BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: GreenPeace Lobbies To Change Bitcoin Code ep247

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

Greenpeace has teamed with Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen in a $5M campaign to change Bitcoin's code and consensus mechanism. Best of luck with your fork! This 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 Keystone Wallet: secure your Bitcoin! http://bit.ly/KeyStoneSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Welcome, welcome, everybody. Hope you're having a good week. We got lots of news to talk about today. Lots of stuff going on. And yet another FUD attack on Bitcoin. We'll dive into that momentarily. 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'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share, all those things really do help quite a bit.

And they help get this in front of more eyeballs. As always, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we dive in, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now, pulling up the bitbow. We're sitting at $45,808 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up, 2,180. Sats. 90.47%

of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees up a little bit today, 11 sats per byte for next block. If you're willing to wait an hour, still five stats per byte. So just keep that in mind if you are in a hurry or use RBF or lightning

or the plethora of options that you have there. Of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, shakepay.com. If you're in Canada, of course, super easy way to buy Bitcoin. E transfers, no deposit fees, no withdrawal fees, thin spread. And there's a link down below if you use that and sign up and purchase your first $100 worth of Bitcoin. They'll give you $30 for free.

You get the same deal if you are recommending a friend and they sign up and do the same. And then you can shake your phone every single day for free Sats. They've also got a Satsback Visa card. And I got to give a big shout out to Mike. on Twitter who ended up winning. I did a giveaway with Shake Pay. Mike and his friend Cody are going to be coming down to Miami. They got their airfare paid, their accommodations paid,

and two tickets to Miami for Bitcoin 2020. And that's thanks to Shake Bay. They footed the bill for that and helped me put on that giveaway. So thanks, Shake Pay. And congrats Mike and Cody. Enjoy your time. I'll see it down there. Leaden.io, you can use your Bitcoin for a ton of different services in particular.

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It is 100% air gap. You never plug it into anything internet connected. It's all done offline via QR code. And of course, that keeps keys to your money safe and away from internet connection. definitely recommend upgrading to the Bitcoin-only firmware, but it works beautifully with Blue Wallet, Sparrow, Specter, you name it, they got it, and of course, awesome in a multi-sig setup. So check them out.

I also have a full tutorial on that. And then finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, get it in steel, guys. Paper does not cut it, fire damage, water damage. I've heard horror stories of people accidentally discarding the slips of paper they have sitting around with seed phrases on them. When you get it into solid steel with something like the Bill Follary, over at Privacypros.io, those concerns seem to fall to the wayside.

So, you know, this is how I back up all my stuff. Check them out, privacypros.io. And with that, let's get into the news. The fud, should I say, lots of fud floating around. It's all recycled fud, though. If you're in Bitcoin long enough, you just, it just kind of, it's a circular ring of fud. Or as I heard in a podcast today, with Nick Carter and Troy Cross.

There's fud dice. Nick Carter actually, I think, made fudge dice of like different concerns about Bitcoin that people tend to use. But if the fud dice, if, you know, fud is never created nor destroyed, it's just recycled. And so if one side of the fud dice is facing downwards, then one of the other pieces of fud is phasing upwards. So there's always going to be something being recycled. But this, obviously, the ESG and the Bitcoin is going to boil the world's oceans stuff is in the news again. So basically what is happening here is Chris Larson. He is the co-creator of Ripple.

If you aren't familiar with Ripple, they're being sued for what effectively amounts to an illegal security's offering. They created 100 billion ripple out of nothing and then sold it to the market. And then pretended that, or sorry, they then tried to differentiate between Ripple, which they now refer to as XRP, even though before they called them Ripples. They say that XRP is in no way related to Ripple the company and it was like somehow decentralized, you know, created in a decentralized fashion and then Ripple the company just happened to be there at the same time. And yeah, it's it's trash. And if you go back, it's obviously total BS. But nonetheless, so Chris Larson is pairing with Greenpeace for a $5 million campaign to change Bitcoin's code away from proof of work, which is the way that we

arrive at consensus to decide what the history of transactions is in a way that can't be cheated. You have to do the work in order to actually prove that the transactions are correct or to add transactions to the ledger. You have to do the work. You have to mine. So effectively, they're going $5 million deep to run this campaign to change Bitcoin. It's insane. Like here's the website. It's called cleanup Bitcoin.com. Don't bother visiting it. But it says you've heard Bitcoin fuels the climate crisis. But did you know, I saw, software code change could clean it up, sign the petition to tell big tech and finance corporations to stop Bitcoin from polluting the planet. Let's take a look at some of their facts and also notice that they have like share fact number one and it'll share it on social media.

