BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: Grayscale Sues SEC Over Bitcoin ETF Rejection ep280

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

Grayscale CEO goes on media junket to make his case for suing the SEC in the wake of another Bitcoin ETF rejection, Canada imposes crypto purchase limits for individuals, Tornado Cash dev arrested, and more 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 ALSO search/subscribe to Shakepay on YouTube! LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $10 free with a savings balance of $75 or more for 15 consecutive days! https://start.ledn.io/btcsessions 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. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. I'm back from my trip to New York, back at home, back in the studio, and ready to talk some news. We've got our buddy, Nico, from Simply Bitcoin again, to fill us in on on what's going on in the space this week. So very excited to have them back. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live Do it live I'll write it and we'll do it live

The fucking thing sucks If you have not already Please do like subscribe share It helps get this content in front of more eyeballs I am Ben with the BTC sessions This is your daily session Before we dive in

Let's take a look at where we are In the market right now This is the bitbo.io dashboard We're sitting at $23,362 per coin. A single US dollar will cost you or will pick you up 4,280 sats. 91.07% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, next block looks like it'll cost you around 14 sats per byte. But if you're willing to wait really any amount of time, one sat per bite, maybe two, you should be safe.

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I can top-up phone refills. I can top of lightning channels. And if you're in the U.S., you can pay bills. You can pay your bills with Bitcoin so you can get on that Bitcoin standard. So be sure to check them out. So let's wrap that up. Let's do a couple quick shout-outs to the boostograms that we've been getting from Breeze and Fountain app, those of you streaming sats to the podcast, audio,

only. Salmon Hupo says, great show. Thank you. We've got tons of individual ones. Great Wob again from Cliff B. Janger. We've got another bull from Michael Matilof.

He's always in there with the Bulls. Never disappoints. Thank you, Ben, and guests from Fistful of Sat. Joey Seychills. No, I need my weekly wab pump, but have a great time in New York, Ben. Thank you, man. Don't worry.

We're back tomorrow. And at second breakfast Can't wait to check of the new tutorial I've been loving the focus on privacy lately Have a great trip Thank you very much buddy Sawzell great session

Safe travels Zika boy Ben You're bloody early but I'm not It's Thursday and you've been gone Oh well still doing your thing Cheers thanks for all the nice messages While I was away guys I appreciate it

And finally Freedom Money 21 says One of the best wall I can remember Epic panel And this was from one I did a while back with Corey Clipson, Lynn Alden, and Rodolfo. So anyways, guys, thank you for all the boosters grams. You're too kind.

You're checking out the show. You're streaming stats. I appreciate it very much. But I'm going to stop my rambling here. You're here for the news. There's been a bunch of stuff going on. And we've got our resident expert in to fill you guys in. Nico, how you doing, man?

What's up, man? I get skittish every time I hear the word expert. He 100% knows everything about all of the news. No, he is here to fill you in on what's going on and give a Plyb's perspective. And I thank you for it, man. How's your week then? Dude, another day, another week working in Bitcoin. I feel so blessed, man.

That's how I feel. I can't believe it every single week. All right. Well, I'm glad to have you here, man. There's been a lot going on. So let's get the ambiance going. here. Let's switch things up. We got to get our simply sessions up and I'm going to pull your screen here. Dude, let me know what, what's been going on this week? What's top of mind?

Dude, more, more government creep than there was, in my opinion, Ben, I think there is a clear indication that the U.S. government might be, there might be a little bit something malicious, right? There's some very suspicious activity, very suspicious, pushback by different government agencies, whether that's the SEC. And I know I'm going to get a lot of like a lot of caca for this, but the Fed. Yeah, a lot of people say the Fed's independent. No, it's not. That's how the government funds all the spending.

So anyways, if you don't mind, Ben, we'll get started. Go ahead, man. Let's do it. All right. So this article is about a couple weeks old. It's what world's largest Bitcoin fund slams the SEC. sues crypto ETF rejection, right?

So on its face, you'd think, Nico, this isn't related. Bear with me, I'll make the case. Digital currency asset manager, Gray Scales, an illegal fight with the U.S. securities SEC over its latest rejection of the company's prospective spot Bitcoin Exchange Fund.

And here's a quote from the CEO of Grayscale. We were simply asking the SEC to hold this product to a higher standard to give it a greater investor protection and give greater risk disclosure for investors. converting, here's the signal, would unlock billions of dollars of unrealized shareholder value. Remember, at the end of the day, the biggest seller of Bitcoin, the biggest converter is not, you know, we would like to think it's the PLEBs, we'd like to think it's BTC sessions, but really, its number go up technology.

