BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: Global Conflict And Its Impact On Bitcoin ep239

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

With geopolitical tensions reaching a high, there is a lot of speculation as to how Bitcoin may play into all this. We'll discuss some of these points on today's show. 💪 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 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, earn sats back while you shop. https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O... BITCOIN tips: https://strike.me/btcsessions

What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Lots to talk about today. This has been a crazy couple of years. Very fourth turning-esque, if you've read the book. If you haven't, recommend you check it out the fourth turning. But yeah, lots of stuff happening around the globe. We've got a lot of stuff happening in Ukraine right now. Obviously, all the stuff that was happening in Canada and continues, I guess, to happen. Canada, we're going to touch on a bunch of it. We're going to kind of do a little bit of a focus on what's happening with these geopolitical tensions and some different takes on how it could play in with Bitcoin or affect Bitcoin or, you know, we'll kind of run the gamut here. 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. Do it live. I can write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. Now if you haven't already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things really, really do help the channel. Help get this in front of more eyeballs. But as always, I am Ben with the BTC Sessions. This is your daily session.

All right, before we dive into the news, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. Oh, Lord, I just lost access to my screen share permissions. Of course. All right, well, we're just going to go with it. Okay. We had this problem before. Anyways, so we are sitting at $37,950-ish dollars per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 2,635 sats.

90.3, 2% of all Bitcoin have in mind. And in terms of fees, six sats per byte will do you for the next block. If you're willing to wait an hour, you can still set it to one sat per byte. Of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, shakepay.com. If you're in Canada, easy way to get Bitcoin deposit via e-transfer, no deposit or withdrawal fees. They cover the minor fee for you. Thin spread. And there's a link down below if you use them there, you can, after your first $100,

get a $30 a little kickback for that. So be sure to check them out if you haven't already. Of course, they've got their Sats-back Visa card, and you can shake for Sats every single day with the app. So check them out. Leaden.io, of course, you can use your Bitcoin for a ton of different services. In particular, if you're in a pinch, you need dollars, but you don't want to sell your Bitcoin.

You can use their Bitcoin back loans. Just deposit Bitcoin. Get a loan of dollars to your bank account within 24 hours. And when you pay back those dollars, you get back the same number of Sats. They've, of course, got savings accounts for Bitcoin and USC, and they have the B2X offering as well. One of the things that, obviously, we've been talking about a bunch lately, but bit refill, easy way to get gift cards for anything you may need, whether it be fuel or groceries or really anything. It doesn't really matter.

But bit refill available in Canada and around the world, and you can buy gift cards with Bitcoin, both on-chain and lightning. You earn sats back as you shop, and they do have a referral program, too, to get yourself some extra sats while you're shopping. A couple last things. Keystone, my favorite and most used hardware wallet. It is 100% air-gapped, meaning you don't plug it into anything internet connected. It's all offline via QR code. And that keeps the keys to your money safe and offline.

Definitely recommend upgrading to the Bitcoin-only firmware. Then it works beautifully with Blue Wallet with Saobie Sparrow Specter, and it's really good in a multi-six. So check it out. And of course, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, get it in solid steel, paper doesn't cut it. And I usually use the bill flottle over at privacyprose.io for that. So be sure to check them out.

Links are down below. And with that, let's get into the news. And again, sorry, I don't have the visual accompaniment. Maybe it's time to go to a different platform because Streamyard has given me some grief lately and keeps on revoking permissions for sharing my screen. right as I'm about to do these things. But regardless, I have a Forbes article up here talking about the reasons why a war in Ukraine will make inflation worse.

And it goes through a number of different things, but I'm going to read a little bit here. And this was actually written, this was actually near the end of January. And so it was talking about kind of the buildup of troops on the border with Ukraine and how, if, conflict broke out as it now has, why that would just contribute to already bad inflation. So a few points here. So federal deficits would increase. So wars in general are inflationary. Wars involve significant expenditures to employ, transport, arm, and feed troops.