Oh, God. Anyways, recent estimates show Bitcoin uses more electricity than all of Sweden. And it's quickly surpassing more countries. Yeah. So basically they're saying Bitcoin uses more. energy than Sweden. They fail to mention that the GDP of Sweden is roughly half of that of Bitcoin. So actually, it would seem that Bitcoin is twice as efficient at supporting an economy if it's on par with energy consumption of Sweden. So one way to look at that. Bitcoin alone could help warm the planet

more than two degrees. Here's the interesting thing about fact number two is it was in a research paper that was printed in a science journal that was thrice debunked. So there were three papers subsequent to them published in the exact same journal that debunked this study because it literally did not take into account how Bitcoin actually works, nor the actual mix of energy going into mining Bitcoin, nor the life cycle of Bitcoin miners, nor the nonlinear way that Bitcoin transactions actually scale

in relation to energy at the base level. It literally just said, current amount of energy being used on Bitcoin and how many transactions Bitcoin can do at the base level, ignoring secondary layers and side chains and all of that. And then just did a linear graph projecting out. And to again prove how bad some of this data was, there was an article back in a few years back that said by the year 2020,

Bitcoin would use all of the world's energy. Yeah, we're sitting at like a fraction of a percent that Bitcoin is using right now. So yeah, there you go. Then it says Bitcoin is resurrecting fossil fuels. They've started buying U.S. coal plants, their fracking gas, and striking deals with the oil industry in Texas to use flare gas to fuel their operations. Now, here's the thing about striking deals with the oil industry to use flare gas. That reduces the warming effects of emissions by a factor of 80.

what they're doing is so when you drill for oil, you're going to have excess gases, natural gas and methane. And when there's no infrastructure to get those gases to market, no pipelines or anything like that, then one of two things happened. Those gases are either vented or flared, vented meaning straight into the atmosphere, which is not good at all,

or flared, which means they're burnt, just like set on fire. and that goes into the atmosphere. So what Bitcoin miners are doing are saying, hey, you know, first of all, that's not great. Second of all, that's wasted energy. It's inefficient. Third of all, there's all these emissions and you're getting hit with, you know, carbon taxes and so and so forth. What we can do is we can capture the methane, which has 80 times more warming effects than the carbon dioxide.

capture the methane, we will convert it and capture that energy into CO2, which again, 180th the warming effects. And then you will reduce your footprint and how much you're contributing to this. So they're reducing emissions and warming. And they're funneling that into a way that not only also reduces the carbon tax is being paid, but it also ups the revenue of the gas well or the oil and gas well. So literally, actually, if Bitcoin mining were to tap into all of the methane that's being flared or bented, it would reduce the emissions from those sites by a factor of 80. So again, totally disingenuous here. And then this, finally, it says a software code change would reduce Bitcoin's energy use by 99.9%.

And they say that switching to a low energy. protocol has proven effective and uses a fraction of the energy. Ethereum is changing its code. Many others use less energy. Why isn't Bitcoin? We'll get into that. Okay. They say it's like, oh, we'll just type in something different and it'll all change

simultaneously. That's not how shit works. So first of all, let's, let's of course talk about proof of work. And I'm just going to recite to you a little tweet thread from Gigi on Twitter that outlines proof of work and contrasts it with proof of stake. So, Gigi, a failure to understand proof of work is a failure to understand Bitcoin. Decentralized systems by definition do not have a single source of truth. Satoshi's breakthrough was to build a system that allows all participants to zero in on the same truth independently. Proof of work is what allows this to happen.

