BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: Michael Saylor SUED For Tax Fraud ep284

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Michael Saylor and Microstrategy have been sued by the DC Attorney General for tax fraud, Russia warms to digital currency for international settlement, NYDIG launches Lightning accelerator 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's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Hope you're having a good week. I am obviously back home. It feels good to be home. I've been away a lot lately, and I get to kind of settle for a couple months here, which was needed. I had a great time traveling and everything, but I'm definitely tired, ready to kind of hang out with the family a little bit here. So excited to be back.

I need to talk about this week. Lots of stuff going on. We've got our good friend, Nico, joining us. to fill us in on what the fuck's up? There's some dramatic shit happening and some cool stuff too. So we'll get into that momentarily. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen.

So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share all of those things. help get this content in front of more eyeballs.

I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we get into the news, let's take a look at where we are on the market right now, here on the Bitbo. Dot I.O dashboard, each coin, Bitcoin is going for 20,100 and, you know, fluctuating 20 some odd dollars per coin. Single US dollar will pick you up 4,969. Nice.

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They've got their BTOX offering. There's got Bitcoin backed mortgages cross Canada and soon to some select U.S. states. Check them out, start.ledon.com.com.com. slash BTC sessions. Bit refill helps me live on Bitcoin. You can pick up all your favorite gift cards here using Bitcoin, both on-chain and via Lightning Network. You earn stats back as you shop. You can get more stats back with the referral program. You can top up your phone, your lightning channels, all this good stuff. And if you're in the U.S., you can pay bills with Bitcoin. So check them out, bitrefill.com. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, get it in solid steel, folks. Paper doesn't cut it. You don't want that shit burning up in a or, you know, disintegrating in a flood. Get it in solid steel. This is how I'm backing up. My important stuff over at privacypros.io slash BTC sessions.

If you care to use that link, then you can pick yourself up one as well. Shoutouts. Time for shoutouts. Thanks to everybody that's been dropping the booster grabs listening to the pod on things like Fountain or Breeze. So quick shout-outs here. KNSV-22. Keep the education going, my buddy.

Is there a smoother, sexier duo than Ben and Nico? Hashtag, bring the heed from Joey Sechiels. Zagaboy, knocked it to the park again, Ben. Francis has better food and climate. But they speak funny. Come to London, mate. It's actually sunny for once. Awesome.

Thanks to Cliff J. Bangor. IDA. I-Dad dude, said fuck Craig right. Indeed, my friend. At Bond said, I like this mashup, simply sessions. Thanks. I like it too. This travel rule, FATF recommendations, and ever increase in KYC nonsense has really got me to the point where I don't even want to interact with these companies anymore that implement this shit. Especially ahead of time, looking into the Trust Alliance that Con Base started and Shake Pay joined. Maybe ShakePay had to considering the custody with Conbase. I didn't get into Bitcoin to bend the knee to the same old invasive regulatory shit. Thank you for the rip guys. I agree. I think some of that shit is bull, and I think it should be resisted at all cause, especially not implemented ahead of time. JPC underscore BTC says, thanks again. Stay humble. Keep stacking. Knowledge is power. Stay humble. Keep stacking. Thanks again, JPC.

Great show is always. Love hearing from the people who are fighting the political fight. This discussion on energy is fire from second breakfast, referring to Dennis that was on earlier. fly 54 keep up the good work bullish on internationally growing bends hashtag more bends and friends hashtag surfing bitcoin OG tutorial or the original golden streak those are excellent hashtags Joey thanks again for that 69 stats nice all right let's get into the news

everybody let's bring in our friends here let me get rid of this screen and hey buddy how you doing man good to see you Happy to be here. Happy to be on the BTC sessions. You're getting lots of praise here in the comments section. It's always nice to see.

People are digging it. So thanks for joining me every week, man. I'm eternally grateful. I love the Simply sessions. It makes my Thursdays so much more enjoyable being able to talk with somebody I really like. So thanks for being here, man. Man, you're thinking me, but I thank you, bro. I'm having a blast.

I absolutely love this. It's a lot of fun. Well, dude, I'm glad to have you. And you always kill it with the news. So, I mean, let's dive into it, man. I'll bring your screen up here. But what's going on? What's on your mind?

What's been happening this week? Yeah, man, the continuation of the separation of money and state. And the state is fighting back. You know, you can make the argument that, okay, you know, Michael Saylor got sued for tax fraud. Coincidentally, it was a big coincidence. And then coincidentally, not only they sue Michael Saylor the individual, but they also sued micro-strategy. And mind you, this is two to three weeks after the U.S. Treasury sanctioned open-source software for the first time in its history. I don't know about you, Ben, but that's a very, very, very big coincidence.