Military conflicts also involved purchasing weapons, ammunition, military equipment. The cost, just to give some context, the cost of involvement in Afghanistan, Afghanistan was estimated $3 trillion, which is less than we've even printed in the first little bit of COVID. So there you go. The additional spending of war in Ukraine will indebtedly increase federal deficit and not in the way that makes the U.S. economy more productive in the shorter long run. Second point here, monetary policy would have to ease. In order to pay for all these things, you can't have a Fed that is being hawkish, aka rising interest rates, because the interest rates on the debt that the U.S. would be racking up in doing so

would be way too cumbersome and they just wouldn't be able to afford that debt with the debt to GDP ratio as it is right now. So yeah, you'll likely see that all of those rate cuts that were being floated around start to become less and less likely. Energy prices also likely to rise. oil and natural gas prices rise sharply when war happens as armies consume enormous amounts of oil. Again, just for context in the early 2000s when Afghanistan and then Iraq happened, oil prices increased sevenfold from $25 a barrel in September 2001 to $140 per barrel in September 2008. And oil is already expensive right now.

So hold on to your hats because it might get a hell of a lot more expensive, especially, and this one isn't mentioned here in the article. But in the context of, I saw an article today talking about Germany pushing to go green. And what they actually did is, yeah, they did some renewable resources in Germany. but then they just imported oil and coal from Russia. And now those lines are starting to potentially be a little bit cut off and that the energy prices in Germany are likely to spike. So I think a lot of, and why did Germany do that, by the way, it makes their emissions look better so that they can kind of fit in with all these accords

rather than actually creating a sustainable solution. Like, it's fine if you want to be using renewables, but you better make sure that they hold up and can actually replace traditional fossil fuels before you go and go off that standard entirely. And it seemed like it was a little bit of virtue signaling there because they were still using a lot of the same resources in that transition. Also, shortages will probably worsen. A war is not just an increase in aggregate demand for energy. It would also increase demand for semiconductors and a wide range of commodities. Of course, U.S. military will go in front of any line for semiconductors or commodities in short supply. So obviously prices there would go up.

Food prices could increase. Again, natural gas is an important input in producing fertilizers. So shortage of that. There you go. And of course, the U.S. dollar could depreciate. So if the United States were to do economic sanctions on Russia, and let's say they cut them off from the Swift network, which we'll touch on is being floated here, what happens then while Russia starts conducting trade in something other than the U.S. dollar, which means that anybody else that conducts trade with Russia no longer has to hold as many U.S. dollars to pay for those goods that are coming from Russia, aka we start to start to start to stay. a shift away from the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency, which means there's much less demand. And as we've seen over the past couple of years, a hell of a lot more supply. And that

does not bode well for your purchasing power if you're sitting in U.S. dollars, let alone any other fiat currency. But yeah. So those are some of the points in and around how that affects inflation and inflation obviously at a decade highs, multi-decade highs. We have that the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and he's pledged to hit Russia with hard aggression in Ukraine and ordered an asset freeze against all main Russian banks. So what is he done here? British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he would aim to cut Russia off from the UK's financial markets as he announced a new set of sanctions in response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions include freezing the assets on all major Russian banks, including VTB Bank, the nation's second biggest bank, Johnson said Thursday.

Britain also plans to bar Russian companies and Russian government from raising money on UK markets. Britain will also ban the export of a wide range of high-tech products, including semiconductors to Russia to prohibit the nation's flagship airline, Aeroflot, from landing at UK airports. So again, we're seeing, and this will, I promise, this does tie into Bitcoin as we get further down the rabbit hole here, but we're talking about sanctions on major banks. And so the banking system and potentially the cross-border payment system like Swift, no longer functioning for one of the largest nations on Earth. And so you can see where I'm going with this. Furthermore, let's talk about people in the Ukraine. There's lines down the street of people trying to get cash out from ATMs. There's just not going to be enough cash for people panicking that are trying to get this money out. Again, in an instance where you can have some of your wealth in Bitcoin, where it's, you know,

if you can remember 12 words in your head and escape with some of your assets, that's a huge help to people like this. Furthermore, we had, and again, I'm jumping all over the place here because there's been so much happening in the past 24, 48 hours. But I saw that there was a Patreon for raising money for people in the Ukraine. And that seems to have been stopped or shut down or frozen or something there. but there is something called the Come Back Alive Foundation. And it's a Kyiv, yeah, based charity in Ukraine, primarily fundraising for Ukraine's

military to aid soldiers and volunteers with supplies, including equipment, cameras, night vision devices, so and so forth, drones, personal body protection, specialized software. Now, the interesting part here is to contribute from a the charity accepts secure money transfers. They have the Patreon thing, which we already know has been shut down. And the banking systems in disarray. And lastly, Bitcoin. So you can contribute Bitcoin.