The point of proof of work is to create an irrefutable history. If two histories, compete, the one with the most work embedded in it wins. The chain with the most work is the truth by definition. This is what we call Nakamoto consensus. Why does this work? In short, because work requires energy. You can't cheat it. You can't argue with it. You can't lie about it. The proof that you did the work is self-evident in the outcome of the work. In Bitcoin, work is computation. Not any kind of computation, but computation that has no shortcut. Guessing. There is no shortcut because there is no progress.

Every guess stands on its own. The beautiful thing is that the work itself is embedded in the solution. The data speaks for itself. The map is the territory. There is no external source of truth required. The work is implicit in the data due to the probabilistic nature of guessing. other mechanisms such as proof of stake, by the way, side note which they are advocating in this campaign here, sorry, I now lost my space, other mechanisms such as proof of stake don't have this property.

You can never be sure what you are looking at is actually the truth since there is no external cost to create an alternative truth. computation is the only bridge between the realm of information to the physical realm. When dealing with information, all we have is information and the transformation of information. Computation. Computation requires energy. Energy is the bridge. Energy is real. Remove this bridge to the physical world and you will stay in fantasy land. You can't tell what actually happened. You will have to trust others to tell you what happened. You can't verify yourself. you have to rely on trust. Proof of stake has plenty of other problems,

such as fair validator selection, who decides, naturally centralizing effects, aka more stake equals more reward equals more stake, and having no natural resistance to timestamp manipulation attacks, for example, proof of work solves these exact problems. It's decentralized, it decentralizes the selection process,

creates physical proof of what happened, has real externalized costs, and decentralizes time. The question of whether proof of work is wasteful or not can't be asked without understanding the problem it solves. Understanding the problem properly will lead you to the conclusion that there is no other way to solve it in a trustless manner. Thus, the question becomes, how useful is trustless digital sound money? Is it worth the energy expenditure? For fridges, cars, smartphones, and a myriad of other things, society answers this question in the affirmative. For Bitcoin, those who understand the societal benefits of sound censorship-resistant money answer in the affirmative. To summarize, proof of work is not only useful, but absolutely essential.

Trustless digital money can't work without it. You always need an anchor to the physical realm. Without this anchor, a truthful history that is self-evident is impossible. Energy is the only anchor we have. Proof of work equals trust physics to determine what happened. Proof of stake equals trust humans to determine what happened. It goes on with some other links from there, but very succinct kind of summary from Gigi there regarding what the importance of proof of work. Now, I made a few notes here.

I watched a little bit of an interview with Chris Larson, and he's just so disingenuous with a number of things. Again, they cite all of these, they cite research that has been numerous times debunked like by orders of magnitude. They ignore the idea of basically eating up waste energy, reducing emissions, grid stabilization, the idea that Bitcoin mining can stabilize green energy production, if that's something that people are interested in. They completely, completely ignore all of that. Furthermore, when he does talk about the miners that are, you know, doing things like reducing emissions or or using green energy, he basically said in an interview that even if Bitcoin had 100% green energy, it wouldn't be enough because of opportunity cost, which is fucking hilarious.

because again, most of this energy is stranded and has no way to get to market. Let's take an example of a lot of the hydro with which Bitcoin is mined or with which it used to be mined, say in rural China. What would happen is you'd have a small settlement near a large source of hydro power. And the hydropower was just way too much for the size of the settlement. There was way more energy there than was needed. and it was way too far to get it to any other grid, any external city, whatever it may be, because energy degrades over time.

So what happened is they would get Bitcoin miners in these rural towns near hydro sources, and they would basically capitalize on the energy that, you know, it's flowing water. So you, you know, you capture that, you use that to power mining rigs, and you're securing a Bitcoin, a decentralized monetary network in the process and getting paid for that service. Again, you couldn't have done anything else with that energy. There's no other way to use it. And he's basically saying, well, if there was solar and hydro and geothermal mining all over the place, it wouldn't even matter if Bitcoin didn't emit any carbon whatsoever