And if you remember the leak from the European bureaucrats, it specifically said, we must attack the price of Bitcoin. And if you remember the China ban, when did they, when did they ban? Bitcoin mining. Coincidentally, in the middle of a bull run. Anyways. So if I was a government, if I was a bureaucracy, how would you slow Bitcoin adoption? You attack the Bitcoin price. Anyways, the inconsistent treatment here by the SEC allowing the futures products to trade, but denying the spot products to trade. Very interesting, right? Futures doesn't require cash settlement. The spot does, right? Anyways. So again, you could be saying like, Nico's a conspiracy theorist at this point.

Bear with me. Here is Crypto Bank Custodia sues Federal Reserve. This came out a couple months ago. This is the Bitcoin Bank that was enabled by the Wyoming Charter, which is why Cynthia Lummis, the Bitcoin Senator,

is such a big fan of Bitcoin, right? She has a lot of hope for Bitcoin pushing her state forward economically. And the lady behind the Bitcoin Bank, custodia, it was called Avanti in the past, is Catlin Long. Right?

So she sues the federal Reserve because the Federal Reserve has spent way too much time looking at her application. Now, here's where things get interesting. I got this email today or yesterday morning, and the name of the article for the audio listeners, it says Fed says crypto bank can't sue its way to account decision. You're like, okay, that makes sense. The signals in the details. It says federal reserve officials are urging a Wyoming federal judge to reject a lawsuit

from cryptocurrency bank that they say seeks to rush them in. into granting access to a key central bank service before they can finish thinking through all the bigger picture ramifications. What are those bigger picture ramifications? They never specify this. They just say it's a danger to financial stability. They say it's going to be used for money laundering, but they never back up their points.

They never provide evidence. Federal Reserve Board of Governors and its Kansas City Regional Reserve Bank argued that U.S. District Judge Scott W., I can't pronounce that guys. I'm sorry. It's a judge should dismiss a complaint filed. by Custodia Bank, Inc. that accuses them of unreasonably withholding action on its application for a so-called Fed master account. Fed official said Tuesday that they are under no obligation to open

an account for custodia or anyone else, nor are they legally required to decide by any particular deadline. Among them, according to the Reserve Bank, are questions like how to monitor custodias, here it is again, anti-money laundering compliance, and what safeguards are needed to protect the Kansas City Fed itself against the possibility of custodia failing. Rather than allowing custodians to substitute its judgment for that of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the court should allow the FRBCC to complete its review consistent with its mandate, here it is, Ben, to ensure the safety and soundness of the nation's financial system.

Now, I find that hypocritical, because here's the M2 money supply. It represents the money supply in the U.S., right? how much money they printed, you can make an argument for that. Does that look like financial stability to you? The rich got richer, the poor got poor, the rich benefited from asset inflation, nobody could afford housing. Housing has increased over 100%. That doesn't look like financial stability to me. The guidelines also provide that the Fed officials can conditionally approve or deny an institution's application if deemed necessary for risk control purposes. They never specify what that means. Notably, the guidelines do not impose any deadlines for application decisions

explaining that it could take time to understand the intricacies of the requesting institutions' risk profiles, mind you, that Catlin Long submitted this application. It's been over a year now. Citing the guidelines, Fed officials argued Tuesday that they are trying to be responsible about how they manage master account access and can't yet know how they will come down on custodia. Because these new guidelines have just been finalized, did you hear that? right they came up with guidelines right before they responded to this lawsuit that is this is like brett they were like oh we got to make up some rules so that we can say what the rules are that's exactly what they did ben and here let me just finish up real quick particularly with their decision

at an issues involving complex issues and policy questions such as the important issues of risk to the US financial system, financial stability and implementation, I think this is the biggest piece of signal, implementation of monetary policy at issue here. You know what is a threat to centralized monetary policy? Bitcoin is. The law is clear that agency deliberations that may reasonably span a period of years do not amount to an unreasonable delay. Still, the Fed has maintained that accounts are a privilege and not a right for banks, even as other regulators have brought in path to legal bank status by offering and approving a range of charters. Okay. So what does all this mean, Ben? Put if you got to put the pieces together, right? Yeah. The SEC is the one delaying the approval of

the Bitcoin ETF. In coincidentally, the Federal Reserve is taking a record amount of time to approve custodia's bank charter. And not only that, they got sued. And then before response, to the lawsuit, they changed the rules and the regulations. And then it dawned on me this morning, Ben. The people that we are asking or the people that are responsible for regulating Bitcoin and shitcoins are also the people that have the most to lose if Bitcoin succeeds. This is total clown world. This is BS.