This is the Attorney General of Washington, D.C. His name is Karo Racine. I hope I pronounce his last name, right. But let's check out what he has to. say he said today we're suing Michael Saylor a billionaire tech executive who has lived in the district for more than a decade but has never paid any DC income tax for tax fraud we're also suing his company micro strategy for conspiring to help him evade taxes he legally owes on hundreds of millions of dollars he's earned while living in DC and then here is a Bloomberg article and here is actually

Saylor and his company responding he says I respectfully disagree with the position of the district of and look forward to a fair resolution in the courts. Although Micro Strategy is based in Virginia, Florida is where I live, vote, and have reported for jury duty, and it is at the center of my personal and family life. The District of Columbia's claims against the company are false and will defend aggressively against this overreach. It goes on to say, shares of Microstrategy fell 3.6%. So obviously, look, maybe I'm a little bit of a conspiracy theory.

Ben, maybe, maybe that's like to my detriment. I don't know, but I'll tell you this, okay? Michael Selaer represents the vanguard. He's the figurehead for the movement of public companies holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet and using it as an alternative to fiat money and the process that takes power away from governments. In the last month alone, like I said, you had a move by the U.S. Treasury saying, hey, open source software, sanctioned, trying to set a precedent. And now you have a attorney general using lawfare to go after Michael Saylor himself and the company. The United States under the Obama administration was caught, and it was a big scandal at the time, using the IRS to go after certain political opponents that didn't believe in a certain ideology.

So this isn't a new thing for the government, right? So I don't know, Ben, there's this really famous saying from one of my favorite broadcasters, and then I'll pass it on to you. There are no conspiracies, but there are also no coincidences. Yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head there. Like it's, it seems to be, uh, more and more obvious that we're entering into or like in the early stages of the, then they fight you stage, right? They're just, they're just starting to kind of dip their toes in and, okay, attack that, sanction that, sue that person. more and more of that happening.

Now, we haven't done ourselves any favors up until now in terms of keeping our heads down and staying humble. I saw somebody putting up that clip of Sailor where he got, he was in an interview and he said something to the tone of, and if you push me too hard, well, I lost it in a boating accident. Tax that. and then I saw somebody else, IRS, hold my beer. Yeah, I think, I mean, this is going to happen. Unfortunately, the people that are in Bitcoin right now are the early ones that are easy targets. So this includes every single one of us right now.

Fortunately, there's a number of Bitcoiners like Michael Saylor that are quite well off and can actually go to court and fight for this kind of shit. And for those that can't when we get attacked, luckily we have an easy, global censorship-resistant way to fundraise for those people, aka Hodlanot, who raised well over a million dollars for his legal fees against Craig Wright. So it's kind of nice that we at least have that on our side,

but it's not going to be easy. And in terms of the idea of suing Michael Saylor in terms of his primary residence, I mean, even in the like past couple of years since he kind of hit the public scene, I thought it was pretty common knowledge. Like his main base is Florida. Like he hits, he's been hitting the the events there. I know he has a home in Florida. I've seen the pictures of all the bitcorners going to his place. He's got his, like, you know, yacht down there and everything. I'm curious to see, like, what constitutes, you know, him living in D.C. as his main residence.

I kind of, it seems not quite truthful. But I guess we'll see. I don't know. Because, you know, when's the last time truth was really observed in clown world? So hey, we'll see. What else you got going on, man? Yeah. So connect the dots, everybody.

This is connected. Okay. This is not like all of this is too big of a coincidence to say that there is. It's just independent, right? And this is a continuation of what actually we reported Ben two or three weeks ago, right? I ran green lights, Bitcoin and crypto payments for imports, right? So we reported a couple weeks ago. The first transaction was about.