because that energy could be used elsewhere, which is fucking bullshit because it's stranded energy. So you're telling me, if I took solar panels in space where that energy could not be reliably transmitted to anyone on Earth for any other reason, and I were to mine using solar energy in space, you know, millions of miles from Earth, that would be wasteful because of the energy would be better used somewhere else. Fuck off, Chris. Come on. So he then goes on to interpret a really good book called The Block Size War, which goes back to, goes back to 2017 when there was a schism about how to scale Bitcoin. And what ended up happening was, keeping Bitcoin backwards compatible, making small changes to allow for throughput of more transactions,

and then to build on top of it in layers, which is why we have the Lightning Network today. There was a concerted effort from the top 50 companies and 80% of the miners on the network to change the code to effectively boot out all of the voluntary code contributors that exist, create a new Bitcoin with a singular developer, might I add, and then say that was Bitcoin. And the reason it didn't go through is largely because people ran nodes and told everybody else to go fuck themselves, said, we're not going to change what Bitcoin is. There was also a consensus market wise that that change in Bitcoin would not succeed.

There was a futures market on BitMex that basically pegged the pretend Bitcoin that these companies and miners were trying to create as having one quarter of the value of actual Bitcoin. And so this is at a time when Bitcoin was even less decentralized than it is now. And still, in an unprecedented show of decentralization, the network ignored all of the top players in the industry, all of them, and just continued on doing its thing. Now, I won't say that wasn't scary at the time. But it was the moment that I truly realized that Bitcoin is unfuckwithable. Now, Chris Larson's interpretation of that was somehow that 20 to 30 people control Bitcoin.

And if we get them to change it, it will change. I do not know how you could possibly come to that conclusion, having watched and lived through it and also read that book to say that that's how Bitcoin works. It is the most, like, what an absolute imbecile. Or he's just completely malicious in his intent, which I wouldn't discount that either. Either way, so incredibly stupid. So what can you do about this?

Well, we already learned that lesson back in 2017. You can run a note. Why? Because let's say that somehow Greenpeace and Chris Larson of Ripple managed to get a bunch of different people exchanges, so and so forth, to change the definition of what Bitcoin is and they create a different Bitcoin that uses proof of stake, which we'll touch on a second. But let's say they change Bitcoin. They say this is actually Bitcoin now. This is the green Bitcoin and it's the real one. if you're running a node and you're running Bitcoin core on that node,

then your wallets will not recognize any Bitcoin, any alternative vision of what Bitcoin should be if somebody tries to send that to you. It will only recognize actual Bitcoin, what you are running, the code that you are running. Now, there's a variety of different ways to do this. I have obviously,

I did a video way back when on how to run an umbral node, which is super easy, super friendly to do. And you can link your Bitcoin wallets to it so that this is like your beacon of truth. What is Bitcoin? My node will tell me. And my wallets will trust my node, not somebody else's. Another great implementation of this would be my node, M-Y-N-O-D-E, no spaces. That's another great way to run a node. Basically, you download it, put it on an SD card, and use it.

little Raspberry Pi computer. Again, a little contention between Umbral and Run Citadel, but run Citadel, again, an open source, basically a forked version of Umbral. That's another great one. Start 9. Ronan Dojo, there's a lot of different options out there. But regardless, if you think what's happening with Chris Larson and Greenpeace is total bullshit, just run a note.

And then you can literally ignore them. Just ignore them because your node will. And you can go on using Bitcoin and they can use whatever they are pretending Bitcoin is probably unsuccessfully. The last thing I wanted to touch on was proof of stake because this is what they're pushing. They're pushing proof of stake. And Gigi mentioned it in his thread here that proof of stake is basically trust. humans to determine what happened. And the reason behind that is,

proof of stake basically says the more of this money, like for instance, like what Ethereum is going to do, the more Ethereum you have and stake basically lock up, you get rewarded with like transaction fees or newly minted, newly created money. But you also get to decide not only what trends,

transactions are valid, but you also get to decide what the protocol is. So do you see the problem here where the people with the most money get to decide, well, first of all, get the most newly created money and get to decide the rules of the money? That sounds pretty fucking familiar. It sounds exactly like central banking. That's because proof of stake is more or less a copy pasta of central banking. So, yeah, it's this disingenuous attempt to change Bitcoin away from an actually decentralized infrastructure that has truth at its core because it's locked in to a real world mechanism, the only one we have, which is energy, and trying to change it to a whoever has the most money says what goes. and I sure as fuck

am not going to do that. My node will be running proof of work forever. Forever, Laura. Forever. So anyways, I'm pretty passionate about this. It's bullshit.