And I just pulled this, I just pulled this article literally right before I I put on here. So forgive me if I'm not super privy to exactly what's happening. But already just today, 14 and a half Bitcoin have been donated. So Bitcoin donations to Ukrainian armed forces have soared following the Russian president's commands to invade the neighboring neighboring country. Over 14 and a half Bitcoin worth more than 550,000 US dollars have been donated so far on Thursday to one of the biggest organizations supporting the Ukrainian army. come back alive began operating in 2014 so and so forth but yeah 14 and a half bitcoin just today has gone in there so again it's an instance where um when the legacy financial system is failing in multiple ways

well you can use this alternative uh to to move value anywhere in the world unimpeded I mean, obviously, we've seen that in the last couple of weeks here. But just another example, again, globally, where, you know, they're getting donations shut down on Patreon. They're getting the banking system is in disarray and can be difficult to access. There may be lots of different hurdles here. And then Bitcoin can just be there immediately and usable. Now, it's not without its flaws. Because, you know, you've got to either have peer to peer, the ability to transact peer to peer,

you've got to have some sort of circular economy or you have to have on and off ramps. Obviously, the on and off ramps are the weak point, but if you can establish some sort of circular economy, then it begins to function seamlessly. Now, in terms of what does this mean for Bitcoin, the asset, and I almost feel in poor taste, even discussing price here. But there's been lots of comments on this. And even earlier today, we saw initially the price of gold spiked and the price of Bitcoin dropped.

And it seemed to be this knee-jerk reaction of, you know, the, the, right now the sentiment is treat Bitcoin as as a tech stock almost. And, you know, in times of war, you know, it's, you know, you don't want, I, I, I people tend to be fearful of things like tech stocks, right? However, we saw that reverse through the day. Gold started dropping and Bitcoin started going up. Now, why this happened, as anybody's guess, I did see some people speculating saying,

well, how, you know, look at how much gold Russia and China hold right now. and would it be, you know, in terms of people that may have a bit more of a pulse and maybe a bit more control over the market, that's not a positive thing necessarily for Western nations if what are perceived as aggressors are holding on to assets that are appreciating in value. And so you saw like a steep climb and then a total reversal. And you saw kind of Bitcoin and gold, you know, diverge from each other and then completely go the opposite direction. And so, you know, you have obviously probably some Peter Schiff's celebration earlier in the day, only to be completely reversed. I want to bring up a clip from Michael Saylor tweeted it out, but it's a clip from CNBC. Mohammed L. Arian talking about how this is likely to impact inflation, impact the Fed, and how it handles its monetary policy moving forward.

So we'll just jump to that right now. What would you anticipate the next move being from the Fed in that case? So this takes 50 basis points completely off the table. It takes the eight, nine hikes that a lot of people were talking about for this. for this year off the table, and thankfully so, because you heard me say on your show, that I didn't think the U.S. economy could accommodate and live with such slamming up the brakes of monetary policy. It means the Fed is going to have to be even more careful, and it's going to have to tolerate higher inflation. Nobody wanted to be here, but we were already far away from the world of first best in terms of monetary policy,

and now we're going to get even further away. So we're going to have a very sort of unsatisfactory situation when it comes to inflation and when it comes to growth, unfortunately. So again, I feel this would have happened in terms of Fed policy, whether there was war or not. But war just, it's a, I don't want to say an excuse, because there's obviously given the state of things that they're not going to be able to continue monetary policy as they had projected.

But I think that even in the absence of all of these things happening right now, the market was already down so much on just the idea that they're going to be raising rates, you know, without even doing anything, the market was dropping. And they think they're going to get through multiple rate hikes. I don't think so. So as the guy said, as Muhammad said there, be prepared for more inflation because it's likely coming. Now, in terms of the Bitcoin price, it's obviously been pretty volatile the last little bit. And this is where I wish the screen sharing was working right now.

But I encourage you to take a look at the price of gold or the volatility of gold in Weimar, Germany during hyperinflation. Because the general trend, of course, in terms of gold priced in in Marx, was up, obviously, a lot. But it was not a smooth ride. It was bumpy as hell. There were massive drops, massive spikes, massive drops back and forth like a whipsaw, but gradually up into the right until the currency was worthless. And in times of volatility to like this, I wouldn't expect anything, any different from Bitcoin, if not even more volatility, because it's so early in Bitcoin's.

life cycle and the size of it is so small comparatively, you know, a one trillion dollar asset, although like under that right now, but regardless, a small asset like that in 12, 13 years into its life cycle that people largely treat like a tech stock that maybe don't understand it. Yeah, it's going to be absolutely volatile as hell. So be prepared for excitement and despair and everything in between because that's likely what we're going to see a lot of over time, especially if things continue to heat up the way they are. So I'm going to get off this topic for a little bit. Again, I apologize. It's kind of like a mishmash of jumping around, but there's just a lot going on.

