BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: New York Times BTC Hit Piece! ep337

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

The New York Times tries to hit Bitcoin miners with blatant disinformation, Fidelity buys MicroStrategy shares, Arkansas + Montana right to mine bills and much more on today's show! 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Nunchuk Wallet and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted multisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Pass on your savings to your loved ones with ease in a simple claiming process with full customer support. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab an Embassy today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/ HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Furthermore, you can check out their Lend platform for p2p loans that are never rehypothecated. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION 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    The Miami Bitcoin Conference is the largest Bitcoin event in the world! Come check it out in Miami Beach Florida on May 18-20th. Use code BTCSESSIONS for 10% off your tickets! https://bm.b.tc/btcsessions Free video tutorials not enough? Need some extra hand-holding when mastering self-custody, multisig, coinjoin, running a node, or other skills? Book me for a private session on my website! https://www.btcsessions.ca/ Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions ⚡[e-mail]

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Thursday, another episode of Simply Sessions. We've got our buddy, Nico, standing in the wings, waiting to fill us in on all the craziness that's been going on this week. I don't know about you, but I've been having a fantastic time this week. It's been, it has been, I don't know. I was just telling Nico backstage, I was busting the gut all week with everything going on with the New York Times and Pierre Richard. And, oh, hasn't it been grand?

We're going to reminisce on it momentarily. Plus, lots of stuff to talk about a little bit, something about fidelity. We got some stuff going on state by state in regards to mining as well. Lots of stuff to cover. Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my good friend Bill here. We'll do it live.

Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can. All right. and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, like, subscribe,

share all those things. They help a ton in getting this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we bring in Niko, let's take a look at where we are in the market right. And now this is timechain calendar.com.

Yes, indeed, I did get it up and running. again. Thanks to TC for helping that out. For some reason, it just wouldn't load for me. Anyways, all figured out back to my favorite dashboard. We're sitting at 30,358 kuckbox per coin. A single US dollar will pick you up 3,294 sats. In terms of fees, next block, you're looking at 24 sats per byte. If you're willing to wait a little bit, 11 sats per byte should do you. Mempool, not the worst. We've seen it. Still full, right? 329. megabytes when most mempools sit at around 300. So it's purging any transactions that are below 1.87 sats per byte.

92.12% of all Bitcoin have been mine. That's 19.35 million of them. And yeah, TikTok next block chugging away. Shout out to sponsors of the show, hoddlehottle.com. If you're buying Bitcoin and you got a few things that are priorities in mind, things like peer to people. peer transactions, things like instant self-custody and no KYC, not having to give up all your personal information.

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You can check them out at hoddlehottle.com. link is down below in the show notes. Now, when you do get your non-KYC sats, you're going to want to store it in something badass, something perhaps like the cold card Mark 4. I love my cold card. I got one of them kicking around right here. Anyways, the thing is a beast.

So many awesome features. I use it regularly with spare wallet on desktop, Nunchuk on mobile. But Coin Kite just has all the great stuff. Tap Siner, coin kite cards, things like the block clock, the open dime, the Sats card, all kinds of great stuff. Also coming down the pipe, the cold card Q1 looks insane.

If you want to check out all their stuff, coin kite.com, use code BTC sessions for 5% off, everything in the store. Now, I did mention Nunchuk here. So if you're looking to move beyond single-sig options and dive into multi-sig, then perhaps check out the Nunchuk Honey Badger package. This is an assisted multi-sig plan, a 204 multi-sig with baked in inheritance planning. It's super easy. It's all over mobile. And you can use things like the cold card and the tap signer and a whole bunch of other options. And it works beautifully. It's super simple.

It walks you through every step of the way so that you know that your next of kin are going to get the sats that you want them to get with no issues. And one of my favorite things, no K. K.C. You don't have to give up any personal information to get set up with this thing. It's beautiful. check it out, check out my tutorial, nunchuk.io. And finally, shout out to start9.com, your sovereign computing solution. These guys are insane. These guys are incredible. I love running my full Bitcoin stack on a Start9 embassy.

So you can run Bitcoin core, your lightning node, things like mempool. Dot space, join market, all the Bitcoin peripherals. You can run and host your own data, passwords, files, photos. You can also run Noster Relays and Nostriles. clients. It's an absolute beast. You can check out start9.com. You can grab an embassy one, which is kind of your base level, entry level option, or an embassy pro, which is a beast of a computer, and you can host your whole life on that thing. So check them out, start9.com, and I got a tutorial on them as well. Just a couple quick shoutouts. A few sat boostograms.