And if you're not running a node already, just start. Start learning. And you'll be amazed. It's actually not that difficult. You know, getting some parts might take some time, But go on now.

Just start. You need a Raspberry Pi. I'd say a Pi 4. Probably a 2 terabyte hard drive would be good. A little micro SD card, 16 gigs, 32 gigs, either one will do you. And then just plug-ins, more or less. That's pretty much it in case for it. And then you're off to the races.

So that's it. You can check out my umbrella video. I do have a video on my note. probably be doing an updated video on my node and some other node implementations. I'm going to try and get my hand on a Ronan dojo sometime soon. So anyways, it's all in the pipeline, blah, blah, blah. Let's keep going. Okay.

Change gear. Damn, I got fired up over that. Okay. Speaking of shit that they totally disavowed in this last story, Lightning Network. That's something that completely changes the dynamic of scaling on Bitcoin. Anyways, Cracken, maybe a year late. but they have implemented Lightning on Cracken Exchange. So you can now deposit and withdraw via Lightning.

So this from Bitcoin Magazine, Cryptocurrency Exchange. Cracken now supports Bitcoin's Lightning Network for inexpensive and instant customer deposits and withdrawals of Bitcoin. The company said in a statement to Bitcoin Magazine. Quote, adoption is going to come from people who have Fiat in their bank account

and they need to get into Bitcoin. Pierre Richard, Bitcoin Product Manager at Cracken, told Bitcoin Magazine. Cracken is providing an excellent venue for them to do that, and then they can top up their mobile lightning wallet and use it as a medium of exchange. That's clearly the next step in terms of Bitcoin evolution. Now, a while back, Pierre Richard basically made like a bet or a statement saying like, if Cracken doesn't have lightning by the end of, I think it was 2020 initially, that he should be fired. or something like that.

Anyways, it came and went. I think they realized that more infrastructure was necessary and they really had to be thoughtful about how to do it. Nonetheless, better late than never, miles ahead of shit like Coinbase. So, hey, cracking. Kudos. You now have lightning. That's great.

So good for them. Let's move on. Gray scale threatens legal action if the SEC rejects Bitcoin ETF conversion bid. I'll say that this headline is a little bit more alarmist than it actually was in the interview here. But let's just read a little bit. Grayscale is not ruling out seeking legal action against the SEC if the agency continues to prohibit the launch of a spot cryptocurrency ETF. CEO Michael Sonnonshine said, quote, I think all options are on the table.

He said in an interview with Bloomberg Monday, when Asset Grayscale would consider an Administrative Procedure Act lawsuit if their application to convert Grayscale GVTC into an ETF is denied. The largest digital currency asset manager first filed to convert its trust, which is inferior to the currently prohibited spot Bitcoin ETF structure in April 2021. Since then, the SEC has approved the first futures-backed Bitcoin funds, but all applications for spot product continue to be delayed or in some cases denied. Quote, the Grayscale team has been putting the full resources of our firm behind converting GBT into an ETF.

It's really important that investors know that we have and will continue to advocate for them. So right now, there's public comment available. This goes for 240 days. That period would close in early July. again, it goes on to say that, you know, GPTC is owned by investors in all 50 states, around 800,000 accounts in the U.S., all waiting patiently to have it converted to an ETF. Yeah, like the main rub here is that the chairman of the SEC keeps on saying that they're worried about manipulation, but that's exactly what having a futures ETF.

not having a spot ETF is allowing. If you look at the manipulation, the change in price, you see GBTC, which is a closed end product, meaning GBTC has a set amount of Bitcoin within it,

and then people buy shares of GBTC. And from time to time, if they need more Bitcoin, then they buy more Bitcoin for the fund and whatever's in the fund stays there. Well, right now, because people, uh,

uh, they, they see the disconnect there. and there's futures products available. GBTC is at like a deep double-digit discount to the actual price of Bitcoin. So it's like manipulated all to hell because of these futures products. And people can bat around the price of Bitcoin based on these futures products because there's no spot product to keep it in check. So pretty disingenuous.