about $10 million. Right. This is a continuation of here. Right. This is what we reported. The order was reportedly valued at 10 million, right? There's a continuation of this. It says, Iran pass an act which enables the use of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency payments for imports through a comprehensive legal framework. Iranian minister revealed that the recent past law defines regulations on cryptocurrencies, defines, sorry about that, defines regulations on cryptocurrencies, addresses supply concerns for fuel and electricity costs for mining, and provides authorization for the administration to use cryptocurrencies. The minister reportedly reiterated the authorization was an agreement between the Ministry of Industry and the Central Bank,

arguably suggesting, here's the signal, Ben, suggesting a multi-departmental consensus on the viability of Bitcoin as a means for international payments. Goes on to say, also noted that local businesses will be able to import vehicles by using Bitcoin, signal here again, instead of the US dollar or the euro now why is this significant here is the US sanction policy list on that list is Iran and on that list is on Russia is Russia as well as soon as this news came out Ben shortly after Russia signaled as well and his and the minister over there said we need to intensely develop innovative areas including the adoption of digital assets here's the key this is a safe alternative for all parties that can guarantee uninterrupted payment for the supply of goods

from abroad and for export. Now, if you want to know why the U.S. Treasury sanctioned an open source software, here is your answer. Here is your answer. These countries are clearly signaling that they're going to use Bitcoin in a way to circumvent current U.S. sanction policy. Yeah. Like, can you imagine reading these headlines four years ago, five years ago, and be like, everybody's freaking out because we're currently in a bear market and these are the headlines. People feel like, you have major nations and not just like some dinky little nations, but like Russia talking about Bitcoin for international settlement and Iran already greenlit and used it. Like it's I mean it's natural that this would happen when money gets weaponized, right? People will migrate to a system that doesn't discriminate.

That is just a level playing field for all. And that's what we're seeing. It just happens to be from one side of the aisle to the other. One, you know, one one set of one belief system, one set of nations to the other just happened to be the U.S. sanctioning Russia and Iran that set this whole thing off. It could have just as easily been the other way around. It does make me worry temporarily for those of us that are in Western nations being villainized for God forbid using a money that somebody, you know, perceived as bad also uses.

Because, you know, the U.S. dollar never gets used for anything bad. So yeah, it's wild to see. I wanted to highlight one thing from that coin telegraph article about Russia. One thing that I noticed that was interesting is down near the bottom, I'll just read it here. It said the idea of international payments in crypto even received support from Russia's biggest government crypto skeptic, the Bank of Russia. In June, the Bank of Russia, Governor Alvira Nabulina, I'm not sure how to say it, me, stated that cryptocurrencies can be used in cross-border or international payments, but only, and here's the caveat that she, obviously, the central bank would say,

but only if they don't get into Russia's domestic financial system. So rules for thee, but not for me, as is what we're saying. And we saw the same thing in Ukraine. They're like, oh, yeah, we're super stoked to receive millions of dollars in donations with Bitcoin and others. but we don't want anybody using it so that they can get their money out of the country. But that's the thing. When they demonstrate that it works perfectly

in the face of people not wanting them to use it, the citizens are going to go, huh, I guess I could just use it. So, yeah, I mean, as much as they try to make rules for the and not for me, I don't think it's going to work or stick. Yeah. Alex Gladstein wrote, to add to your point, Ben, Alex Gladstein wrote this amazing article called Bitcoin is the Trojan Horse for Freedom.

And in that article, he makes the case that dictators are going to be attracted to using Bitcoin because of the freedom properties. But what they don't understand is that once they take that pill, the freedom and the number go up technology is in inextricably linked. So you can't disconnect the two. And I think that's basically what you were saying, right, is that once they should. show the Russian people, hey, we could use this to go over, go around U.S. sanction policy. You know, why can't I use it to, to, you know, save in a money that won't be the base. It can't be easily confiscated, right? So it puts the, it makes the, it forces the government to answer very difficult questions

where before they wouldn't even have to answer them. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I, something tells me this isn't the last time we're going to hear country, X, Y, or Z has started using Bitcoin because they've been purged from the legacy financial system. 100%. I think this is the first inning. And in about a year or so, we will be doing the show live from the Goulog. Perhaps. Well, in the meantime, let's see what else is up before we get tossed in. All right. So this was also a huge announcement. I'm going to connect it with something else. Again,

very big coincidence here once again, but I'll connect it. This was a announcement. announced over the weekend at Bitblock Boom at a satellite event. New York Digital Investment Group announces Lightning Accelerator project called In Wolf's Clothing. Absolutely love that name. And it was Ross Stevens. For anyone who doesn't remember Ross Stevens, Ross Stevens was the guy who was in charge for the Bitcoin for institutions in this crazy kind of presentation that Michael Saylor did about a year or two years ago. Right.