Michael with the hearts, we got cryosats, sprinkling sats everywhere. And Dale saying, thanks for the show and Joey saying since hitting 30k all I hear is people wanting bitcoin to go up I on the other hand want bitcoin to go down no not bitcoin I'm talking about Benico tip touching ceremony hashtag touch tribe tip to wait again all the just too many teas the teas tip touch tribe holy crap Nico you're bringing you in what do you feel about the tip touch tribe Titch Touch Tribe. Wow. Okay. All right. I'll take it. Hashtag Benico. Benico. Benico or Benico? Benico. I feel like Joey has got all the great hashtags. I don't like we just need to hire him from marketing. Like how do we how do we top like I love that he he made an acronym for BTC. Benico tip touching ceremony.

amazing. I can't wait for this air, bro. It's going to be we're going to get goddy music, you know. We got to, I'm going to reach out and I'm going to get some connections going. We got to, we got to, like, let's, we'll cement in a little bit of time.

When do you get into town, by the, well, I guess you're like, I live here, dude. Yeah, right. Yeah. I'm getting in on the Monday. Okay. And so we'll be around. Yeah. figure something out. We'll chat after this and get something. I feel like we should just,

this should just be like an open thing where plebs can come and hang out. We'll, like, we'll, we'll bleach on the beach or something. Dude, the bit, their, Bitcoiners have been, I think they locked down a place in Miami Ironside. There's like, uh, like a Bitcoin type of place where, you know, Bitcoiners could commingle and stuff. So that might be something, uh, that might be That might be a thing. All right. Well, we'll figure it out. Let's do some redecorating in here.

Shabam. Boom. Awesome. So, man, I mean, where are we starting here? Because I know what has tickled my fancy this week. But where do you want to take this first? What should I be pulling up here? Let's put up, let's pull up the articles.

And then we'll, you know, we'll kind of get to it, bro. some crazy things happened and lots of coincidences. I think, you know, and this is a very strong tweet. I'm just going to like emphasize that right in the beginning, but I stand by every word of it. But it's the theory that we've been talking about a lot on Simply sessions, which is the disintermediation of information, right? The internet has allowed, like what we're doing right now,

we're talking to people directly, you know, 10, 20 years ago, that wasn't the case, bro. Like, you would have to get your information. either through a handful of TV channels or through a handful of media out like institutions, one of which was the New York Times. So their ability to craft the narrative was very, very powerful.

And now the internet has empowered everybody. But anyway, speaking of the New York Times, they released a hit piece for anyone who's not in the know, specifically on, you know, again, trashing Bitcoin mining. It says Bitcoin mines cash in on electricity by devouring it, selling it, and even turning it off, and they cause immense pollution.

In many cases, the public pays the price, right? This is also another headline by the New York Times. It says El Salvador decimated its ruthless gangs, but at what cost? In the year since El Salvador declared a state of emergency, the government has delivered a stunning blow to the gangs that were once the ultimate authority and much of the country. And if you read, Pat, like further in that article, it says that that is somehow a dangerous.

to democracy. So I took some time to look back into the history of the New York Times, right? So what is the New York Times? What institution? What type of reporting has come out of them? And there's a couple things, right? So I said, remember when the New York Times originally broke the story that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which led to the invasion of Iraq? Remember when the New York Times intentionally covered up the Hologamor, which is the Ukrainian Holocaust, the murder of millions of Ukrainians by Stalin. The New York Times has the blood of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of individuals on their hands. They're not on the side of human freedom and prosperity. They're on the side of tyranny, death, destruction, despair. And I stand by those words. They're very powerful words,

but I stand by them. Here is a Fox News article, and it goes into the details of what exactly this New York Times reporter did. His name was Walter Durante. Apparently, he covered up the, he denied the existence of a demist. devastating famine in Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. It went on to say that an estimated 5 to 7 million people were killed in that famine. There's a book that was released called The Grey Lady Winked. And on a trip to the U.S. Embassy in Berlin in the spring of 1931, Durante made a confession to a State Department officer so stunning that the officer wrote it down

verbatim and entered into the U.S. government record, quote, in agreement with New York Times and the Soviet authorities, official dispatches always reflected the official opinion of the Soviet government and not his own. And it's very something very similar happens with the case in Iraq, the weapons of mass destruction. This is Judith Miller. She was a reporter for the New York Times. And she is known for her coverage of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program both before and after the 2003 invasion, which was later discovered to have been based on inaccurate information from the intelligence community. So isn't that strange 50 years apart both times the New York Times has been caught, basically not being journalists, but

actually propagating information from governments, right? So it's interesting that trend, right? Here's the original article on El Salvador, you know, making it look all menacing. But here is the article, the specific article about the New York Times. I read you guys the quote, you know, we've been covering it on Twitter this whole week. But I think the, and I'll play you guys the rebuttal, right, because they did say specifically is they cause immense pollution, right? So I'll play you guys, I'm not going to say better than Pierre Richard himself. So I'll play you guys the video in a little bit. But what I want to focus on is the power of the internet, right? The power of taking agency. So what the New York Times tried to do is that they tried to use the Twitter

community post feature to basically label the video misinformation. We riled up to troops. Bitcoin Twitter riled up the troops together. And enough people downvoted that, basically said that that community vote was unhelpful and Twitter removed it. Right. So this is the battleground of the internet. This is the narrative trench warfare that we are talking about.