I'm really curious to see how this turns out, but I've really curious to see how this turns out, but I really suspect foul play here. What are your thoughts, Ben? I mean, it falls perfectly in line with the whole, and I'm going to probably model this a little bit, but recently there was a new guidelines set out where anybody that has to do anything with setting policy can't actually own Bitcoin,

which like wouldn't you want some people who own Bitcoin and are familiar with it and know the intricacies of how it works and why it's important to have a say in how to regulate it, as opposed to. It's like setting out to regulate or set about any sort of regulation around the internet with people that have never used a computer. Like why would you think that's a sound way to set out any sort of regulation for a society, having the people that are the most uninformed on a topic and having them set the regulations. But yeah, like this, the bank charter thing is hilarious to me that they could come in and say,

oh, we're getting sued for not acting quick enough. Well, we didn't have these guidelines set before. So let's set them out. And the other thing that just to the writing clearly is not even on the line. wall. It's just been said out loud. They said, it's not unreasonable to expect a period of years, like, plural. So what they're saying is we're going to fuck around for a few more years and then maybe say no.

And the crazy thing is that Caitlin Long, like with Avanti and the rename and everything, they jumped through so many hoops to make sure they did everything like to a T by the book. they were like we're going to be we're going to go in we're going to be super responsible we're going to make sure that we dot every i and you know dash every t and and we're going to make this we're going to take something that looks like it shouldn't fit into the existing system but we're going to play by the rules and we're going to be able to uh catapult our existing financial system forward with this great new technology and then they were like

hmm we see you did a ton of work here but also fuck you that's basically all they've done and the same with the SEC with like the okay so the one thing that I noticed about the SEC thing is

the SEC keeps on saying to gray scale and to every other ETF contender that hey we're worried about fraud and manipulation. The futures products that they've approved are going by the price indicators from the exact same exchanges that a spot ETF would go by. So if there's fraud and manipulation, it would be equally possible in the futures products versus the spot products. So how is

it any less likely to happen with the spot products? And just as to juxtrous to suppose this versus where the U.S. is. There's, there's ETFs around the globe now, but in Canada alone, did you know there's, I didn't realize this. I looked this up before the show.

There's 40 Bitcoin and crypto ETFs in Canada alone right now. The first one launched last year in February of 2021 by purpose investments. They hold about 51% of the existing Canadian funds. Like there's a whole bunch of funds. launched but there's a whole bunch of other companies that have funds launched here too and i mean shit hasn't imploded here even amongst this deep bear market everybody's just fine so clearly there's fuckery a foot down there man and it's uh i mean it's if we're not escaping it much here but just maybe not on the etf front absolutely i think and it was actually a btc pin shout out to him

that said in the comments in a previous in a previous video that said it's almost as if they're acting like a cartel and coincidentally the futures which we know for a fact you know has downward price pressure that's the thing that gets approved but the the the spot ETF which has the potential to unlock it's said in the article the the gbtc guys maybe they shouldn't have said it but it has the potential to open up bitcoin to billions of dollars. right and of course coincidentally that's not the thing that gets approved i don't know man you can't come to a direct conclusion but it's awfully suspicious i'll say that absolutely awesome well let's let's roll on then what uh what do you have up next for us yeah i think it's a very dangerous precedent

from the land of maple syrup of your of your canada btc ben check this out this is the legendary NVK, CEO of Coin Kite, awesome company. And this is, he's retweeting a tweet from Simon Dixon. If you're doing something silly like Canada, best to go with percent of net worth rather than annual sum, new regulatory changes in Canada for crypto, you're allowed to buy as much Bitcoin, shitcoin, shit coin, and shit coin as you want, but any other crypto has a limit of 30K net buy per year. And I know what you guys are saying.

Ah, Nico, this doesn't apply to Bitcoin. Wayne, why are we talking about this? This is BT. Well, I'm going to take you in the past real quick. I'm going to introduce you to the Bank Secrecy Act. The Bank Secrecy Act is the law that was responsible for you to file any reports of cash transactions exceeding $10,000. Why am I saying that? When they passed this act in 1970, that was the equivalent of $76,000 today. Of course, you're back in 1970. Ah, that's not that big of a deal. It's $76 grant.

