BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: Lightning Strikes Bitcoin Twitter! ep202

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

Strike and Twitter roll out their Bitcoin tipping integration, El Salvador buys the dip, US eyes debt default and much more on today's news roundup! 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Buy Bitcoin In Canada With Bitbuy - after your first $250 purchase get $20 free! https://bitbuy.ca/en/sign-up/?c=BTCSessions LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $25 free https://bit.ly/397rlLN 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 https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. Hey, what is going on, everybody? Welcome to this show. I hope you're having a great week. And what an announcement today, Jack Mallors and Jack Dorsey, with the drop of tipping via Bitcoin Lightning Network on Twitter. So we're going to be chatting about this

amongst plenty of other things. As always, this is live. So 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. Frikin thing sucks. Now, if you haven't already, please do hit like, subscribe and share. That last one's important because it helps get more eyeballs in the room and gets this in front of more people.

As always, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right. we dive into the news, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. I'm pulling up the Bitbo.io dashboard. We are sitting at 44,725 bucks per coin. A single US dollar will grab you at 2,236 sats. We are sitting at 89.64% of all Bitcoin having been mined. And in terms of fees, not bad. Next block, you can get into with three sats per byte. If you're willing to wait anything beyond that.

One sat per byte will do you. Yeah, very nice to see it cheaper to move transactions, but that won't be forever. And thus, the Lightning Network, which we're going to be discussing momentarily. Before we get into that, of course, shout it to sponsors of the show, led not I.O. You can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services here. If you're stuck, you need your hands on dollars, but you don't want to sell your Bitcoin because that's a taxable event. and you're worried about having a buyback and at a higher price.

Very simple with lead, and you can deposit, get a loan against your Bitcoin, and get it deposited into your bank account within 24 hours. You pay back those dollars. You get back the same number of SATs. Of course, they also have their savings accounts, their B2X offering, all of that great stuff. Links are down below, and I do have a tutorial for it as well. If you're stacking SATs in Canada, BitBy is a super easy way to do it.

They've got a sleek and clean web interface. They've got a dedicated iOS and Android app. And after your first $250 purchase, they'll give you $20 for free. So check them out. I live on Bitcoin. Bit refill really helps me do this. You can pick up any gift card your little hard desires here. You can pay via Bitcoin on the main chain or Lightning Network.

We're going to be talking about that again today. And you earn Sats back as you shop. They've also got a killer referral program. If you've got friends and family interested, that can help you out too. You guys know Keystone. One of my favorite and most used hardware wallets, the whole thing is entirely air-gapped, meaning you never plug it into anything internet connected. It's all done offline via QR code, keeping your money and keys to your money safe from devious internet connections.

I love this thing. You can get Bitcoin-only firmware, which I highly recommend. It works with all my favorite wallets, Sparrow, Spector, Wasabi, Blue Wallet, all of them. And it's great in multi-sake. Check it out. Links are in the show notes. And finally, if you're backing up any important hardware wallet or it really, really any important wallet that has a meaningful amount of money on it, you might want to get your

backup in solid steel on something like the bill foddle over at privacyprose.io. Why steel? Because while paper opens you up to fire damage, water damage, you might accidentally discard the thing if you're not careful and conscious. So give yourself that piece of mind. This is how I back up all of my important wallets in steel. Check it out. And let's let's dive into this news, guys. Yeah, we knew it was coming. We saw the rumblings. it's rolling out and it is available right now if you are using iOS. So if you're on the Apple iPhone version of Twitter, you should have access to the tipping function within the settings.

You can turn that on. They also have tipping via other options like PayPal, so and so forth. But the big news here is that Bitcoin is now integrated. So here from CoinDesk it says starting Thursday, Twitter users on iOS will be able to to connect third-party tipping services to their profile on the social media site. That will include the ability to link both Bitcoin addresses and Lightning Network addresses. Twitter also today announced that it will add, and this is the part of the story that's not as exciting for me, but hey, whatever.

We'll add NFT verification features on the platform, a key step in the evolution of blah, blah, I'm going to, I don't really care. The tips feature will roll out on Twitter's iOS app today and come to Android Systems, quote, soon, company representatives said in a press call. Now, I think the better coverage of this is just Jack Muller's from Strike, his blog, covers basically the importance of this announcement and what it's going to do for the world. He again says, yo, today I'm unbelievably excited to announce the Strike API and Strikes First API partner, Twitter. Today, Twitter enables free instant global payments for their users with their

integrations of the Strike API. Starting today, Twitter will allow all iOS users around the globe to send tips over the Lightning Network. The Strike Tips integration allows users to receive global tips through their Twitter account. We'll begin to roll out on iOS today and expand to all users, including Android, over the coming weeks. So he goes on to talk about the implications and how this global monetary network is going to effectively eat the world, the visas, the visas, the Western unions, the money grams of the world, your fucking days are numbered because you can't feasibly charge fees in the long run when there's a free and open option that people can easily integrate to their platforms.