But it's also happening on other fronts. At the same time, right, this is something that dawned on me when, I saw this happen, the power of just the individual to rebuke these once powerful institutions, I realized we are witnessing the complete collapse of the corporate media's legitimacy without their previous monopoly on mass distribution. They have to compete with the general public on equal footing. Their narratives, right? So these types of things no longer work.

And I'll show you guys. Look at the drone footage of what's happening. Well, there was an awesome bitcoiner that kind of, you know, has a background in photography, and he dove deep into into that image specifically. And Rory said either you're a completely clueless hack or you extended the bounds of your black point to wash the image out. See how there's zero color information below 80? This is altered, right? So again, they would have been able to get away with this, just how they were able to get away

with the weapons of mass destruction narrative, the problem that they have now is the internet. So if you could play the video, Ben, and I think it does a really good job of not only a Pierre Richard Rebuking the New York Times in a deadpan comedic fashion, but also an interview that Elon Musk had with the BBC, and again, you're seeing the cognitive dissidents

by these legacy institutions. They don't know how to deal with people, talking back, calling into question their very legitimacy itself. Yeah, 100%. All right. Do you want pier up first then? It's the same video. It's all in there.

Beautiful. Okay, here we go. We're here out in Rockdale, Texas. We've got lots of plants here. These plants are consuming CO2 and emitting oxygen, which is fantastic. When we measure CO2, we measure CO2, out here we're in the green. There are very low levels of CO2, 455 parts per million of CO2. Just fantastic reading. Rockdale has some of the freshest air I've ever breathed. So this is a great

way to establish a baseline. We're going to go inside the mining facility and we're going to see how much is this number going to go up? If the number does not go up, then the mining rigs are not emitting any CO2. If the number goes down, that would be interesting as well. So let's find out. This is where the science happens. This is the largest Bitcoin mining facility in the United States.

Outside, we were at 455 parts per million of CO2. Inside, we're at 428 parts per million of CO2. So CO2 levels actually decreased a little bit by entering this Bitcoin mining facility. That might just be a measurement error. But in any case, so far, our going thesis is that Bitcoin mining does not emit any CO2 at all. But let's go to an air-cooled building

and see if that's the case there as well. We're on the air intake side of this air-cooled mining facility. We're still out here in Rockdale at Riott's world-leading, mining facility. We're at 452 CO2 parts per million. Still in the green. This is good. This is good. We're going to see in the hot aisle where the exhaust is coming out of how much CO2 is coming out of the Bitcoin mining rigs. Let's find out. This is my favorite part. I love it. All right.

It's so good. We're going to put the meter just right behind a face. right behind a fan so that we're blowing all of the air onto the meter and we're going to see what it's going to change here in terms of measurements. We're still at 452 parts per million. This result makes me think that there might not be any CO2 coming out of the Bitcoin mining rate. I think the science is conclusive. The data shows, Bikovir, Coin mining does not emit any CO2. Good.

Dude. Content you don't like or hateful. What do you mean to describe a hateful thing? Yeah. I mean, you know, just content that will solicit a reaction, something that may include something that is slightly racist or slightly sexist, those kinds of things. So you think if something is slightly sexist, it should be banned? No. Is that what you're saying?

I'm not saying anything. I'm saying... Well, I'm just curious. I'm trying to say what you mean by hateful content. content and I'm asking for specific examples and if and you just said that if something is slightly sexist that's hateful content does that mean that it should be banned well you've asked me you've asked me whether my feed whether it's got less or more I'd say it's got slightly more that's why I'm asking for examples right can you name one example I honestly don't you

honestly I can't name a single example I'll tell you why because I don't actually use that for you feed anymore because I just don't particularly like it but you said a lot of people A lot of people are quite similar. I only look at my following. Well, hang on a second. You said you've seen more hateful content, but you can't name a single example, not even one. I'm not sure I've used that feed for the last three or four weeks. Well, then how did you see that hateful content?

Because I've been using Twitter since you've taken over for the last six months. Okay, so then you must have at some point seen for you hateful content. I'm asking for one example. Right. You can't give a single one. And I'm saying... Then I say so that you don't know what you're talking about. Really?

Yes, because you can't be a single example. of hateful content, not even one tweet, and yet you claimed that the hateful content was high. Well, that's a false. No, what I claimed... You just lied. What I claim was, there are many organizations that say that that kind of information is on the rise. Now, whether it has a my feed or not. I mean, right, and you can't even if you get something like the strategic dialogue in the UK, they will say that.

So you... Look, people will say all sorts of nonsense. I'm literally asking for a single example and you can't name one. Right. And as I've already said, I don't use that feed. But then how would you know that? I don't think this is getting anywhere. You literally said you experienced more hateful content and then couldn't name a single example.

Right. And as I said, I haven't. That's absurd. I haven't actually looked at that feed. Then how would you know this hateful content? Because I'm saying that's what I saw a few weeks ago. I can't give you an exact example. Let's move on.