So I'll try and be a little bit more concise with it next time around as we recap. next week. But let's jump to Mexico now. There's a Mexican senator that plans to introduce a bill to make Bitcoin legal tender. So Indira Kempis recently featured in an interview with Diario El Salvador discussing her intentions to propose a bill that would make Bitcoin legal tender in Mexico. Kempis discussed the inspiration she received in visiting El Salvador and seeing their rising financial inclusion. And Kempis also discussed. is the price of an action and the need for Mexico to take action as a basic right for its citizens. She said that El Salvador is undoubtedly becoming the most important hub or laboratory in the world

about the future with Bitcoin. It is clear to me that financial exclusion is one of the public problems that few of us have addressed with feasible alternatives. And then this type of technology is allowing us to generate an alternative. away a solution so that millions of people can be included in the financial system. So she was also, she went on to say that if we need Bitcoin in Mexico to be legal tender, or we need Bitcoin in Mexico to be legal tender because otherwise, if you do not make that decision as El Salvador made it, it is very difficult to specify actions.

So I think that we're seeing, and don't get me wrong, I don't know. that this would pass. I think that it may be still a ways off, but it's interesting to see politicians start to take a look at this and latch onto it. In particular, in and around what happened in El Salvador in the past, well, since they made illegal tender, their GDP is up. Tourism is up massively. It's been quite a boon to their economy, regardless of the price of Bitcoin. And now they're looking at doing their Bitcoin bonds, they've got half a billion in, not yet committed on paper, but they've got spoken agreements of about half a billion. And so they're looking at expanding the offering to up to five billion they're talking about. So it could be quite a boon for them. Time will tell.

but this is all going to be stuff that we see in the coming months here and it could be, it's going to be historic no matter what happens, is what I'm getting at. Okay, let's move on here. I wanted to touch on something called Coin Pool. And this was brought up by Marty Bent on The Bent, if you're not subscribed, excellent newsletter, highly recommend. But Marty Bent from TFTC was talking about,

coin pool, which is a new spec, a new white paper that was released. It's very interesting. It's all about scaling and potentially privacy promises on Bitcoin itself in a very interesting way. So it's the coin pool implementation. They just released a white paper just in the past couple of days here, in the past week for sure. But they had been a discussing it, the creators here have been discussing it for a couple years prior. So this white paper basically goes through and the coin pool implementation would allow many users to have partial ownership over a single UTXO, which would be an incredible boon to scalability. And so if you're unfamiliar with what a UTXO is, think of it as like you have a wallet full of cash, but there's individual

bills sitting in that wallet. So a UTXO would be an individual bill. All right. Now, Bitcoin works a little bit different than just regular cash in and out of a wallet because every time that you go to spend Bitcoin and you're using more than one bill, it effectively destroys the original bills and creates new ones based on the denomination that you're trying to send and the change that you would get back from that. So you can think of it as creating and destroying bills.

every time that you send and then you just have individual bills sitting in your wallet. So what this would effectively do is allow people to have partial ownership of some of these quote unquote bills. Another way to think of it is if you've read the Bitcoin standard, he goes through the monetary standard on the island of Yap. And so they had these big stones called Yapstones that were basically impossible to move. they would just stand still on the island, but everybody kind of kept a record of who owned what. And in some cases,

many people owned portions of particular stones that were on the island. So it would be very akin to that where there's partial ownership over a UTXO rather than a Yapstone. So I think this is very interesting. So it says even better, users would be able to make instant off-chain transfers of that part. ownership, eliminating the need to amend the individual coin pool ledger with an on-chain transaction. If possible, coin pools would enable billions of people to claim ownership to on-chain Bitcoin in the form of a slice of a UTXO, which would massively distribute Bitcoin ownership

at the base layer over time. Now, this wouldn't only be incredible for scalability and ownership distribution at the base layer, it would also bring about better privacy to Bitcoin users. However, we have to note that a lot needs to happen for CoinPool to be possible, mainly a soft fork or possibly multiple soft forks to enable some of the op codes to make this possible. So again, it could take time. But for those that look at things like, you know, obviously there are scaling wars early on. people worried about scalability of Bitcoin on the base layer.