But the problem is that that number never moved. So why am I saying all this? To kind of tell you guys about the slow creep of government regulation, they start to take a nail, and then over time they've taken the finger, and then over time they've taken the hand. Now, could this be the same thing? And one last concept before I pass it on to you, Ben. Why is the government getting to decide where you can and cannot put your money? You spend time and energy and work, working for something, and they're dictating, hey, you as a Canadian, you're not allowed to put more than $30,000 into something. How long until they make an argument saying, hey, Bitcoin?

10,000 at a time. Why that number? Because we say so. But at the end of the day, what could they do? All they're doing is just slowing down Bitcoin adoption. and when people are in the Bitcoin ecosystem, they're going to look back and they're going to say, it's a lot freer out here.

Maybe I stay on the orange side. Yeah, it's, dude, it's, okay, so I'm just doing a quick calculation here for inflation. Okay, that's about right. Okay, so let's let's break this down here. So there's a few things there. Number one, temporarily, well, first, I'm going to start off by saying the only thing I hate more than shit coins is governments telling people what they can and cannot do with their own money. So while I hate shit coins, I think it's disgusting that any government is saying you're not allowed to buy shit coins because you should allow people to buy shit coins, make their own financial decisions with their own money, and then learn from. those decisions. I think that's the most important teacher. And we've been babysat for so fucking long that

nobody knows what they're doing with their money. They just blindly like savings don't exist and people just blindly throw their money into funds that they have no idea what's even in them. It just comes off their paycheck. They're like, yeah, I guess you're going to take how much of my paycheck every month and put it into something that I retire on. I don't know what it is, but they tell me that this is how you retire eventually. It always it's later now. Never mind. They extended the retirement age. But you know, like that's that's the extent of people understanding because their babysat so much.

The caveats that they dropped in in that document there, by the way, this is from an exchange, the FAQ and the and an exchange called Newton in Canada. But they said, yeah, basically you're annually, you have an annual net buy limit. on anything outside of Bitcoin and three random shitcoins, which is hilarious because the three random shit coins, like one is Ethereum. And then it's just like two others that were picked because they just been around for a bit.

There's light coin and Bitcoin cash. Like somehow those are any better than any other shit coins that's sitting on an exchange. Like light coin literally has no use case whatsoever anymore, given that it can't, it's not even really a test net for Bitcoin. Bitcoin at this point. And it's the whole reason behind it was ASIC resistance that failed and transactions per second,

which lightning exists. So why have it? And then Bitcoin Cash is just lightning exists. So you know, you failed. It's like worth one percent of a less than one percent of a Bitcoin. It's so, so terrible. Anyways, I don't know what the reason for picking those random shit coins to be. exempt is, but whatever.

It does not impact all provinces. So those watching outside of Canada, there are 13 provinces and territories in Canada. It would apply to nine of them, although I could see that easily changing. The ones that it does not impact

is Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Quebec. So I live in Alberta. So currently, that would not apply to me, not that I'm rushing out to buy shit coin, But what you're saying and what I agree with is it's that regulatory creep of, well, this is a certain amount. And let's say, let's say they left that amount steady. Well, do you know what inflation is right now?

Like it's like eight, nine percent somewhere in there. Right. Like in a matter of a few years, that's half of the purchasing power. So basically, without doing anything, if inflation were to continue running this hot, then that number is effectively cut in half in a few in like five years. So like that that's where you get fucked there is that. And then of course they eventually expand it to Bitcoin and basically blanket everything. Oh, you can only buy so much of this. And then, oh, you can only buy and then it has to stay on the exchange and so on and so forth.

even just a quick I did a quick inflation calculation if they had implemented this in 2019 the purchasing power of 30 grand then would already be 27,000 now. So like even just in a few

years that's already taken it's already taken like three grand off of that purchasing power. And that's just based on like the where am I even Bank of Canada inflation calculator. I don't even know if they're actually,

I think they're just using the average percentage change. Oh yeah, yeah. They're calculating annual rate of inflation at 3.77% on the official Bank of Canada inflation calculator. So, you know, fuck those guys. But yeah, this is where they get you. And in a situation where inflation gets hotter, than it is right now that effectively becomes nothing.