We have, we only have a certain amount of time. Wow. Dude, that is literally what that is literally what I'm talking about, Ben. That is literally what I'm talking about. They are not used to the fact that we can talk back now. And they don't know what to do. And he had a bit of a Freudian slip. I don't know if you noticed, right?

When Elon was like, hey, so like, name me the example. He couldn't say, he couldn't say. But he's like, there's been many organizations that have said that. And that is that, that, that's that mindset, this mindset that it's like, look, we're BBC, we're the New York Times. We are the authority on information and just the internet is just completely destroying that, bro. Yeah.

And they don't know what to do. You know, it's such a beautiful thing like actually having for a change. And like, again, everybody can be wrong about something. That's just, you know, that's the reality of things. But, but up until very recently, it's just been you, you hear it and you don't get to respond. Nobody gets to respond. It's just this is what's there and this is just what, you know, you read it and that's that you take it in. There's no there's no back and forth. And now there is. And there's a growing sentiment of like, what if, you know, especially amongst

bitcoins because, you know, there's a topic that we know extremely well. And when you see that topic just completely, you know, basically actual disinformation about that be spouted as absolute fact, you begin to wonder, well, how many other things that I don't understand that I just take for granted the reporting is correct is also very poorly reported. And, you know, as you start to dig a lot of it, it's quite a bit. And so yeah, yeah, it's very, and I mean, the Pierre Richard thing. Like, okay, I've got to say his, the best part is, I think I tweeted something to the, to the tune of Pierre Richard is an absolute artist. When it comes to triggering people to the point where they will literally screech and scream and basically.

point the finger at themselves about how incorrect their baseline assumptions are. Because he he steered that conversation exactly where it needed to go, right? The whole point, like, Pierre Richard knows the carbon accounting tactics of like how it works of, you know, oh, yeah, there's the carbon obviously doesn't come out of the fucking machines. It comes out of like the point of production in that case. but the whole point is the responses that he got where people are like, oh my God, what an idiot. This guy doesn't even know that we're not talking about the machines.

We're talking about the grid and the power it uses. And then that inevitably leads like when you have every person, every environmentalist streaking at the top of their lungs that obviously it's not the machines. It's the grid. It's the power that you're using. And you're like, oh, so how is this different from plugging in your EV? How's this different from plugging in your electric vehicle? How's this different from using your tumble dryer, which by the way,

tumble dryers domestically use twice as much power as Bitcoin? Like, how is that different? How do, so what you're saying is, I like my thing. I don't like your thing. I don't like to use your thing. So you shouldn't be allowed to also use the same power with the exact same energy mix as I do. Yep.

Dude, literally that. And then you know what's interesting, is that they all, the cognitive dissidents when it got to that point, they didn't know what to respond. There was blocks. It was just like, no, this guy, what the BBC reported, this is why I wanted to play that video, that, like, default response, like, you're racist.

No, you're wrong. Like, there is, you're, you're an extremist. It's like, okay, but give me an example. It's like, but you all, that's the narrative. That's the official narrative. What are you talking about? Many organizations have told me that is what is happening. Dude, it's so crazy.

And you know what, though? I'm very proud of this community because we won that fight. We ratioed that New York Times tweet. We fought back that community note. We took it down. And now the riot video has more likes than the New York Times tweet. Yeah. So now they know.

Oh, and by the way, around the same time, New York Times lost their official verification badge as well. And NPR was pulled down because. they were they got butt hurt that they were labeled a government sponsored organization right we are literally watching the disintermediation information in real time and this intermeciation of money is happening as well bro and it's fucking fireworks it's great a entertainment uh nico i know this isn't uh simply bitcoin but i i you know i want to submit uh to the meme review uh one that i dropped a pierre richard one earlier this week uh just let me know let me know what you think of this one For those listening audio only, it's the clips of Pierre in the field with the carbon detector.

But he's motioning to like the New York Times with the number of likes they got. And then he's closely inspecting the number of likes that Riot platforms got, which was indeed more than New York Times. Well, if it is the meme review, we have to review it. Q the epic music. All right. I would give that a tiny Coca-Cola bottle. What about you, Ben? That is absolutely, we're done.

I'm going to give, I know it's my own, but I'm going to give that a cold part in a custom DTC session case. Ooh. Ooh, ooh, ooh. It's very, very good. Very, very good. Oh, wait. And hold on.

It's over because the buzzer hit. Yeah. Fantastic. Oh, man. Oh, wow. We're already touching the tips. I could feel it. All right.

Okay. So in, in... Do you want your articles back up? What do we... Yes, please. Articles back up. All right. And other news, coin, let's talk about Coinbase.