And then in time, that was addressed with things like Lightning Network and Liquid Network. Well, now there's another base layer potential solution down the road so that if Lightning, if Liquid, if Base Layer on its own are not enough for scaling. There's a whole other way to think of things. and it reminds me of and I'm going to paraphrase here probably horribly of something that Andreas Antonopoulos used to say quite a bit about scalability is

the way in which the internet scales and he would always say well the internet couldn't scale until it could it would always bump up against these limitations until suddenly some new innovation would come along and make it all possible. And I think that's what we're going to see quite often with Bitcoin where, oh, holy crap,

you know, we need something here. And innovation will come about in layers to allow this kind of stuff to happen. And again, soft fork here. We do not have to hard fork to make this possible. And that's an awesome thing. So yeah, anyways, you can check that out over on the bent, Marty's Bent, or they did reposted to Bitcoin magazine as well. So go check that out.

Now, I want to talk about something because, again, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about this. There was a book released by Laura Shin this past week. What's it called? The Cryptopians, something like that, talking with the Cryptopians. Yes, that's what it was called. Anyways, in it, she believes that she discovered the identity of the Dow hacker. Those unfamiliar back in 2016, there was a massive hack of a Dow or decentralized autonomous organization, the first of its kind on Ethereum, which basically had, I think, like 15% of all existing Ethereum were stolen, at which point enough was lost that the powers that B decided to hard fork and effectively reverse the effects of that hack. and that caused a bit of a schism.

It resulted in Ethereum Classic, all that stuff. So, Ben, why are you talking about all this shit coinery here? There is a point here. Eventually, that hacker, you know, moved some of that into Bitcoin. And in the process of writing this, Lorishin worked with chain aliasisysus and believes that she,

may have discovered the identity of the hacker and partly because of a on-chain data despite using Wasabi Wallet to mix. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about what happened here. So first of all, let's talk a little bit about Wasabi Wallet and how it functions in terms of mixing. Effectively, people contribute different coins. into a round and create a transaction where all of the outputs are the same size and revert back to the original owner's wallet. What this does is it makes it difficult to decipher who currently has the coins after that mix.

Now, the way that Wasabi Wallet does this, if there's a large amount, is it will take a portion of that large amount and then it will mix the correct size, which is around 0.1 Bitcoin on average per round. And then the rest will come back as change. And typically, you're not supposed to, I mean, as a general rule, you're not supposed to combine unmixed and mixed coins together. In fact, it's not even a good practice to combine mixed and mixed coins together.

It's better to kind of segregate those UTXOs. But what this does is there's the, let's say you put in a large amount of Bitcoin into a mix and then some of that gets mixed and the rest comes back as unmixed change. Well, that large amount will go back into a new mix and come back as a smaller amount of change and a smaller amount of change. But it's relatively trivial to kind of see the large unmixed amount being whittled away at. Okay. Now, in essence, if you were to do this, in the long run, it's not a big deal if gradually that gets whittled down and there's no connection between the unmixed change and the mix change. However, as they went through, and this is where some things are still unclear to me, what ended up happening is there was an address reuse. And how that. happened is the point of contention here. Some are saying that the address reuse was a bug within the software and wasabi. And some were saying it was misuse by the individual that was doing this. But many people are pointing to and saying that, no, the change and the new mixed output

went to a same address. And so what happened is, let's, you know, the number are going to be off here. But basically, somebody put in 50 Bitcoin and gradually got whittled away down the line until it was around 25 Bitcoin. And at that point, 25 Bitcoin change and what was supposedly a mixed UTXO were combined on the same address. And at that point, a number of other UTXOs convened on a single ad, on a single entity and then was deposited into Polonex, at which point, obviously they have KYC

and they can understand who's using their platform. And so chain analysis or whoever law enforcement could reach out and ask for more information at that point. And so the question therein lies is, was this a flaw in the software that caused mixed and unmixed coins to go to the same address? Or was this an instance of perhaps a user having multiple instances of Wasabi going at the same time and address reuse happening in that instance? I do not know.

I'm still kind of looking at and evaluating things as I go. But I didn't want to not talk about it here. Obviously, Wasabi Walla is a sponsor of the show. But I think it's important to talk about these things as they come up. full transparency, I still use Wasabi Wallet, but I also use Samurai Wallet. I also use Lightning. I also use liquid. I also use state chains.