This is the guy behind it. He also did a legendary interview with Michael Saylor as well, right? when it was just starting. Anyways, it says, speaking from the Bitcoin Commons, Steven shared that NYDig will launch a lightning accelerator project, to quote him, says the reality is that this year, and this is the signal, Ben, the progress in Bitcoin and Lightning is staggering. Month after month after month, the nodes on the Lightning Network are growing. Keep in mind, this is after Bitcoin fell 70%. The accelerator is geared towards individual founders and small teams, developers working on Lightning, Terro, Covenants, pre-seed, seed, series A companies, transportation and lodging

will be provided participants from anywhere in the world. The program will be run in eight-week cohorts. There will be eight to 12 teams per cohort, world-class mentors with office hours. The cohorts will be exclusively non-remote. There will be significant seed capital for each team with already recruited investors and full-time in-house expertise. It's absolutely crazy that they're doing this after Bitcoin fell 70%. Now, here's a little bit of signal. At the end, And he says, Stephen says, we're coming for you, Fiat. Let's work tirelessly to make finance decentralized. Let's work tirelessly to make money decentralized.

Keep in mind, this article was released August 26th. This came out August 29th. Again, very big coincidence. The U.S. Federal Reserve has tightened the window for the launch of its Fed Now instant payments platform to between May and July, 23. According to a press release, Fed Now will be open to financial institutions of any size. So they're basically making the case. Again, very big coincidence. A couple days after Ross Stevens, who's behind the whole institutional movement, says, hey, we're investing in lightning, it's going to destroy fiat.

The Fed says, hey, we got our Fed now, but it's it only isn't only the Fed. This is a recent article published by the World Economic Forum. Check out the date. Again, coincidentally, a couple days after that, what are central bank digital currencies in it, Ben? It says, central bank money is a risk-free form of money that is guaranteed by the money. the state. That sounds absolutely terrifying. And I know you're going to like this, Ben. Does the Bank of England

explains that CBDCs because they're pegged to a country's national currency don't have the volatility of privately issued digital currencies like Bitcoin. Okay. Hold on a second. Are you trying to tell me that Bitcoin is more privately

issued than central bank money? That is propaganda spin. Yeah. That's such a track. I just, oh my God. I love that they said basically risk-free. Was that the actual quote that they said, basically risk-free? No, risk-free.

No, basically nothing. Risk-free form of money. Wow. They double down more than Rao Powell there. Like, that's risk-free. I'm just picturing his smirking face. Yeah, risk-free of, I guess you need to specify what the risk is.

If the risk is having your entire life dictated by a central bank, then the risk is 100%. If you're worried about fluctuations in value in the short term, well, I mean, the risk is still there because, as we've learned, they have no clue what they're doing in regards to. monetary policy. So, yeah, man. And privately issued, privately issued Bitcoin. Man, I just, I mean, nail on the head for Ethereum and XRP, I suppose, which came afterwards there in the quote. But, yeah, I mean, it's just, there's so much gaslighting here.

It's unbelievable. It's actually very believable. What am I talking about? It's par for the course, I suppose. Plenty of propaganda. And I'll give a shout out to Lina Seish. Speaking of central bank propaganda, the Bank of Canada came out with a tweet, a tweet storm clarifying the misinformation around money printing.

And they basically threw it all the jargon of like, we're not printing money. We're buying government bonds. And you're like, where did the money? come from to buy the government bonds. And then so she made a little cartoon with her little Bitcoin characters that basically makes fun of the central bank trying to spin the narrative. And it's excellent.

I'll show it after we wrap up with the news here. But yeah, it's gaslighting all around from the central banks. But yeah, any other thoughts on this one here? Yeah. I mean, look, it goes on to say, right, it's like the Europe says it's risk-free. America's central bank says the safety. digital asset available to the general public with no associated credit or liquidity risk. Like, yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, and a lot of people are going to believe it too.

They're going to be, they're going to see all the headlines of like the shit coin rug pulls. And they're going to think like every mainstream article out there that that Bitcoin is those things. But it's it's not. Like those are the, the, the, the skis. Scammers capitalizing on the success of Bitcoin. And then the central bankers capitalize on the lack of understanding around the difference of Bitcoin and crypto in the hopes that people don't get it, gravitate towards it and opt out. Absolutely. Ben, what are your thoughts? I'm curious. What are your thoughts on the Ross Stevens announcement?

