's some of the details. Shout out to No BS Bitcoin that broke it down. This is major Bitcoin banking partner Silvergate. And it goes on to say the collapse of FTX sparked a run on Silvergate Capital Corp, forcing the bank to sell assets at a steep loss to cover $8.1 billion in withdraws. And here are some of the exchanges that have to do with Silvergate.

We have FTX, Coinbase, Paxos, Crypto.com, Gemini, Cracken, BitStamp, Circle. It's absolutely massive. It goes on to say the 718 million Silvergate loss selling debt far exceeds the bank's total profits since at least, oh, man, dude. Oh, man. I'm going to race a decade. Is it going under? The bank has laid off 40% of its staff or about 200 employees.

It shelved a plan to launch its own digital currency. Well, there is a silver lining. There we go. Silver lining to Silvergate. One left shit coin. I don't know if I can keep reading this. The Silvergate caters of Bitcoin companies taking their deposits, operating a network.

FDX and other companies controlled by its founder, SBF. Silvergate was able to survive such a steep decline in its deposits because it isn't structured like most banks. It sold off much of its traditional banking operations and branches to focus on providing bank accounts to crypto exchange. Well, look, I don't know if it could survive, but I mean, how long is it going to take for it to be profitable? Oh, man.

10 years. Imagine, like, having been, the people running that company being like, wow, every, like all of the profits that we thought we had made over the past decade of work are erased. I mean, I don't even know what to say to that. Like, again, stop people, giving people your Bitcoin. And maybe, like, I get, I get why banks are so risk-averse for, I mean, because they, they, they kind of paint everything with broad strokes.

So that, you know, and they've been relatively right with all of these casinos, right? Like the exceptions are like the, the Bitcoin only companies that are just simply providing a ramp for somebody to purchase Bitcoin. But outside of that, you know, yeah, of course they're going to be want to be risk averse. And here's here's the reason why. Yeah. Oh, man. Oh, man. man but look I just want to emphasize there's a silver lining here

they shout out to Silvergate or did with the bank's name they are not launching their own shit coin and they had to write off $196 million and spent buying the tech oh did you hear that did you hear that they bought they bought the they bought the technology that Facebook and their shit coin was was using to launch their own shit coin then it died Why? Why? Like, they spent

196 million. Like, imagine the thought process. I mean, these guys deserve to go bankrupt at this point. But like, imagine the thought process of like, hey, you know that thing that Facebook tried to launch and failed? Let's buy that for $196 million. I'm sure little old us will be much more successful. Could you imagine if they just bought Bitcoin? Seriously. Oh my God. Total disaster. Yeah, it is. It's a total disaster. But hey, it is what it is. Okay. So the next New York Times article for audio listeners, Coinbase reaches 100 million settlement with New York regulators, right? So what's it talking about? Again, shout out to NOBS Bitcoin. It summarizes it. Coinbase pays $50 million to New York governor and promises to surveil users more.

The exchange will pay a $50 million fine for letting customers open accounts without sufficient background checks and spent $50 million to increase surveillance. Coinbase has agreed to pay $50 million fine after violating AML laundering laws by allowing customers to open accounts without sufficient background checks. The settlement with the New York State Department of Financial Services also requires Coinbase to invest $50 million to strengthen its surveillance program. Now, okay, look, I know a lot of people get distracted. by the straw man, right? The reality is that these laws, AYC and K and K-M-L and K-Y-C laws have been used to justify the sanctioning of open-source software, right? This already happened. These are the laws that they used to justify that. They've also been extremely hostile. Arthur Hayes got charged with the crime, right? And they've been extremely

hostile and extremely aggressive for exchanges not complying with these regulations. Now, I'm not advocating for crime or for any of those those things what i'm trying to say is that they use these regulations as a justify as a justification to curtail a lot of our freedoms and there is no we don't get a benefit from it there is no net benefits it's like okay so what i'm what exactly am i benefiting from this and then also the cost of doing business increases dramatically which a lot of these exchanges and a lot of these banks use as a regulatory moat to just basically like look there's no We basically have a monopoly here, right? So look, I think this is another creep, right?