So there's a lot of different tools out there, but just be aware and just be cautious and perhaps use multiple ways of keeping yourself private because there's not exactly a silver bullet and user error can still occur. And also, you just never know. So I plan on continuing to use Wasabi, but I also want to look at this objectively as time goes on and kind of see and also see the responses here. And I'm still looking at it. But there is a good video called How Wasabi Wasdivis D-Mixed by Chainalysis.

Now, it was released by Samurai Wallet, of course, and, you know, Moussavian Samurai tend to butt heads quite a bit. But it's worth watching just to kind of see the flow of funds and how things were kind of narrowed down. And then, yeah, I guess that's all I'll say about that. I encourage you to watch it. And I'll just leave that there. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about, let's bring things back here to Canada, where I am. Obviously, a lot of stuff happening over the last couple of weeks with the Emergencies Act and the Bitcoin donations for truckers.

And if you guys were following along, obviously, like, it's been a stressful few weeks. But effectively, what has happened is there was a lot of Bitcoin that was donated. and Nick, aka Nobody Caribou, managed to distribute about 14, somewhere in the realm between 14 and 15 Bitcoin directly to truckers. He worked tirelessly at this and went out and distributed those funds directly via, if I'm not mistaken, seed phrases that could then be imported into blue water. wallet and potentially swept to whatever other wallet that the individual would like and then used as they saw fit. And he provided different resources of how to purchase things with the Bitcoin, so and so forth.

However, there was also, as I understand it, like a class action lawsuit from a couple individuals and a business within Ottawa against the convoy organizers. So this included people like Tamara Litch. BJ Dichter, who is also helping with the Bitcoin donations and Nick as well, aka Nobody Caribou, was named, they were all named as defendants, amongst other prominent convoy organizers. Myself, Greg Foss, Jeff Booth, and for some reason Francis Pouliott, were listed down below, not as defensive,

but as as custodians of some of the Bitcoin that may have been involved, along with a whole bunch of different exchanges. So I saw like Bull Bitcoin and Shake Pay and Bit Buy and I think some others on there listed as well. And then there was a list of individual addresses to which Bitcoin has flowed. So there were basically there was an order to freeze. freeze that Bitcoin. Now, so what are the current state of things? And Nick has kind of been updating about this, but there's effectively a large lawsuit

against the organizers, a couple hundred million dollar lawsuit sitting there. 14 to 15, somewhere in there, Bitcoin, are in the hands of truckers themselves. So technically speaking, are they, I don't like, are they allowed to move it? And I don't know if they're privy to even what is happening here. But basically they have direct access to that Bitcoin. People on chain have been able to see that some of those funds have been swept. And then others are still sitting in the wallet, which doesn't necessarily mean that those are frozen. It could just mean that somebody imported this seed phrase and it's just sitting in a wallet with the same seed phrase on their phone.

So the answer as to what's happening with that Bitcoin, I do not know, but 14 to 15 of it is actually in the direct hands of truckers. Now, as soon as Nick as one of the custodians, and I guess I should preface this by saying, obviously myself, Jeff, Greg were helping BJ and Nick with a multi-sig and with the donation page and all of that stuff very early on and continued throughout about, I'm trying to think of the timeline here, everything's kind of meshed together, a couple weeks back, maybe more, the decision was made that having myself, Jeff, and Greg, as public keyholders, was not secure. And so funds began to migrate to another multi-sig at the discretion of Nick and potentially BJ and some of the other people involved, like the actual trucker convoy planners. so that they could have full discretion of where those funds went.

And so that was, that gradually moved over so that myself, Greg, Jeff, were no longer points of failure, easily identifiable points of failure. So at that point, we basically had to try to not know who had keys, which obviously was not communicated to us purposely. And then it was at the discretion of Nick and the board, the corporate structure set up with them as to what to do with these funds. A bunch were distributed, but as soon as this order dropped and Nick was privy to it, effectively, the remaining Bitcoin is under this Meriva in general.

junction is not to be moved. Otherwise, you know, individuals with keys to that could face massive fines or jail time. Okay. So that's kind of where things sit right now. There were calls or rather notifications sent out to a number of, it seems like they just blanket sent out notices to everyone, including Nunchuk and Edgewallet. And basically they asked these non-custodial entities to freeze assets and give up personal information. Now, the Nunchuk reply to this, Nunchuk Wallet reply, which is a multi-sig, was something else.