And Twitter just happens to be the first one to jump on it. Very, very interesting. He goes on. He does a demo video. He had somebody here that was in El Salvador at a Starbucks. And that person had Twitter integrated with their. Strike app. And basically he went on Twitter.

He looks up the guy's handle. There's a tip button then he hits. He chose the amount, 10 bucks. He hits send. It then says, can we open up a Bitcoin app or a lightning wallet app? And he opened not Strike. He opened Moon Wallet, which is a non-custodial, separate from Twitter, separate from strike, lightning wallet app, and sent a lightning

transaction from that to the person's Twitter account, which was linked with their strike account, the person got it instantly. And then they instantly used it to pay for a coffee at Starbucks in El Salvador. So again, it happened in less than a minute. All of those things happened in less than a minute. He sent it off. The person received it and instantly used it to pay for a drink in Starbucks in El Salvador, priced in dollars all seamlessly.

pretty amazing again and he's talking about how the Bitcoin Open Network as a payment rail can connect companies across the world and he does kind of like a

hey you know Bitcoin as a base layer and then you can swap out to any local currency that you want you don't even have to know that you're using Bitcoin to get the benefits

of the network itself I highly recommend you check out his blog post he does detail here also again in the tips you can see that there's basically a little button that allows you to activate tips. You can now within the Bitcoin app itself or sorry within Twitter itself, currently the lightning wallet is strike.

Okay. So if you don't have access to strike yet, which is basically the US and El Salvador, then this will not work for you. I do have access to strike because I got early access in Canada just to do a tutorial video. but I'm not an iPhone. So I don't know if I can use this and integrate it yet. I assume if it rolls out for Android, I'll be able to integrate it,

but I shall see. And as soon as I am able to, I will do a tutorial and show everybody what it looks like. Yeah, so anyways, basically you turn on this function, you type in your username, and that's it. And then you're able to receive tips instantly. Yeah.

And even if you didn't have strike and you could still see the tip button, you should feasibly still be able to send tips via any other Bitcoin wallet. You can also add a Bitcoin address to your profile. You can also add a Lightning Network address to your profile for tips, which you can get from a variety of different apps. So you can get like the Zebedee wallet, which also I'm going to do a video on. you get an address that looks like an email address. For me, it's BTC Sessions at ZBD.G. And so this is like a static address that allows you to receive light in Bitcoin lightning network payments

without having to do invoices and the typical flow that you would do for a lightning payment that we've seen up until now. And it just makes it so much easier to transact and just say, hey, shoot me a tip at my, at my lightning address and just drop one of those. So anyways, really, really cool. Congrats to both Jack Mallors and Jack Dorsey for rolling this out.

And hey, millions of people just got slapped in the face with Bitcoin. It's interesting. And the other thing, and thank you, Dennis, for pointing this out. And Jack Dorsey retweeted him here. And he said, the big news of the day that everyone is missing, Twitter made SATs the standard. Take a look at this. They don't have decimals here, my friends.

No decimals. Sats are now the standard to millions of people across the globe. Goodbye unit bias. Hello, global monetary network with SATs as the standard. Now the transaction per second and the unit bias arguments of shit coins are out the window because, hey, look, you can grab 11,190.1,190. Sats for five bucks sounds like a steal and I can send that instantly and effectively for free anywhere in the world. God, it feels good. I love it. I hope you guys are are buzzing about this.

It seems like everybody was. So let's continue on from that. And I'll continue to look at this. And again, I will do a video as soon as I have access. But let's move on. We were just mentioning El Salvador. El Salvador this past week. They bought the dip. for the first time in history, we saw a country, a nation state by the dip. So El Salvador now owns 700 Bitcoin as President Buckele. Buy us to the price dip. I'm not going to spend too long on this, but effectively, they now have Bitcoin in their treasury. And the president of a country tweeted, we just bought the dip, 150 new coins.