So they made a very... The CEO, Brian Armstrong, CEO of one of the largest shit coin casinos, made a big announcement. And you gotta be thinking, like, why did he do that? Well, we know that recently Coinbase was worn by the Sest. CC of potential securities charging. We know how Gary Gensler feels about shitcoins. He says that everything other than Bitcoin is a security. And we also know based on this Bloomberg article, it's a bit old, but the vast majority of

of revenue of trading volume in Coinbase is coming from shitcoins. You know, 68% is coming from other shit coins. And 16% is coming from Ethereum. Only 16% is coming from Bitcoin. So if the SEC gets its way, boy oh boys, coinbase in trouble. And then coincidentally, lots of coincidence these days, Brian Armstrong says, hey, you know that lightning stuff? Maybe we should integrate it, which is really interesting because if they do integrate lightning, that kind of defeats the narrative of a huge portion of shit coins that they're selling the public, you know?

So it's interesting how market forces are doing what market forces do. Yeah. I love that, again, the integration of lightning means that all of all of the narrative around, oh, Bitcoin is slow and expensive. And that's why you need all these other shitcoins. That just gets decimated right out the gate, which is fantastic. By the way, no wonder they have so much volume on all those other shitcoins. Have you, I don't know if you've seen what Coinbase looks like lately. Oh, my God.

It is online gambling to the max. It's scrolling marquees of like this percent and check out this coin. It's brand new and has these bells and whistles. And it's literally just you're in and day. There's flashing things. And it's just all shit you can buy and trade. And they email out and every. And I know this because I get like these one-on-one bookings with people and they're like,

and they always say like, all right, I'm, you know, it's time for self-custy. And they're always like, yeah, I got my stuff on Coinbase. And they're like, I'm sorry. And they like apologize to me. Like it's okay. You know, I understand. We're fixing it. It's okay.

I'll guide you through it. But then like, then I have to go on Coinbase to be like, show them where stuff is and like how to do it. And then I'm like, oh, every time it's awful. Also, did you see that Brian Armstrong offered to send a hundred bucks to Joe Hall? They never did. And never did. He's like, oh, I sent it to whatever, like Joe's lightning address. And Joe was like, it didn't show up.

Where, where's that at? And then we're trying to like, everybody was trying to decipher if he did like the Coinbase thing where you like send funds like via Coinbase to an email address. But like nobody knows and he hasn't responded. And Joe wrote an article being like, Brian, where's my $100? Dude, that's hilarious. Dude, Joe's the man. But yeah, bro, it's a shit coin.

Look, I forget who said this, but it was very true, right? You play shitcoin games, you get shit coin prizes, bro. You know, so it doesn't surprise me. Doesn't surprise me whatsoever. Anyways, other news, huge news, honestly, bro, is micro strategy. So, and I also got a video as well, but playing a sec. So first of all, so micro strategy is basically acting like a Bitcoin ETF. I'll pull up the charts, which.

I usually never do, but let's pull them up for the sake of, you know, talking about this. So here's the micro strategy stock. And here is the Bitcoin stock. And as you can see, you know, especially as of late, really when they started their Bitcoin strategy, doesn't that look very similar to you? It looks, they could be twins. They could be twins, right? It's almost as if this trades specifically on the Bitcoin allocation and has not. nothing with the company itself.

It's basically a Bitcoin ETF. Let's be clear. It's a Bitcoin ETF. Now, what's really interesting though is the fact of who has purchased micro-strategy stock as of late. Fidelity.

We know how Elizabeth Warren feels about Fidelity. We know how many trillions of dollars Fidelity has under assets. We know that Fidelity recently announced giving their clients or customers the ability to purchase Bitcoin and Shikcoin Ethereum through their platform. Look at what they stocked up on.

28,000 percent. They bought 96,000 shares of Microstrategy. And Bank of America brought 226,000 shares, an increase of 47,000 percent as of late. And it's interesting because Michael Saylor gave a hint of this at Pacific Bitcoin, I mean, Ben, can you play the clip? Yeah, let's do it. I did to buy Bitcoin. I told my broker at Merrill Link, I want to buy Bitcoin.

Can you sell it to me? He said, I can't even talk about it. I get fired. I said, okay, you're sure? He said, we don't cover. I can't talk about it. We're afraid of it. I said, okay, well, I want to wire $175 million somewhere else.

So I wire the money that I bought the Bitcoin. Two years go by. And just last week, my secretary called you. She says, hey, Merrillink. sent a bunch of documents over and they want you to sign them. And I said, what? I didn't ask anything. She said, well, you have to sign these documents so that you can buy Bitcoin with Bank of America and they want you to sign them now. So now, you know, they wouldn't sell it to me and now they're jamming it down my throat. So that's like a leak for you guys. Like presumably

if Merrill Lynch is going to all their clients, they fill this out. I think the Bank of America is embraced Bitcoin. Now it is confirmed that. they have embraced Bitcoin. It is no longer a rumor. It is 100% confirmed they have embraced Bitcoin because if not, they wouldn't be buying a Bitcoin ETF. And it makes you think, why is that the case? Well, Michael Saylor says it best. Consider a Bitcoin strategy. If you would have kept, you know, your assets or reserves and bonds, you're down 16% and silver, 12% and gold, 2%. Nasdaq 10% SMP 500, 22%. Bitcoin 152%.