Do you think it's noise, signal? What are your thoughts? I think it's, I mean, listen, you've got this guy. he appears to know what's up. He appears to know that the money is broken. He appears to very much know that there's a huge difference between Bitcoin and shitcoins. Even in some of the quotes there, he said something like,

he referred to shitcoins and said that it's all all trash. Something about the tech behind shit coins is brittle or something like that, he said. And he's putting his money where his mouth is. And he's getting smart people in a room in person to work on promising second layer solutions to further improve upon what Bitcoin can already do. I think that's massive. I think it's incredible. I think the announcement is big, but it'll be another one of these kind of slow burn stories. You hear it.

You don't hear anything else for an extended period of time. and then all the sudden, incredible amounts of innovation start happening because the work that's being done starts to actually come into production and people actually get to start to use it. So it's great and I love that this is happening in the midst of a bear market because this is where the signal is. They're doing this, like you said, after Bitcoin drops 70%, and they're like, oh yeah, we're going to pile tons of money into this

into ensuring that stuff continues to get built on Bitcoin. A plus, A plus. Ben, do you think, and again, this is like some Nico Jones, but do you think that this type of language has to do with them seeing this type of stuff? And then one last thing, these bureaucrats have never been used to competition in their entire lives. So instead of competing on an open market and trying to out-innovate the other guy, which is what you're supposed to, they're showing their true colors of, totalitarianism. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I think it's no mistake that there, you know, this, the wording of the, the pumping of central bank digital currencies saying that it's going to be efficient and eco-friendly and all this shit. The, again, in reference to the Bank of Canada coming out and clarifying misinformation around money printing, all this shit, it's no mistake that they're now being kept on their toes because there's an alternative. When there's no alternative, you don't have to clarify shit. You just keep on doing what you're doing because nobody has any choice anyways.

Now they're having to come out and be like, no, please guys, don't go anywhere. Hold on. Please opt into our totalitarian system. So you're totally fucked. But there's always going to be an opt out. There's always going to be an opt out now. It's not going anywhere. It's just how much of a headache are they going to make it in the interim?

That's it. 100%. Christine Lagarde has a word for it and everything. the escape valve in her French accent. Absolutely hilarious. Yeah. So Ben, I know this is going to be the part that you find the most interesting because you're a tinker like me. This is Block. Block is the company that Jack Dorsey launched and what they wanted to do is launch an open source hardware wallet, but it wasn't just the actual software that was open source. It was the actual circuit, the actual chip itself that was open source and no one's really ever done that before and here what i found interesting is that they

give their reasons as to why you know they wanted to do this so first it lays it out says initially considered we primarily focus on three options secure elements system on chip microcontroller and a custom asic right so they go on and they have this really fancy graft of course i think it's a little bit bias um where the difference the tradeoffs between all of them secure element general purpose SOC, general purpose MCU, secure MCU. And then the color labels make it, you know, red is, you know, high risk, green is good, right? So they kind of justify their reasons. Now, what's really interesting, Ben, I want to get your thoughts on this, is that they went with the MCU.

They went with the basic microcontroller, confident that a secure microcontroller offered the best balance against the criteria for our product. Our team developed a short list of components that could work. Of all the options we considered the silicon, I don't know what that is, secure MCU, you offered the most compelling mix of security features and gave us the most flexibility for transparency. So it's really interesting, Ben, because the seed signer project kind of took that same approach. And if you compare that with, you know, with with the other hardware wallets like, you know, one of my favorites, which is the cold card. You got Bitbox, of course, Ledger.

They all use a secure element, right? And these guys are choosing not to do that, which is really interesting. And do you think that they're being forced to do that because you can't really open source a secure element? Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. I mean, they kind of came into this saying we want this to be fully open source and we want, I mean, my feeling when I was listening to kind of them talk about this as they launched the project was they wanted people to be able to replicate their work and not have to go through third parties. So in the article here, they talk about like, you know, if we had a secure element, then we're necessarily having to work with some of these people that create the secure element.

And that means they have to be involved in the development process as we create this device. And it just adds, you know, roadblocks for us. We can't do things as quickly. So I get their point there. Now, the thing with not having a secure element, when it comes to the seed signer, it's stateless, right? Like it doesn't retain a copy of your seed phrase. And so you can't extract the public key or the private key if you get a hold of the device

because it's not stored on the device. It's separate from the device. It's literally just used to interact with a private key that's usually in the form of a QR code. When you have a device that stores your private key, and it doesn't have a secure element, then you have to basically, depending on how you interact with it, if you don't have like a pass phrase added to your seed, then anybody that gets a hold of the device, you've got to assume that with enough know-how and proper equipment, they'll be able to extract your private key.