El Salvador now holds 700 coins. hashtag Bitcoin. And then he says, they can never beat you if you buy the dips and then followed up with presidential advice. So I mean, take that for what it is. It's obviously Bitcoin is still down a good chunk from when the Bitcoin law went into effect in El Salvador. It was like it, you know, it kind of was peaking out around 51, 52K on that day or the

day prior. I think it was a by the by the rumor sell the news kind of thing, which I think a lot of people that I saw were expecting. If you're expecting it to go up on the day, then you know, you got to stick around a little bit longer to see how this shit works because often people are, especially with people with leverage and and trying to make plays on future price of Bitcoin, trying to call and it's it is what it is. speculator is going to speculate. But I do agree with his sentiment here, Buckele's sentiment,

they can't get you if you just buy the dips, especially with a long time frame in mind. If you keep that low time preference, you're going to be doing all right. So kudos to El Salvador, now holding 700 coins. I hope that that game theory continues to play out. There's actually a good quote here down at the bottom of this article.

The world is watching this experiment and Bitcoiners are eager to see what country will be next to adopt Bitcoin as nations are forced to compete or be left behind. The game theoretic prisoner's dilemma has begun in global politics and nation states that adopt Bitcoin first are at a great advantage.

Don't disagree there. Let's move on. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the spectrum, you have the president of Turkey. According to Bloomberg, this statement, which is, we are in a war against Bitcoin from the Turkish president. He declared this Saturday as he attended a meeting with students in southern Turkey. The statement came from the president when asked by a participant at the event

whether the central bank was interested in opening for cryptocurrencies. More than confirming a lack of interest, Erdogan said he is in a war against cryptocurrencies and is fighting to destroy them. Now, this is interesting because of the place that they are as a country with their currency itself. So I'll read a little bit more here, but you'll see what I mean at the end. Turkish president's declaration of war on Bitcoin is not a surprise since the beginning of the year. The country has been preventing the advance of the quote-unquote crypto market. In April, the government banned Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from being used to make payments.

in the country. At the time, the central bank defended the measure saying the ban was necessary because the crypto-actives were not subject to any regulation and supervision mechanism of a central authority, citing possible, quote, irreparable damages and other risks with transactions involving digital assets. Back in May, regulators published a decree that tightened the rules that exchanges should follow to operate in the country, forcing all companies in the sector to follow the same security guidelines as traditional banks. I mean, general security provisions for financial entities, I guess not bad. But at the same time, the interest in Turkish, of the Turkish population in Bitcoin only

grows in the country that suffers from devaluation of its national currency. When President Erdogan fired the central bank. president in March sending the Turkish lira plummeting against the dollar. Google searches for the term Bitcoin soared across the country. So again, like this guy is leading a country whose currency is continuously being devalued and people are looking for an alternative. And he's saying that we're in a war against Bitcoin. You may be.

You very well may be. In fact, I would venture to say that's a correct statement, but you're not winning it. you are not winning if your people are looking and finding ways out and they will you know in the long run you're not going to be victorious in this battle it is it is going to end poorly for you and you will let's just say El Salvador will be doing much better than Turkey if this is the trajectory that they both remain on Speaking of government debacles, the White House prepares for a potential shutdown as leaders grapple with crucial deadlines. And why is this relevant right now?

Well, it has to do with the national debt and the debt ceiling or the limit of spending, which the government can do, which they place that limit, and then they constantly lift it every couple of years. how many potential or actual government shutdowns have we seen in recent years? I've lost count. It seems to happen almost every year. Anyways, the White House on Thursday began to advise federal agencies to prepare for the first government shutdown of the COVID-19 era. The White House Office of Management and Budget is alerting federal agencies that, barring a new appropriations bill, they are expected to execute shutdown plans next week. Meanwhile, House Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Schumer announced an agreement on a framework with the White House over taxes to pay for the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package.

So, you know, money printer is trying to go burr, but there's these pesky regulations in the way to stop the burr from happening. It's what's actually going on here. One thing that I thought, so the Senate Republicans are very, very against lifting either or either getting rid of or lifting the debt ceiling to allow more spending. And they say that they're effectively going to try and block that in the Senate. However, Treasury officials estimate that lawmakers have until some point in October before the U.S. would default on its debt for the first time. Now, I am skeptical if it actually gets to that point. I think Republicans will just use this as a bartering chip to get something that they want because the Democrats are not going to want to look bad being in power for the first time when the U.S.

defaults on its debt. So I think, yeah, I think the ceiling is imaginary and that we will continue to see that through the years. I don't even know why they haven't. I think it's just it's just for show. It's just for people to think that there's some sort of check on spending, but it's not really there. They're always going to lift it. They're always going to spend more. They don't want to default on their debt. Yeah. But we'll see. Maybe I'll be wrong. Maybe they'll default mid-October and shit will go sideways. Who knows? Let's keep going. Also on the regulation front, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but Gary Gensler, head of the SEC, he's been talking a lot about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. And he seems to very much recognize that Bitcoin is actually decentralized and kind of out of his hands.