And now we know that Michael Saylor, the micro strategy stock is basically following the price of Bitcoin, which I think is hilarious. Yeah, it's fantastic to, fantastic to see. I love that. I mean, it's very important that Mike, even Michael Saylor had to,

you know, pay the cost of tuition in Bitcoin, right? Like, nobody can avoid it. I'm very glad that, he had a good head on his shoulders and just weathered it like a champ and continued stacking. And same with Buckelly. You know, the price of tuition leaves no one behind. Like you've got you've got to get in the door somehow.

And at some point, you're going to have to sit through those drawdowns. And that's just the reality. You have to understand what you own so that you understand not to get rid of it. Yep. Dude, and honestly, that's one of my favorite things about Bitcoin, Ben, is that it spares no one. You're equal. You have to get in line like everybody. Michael Saylor might have a lot more purchasing power than, you know, the rest of us. But hey, he still had to get in line, still had to endure his first bear market. He's just about positive right now. We're over 30K. We're 30,000, $384 right now. So he's just about positive. But, man, he still had to go through. He still had to go through it. And, you know what?

I saw him at Pacific Bitcoin, man. And that was around the near bottom of, of the Bitcoin price, bro. And, you know, bro, you know what? For most plebs, like most of us, right, were down 80%. Right? You know, it's still painful. Money's completely relative, bro. But could you imagine being down billions upon billions upon billions of dollars

and being basically responsible for your share? So your shareholders will hold you accountable. I can't imagine what that stress must have been like. Oh. And and and having the wherewithal to be like, listen, I, I know what's up. But like, I'm sure what was crippling pressure at the time to be like, no, this is the correct thing to do. And I'm going to stay the course. And well, here we are.

I think he's going to be having a much better coming couple of years than, than, you know, the past year. Yeah, one million percent. Anyways, so moving on. Yeah, dude, him and Buckele, they're going to be vindicated. It's vindication and then all hell's going to break loose because companies and nation states are going to look and be like, whoa, that Bitcoin thing, that looks, that looks quite nice. Anyways, more on the separation of money and state front.

So we all know how, you know, how the Texas bill was aggressive trying to take away Bitcoin mining's incentives. We know how the federal government, the current administration, feels about Bitcoin mining. We have enemies in the New York State Assembly that basically passed a mining mammatorium, making it very difficult to mine within the state. We have Elizabeth Warrens. You know, these are all social attacks, right? Bitcoin's using too much energy, but Pierre Richard summarized it perfectly. It's not polluting anything. It's not whatever. It's just taking electricity from anywhere else.

And what's interesting and what's never talked about, right, is the fact that Bitcoin mining uses energy that was already going to waste because if it wasn't, then it wouldn't be economically viable to use that said energy. That's why it's so cheap. That's why Bitcoin miners go to those specific locations, right? A lot of energy supply, but not that much demand. Well, anyways, on the state front, just how individual states are fighting back against central bank digital currencies, like the state of Florida.

Florida, like North Dakota. Also, it looks like, and shout out to Dennis Porter, you got to give him credit, right? Dennis has really pushed this forward and he's really codified protecting Bitcoin miners' rights in certain states. So what's interesting is that this all happened around the same time in the state of Arkansas. The bill states that a digital asset mining business may operate in the state if the digital asset mining business complies with state law, business guidelines and tax policy, a person that is engaged in home digital asset mining or that has digital asset mining businesses should not be considered a money transmitter under the Uniform Money Services Act. Discrimination against digital asset mining businesses

prohibited and also in Montana, something very similar as well, past 64 to 35. The bill entitled an Act generally revising cryptocurrency law prohibits Discriminatory digital asset mining utility rates limits local government's powers related to digital asset mining, as well as discriminatory taxation of the use of cryptocurrency as a payment method and frames digital assets as personal property. Whereas digital asset mining provides positive economic value for individuals and companies throughout the United States, and whereas the state of Montana wants to protect the right of individuals and businesses to mine digital assets and create legal certainty for the digital asset mining industry and whereas digital assets mining has a potential to stabilize the grid and provide revenue for infrastructure upgrades statewide. Take that New York Times to this week

was not for you guys. It was not for you guys whatsoever. Anyways, what are your thoughts about? I mean, it's very interesting to see and it's unique. This is something very unique to the U.S., the state-by-state, you know, approach to things where the individual states have much more power than, you know, up here in Canada, where I am, where the provinces, like, they kind of have to bow much more to the federal government than you guys do. And so what's going to result from this is miners will go where they're treated best. It is the sovereign individual, but instead it's the sovereign mining company that will be, you know, packing up and moving next door. It's going to be an exodus of miners wherever it doesn't make economic sense.

And so, you know, you're going to have states that lose out on a ton of revenue if they don't get friendly with this stuff. And they, what you may even find is the ones that are harsh on it now and lose minors, well, when those miners already reallocate all and move everything to a friendlier state, well, if they want those miners back, they're not going to be able to just offer the same thing that the state that they're now currently in is offering.