It's long term, it's outlying, outlying buying anything other than your local currency. That's what the long term goal is. Same with, same with AML, KYC. Like they have the $10,000 limit from way back when. But now they're starting to keep tabs like in Canada or sorry, in the U.S. They're now talking about, you know, anything over $600. you know it's like who who is this for it's insane to me um it scares the hell out of me i think it's also why it's important that people if you're buying bitcoin through a kyc source now

that's you know i recognize it's convenient i've used them myself i have to use them when living on bitcoin obviously um but also familiarize yourself with non kyc methods of purchasing bitcoin where there's no limits, where you can just do whatever you want and you can have your own stack and you can keep that and you can save it outside of these hoops that you have to jump through. So take a look at Robosats, take a look at BISC, take a look at Hoddle, Hoddle, go to your local meetups and meet people that might want to peer to peer trade with you. These are all viable methods of obtaining Bitcoin or figure out something that you can do, offering goods and services for Bitcoin.

Sell your body. Don't sell your body. But you know what I'm saying? Just you need to go and battle harden yourself so that when shit hits the fan, you've got optionality. So yeah, that would be my main takeaway there. And before we move on to the, you know, obviously any other points here, but yellow's here.

And he wants to say, what the fuck is this? Is this a new show? Yes, yellow. Well, kind of. It's still my new show. But now it's mine and Nico's new show as he's a guest contributor that comes in and helps give us the rundown. So yeah, dude, this is not boating well. The writing is on the wall.

And yeah, I don't know, guys. Go out there, learn, take a look. Try buying non-KYC stats just once. So you're familiar with. the way to do it. That's all I'll say. Nico, shall we move on? Any final thoughts on that? Or do you want to jump to the next? We shall. Now, going back to selling your body, Ben, not everyone looks like you, okay? I can only get 0.001.

So, but no, just a joke. But yeah, man, this is, the reason that this is important to cover guys, and it seems like noise on the outside is because this is signal. In five years, you'll remember when this first started, right? So it's very important that you're aware. Okay. Now moving on. So at least you prepare yourself. This is the big cahuna of the week, Ben. And this led to a lot of unintended consequences. It led to the realization by the ETH people that ETH is really run by Amazon controlled by the U.S. government. And their kind of cognitive dissidents coming to the fact, coming to the realization that, holy crap, this can and will be captured by the U.S. Treasury, which leads me to believe, that they knew exactly what they were doing, and it was a 3D chess move. Anyways, Netherlands arrest, arrested suspected developer of sanctioned crypto mixing service tornado cash. I know a lot of you guys are thinking. There's a Bitcoin show.

The implications of this is they just arrested an open source developer because he wrote code. Code is speech. How long until they say the same thing, if you're not running, an Office of Foreign Asset Control Bitcoin node, you're breaking sanctions. Remember what Maripool did. Remember what Marathon did. They released the community push back, but they released an OFC compliant block. This is the same government agency that is behind this. It's the same government agency that did the sanctions. Anyways, a 29-year-old developer suspected of being involved in the Tornado Cash Protocol that's been sanctioned by the U.S.

was arrested in Amsterdam on Friday, according to a statement from the fiscal information and investigative service. Remember, it's the first time in history that the U.S. has sanctioned, not an individual, not a country. We covered this last week, Ben. This is the first time that they sanctioned a technology.

What we didn't cover last week is that we didn't think they would go as far as to actually arrest someone for writing code. They're saying that writing specific code is illegal. whatever happened to freedom of speech. Ah, that doesn't matter when you're fighting to maintain money supremacy, I guess. And anyways, here is Miles Stutter. I just want to read this last bit because I think he summarized it perfectly and I'll pass it on to you, Ben.

And it goes, let me read the first to kind of give a little bit more premise, right? He says, way too many Bitcoiners are not paying attention to the two serious crisis playing out in ETH just weeks away from the merge. Both have implications for Bitcoin in its future. Now, here's where I think he gets it wrong. because Bitcoin is decentralized, because it's a decentralized network of nodes all around the world, which is why the Fork Wars are so important to keep those hardware requirements low so that it has sufficient amount of decentralization. And also, just because a percentage of the hash rate is located in a country,

doesn't enable that country to censor transactions. The worst thing that they can do is slow transactions. Now, that's very different from EF. And he goes on to say, fallout from the tornado sanctioning and realization that 70% of validators are U.S.-based, regulated custodians that have to comply with OFAC. This introduces the real possibility of base layer protocol censorship being introduced on our favorite shit coin, Ethereum. So again, it's highlighting the importance of decentralization. Why is this happening to ETH? because it's so resource intensive, because the hardware requirements are so high, the majority of

eth nodes are run on servers, specifically, 48% are run on AWS servers. You could make the case that Ethereum is run by Jeff Bezos and controlled by the U.S. government. So, Ben, again, awfully suspicious, just like what we were talking about with the Fed and the SEC. Are you trying to convince me that this move wasn't a power move by the U.S. Treasury basically communicating to the entire world, we are still in control here. Yeah, man. I mean, the interesting part is you've seen people from the Ethereum community actively trying to pitch Ethereum as a base layer for CBDCs, right? Like they want that volume.