I would say there it's laughable that the U.S. doesn't have an ETF here. Canada has had multiple ETFs for two years now, at least a year. and a half. It's, yeah, I don't buy Gary Gensler's objections whatsoever. I think there's probably some heavy hitters that are trying to delay this as long as possible, some entrenched interests, and there's just money to be made by not having a spot ETF. So we'll see.

I hope that they do sue, though, because it's clear that something fishy is going on here. Let's keep going. Oh, yes. Our good friend Pierre Poliev in Canada, there's been an ongoing gag. He keeps on talking about in and around sound money and everything. And he's very like in tune with the idea of like there is no free lunch. And, you know, when you print money, it doesn't reflect reality and capital gets misallocated. And it flows in a way that drives the wealth gap.

And everybody's known for so long. like Pierre, just say it. Say it. We know you're talking about Bitcoin. Say it, Pierre. And I would always respond with gifts. So when he would get on a rant, I'd respond with a gif of just whatever I could find under the words, say it. Because I knew what he was talking about.

Well, he said it. He has basically come out. He's said the B word. He's been batting Bitcoin around a bunch. And he really kicked it off with going to CLE at Tihini's. and buying a swarma with Bitcoin. Not just Bitcoin on chain too. He was using a lightning wallet.

So kudos to him. He went down, he talked about Bitcoin. He talked about he sat with Ali and had some Shisha and discussed inflation and money printing and like the disconnect. Talked a lot about Jeff Booth's book, The Price of Tomorrow and how technology itself is deflationary. and we should be living way more abundant lives for less cost. And yet the cost of things continues to grow despite massive leaps forward in technology. And a lot of this is because of money printing, perverting the price mechanism. So yeah, anyways, kudos to, kudos to Pierre for kicking open that door and drop in Bitcoin all over the place.

hey, maybe it'll be a speaker at next year's Bitcoin 2020 or 2020 conference. I'd like to see that. We'll see. Let's keep going here. Zebedy, I just saw this today came out. Zebedy streamer. Okay, so if you're unfamiliar with Zebidi, they're kind of mashing together the worlds of gaming and lightning and enabling lightning payments within gaming and so and so forth.

But I found something that kind of, I guess, applies to me, but maybe for you guys as gamers or whatever if you do play games. But for me, I found it interesting because it's basically a tool that allows you to within your live stream accept Lightning Network payments via LN URL, which is just a single-scannable URL or QR code rather, that you don't need to create a Lightning invoice for. And then people can send whatever amount they choose. And so the way it would work is, let's say I was doing this live stream right now,

in the corner there'd be a little QR code. And then with any lightning wallet you wanted, you could scan it and then send like 100 sats or whatever. And then an animated gift would pop up and say like, thank you or whatever the hell I've wanted to do. But I think it's a really cool idea in breaking

into not only the gaming market, but just the live streamer market, where with no middleman whatsoever, you can utilize this tool and somebody with a lightning wallet not connected to anything else could just scan an instant tip any type of streamer on the internet without having to even go through the

platform they're streaming on, which is really cool. So I'm, yeah, I'm going to be playing around. I would have to change a little bit of how I stream and do these things, but it's definitely possible. So I'm going to mess around a little bit, see what I can do. Let's keep going here. I'm just going to touch on this briefly and encourage you guys to read this as a piece of content that was recommended and did a pretty good job summarizing stuff. Econo Alchemist wrote this, just dropped a day. It's an article called How the Freedom Convoy could have protected donation privacy with Whirlpool. It basically goes through like the series of events that happened behind the Freedom Convoy and the Bitcoin donations therein as well as the GoFundMe and all of that stuff.

But then it also gets into some on-chain analysis of like where the Bitcoin went and kind of like, you know, going from like the original donation address and then being split up and divvied up to truckers and so and so forth. You know, the state of things in Canada. And basically what I mean, I was I was there for like a huge chunk of this. but reading it all summed up in a single place and then seeing at the end saying all of this happened in two weeks, that's, I mean, the speed at which all of this happened was astounding. It went from, hey, you know, we've got a 10 million sat goal to maybe buy some gas to one, one millionth of all Bitcoin that will ever exist have been donated to a single cause. And this protest is now effectively illegal and we're shutting off people's bank accounts. And we've invoked the Emergencies Act, which is basically martial law or could have been taken to that level.