They're going to have to offer a better deal in order to entice them to make the economic sense for them to, you know, incur the cost of moving again. Right? So they're going to have to offer way better deals, they're going to end up screwing themselves even more if they want the economic activity back. So people have got to be forward thinking about this. If they're not, well, I mean, you're kind of shit out of luck. You're going to have to, again, that's their cost of tuition, right?

Yep. That's their cost of tuition. And again, it's, you know, this is what we've been talking about. We were talking about it during the, during the news segment. We were talking about it, you know, during the, we were talking about it during the news segment. We were talking about it in the beginning been like this is a disintermediation of information and the disintermediation of money right and politicians have been using both those things monopoly on information and monopoly on money in order to basically control people and now you're seeing the rise of sovereign individuals choosing on an individual basis what information they choose to consume and what money they choose to use therefore empowering them and now they're just going to go to where they're treated best you can't

If you decide to go totalitarian, hello Salvador. Let's rename our shows, bro. El BTC sessions, La Simpli Bitcoin. We'll just speak in Spanish from now on. BTC Sessiones. Oh, man. Yeah, no, it's, I'm a fan of the direction we're heading.

I mean, the direction we're heading is going to have a lot more resistance, but individuals that care, are are heading that way regardless. And it, yeah, it's going to be a bumpy road to get there. But like, you're seeing more people directionally saying, you can't tell me what to do. You can't tell me what to think. You can't tell me what to earn and how to use my money.

All of these things where people are, again, they're taking their sovereignty into their own hands. And it's a beautiful thing to see. And yeah, man. And literally, this is, why we've been this is why we will win anyways ben it's been an honor and a privilege always love coming on your show brother and uh guys this was your simply just i love doing that thanks man and uh shout out to everybody over on uh the simply bitcoin channel thanks for uh being here and joining

the two of us and uh and uh we'll we'll we'll see you next week man peace ben all right later All right. Everybody, thank you guys so much for watching. I'm going to cap us off with a couple more things before we tap out here. Just a couple fun things that I saw come up that were worth a mention. Shout out to down in Guatemala, a new class of Bitcoiners just got their Bitcoin diplomas. This has to do with me, Premier Bitcoin, which is my first Bitcoin. They're running a lot of different classes in and around El Salvador and now Guatemala.

And they're kind of expanding out throughout Central America. So love seeing this. Those kids are well ahead of the curve already if they're getting a Bitcoin diploma and learning the basics of Bitcoin this early on. Fantastic. Great to see. Voltage just dropped Nostar support with Nipo 5 and Lightning addresses and Zs. ZAPS. So what is this? Voltages NOSTER toolkit includes NIPO5 support, ZAP, and lightning addresses. The quote, we are excited to bring the ability to receive non-custodial payments to your own node

while still getting the easy to use tools like lightning addresses and ZAPs. Now, when you see someone with a VLT.GE domain, you know that they are taking custody of their own funds and our active participants in the network. Best of all, these tools are free to use. This is a phase one in our Nostr journey, so be on the lookout for more to come. I'm stoked about this because, again, right now, if you're on Noster, the default tends to be,

oh, I'm going to use a custodial lightning wallet, and you just link that up. And that's because of the realities of hosting a lightning address. That's how the payments are done via lightning address. Well, if you're on voltage and you're hosting a lightning node, which, to be clear, Voltage, they basically host the node for you, but with your password, you encrypt all of the data there, which means that Voltage doesn't have any access to your funds.

They're just like hosting the infrastructure, so it's up all the time. And so with this, you can then host the data necessary to be hosting your own Lightning address. And that's the issue with just having your own Lightning node or a Lightning mobile non-custodial option is you don't have web infrastructure to host the API calls that are required to do lightning addresses. Voltage solves that. And I am using Voltage actually for my store for like tickets for my events and everything. So yeah, I haven't dove into this yet.

Perhaps maybe that's a good tutorial to drop. That's probably a good one. Yeah, I think that's on the list. Jot that in my head. What else? Stratum v2 reference implementation update is out. The update allows miners to select transactions via job negotiator, sub-protocol, and their Bitcoin node. What the hell does that mean? Well, effectively, this helps further decentralize the mining process.

So miners can be part of a mining pool. So you're pooling your resources altogether. and in doing so, the mining pool up until very recently, they basically set the rules of the block. They're the ones that get to choose which transactions get added to the Bitcoin blockchain. Well, with this newest implementation, it says this new update allows miners to select transactions via a new sub-protocol and their note. This is a major milestone in democratizing transactions selections in pooled mining,

and decentralizing Bitcoin. We're inviting miners, pools, firmware makers, and the community to check out our getting started guide and pilot test the software locally with CPO, our actual mining devices. Your feedback will have a high impact on the development direction. So, yeah, I mean, the long and the short of it is, rather than having centralized entities, which could be potentially coerced by governments or whatever to exclude certain types of transactions, Well, now it's down to the individual miner. So if you're part of a mining pool and you happen to be the individual or the entity that mines the block, now it's no longer the mining pool that says these are the transactions in the block.