They want that business, right? Because it's effectively an unregistered security at this point. But if they come out of this compliant and clearly capable of being coerced into actually sanctioning transactions and if it's clear that in proof of stake that they can just say like, hey, you know, all of these validators are going to be compliant. client, then at that point, you can start to actually, you can start to basically shape this to be a tool of central banks and of governments. And some people, obviously, I think that there are people in Ethereum that genuinely want decentralization, that genuinely want, a separation of money and state.

I just think that they were hoodwinked into thinking that it was possible without actually running the code themselves, without running their own nodes. They were told that this is fine. You don't need to do this. It'll make it more streamlined. It doesn't matter that there's bloat on the base layer. It doesn't matter.

And hey, we're going to move to proof of stake. And it's going to be much more efficient and better for the environment and all these different buzzwords around it, not saying what was being sacrificed. And it's now becoming very, very clear. And don't get me wrong, in the end, I hope, as much as I don't like Ethereum, I kind of hope that they're able to pull it off and somehow navigate around this. I just don't think it's possible. I don't think it's possible to have an Ethereum where it is right now with with the amount of like quote unquote value on that chain and be noncompliant. It will get crushed. It's going to get co-opted.

It's becoming a tool or or at least it's just going to be subversive to it's going to be submissive rather to. government control. And again, it's super unfortunate that people were kind of sold this. Oh, yeah, it's it's decentralized enough. It's decentralization is a spectrum. Well, on that spectrum, you want to be as far fucking to this decentralized edge of that spectrum as possible. Otherwise, you run the risk of exactly this happening.

And that's the issue. Now, in terms of the arrest of somebody for writing code, that's just, it's disgusting and it's super worrying because this is where you could get spillover right this is where any dev that's not anon is is probably like oh my god shit are we next on that list because it's very easy to say oh this person is contributing to this code base um and we're going to we're going to lock them up so the precedent moving forward now is clear that devs just have to be anonymous. And I think we're going to see,

I'm wondering, actually a question for you, do you think that the lead developer of the, with commit access to the Bitcoin core repo leaving, has any sort of correlation and causation in and around this? Do you think that this was an intentional, I'm stepping away and like,

there's going to be some like, Wiz kid that shows up with a new A&on account that starts like what do you think? I'll say this Ben with the Fed stuff with this news and one of my favorite broadcasters always says there are no conspiracies but there are also no coincidences. So that's what I got to say about that because that's a hell of a coincidence just like it's a coincidence with the Fed and the SEC, just like it's a coincidence that the Treasury happened to pick this privacy tool. that happened to show the ethnic community that it can and will be captured due to centralization.

A lot of coincidences happening lately, Ben. Yeah, yeah, I agree. So I just wanted to say one other thing, and it was just kind of like a funny thing that... There are a number of people on Twitter that were cringing at it, but I did find it to be a nice nod to kind of the original cyperpunk movement. was back in the day when they were going through court, going through the court systems to basically argue that encryption was speech.

One of the people went to basically went to court and had code just printed out on a t-shirt to say, like, is this t-shirt illegal? Because it has these characters on it in this particular order. There's a dude who basically sang some of the, the tornado cache code, code base. And he made like, he made a, he made like an auto-tuned kind of like song out of it. And again, while I think that Ethereum on its face is flawed from like a basler protocol, I do respect the idea of people that want and advocate for free and open source software to be viewed as speech.

that's basically what it is. So yeah, I thought that was, I don't want to say a unique thing, but it was a nice little nod of the head to the original cypherpunk movement. Absolutely. I think it's going to be a hell of a battle. I think this is the continuation of the crypto wars or the encryption wars, right? That Adam Back, he was a big part of that as well, right? So the only difference, the only thing that has me a little bit worried, Ben, is that this time we're playing for the final boss, right? And government's power comes from the monopoly on the creation of money and therefore, and also legal tender laws.

They force people to earn a money of which they control the monetary policy of, right? So that's the only thing where I'm like, I don't think that they're going to go gently into that good night. Anyways, last piece of news that we got time for. This is a continuation of last week. Last week, we gave you guys the news that BlackRock announced a deal with crypto exchange coin base to offer institutional investors access to Bitcoin and shitcoins. But it's funny, they say crypto, but it's only Bitcoin for now.