But that everything else, he's basically calling bullshit on the decentralization theater that is altcoins. And so he's in this from Washington Post. He basically says that he's going after 5,000 or 6,000 projects that are raising money from the public anticipating profit. And so he views Bitcoin as a digital scarce store of value and actually decentralized. So effectively, Bitcoin would be under the CFTC's regulation guidelines, which treats it as property or as a commodity. and the rest would fall under SEC jurisdiction, which basically says that they're securities. So altcoins may be in for a tough time,

and I'm not super pro-regulation on this. I think that people should be able to make up their own minds and make their own mistakes. However, if there's somebody for the SEC to go after, it may be a sign that you're not decentralized. So that's all I'll say about that. But just keep that in mind if you're holding some bags of something that has a founder or a foundation that is publicly visible. It could be a bad time for you.

Let's move on. Also in the realm of bad regulation from CoinCenter, they said an unworkable and arguably unconstitutional tax change tucked away in the infrastructure bill. So there's a provision, an amendment to section 60-50-I of the tax code imposes a new surveillance and reporting requirement on users of digital assets. This is not the much-discussed broker provision that provoked opposition in the Senate. This is something totally different. This provision requires recipients of digital assets, including NFTs and others, to verify the sender's personal info and record their social security. number, nature of the transaction, etc., then the recipient must sign under penalty of perjury and send a report to the government within 15 days.

They go on to say that this is difficult or impossible to obey in the context of cryptocurrency transactions. I mean, of course, like, it's not the, they're not poll payments. Like the recipient is not in control of what's happening. So you could effectively spam people with transactions of which they would not be able to deny them. And then they would have a reporting nightmare on their hands because they wouldn't know who the fuck sent anything. And they would have 15 days to file a report and sign under penalty of perjury, otherwise face stiff penalties. Yeah.

It's stuff like this that really shows that people creating the laws have been. no idea what's going on. And again, like, I don't give a shit about NFTs, but this, this thing being crammed in a bill, whoever wrote this has no idea how any of this works. And again, it's unenforceable, impossible to obey effectively. So there you go. Government doing this thing. Okay, so this is very interesting. This from CoinDesk, uh, leaked slides show how chain alysis flags crypto suspects for cops. So basically there was a leaked set of slides from a presentation from chain analysis. And it talks about kind of how they go about doing things and providing law enforcement

with information on blockchain related stuff. And Bitcoin is in here, of course. So first off, WalletExplorer.com is owned by Chainalysis. So don't ever use. I've never heard of it before, but don't do that. Don't go there because they own it and they're probing everything that goes through there. So there. But I wanted to highlight this one thing.

By the way, they can demix Minero. Questionably. I've heard that's questionable. Again, not that I'm a fan of Monaro, but just heads up. Maybe give that a read if you're holding that. Anyways, this is the thing I thought was interesting. If you've ever wondered one of the reasons why you might want to run a Bitcoin node, this is direct from Chainalysis.

Another way chain analysis captures Bitcoin user data is by running nodes that verify transactions. The documents confirm. This allows the company to capture data links on the publicly accessible internet or clear net from user's simplified payment verification wallets. An SPV wallet is any wallet that you just download to your phone or computer that is not already connected to your own node. So if you don't have a node and you haven't gone through the process

of connecting your wallet to the node, this is what could happen. Those services are designed to prioritize easy storage over foolproof security, although, to be fair, they are arguably more secure than wallets that rely on APIs, blah, blah. Okay, so the downside to this design

is that when the user wallet connects to the network, a variety of information is revealed. the user's IP address, the full set of addresses in the wallet used and unused, and the version of the wallet software, according to the slide deck. Chainalysis runs a series of Bitcoin nodes on the Bitcoin network, and if a user connects to one of our nodes, we receive the above information. So if you unknowingly connect to a chain alice Bitcoin node, so if you're using some wallet and it connects to a random Bitcoin node on the internet

to verify the transactions, they will get your IP address, which basically identifies exactly where you are on the world, down to your address, the full set of addresses in the wallet, so any address that you've received coins to, and any future address that would be associated with your wallet, all addresses,

and also the version of the wallet software that you're running. So basically everything they need to know exactly what you're doing, where you are and probably who you are. So if you don't like that, maybe check out running a Bitcoin node. I do have tutorials on that subject. I think it's a fantastic thing to do. Now, in the same vein,

I would like to point out that Sparrow Wallet just added Samurai Whirlpool. So you can actually now mix in Sparrow Wallet on desktop. It doesn't show it here, But basically, when you download the wallet, there's a section called UTXOs near the bottom here. And when you click on that, you can select your different UTXOs or basically pieces of Bitcoin that you've received transactions. And once you've selected them, there's a little button that says mix selected. And it will enter you into a coin join round.