So I'm going to read it here. They said, Dear the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Nunchuk is a self-custodial, collaborative, of multi-sig Bitcoin wallet, we are a software provider, not a custodial financial intermediary. Our software is free to use. It allows people to eliminate single points of failure and store Bitcoin in the safest way possible while preserving privacy. We do not collect any user identification, information beyond email addresses. We also do not hold any keys. Therefore, in bullet points, we cannot freeze our user's assets. We cannot prevent them from being made. moved. We do not have knowledge of the existence, nature, value, and location of other our

users' assets. This is by design. Please look up how self-costody and private keys work. When the Canadian dollar becomes worthless, we will be here to serve you too. Sincerely, the Nunchuck team. Holy shit. I was a little in awe reading that. And then there was a second response from Edge Wallet. Official response, request to freeze Canadian EdgeU's. accounts. So they write here in a blog, in the wake of ongoing turmoil taking place in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, Deputy Prime Minister Christina Freeland has requested via the Emergencies Act that various financial services companies freeze accounts of those linked to protesters

occupying the region, as well as those providing funding to the protests but not present physically. Regardless of whether the protests resonate with individuals or not, financials. seizure is an unprecedented action and must be taken seriously. It is with great consideration that we would like to share our official response to the Canadian user's edge accounts being frozen. No. And then at the end they say, and most importantly, we can't even if we wanted to.

Yeah. So again, I think that this lawsuit seemed like they were just kind of trying to blanket send out stuff and freeze what could be frozen. And yeah, I don't know where this goes next. In terms of how this is affecting people that had been involved in the convoy or had been protesting, so and so forth. First of all, Ottawa is effectively cleared out at this point. There are no border blockades at this point.

There are a few small camps of trucks out. side of Ottawa, which are dwindling in size over time. Now, what this has done is it's caused I imagine some problems with the Canadian banking system

in that this is a massive overreach in enacting the Emergencies Act, such that people have got to be questioning, and I'm not just talking about individuals. I'm talking about customers or

rather companies and individuals outside of Canada. If a peaceful protest, whether you agree with it or not, if a peaceful non-violent protest can invoke the Emergencies Act and have people's bank accounts frozen at will with no court order whatsoever. Do you feel secure having your assets in Canadian banks? And so what was happening was initially a lot of bank accounts were being frozen, hundreds of different bank accounts being frozen, both corporate and individuals. And after, I want to say about a week, though that started being reversed. People's accounts started to be unfrozen. Same with even BJ Dichter, his account,

credit cards, everything was frozen. I saw. from him just recently that they are now unfrozen. They spoke with Nick the other day. I believe he is now in the clear to use bank accounts again as well. And I think it's, again, it starts to become speculation. But I think those heavy-handed actions were beginning to be questioned and maybe having adverse effects. Beyond this, the emergencies act, this is the crazy thing.

So I'm going to fill you in on a little bit of stuff that's been happening. here. There was a big vote on Monday night whether to extend the Emergencies Act and these special powers that the government bestowed upon itself. And so the liberals who are Justin Trudeau and that's his party that's in power and the NDP, which also kind of leaning far to the left and they tend to align with the liberals a lot or or just kind of follow along with whatever they're doing. they effectively every single person in both cabinets there voted yes to extend this and and some very reluctantly and why would they vote against their beliefs? Well, because Justin Trudeau that day effectively said those who vote know,

you know, if this doesn't pass, I have to interpret this as a vote of a lack of confidence in the government to make hard decisions during very important times or something to that effect. What he was alluding to there, obviously, was that if it failed, he would trigger an election. And why would that be bad? Well, for anybody that's liberal or Democrat, they're worried as hell about losing their, like, basically being voted out of their seat. And so in their minds, and this was said publicly by a number of them is, we're going to, I'm going to reluctantly vote yes on this because I don't, I don't want an election to happen right now. And then what happened? They all voted yes. They passed it. And less than 48 hours later, he revokes the Emergencies Act.

So all those people that voted yes, that yes, there is absolutely still an emergency present that warrants the extension of these emergency powers because there's such a risk right now. And all of the NDP that said reluctantly, and Jagmeet Singh, the head of the NDP saying, you know what? We're reluctantly doing this. But I promise, as soon as we think that there's no longer a threat there, we will pull our support from it and we'll make sure that things go back to normal. And what does Trudeau do? He goes and rug pulls them and pulls the emergency act before they have the chance to do it. basically with egg all over their face saying, oh, silly us, we voted to extend it.