We've seen this with the treasor. You know, if you don't have a seat, see if you don't have a passphrase on your treasor um they've shown that you can extract the private key from that device um so again it depends what you're defending from uh if if you're trying to defend from very uh tech savvy individuals kicking in your door and stealing your device and then going and hacking it elsewhere then yeah you're going to be worried about that or or um your your hardware going missing unbeknownst to you and in that time somebody extracting your private key. Yes, that's a worry. If your main worry is not having your keys accessible in a hot or connected device, then maybe this isn't as much of a worry for you.

So, I mean, I'm obviously going to tinker with it. I also do, I do like the treasurer for ease of use and everything, but I recognize that if there's not a passphrase attached or it's not part of a multi-sig, then you have to be careful in how you utilize the treasurer. And the same would go for something like this from my understanding and cursory reading of this is attach a passphrase, I suppose. And we'll see what the interface looks like when it comes out. I still think it can be useful. And they're trying to, like, they're going the NFC route.

We'll see what comes of it. So I'm hopeful. And it seems their main goal, too. is making something that's very simple to use and accessible to all so that self-custody becomes more of the norm. And I can appreciate that too. So yeah, we'll see. I'm cautiously optimistic, but I also feel like I'm well-informed enough to recognize

the trade-offs. Yeah, 100%. I'm completely on, especially for a single SIG, I would not feel comfortable with a device without a secure element. That's just, you know, because at the end of the day, it is physically vulnerable. You know, there's mitigations, like you said, with the 25th word. If, for example, you're using it as a one key out of a three of five, fine. But it's like, you know, if I'm traveling and if I'm going over a border, I love having

a cold card. I'll just say that because I know it's going to buy me the most amount of time. Yeah. Right. So. Good guy biker in the comment said ledger and cold card can be physically attacked too, but with a much higher threshold. so a passphrase helps there as well.

Yeah, I mean, everything, again, a general good practice is assume if somebody gets a hold of your hardware, that it may be compromised, have that backup ready, and then move those funds. Exactly. Yeah. The, the cold, the last one that was broken was the MK2, and it required specialty hardware, laser beams, and it was 500,000 with all the equipment, all, whatever. And that was the MK2, right? So imagine if.

you have that in a three of five with multiple cold cards and it becomes very expensive. Like I feel like only nation state attackers could pull something off like that versus what you were saying with this. It's like, dude, the average Joe. You know, if he's computer savvy enough, he knows how to do it. And I agree. I think you got to, this thing is just a signing device. You know, but it's not something that you definitely, I, let's see what happens.

I'll just say that. So the next thing I want to talk about, Ben, was. the last thing actually was the bitcoin mining difficulty jumps 9.26%. This is a little bit of an update. The largest hash rate increase since January. Also the hash price, which basically represents how much Bitcoin you're getting for a terror hash, it continues to go down. It's like a record down. It's like a .08 cents. So miners right now, like in every single bear market, are getting absolutely crushed and the miners with the worst power costs are starting to get pressured out.

But this happens every single time. But that difficulty adjustment is quite big, right? That's interesting. Like difficulty jumping up would indicate an increase in hash coming onto the network, correct? Correct. So in this environment, that it seems strange to me. me that there would be that much of a jump in difficulty given everybody's getting squeeze the fuck out of if they're not super efficient. What do you see as a reason for a difficulty jump

in this type of an environment? Yeah. So it's a little bit of a lagging indicator, right? And, you know, remember we had the catastrophe. I wouldn't even say catastrophe. We've been in Bitcoin. It doesn't matter. But if, you know, you got into Bitcoin last year or two, you know, the month of, of August, really June, August were terrible for you. This thing fell like 38%. And with it, you know, fell down the little bit of a hash rate. But we did have, you know, we did have a little bit of a recovery. We went all the way up to 25K, right?

And what that did is, okay, look, I could plug in my miner again. And the hash rate went up with that, right? And now, like I said, it's a little bit of a lagging indicator. And what you're seeing now is the Bitcoin network, which I think is absolutely fascinating, adjusting to make sure that the time stays in about 10 minutes. But this difficulty increase will force less economical miners to unplug. And I suspect that's what's going to happen, especially with the price the way it is. And the general macro conditions, right?

The energy situation in Europe absolutely brutal, completely they caught, they brought it upon themselves, but it's very, very scary. And then is that going to lead Europe into a recession? If that leads into Europe into a recession, that could potentially affect America. So it's a lot of uncertainty right now. I suspect that, yeah, it's going to go 9% up. And you'll see in, you know, in a couple weeks, you'll see this thing go right back down. Yeah, yeah.