Maybe that changes later. But again, why would any institution hold something that the U.S. government can manipulate? Just a just a thought. Anyways, there's a follow-up. Investment manager BlackRock has launched a private. trust offering U.S.-based institutional clients exposure to spot Bitcoin. The trust will be available to U.S.-based institutional clients and will be BlackRock's first product that offers direct exposure to the price of Bitcoin.

Did you hear that, Ben? Exposure to Spot Bitcoin. BlackRock could do it, but hey, you peasants, you dirty plebs. Nah, you don't play by the same rules. Anyways, just to give you guys a quick reminder, BlackRock has $9.5 trillion. That's right, with the T, currently under management. They moved very quick, Ben, to launch that trust. Yeah.

The one thing I liked in this article that I noticed was they said they still see lots of demand despite the downturn in the markets. So they're saying lots of demand from institutional customers, despite the bear market. market. Literally a year ago, they said there was very little demand from institutional investors and high net worth individuals. So were they just lying then? Because last year was in the midst of a bear market or in the midst of a bull run at like all time highs. And now, you know, everything comparatively has been from the eyes of somebody on the outside has been decimated. So it kind of seems like they were just using misdirection last year when they said, oh, there's very little interest.

We're totally not getting into this game because it takes a long time to set that shit up. It's not like they've been doing nothing this past year. They were clearly, at least for part of the past year, we're like, okay, we're getting our ducks in a row. How are we going to structure this? How are we going to offer it? What's this going to look like to the individuals that actually jump on board here? So they were effectively, it seems like at some point they would have had to be bullshitting in some way, shape, or form so that they could use some misdirection and hope that they were the first to kind of get something like this out the door.

Yeah. I wouldn't put it past them. And there's also rumors that Black Rock was responsible for the implosion of the Three Arrows capital as well. So I don't know, man. Shady people. J.P. Morgan, same thing. Jamie Dillon was like, hey, Bitcoin bad, but we're going to offer Bitcoin to our clients. Black Rock, Larry Fink, kind of sat the same type of language. And then suspicion, a lot of coincidences today. Incidentally, he offered it a year later. I don't know, man. I don't know. My gut is telling me they knew what they were doing. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think the main takeaway we should have from everything here is. is that the powers that be want you to own nothing and be happy about it. And you should fly in the face of that. You should stack some stats.

You should familiarize with yourself how to stack sats in an instance where that's no longer allowed and save it in a self-sovereign way that isn't an IOU. Get it in your own self-custody, back that shit up, learn about self-custy, learn about non-KYC sats you know you can you can use exchanges if you want but also have that be familiar with how to do it without them okay so yeah man dude this is awesome thank you for filling me in on all that that was a a great riff on uh on everything we covered you it was an honor it's always an honor to join the legendary bTC sessions youtube channel like i what we say I'm going to keep saying it.

Huge inspiration for me. Ben, thank you so much. I've always wanted to do this. This was your Simply session. Yes, you need to do. That's every time now. I love it. Dude, thank you very much.

I'll see you for the next one. Cheers. How about that? Go subscribe to Simply Bitcoin if you're enjoying that. If you're enjoying this news with Nico because he does it six days a week with Optimist as well. So go subscribe to Simply Bitcoin if you're not already because that's where you're going to get your daily.

This is just a recap. This is just a quick recap of the top picks of the week. But if you want to be filled in on everything, then let's go do it. I need to touch on a few other things here. And I just saw Yellow mentioned it in the chat, but I already had it queued up. I'm ahead of you, man. we are all hobdlenot those unfamiliar

Hodlennot legendary Spacecat on Twitter who created the lightning torch which went around the globe all over had people sending lightning transactions and then eventually had it donated to a good cause he spoke

the truth on Twitter and called Craig Wright a fraud and then was slapped with a lawsuit and is about to in seven days maybe I should refresh this so it's actually live in just over seven days he's going to be in court

against Craig Wright and his team of lawyers and Calvin Air and all those absolute scum of the earth pathetic individuals he had a lot of support early on for not backing down and he needs your support now So if you want to help contribute to fundraise for legal fees,

then you can head to defending BTC.com and, you know, drop whatever you can, a few sats, a few dollars, whatever you can do. But, you know, this guy's an absolute legend. And, you know, he's got a family. And, you know, I can imagine. imagine the stress that he's under. You know, he's got young kids and they are under a lot of pressure.