All of that happened inside of two weeks from the moment that the trucker started arriving in Ottawa to kind of like at least the end of what they outline here. It's pretty astounding to see. But with the on-chain stuff, it goes into talking about whirlpool and, like, privacy concerns and around this stuff. And it's a good article. I do recommend you read it. And I agree with its conclusions. I absolutely agree with its conclusions. Also, on the privacy front, I'm kind of bundling two similar privacy-related things into one here.

So this from the EU today. Parliament passes privacy-busting crypto rules despite industry criticism. So European Union lawmakers voted today in favor of controversial measures to outlaw anonymous crypto transactions.

The proposals are intended to extend anti-money laundering requirements to apply to conventional payments over €1,000 to the crypto sector. They also scrap the floor for crypto payments. So payers and recipients

of even the smallest transactions would need to be identified, including for transactions with unhosted or self-hosted wallets. Basically, wallets, because if you're not hosting the wallet,

if you don't hold the keys, it's not a wallet, it's an account. Further measures under discussion would see unregulated crypto exchanges cut off from the conventional financial system. National government, governments said in December they wanted to scrap the 1,000 euro threshold for crypto on the basis that digital payments can easily circumvent the limit and to include private wallets that aren't operated by regulated crypto asset providers.

So obviously, this got pushed back from some parts of the government, but not enough to not vote in favor of it. Now, the EPP, the European People's Party, said such proposals are neither warranted nor appropriate with the appropriate. of regulating new technologies, the EU will fall farther behind other more open-minded jurisdictions. A hundred percent agree right there. Yeah. And it goes on to say, basically, what's the implications of this? Under the new rules, somebody like Coinbase would have to report to the authorities any time

a customer received over a thousand euros of any cryptocurrency from a self-hosted wallet. So like, if they received it from not an exchange to an exchange. exchange transfer, but somebody with a wallet where they actually hold Bitcoin sends over a thousand euros worth of Bitcoin to their Coinbase account, that would then have to be reported. Yeah. And then the plan, so in the end, this is not a done deal right now. So these plans must also be agreed upon by both the parliament and national ministers

who meet as the EU council in order to pass into law. uh this article here this kind of privacy uh vote in favor of is more or less the reason for this dump that we saw this morning and by dump i'm using that like a little hyperbolicly we went from like in the 47 range to like the you know mid 45 range so yeah it is what it is um so in the end here you know what do i want to point at i guess um Ronan Dojo tweeted out, The Crackdown on unhosted and self-hosted wallets continues. Draw the line.

Choose privacy, no KYC and live free. Economo Alchemist, who also wrote peace on the Freedom Convoy, said, self-custody puts the asymmetric advantage in your hands. Stop using KYC services by mining at home, peer-to-peer trades, or exchanging goods and services. Now, if you're more curious about this, I do have a playlist on my channel regarding privacy. So there's a short kind of intro of different things you might want to consider regarding privacy.

Now, I don't have a node video added in this playlist, but I think I'm going to do this right after I get off here. But what is covered here, there's two different videos on buying Bitcoin or selling Bitcoin peer-to-peer without the need for like ID and everything. You just peer-to-peer. one is BISC, which I did a while back, and the other one is Hoddle-Hoddle, which I literally dropped on Tuesday.