I had, it's funny because you forget how recently the differences in price have happened. And yeah, you're right. You know, it went up to 25K. people probably, oh, plug these back in. We're profitable now, marginally. And then, you know, you get smacked back down to sub 20K. And suddenly, and with increasing energy costs, that double whammy is probably going to drop that difficulty again. We'll probably maybe some slightly slower blocks in the next couple of weeks here.

So I guess we'll see. We'll see. Yeah, man. Well, dude, I appreciate everything that you brought us today. great topics, very interesting. Hopefully, you know, well, thoughts and prayers for Michael Saylor. I'm sure he'll make it through.

And, yeah, lots of interesting stuff on the nation state front. So yeah, man, Bitcoiners, just keep your head down and be humble, I suppose. Dude, thanks for being here. I appreciate it. Awesome. My pleasure. That's right. Take self-custody, everyone.

And of course, this is Nico. and this is your Simply Sessions. Love it, man. Thanks. I'll see you next week. All right, everybody. Again, if you need that AIV of good Bitcoin news to your veins, you got to go and subscribe to Simply Bitcoin.

Nico does this six days a week. He's pumping out the news on the regular. This was just a taste of it. So if you like the news reviews with myself and Nico, head over to Simply Bikon. Bitcoin, give them a sub because just straight signal coming out of those guys over there. I've got a few more things to chat about here. Just a few things that I've been working on since I've been home and prior to leaving

my Razby Blitz is all synced up, ready to go. Well, with some exceptions, I've got to get, it's purring away on behind me here. But I've got a few things that I still have to do. So I got a little screen that's going to be on it. And I bought a soldering gun, soldering iron rather, that I'm learning how to use. Literally, just before I did this, I soldered in some of the pins that I need. So I'm going to be affixing this screen to my node, which will give some live information on it. But yeah, my dashboard is up and running.

I'm going to have to get playing with this, learning about how to use it, experimenting, so on and so forth. So yeah, look forward to that. and we'll be diving in. A couple other things. Robosats, the peer-to-peer K-YC-free method of obtaining Bitcoin, which I've done a video on exclusively, and I've also done a non-KYC Bitcoin flow, and Robosat was featured in that.

Well, now it's an app that you can add on your Umbral node. So I have Robosats open here, and if you notice up in my browser, it's Umbral.Local and a port number. So what is the benefit of using Robosats in that way? Well, one is because your umbrella uses Tor anyways, you don't have to actually have Tor browser and access it that way. You can just go on Robosats that is linked directly to your own note. But then there was also some clarification here,

which was super interesting, was that currently, in order to retain any information and around previous trades that you've made, it's better to use a new NIM every single time because it keeps you anonymous for each individual exchange that you do. But if you're running it on your node, then down the line as they implement things like this, you could actually retain some of, for yourself,

retain some of the previous trades that you've done if you want that for your own, piece of mind like, oh, I obtained this Bitcoin. It was currently this price. You can keep that, you know, privately on your own node to retain that information if you see fit. But yeah, there still, you know, it gives you access to utilize through Tor. So if you want to do it that way, well, there's an easy way to do it. Um, all right, moving on. Um, mempool. dot space just launched mempool. dot space slash lightning.

It gives you lots of cool lighting insights. I've just kind of peeked through it here, but I love mempool. dot space. It's such a great website. And now that they're offering some insights on lightning, super awesome, stoked about that. So yeah, check it out. Mempool.

That space slash lightning and tinker around. It's a little fun. What else do we got here? Oh, they just dropped a new LNBits extension. So I've previously done a video on on Ellen bits and just how to use it again with either your umbril or via I did the video that I did was using voltage. But it's basically just a toolkit for lightning. You can do so much with it.

They just added a new extension that allows you to program an NFC card to pull from a balance set withdrawal limits either per transaction or per day and basically set up a tap card to be able to. spend from a designated lightning wallet whenever you like. So I'm excited to play with this. And the reason I want to play with this is there was a bit of a more proprietary version of this. Or it is open source. They open source and everything. But Coin Corner, they launched the Bolt card. I did a video on that.