Saying, look, your KYC AML isn't enough. Here's a 50 million, 50 million with an M dollar fine. Pay it, shut the F up, or you're going out of business. It's nuts, dude. It's nuts. Yeah. I love the language too. It's not even like to enhance their customer protection safety,

whatever program you normally get to enhance their surveillance program. Just just straight up. Yeah, it's straight up surveillance. Yeah. It really is, dude. It really is. All right. I think this is the last one.

So this is awesome. Feddyman Hackathon win Bitcoin for creating Fedomit models. 2.58 Bitcoin in prizes. As an open source custody platform, Fedement is a unique place where you can not only store your Bitcoin, but also extend the functionality of your Bitcoin to add privacy, smart constructs or anything else you can imagine within the scope of a community. So I think really the signal there is 2.58 Bitcoin in prizes,

win Bitcoin for creating Fedomint models. I mean, dude, I love that, man. That's awesome. You create that incentive. You make it better. I love how on Bitcoin the incentives are aligned and everyone wins. And I think that this is just another example of that. And I don't know, I'm pretty bullish on Fedoments.

Dude, I think it solves a major issue, which I describe as the custody problem. I know a lot of people like, there is no custody problem. You should just take personal responsibility. I would like to make the argument, though. And Ben, you know, you've been a Bitcoin educator for longer than I have. The reality is that there's a percentage of the population, bro, that I just don't think are going to take the personal responsibility to take self-custy. I know some bitcoins are going to, like, be like, spontaneously explode. But in my experience, maybe that's an educational thing.

maybe it's a generational thing, but I just, I just don't see it. I think that fetamins could potentially be a solution for those types of individuals. Yeah, yeah. It prevents certain things from happening. And furthermore, like, you could use a fetament between exchanges, right? You can have exchanges as a fetament, which then prevents a lot of different things, or at least like it's easier to point fingers at what the hell is going on. but again like having like tight knit groups of people communities um corporations things like that

where they're like okay we have a fetament for this um you know increases privacy in increases like transaction takes uh the amount of transactions you can do to basically unbounded um it it improves a lot of different things and it can help those that would have never taken their own self-cudency to at least be one step closer to that. And then it's, it more easily enables the Uncle Jim model to small communities. And I think that's a good thing. It's better than, it's better than leaving everything in an FTX. So, yeah, I think, I think Federman is pretty cool.

I'm still learning about it as we go. Obie was on the Christmas show talking about it. Super interesting. I think, I think it's really cool. 100% man 100% my dude awesome yeah um well dude uh thank you for uh coming on and and giving us all of this delicious information to ingest our first week back uh yeah it's uh it's been a good start to the year and i'm looking forward to much more and uh and yeah man i like let's uh let's uh Let's reminisce back, like, picture all the stuff that you've accomplished last year where everything is today with Simply Bitcoin and Simply Sessions now.

And I look forward to our first show of the year next year, reminiscing how much things have changed by then. So, so buddy, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, man. Always a pleasure to be here. Bullish on Simply Sessions, 2023. tuning out. This is your simply session. I'm going to have a streak by this year by next year. It's just come naturally. I'm not going to do anything. It's just going to be like, Nico, what is that? I'm like, I don't know. What's going on here?

If you keep traveling, it's just going to be great. That's all. Oh, man. Just saying that word gives me nightmares, man. Awesome, man. I will see you soon. Have a good night. See you later, Ben. All right. All right, everybody. A few more things I wanted to bring up before. we get ourselves moving here. I'm going to bring up my screen. By the way, again, if you're not following Nico, if you're not following Simply Bitcoin on YouTube, on Twitter, all that, go make sure you're following and watching because they've got the news six days a week. It's insane. They work themselves to the bone. Him and Omfi over there. It's, yeah, you got to subscribe.