And yeah, that can help break the links between you and your Bitcoin. So that's pretty cool. I'm going to play with that. I'll probably end up doing a video on it at some point. A couple more things. Man, you've got to be careful out there, guys. Bitcoin.org goes offline after suffering a scam attack. So, Bitcoin.org, one of the first websites about Bitcoin has been hacked by online scammers and is down as of the time of writing. Cobra Bitcoin's Cobra, Bitcoin.org's anonymous creator announced on September 23rd

that the website was compromised with hackers managing to put up a scam notice. on the site. He said, looks like Bitcoin.org got hacked and the entire site replaced with a scam asking for free Bitcoin. Do not send funds to that address. That was from developer Matt Corallo. Following the query, Name Cheap temporarily disabled the site. According to Cobra, the website may be down for a few days. Prior to it going offline, users reported that it was showing a classic fake giveaway announcement with scammers reportedly managing to collect about 17 grand. their addresses. So it's basically like, hey, send any amount and you'll get double back, which any season Bitcoiner is going to understand that that's stupid and you should never do that.

But for brand new people searching Bitcoin to go to Bitcoin.org, that's a problem. I also saw Matt O'Dell tweet out, we're lucky that the scammers that got Bitcoin.org only tried to put up that scam thing instead of replacing the Bitcoin software that you download with something malicious that would steal your funds because that would have been a terrible, terrible disaster. So a couple things you can do. First, don't buy shit like that. But second, you can go about actually verifying the software that you're using.

Perhaps that's a video for me to do for you guys now that I say it out loud. I think that's a good thing to probably do. Okay. Add it to the list. right. Last thing I want to draw attention to, hey, if you're into VR, if you have a VR headset, I checked out this thing the other day. It is called the Bitcoin Cyber City on AltSpace VR. Pretty cool. Pretty cool place. When I was in there, there weren't people there, but I guess they hold meetups there once in a while. Anyways, follow Citadel VR. Let's C-I-T-A-D-E-L-E-V-R on Twitter.

And I'm sure they'll announce whenever there are actual events happening there would be cool. Yeah. Anyways, so check it out. I thought it was fun. Any other announcements that I have for you guys? Yeah, I'm going to be in Miami next week. So if anybody's in Miami, I will be there for the Oslo Freedom Forum with the Human Rights Foundation. I'm seeing, I guess, alongside Alex Gladstein in the Bitcoin, God,

what's it called? Anyways, there's a big learning space about Bitcoin. There's going to be a bunch of different presentations. And it's talking about how Bitcoin is a tool for human rights. And I'm very excited to be there. Very flattered to have been asked to be there. And I hope to see some of your Bitcoiners there as well. Outside of that, I've been doing some new shows lately as well.

Very short form. So a couple of them tomorrow, be sure to check out, why are we bullish? because you can choose your bullish bit. All you need to do is drop a comment of your favorite moment of the show with a timestamp, and it'll enter into the running. And also, I'm doing something called your weekly lightning sessions, and these are just single, simple questions answered short form, and it goes out to a whole bunch of different platforms,

including Twitter and YouTube and TikTok and Instagram. Last week was a very general one about wallets, and the winning one asked about the difference between Bitcoin and lightning wallets and payments. And this week, the topic is hardware wallets. So if you have a hardware wallet question, you can either tweet me on Twitter at BTC sessions and use the hashtag lightning session. Or you can respond in the comments of this video, not the live. chat, but the actual comments of the video after the fact with your question regarding hardware wallets, whatever it may be. Anyways, guys, that's enough of my rambling.

Thank you guys so much for watching and or listening if you're on the pod afterwards, streaming sats on breeze or something. Of course, please here on YouTube, hit like, subscribe, and share. I can't stress enough. Those things help so much get more people on the show. If you want to help the show in another way, you can hit up. Wow, I can't talk right now. You can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below.

Ledin, Bit Buy, BitRefill, Keystone, Bill Fottle, all in the show notes. And if you really liked what you saw, since we've been talking about it so much today, you can hit me up with a Bitcoin tip at my strike.me page. That is strike.combe slash BTC sessions. When you get there, you can type in any amount you like. You hit the tip button, and you'll be greeted with a lightning invoice, or if you click to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I am out.

yourself a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be and I'll see you guys next time, hopefully tomorrow for your daily session.