And, you know, you didn't even use it for the day and a half extra that it was reinstated. And so why the sudden turnaround? Well, it still had to go to the Senate and it still had to be voted upon within the Senate. And the Senate was not as worried about what was going down in terms of, you know, potential elections. Basically, they couldn't be strong-armed into voting against their. beliefs. And the Senate was starting to ask some important questions like, can you provide proof of the imminent emergency that is necessary to extend these powers? And they were coming up with a big

fat donut because again, the protests had been dissipated. There were no blockades effectively. There were just like a few people on the outskirts of Ottawa. And so it looked like it was probably going to be shut down in the Senate if I had to guess. And they, I'm, I'm, I'm imagining that Trudeau wouldn't have been a fan of that happening. It would have looked pretty bad. So we pulled it himself. So anyways, this is where things are currently. Again, sorry, there's a bit of a ramble.

But what I wanted to bring up is I wanted to talk about Nick. So Nick obviously is part of this lawsuit of which we don't know where this is going to go. However, he now has a page for legal defense. So he set up a BTC pay server crowd fund. And I've donated to it already a couple times. I'm going to continue to do so. And he basically said, all legal invoices will be paid and shared publicly, basically showing that he's not like blowing it on hookers and lambos or something.

So he'll be publicly sharing any invoices and any unused funds will be returned to donors. He left a link. I retweeted it. So if you want to go find that, I've got to say, like, Nick had a lot of balls in all of this. And he was an absolute rock through everything. And he was out there. Like, I'm across the country from him, just to give an idea, like the drive to Ottawa would be, effectively three full days of driving.

Like it's, it's a big country, just so you know. But so I've been across the country corresponding with him. I spoke with him earlier today and a couple days ago as well. He's doing, he's doing good. He is on Twitter still. So keep up with him there. But if anybody deserves support for, for kind of the inspiration that he brought to so many people, for spearheading and just being on the ground and and helping all these people and

kind of also showing um showing the world that that bitcoin is needed uh if anybody deserves a pat on the back and everybody's help it's nick so i did retweet it if i was able to pull up the page and show it here. I would. But you can find it either way. Follow at nobody caribou, the animal caribou on Twitter or just checking my feed and I've retweeted it just today. So be sure to check that out. Okay, let's wrap up here. I did a video tutorial at the beginning of the week about Paynims. So now I'm on a, again, a bit of a privacy kick. Paynems are basically publicly sharing publicly shareable

IDs that allow you to receive Bitcoin without revealing public addresses. And so what this does is it doesn't make transactions on the blockchain unseeable, but it does. Basically, if you've got like a page or a donation page or if you're

transacting with somebody, you're not publicly posting an ad. so that the entire world knows at that moment that that is your address. And so it creates the ability for somebody to generate new addresses and send you funds. And so it's really cool. I know that more wallets are implementing it. Right now it's in Samurai, but it's also partially in sparrow wallet.

And I believe there's going to be more support too. I also saw rumblings of blue wallet integrating it. pretty soon and i've also seen samurai talking about other wallets uh adding it as well i think it's something that's important and is needed and it was really cool to play with uh well worth checking out anyways uh i dropped that on my channel on monday so check it out and tomorrow uh why are we bullish i've got uh three new guests we've got dan kuman briana pancawa de estries and i hopefully i said that right and brandon keys both uh brandon and dan are from Green Candle Investments

and Brianna is over at geez, I'm losing my mind as to the name of her company basically a way to live on and spend Bitcoin. I apologize, Brianna. I'm just slipped my mind. Anyways, all new guests tomorrow for Why Are We Bullish. So very excited about that.

Be sure to tune in for that tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern time. I think that's it, guys. Sorry I didn't have visual accompaniment. this today. I'll get that fixed. Let me. I'll switch platforms. What do you think?

And besides that, yeah, guys, like, sub, share, all those things are super important. This would, of course,

if you want to help this show on another way, sponsors are all listed down below. You can check them out. And this would normally be where I shill my tips on my strike page,

but in lieu of that, I would request that you go and check out Nick's page and maybe drop him a few sats. You can do that. that on chain or via lightning. And you can just find that on my Twitter page. But anyways, yeah, thanks, guys.

I really appreciate it. And more to come. And, yeah, have yourselves a good night. See you guys next time for your daily session.