A few things. I wanted to give shout out to some awesome content to check out. So Max DeMarco. I don't know who that guy is, but there's a guy named Pleb Music. He's a good filmmaker. And he made one, he went to South Africa to check out what is happening down there with Bitcoin. It's on YouTube. It's called The Silent Bitcoin Revolution of Africa. And it's well worth a watch. It's a nine minute, nine minute film.

Go check it out. It is super awesome. And again, you can just search on YouTube. It'll come right up. Parker Lewis is back in the game, writing again. super stoked to see a new one from him called Bitcoin is not a hedge in his gradually, then suddenly, blog series. And then I dropped a tutorial just yesterday. And the reason for this tutorial was back in December, we had some legislation floating from Elizabeth Warren and others that would effectively, it's not going to pass.

but if it were to pass, it would effectively outlaw or require licensing for anything that helped in any way relay transactions. So that would be like wallets, nodes, lightning nodes, like pretty much running the gamut. So it would make life as a Bitcoin in the U.S. a gigantic pain in the ass, if not impossible. And so I wanted to outline how stupid that was and how unenforceable it is. And so I took an article from Armand the Parman, which was on Bitcoin magazine last year. And I learned from that through in a couple extra things. And this is a video on how to create a Bitcoin wallet with effectively dice, pen, and paper. So very, very interesting if you've ever wanted to see kind of what's going on in the background and understand better what your 24.

words are when you create a wallet and back them up. Really cool way to learn. I wouldn't recommend creating your seed phrases this way as a norm. But as a learning tool, this is incredible. And it does speak to the fact that because this is possible, just how utterly unstoppable Bitcoin is. If that law were to pass, were they going to do ban dice and paper and pen and words and letters and numbers and math, again, it all of a sudden very clearly becomes you're trying to ban speech. That's what you're banning. So, yeah, check it out. It dropped yesterday.

Permissionless Bitcoin wallets, they cannot be stopped. It's on the YouTube channel. Do not miss that one. Now, I'm in Toronto. So unfortunately, I'm sorry, guys. It's not going to be a wire. We bullish tomorrow. I even set it up.

I had guests and everything. And then I realized my time zones were totally messed up. And I'm going to be part of a panel tomorrow. or a day of stuff here in Toronto. But what's going on? This is something called Finposium. It's at Queens University. And it's Bitcoin for Good conference.

It happens in about 17 hours. So I'm going to be there with a member of parliament, Ben Lobb, Brad Mills, Mags, Cryptomags, if you are familiar with her, Jason Mayer. And then Carlo Campisi from Shigpay and John Aikman. by the way, Jason is the one he's writing a book called The Progressive Case for Bitcoin. So yeah, we're all going to be speaking on stage about various things. I'm going to host a panel and also Rodolfo Novak, aka NVK from Coin Kite, creator of the cold card, is going to be there as well. So yeah, I'm going to be there speaking and and moderating a panel. It should be a lot of fun.

There's a big hackathon going. And I was very happy because Carlo was. helping organize this and effectively the team at shake pay and everything they they were doing they were able to take this from like a general crypto event and and have it focus bitcoin only which kudos kudos on that very happy to see um nonetheless that's what i'm up to that's why i am here in toronto for the next couple of days but i will be back home uh on saturday and things back to normal as per usual for next week. And I think that's pretty much all I've got for you guys.

Of course, like, subscribe, share. Thank you guys so much for watching. All those things, help get this content in front of more eyeballs. Of course, if you're looking for a little bit more handholding whenever you're doing tutorials, things like that, trying to figure out your hardware, you can book me for one-on-one sessions at my website, BTCSessions.ca. A, hit up the sponsors down below.

Coin Kite, Start 9, Hoddle, Hottle, Bill Fottle at Privacypros.io. And if you really liked what you saw, you can drop a tip on my strike page. Strike.com. Me slash BTC sessions. Type in any amount you want. Hit the tip button. You don't need strike, by the way, for this. It'll show you 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. See you guys next time for your DailySense. session. Total by Bitcoin.