You can program it however you see fit in terms of just basic gift card, tap and redeem. But the lightning debit card functionality. that they had was pulling from a coin corner account previously. Well, now that's no longer the case. You can use their tool and this LNBits extension to use the exact same card or really any NFC device to create your own, you know, tap and pay and redeem option in terms of an NFC card or like you can put it in the in the little preview video. Ben Arc says, or you can put it in like an old Casio watch or really anything you wanted.

and just tap and pay, which is super awesome. Stoke to play with that. What else we got here? I was talking about this earlier with Nico. Lena dropped this little cartoon here with her little hodler characters. With the Bank of Canada, gaslighting everyone, you asked us if we printed cash to support the federal government. We didn't print cash, you dumb dumps. We printed money electronically, and we can remove that money from the system whenever we want.

And then everybody's peaking over at a, graph of money supply and the Bank of Canada saying, no, don't look at that. So anyways, enjoyed that. I enjoyed that. I asked you guys, what are some of your favorite pieces of content from the week? I got a few answers here. Joseph Hall did an article on Bitcoin could become zero emission, talking about negative or a carbon negative technology in that Bitcoin on aggregate.

could actually be cleaning up the environment more than it actually emits. And what he's referring to there is taking abandoned wells, like oil and gas wells that are literally just like leaking methane into the air and actually attaching miners to those, capturing that methane, removing it from the atmosphere, utilizing it to mine, converting that to CO2, which is much less detrimental to the environment and being a positive impact on our air, which is fantastic. So that's interesting. Feel free to give that a read. Another great article from Pete Rizzo, How to Be a Bitcoin Maximilist.

And he refers to it as a system believes accepted by authoritative, accepted as authoritative by some group or school. a follower of a distinctive practice system or philosophy. He goes into, again, the current fervor around the debate over Bitcoin maximalism. Is it bad? Is it good? Yeah. So anyways, good read here. Recommend.

And then my good friend that I got to hang out with Alex McShane in France just this past week. He wrote a little article on his experiences in Bioritz, France, for the Surf and Bitcoin conference. So if you're curious about how that was, or if you were there and you wanted to see his take on it, well worth checking out. So, yeah, head on over to Bitcoin Magazine and check that one out. It's called Surfing Bitcoin Maximilism.

I dropped a video at the beginning of the week here on, well, actually just the other day, On the Ledger Nano S plus, I try to cover as many pieces of hardware as I can. They recently upgraded the Ledger NanoS to the Ledger NanoS plus. The too long didn't watch of it is not too much of a difference in terms of functionality. Pretty much does all the same things. The main reason for the upgrade was to be able to add more applications. If you're only using it for Bitcoin, then that won't really matter to you. I will say it's a bit more robust in terms of the build.

It feels a little bit more solid, bigger screen, not as flimsy. The buttons seem a little bit more robust as well. So I just kind of did a walkthrough of how to set it up, how to use it with Ledger Live, update the firmware, all of that, transact with it. I also show how to do your recovery, how to use a passphrase on it, and how to import it and use it with alternative software, in this case, spare a wallet. So if you want to take a look at that, feel free. Or if you know somebody that has a ledger and they just don't know how to use it, there you go.

You can take a peek at that. Hopefully it's helpful to some. I still love my cold card, though, obviously. And then tomorrow we've got a banger of an episode of Why Are We Bullish coming out. We've got Rob Simone, which is the resident Bitcoin Maximus over at Hedge Eye. Remember Keith McCullough? Anyways, they've got a bitcomer in their ranks that is trying to orange pill everybody on the team. So he had me on Hedge Eye just a couple weeks ago.

So he's going to be joining us. We got Joey from the Canadian Bipcoiners podcast. We've got Chris Betcher, which if you're unfamiliar with him, check him out on Twitter. He had a really good thread on things that he's learned in life. Super awesome guy. A lot of it is pretty based. And he has Bitcoin references in there.

So he's going to talk about kind of his thesis on life and things that he's learned and how it may relate to Bitcoin. as well. And then we've got Mark Goodwin from Bitcoin Magazine joining us as well. So it's going to be a packed panel tomorrow. It should be a good time. So don't miss it. 6 p.m. Eastern time tomorrow. All right. It's time to wrap up. Thank you, everybody for being here. I appreciate it. Like, subscribe, share, all those things. Again, really, really help get this in front of more people. Make sure you follow Nico over at Simply Bitcoin as well. Get your daily dose of news six days a week. Of course, you can help the show in another way.

You can head up these sponsors I mentioned down below. Coin Kate, Shake, Pay, lead, and bit refill, and bill follow. They're all down here. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. Strike.combe slash BTC sessions. Head there. Type in any amount you want. Hit the tip button.

You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice. Or if you prefer, tap to the right, you'll see a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. See you guys next time for your daily session. Total their Bitcoin