Like these, these types of things are not easy to deal with. You know, I don't think Hodlenau by any means is a wealthy individual. And I can only imagine like myself or somebody else in that position, like you run the risk of literally losing everything. like your home, like every piece of property that you own just because these lawsuits are specifically designed to drain you of cash of resources.

It doesn't matter the outcome. It just matters that you lose all of your money. And that's basically what he's facing. So if you think that it's a worthy cause to fight back in the face of blatant fraud and harassment, then go to defending B. BTC.com hit that donate button and drop some sats because he's got a tough road ahead. And anything that can help him out, in my opinion, is worth is worth donating to. So yeah, defendingbtc.com.

A couple of other things I wanted to quickly mention. You guys know that I run my umbrella node. I've got a Ronan Dojo going. but I've been playing around friends last night got a little busy started playing around here you can see that little screen there I don't know if you can read what's on it

pulled out my crypto cloaks case there it's not finished yet I've got another screen coming in I've got to get some extender cables for the fans here so they all light up nice and pretty altogether.

But this is going to be RAS by Blitz. I'm in the initial sync right now. And it's looking like, I'm about 20% into my initial sync. And yeah, so I'm going to be experimenting with that, doing a full tutorial on basically how to do everything.

So that's going to be coming down the pipeline. And beyond that, you can expect some more, outside of just Razby Blitz. I'm also going to be building a start 9. I think I'll build up myself rather than just getting the plug-and-play one. I've got a metal case from CryptoCloaks as well

that I like to use. So yeah, that's on the docket. Very excited about that. And yeah, a couple of the last things here. Voltage, if you guys are unfamiliar, you can host a node there if you need to, like if you're remote and you're moving around a lot, but you still want to not trust but verify.

You can get them to host a full Bitcoin node for you, a prunes node, a lightning node, BTC pay server, all that stuff. And now they now offer one click inbound liquidity for lightning nodes. So if you've got a lightning node with voltage, it's literally a single click and they'll open a channel to your lightning node so that you can get inbound transactions going as well, which is super awesome.

So kudos to them. Love Voltage. Those guys rock. Last couple of things here. When I was in New York, I had a really fun time. I brought some open dimes along and I did a little bit of a scavenger hunt. I mean, not super difficult. I showed where they were.

But I just, you know, I drop them and then I get plebs to come and grab them. So I took an open dime, taped it to the back of a card. And I loaded it with 200,000 sets. I put one on a bench in New York City in Central Park. That one was literally gone in 10 minutes. And then shout out to Bitcoin Pizza Day because I went to Lombardi's Pizza in Little Italy, which was the first pizzeria in America. And I put it under a bench there.

And somebody grabbed that within probably in, hour or so. And then I also, because I'm an adult child, I went to the Ghostbusters headquarters and I put it behind a box there and hit some sats back and somebody snagged that one too. That one took a little bit longer for somebody to get. They did get it the same day, but I think it was at night. But yeah, everybody, all of these have been grabbed by plebs and and they have access to the Sats now. So I had a blast doing that. I think I'm probably going to do that next time I do some traveling.

I'm going to be in France for surfing Bitcoin next week, by the way. I'm presenting there. I'm going to be doing this is in Beirits, France. So I'm doing a workshop on multisig with Sparrow, just kind of a quick workshop. and then I'm also speaking on a panel about quote unquote victims of the banking system. But maybe I'll plant some open dimes in and around beer ritz. I think they'll get snagged pretty quickly with a bunch of big corners there.

But I think that'd be cool. And then finally, why are we bullish is back. I had a little hiatus last week because I was traveling, of course. But we've got Kevin Rook, we've got Nat Brunel, and we've got Nico. He's going to be joining us again tomorrow, but for Why Are We Bullish? So less focal point on the news and more just free-flowing conversations. So super stoked to have everybody on tomorrow. It's going to be a blast.

Make sure you do not miss it. And with that, thank you guys so much for watching. Like, subscribe, share. All those things are super important. They help get this content in front of more eyeballs. If you want to help the show in another way, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors and the show notes. Coin kite, shake pay, leaden, bit refill, Bill Fottle at PrivacyPros. They're all down below.

And if you really liked what you saw, you can always hit me up with a lightning tip. Actually, you know what? Today, fuck that. Don't drop any tips. Any tips that you would have given today, please go to defendingbtc.com and give some tips as much as you can to Hovlonon for his legal defense. I think that's incredibly important. So be sure to hit him up for that. Anyways, guys, with that, I am out.

Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be. See you guys next time for your daily session. Hold on the Bitcoin.