So if you want to go back and check that out, that will walk you through how to use Hoddle-Hoddle and check out the BISC one too. In terms of privacy regarding like coin join via a whirlpool, then I have a video just on how to do it with Samurai wallet and as well how to do it with Sparrow wallet on desktop. regarding sharing public Bitcoin addresses, you know, which is not a great practice. If you want to get away from that, then using Paynems, which hopefully will start to roll it to more

wallets in the near future. That is something that you can check into. So I did cover that again, both in Samurai and Sparrow. That's on the list. And then also a new kind of privacy technology, which would be Mercury Wallet or state chains. And this allows you to actually swap UTXOs or pieces of Bitcoin with an individual without any on-chain movement whatsoever. You're actually trading the keys to the money in a as trustless as possible way. So that's worth checking out as well. And again, outside of this,

you may want to look into obviously running a node, not only for privacy on a network level, but also for basically telling Greenpeace and Chris Larson to go pound sand. That's a good reason to do it as well. Other things that I want to touch on there. I mean, really, when you think about it, obtaining Bitcoin, connecting, you know, on a network level to verify your Bitcoin, transactionally and on a UTXO level, your privacy on Bitcoin. And then, you know, additional to that, again, and transactionally with PayneMs and stuff like that. So coin join, pain ems,

nodes, and peer to peer. And lightning is helpful there too. So yeah, check out all that. There's so much. Okay. We're going to start wrapping up here a little bit. Hey,

I'm going to be in Miami. Soon. Soon. I'm flying on Monday. Damn, that's getting close. I will be flying on the fourth, getting in that night. On the sixth,

I'm going to be going to Pierre Corbin is putting on a screening of his film The Great Reset and the Rise of Bitcoin. You can watch it on YouTube, obviously, right now, but he's rented out of theater and a bunch of Bitcoiners are going down, and then we're going to do a live chat afterwards. I'm going to be part of the chat with him and Knut's Fanholm. So that's going to be excited.

I'm very excited for that, actually. It's going to be at 7 p.m. Wednesday, April 6th, and you can grab tickets just on Eventbrite. So just search screening. The Great Reset and the Rise of Bitcoin. And hey, if you want to come, two tickets for free. The first two people that use the promo code BTC sessions will get free tickets. So if you're going to be in town and you want to head up this screening and you want two free tickets, go.

And the first two people to use that promo code will get their tickets for free. Otherwise, they're $13. So it's not that expensive anyways. But if you want a couple free tickets, go check it out. Um, speaking of which, if you're coming down, uh, not a lot of time. I think the prices for tickets go up tomorrow. Uh, right now it's like, what is it? I think it's like $6.99 if you pay in Bitcoin.

Uh, so those go up by $100 bucks tomorrow. So if you're looking to get tickets, uh, today rather than tomorrow will be better. It'll at least save you $100. Uh, also if you do want to discount, again, just use code BTC sessions. and it'll get you 10% off. So B.TC slash conference, you can grab them there. But I will be down there. So look for this beacon on my head.

I'm told I'm hard to miss in a very busy setting. So I will see you guys down there. And lastly, of course, tomorrow we've got, why are we bullish? We've got Yusuf, we've got Isabella, Joe, and Sam on tomorrow. stoked for them to be on. It'll be a good rip. And yeah, well, it's last, why are we bullish before the conference. And I should say that while I'm at the conference, it's going to be why are you bullish?

So I'm going to tweet out randomly probably once or twice and say, hey, I'm doing why are we bullish in this location? Come find me and tell me why you're bullish. And you can come find me and you can do a few minute rant on what has you excited and why you're bullish. And then I'm going to piece that together and drop that episode, you know, probably on the Saturday. So, yeah, keep an eye out. Make sure you're following me on Twitter and looking for that tweet when it happens or those tweets when they happen.

Anyways, guys, I'm going to wrap it up there. Thank you so much for joining me. I got fired up for the beginning of this one. You know, get excited. But in the end, this is not, like, even though it caused a price dip, this is. a the the green piece and chris larsons thing is such a nothing burger because we already experienced this uh we experienced it almost five years ago now and we saw that bitcoin just continues doing what it does and people can create their imitations and go off on their own and those things are are not worth

anything uh so yeah that's that it is what it is Anyways, guys, like, subscribe, share. All those things really help. You can hit up the mentioned sponsors down below. Shake pay, leaden, bit refill, keystone, bill bottle. They're all down below. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip, either on Twitter or at my strike page.

That is strike. That is strike.comme slash BTC sessions. Get there, type in any amount you like. Hit the tip button. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice. Or if you click the arrow to the right, you'll see a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I'm out. Have yourselves a.

wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. See you guys next time or in Miami for your daily session.