It's whoever mined it. And then they decide and the mining pool says, okay, well, that's what's happening. We have no control over that. And then the payments are divvied up based on who contributed to the mining hash rate. A couple more things. Dan Gold's tweeted out. Every payment here goes to a new address thanks to PayJoin. It has privacy like a payment code or stealth address,

but without any notification transaction or need to scan. You can now support payjoin.org's cold wallet here using PayJoyn. So what this is effectively, pay join is the act of creating a collaborative transaction in the midst of making a purchase or sending somebody Bitcoin. And what that means is you're using the person you're sending money to also sends money into the transaction. It gets all pooled together. And then you pull out what you're each entitled to in that transaction.

And this has an excellent privacy effect on the both people in the transaction in that there's no way to say for sure who got what, in that transaction or what even the transaction amount was. There's multiple ways to interpret it. And so chain analysis companies are going to have a fuck of a time trying to sort through it as stuff like this rolls out more, begins to proliferate more through the Bitcoin ecosystem. The unique thing about this is in this tweet, he shows a single QR code. And if you're dealing with a wallet that uses pay. and understands how to interpret this, effectively you scan that QR code, but depending on who scans

it, every person gets a different address. On top of this, for the pay join to happen, normally, the person on the other side of the transaction would have to be online and then get a proposal for a pay join and then queue up an amount and send to be part of the transaction and like do all this manual stuff. This is fully automated. So effectively, somebody would scan this QR code, get a unique receiving address, which helps with privacy as well. And then automatically on Dan's end, everything would be pre-done so that they could accept a payment and also send money to the transaction to confuse on-chain privacy spooks that are trying to figure out who owns what. All of it's automated.

And this is incredible. So, like, you could have a single QR code and that's all you need. And damn, like, I'm still wrapping my head around it. I can't wait to play with this stuff. Anyways, moving on, Save Padine just dropped pre-orders for his new book, Principles of Economics. It's now available for pre-order on Amazon, also on his website, too. So, yeah, stoked for this.

I'm actually, I've got the Fiat standard in front of me now. I was a little slow going on this one. It took me a while because I had so many other books to get through. Anyways, I'm just finishing that one up now. And I have preordered my copy of Principles of Economics. Earlier this week, I dropped a tutorial. In fact, yesterday I dropped a tutorial on something called Border Wallets. I played with it before, but it's now been implemented in Sparrow Wallet.

And it basically allows you a way in which you can more or less memorize your seed phrase using pattern recognition instead of having to remember the actual words. It's a very unique way of handling something and it effectively allows you to have a piece of information like a regular seed phrase that you can store anywhere. You could you could store it in the cloud. You can store it on an internet connected device. You could store it wherever. And it wouldn't matter if somebody got a hold of it because it would look like a seed phrase, but it wouldn't actually connect to any sort of wallet. It then allows you with that seed phrase and some stuff remembered in your head, one word and a pattern, you can then regenerate a wallet. And yeah, it's really cool.

They call it border wallets because, again, the use case of escaping a totalitarian regime with your life savings intact. This is one way that you can do it. So I encourage you to check out the video. Very interesting. Of course, lots of ways to do this, but this is just one more tool in the tool boat. Tomorrow, we have why are we bullish? Very excited. This is going to be a good one. We got CK over at Bitcoin Magazine joining us.

We got Lisa Hoff. She's incredible. And we were just talking about Dennis Porter. He's been doing a ton of work in and around the regulatory regimes, making sure that states respect the right to mine. So lots of stuff coming up. Tomorrow's going to be a fun one. I'm excited for it.

So be sure to tune in tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. should be a blast. And then finally, that's it. I'm going to wrap up. Thank you guys so much for watching. Like, subscribe, share.

All those things help a ton. You can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Hoddle, hoddle, coin kite, nunchuk, start nine. Also, are you going to be in Miami? That's coming up soon, 35 days to Bitcoin, 2023. This is my fourth time attending. I've loved every time I've been there. It's a barrage on the senses.

There's so much going on at all times. It's going to be so much fun. It's coming. Myself and my wife are both headed down. I'm hitting a ton of events, extracurricular events. I'll call them outside of the conference as well. And so, yeah, if you haven't got your tickets yet, it's better to grab them sooner rather than later just because the prices keep on going up prior to the event.

I think they go up either tomorrow or next Friday. I'm not sure, maybe next Friday. Either way, they go up 50 bucks every single time. So again, better to get them sooner rather than later. Head to be.tc slash conference. Use code BTC sessions and you will get 10% off. So that should be helpful at least. And then I am also doing my cold card workshop in Miami on Wednesday, May 17th.

It's from 1 to 5 p.m. And it's a deep dive. We're basically starting from scratch, get you up to snuff on all the basics, setting up your cold card backing it up using it recovering it all that stuff but then we're also going to go through and we're going to touch on some of the awesome advanced features that it has you're going to walk out of that room being one of the top experts on cold card on the planet I can promise you that um there's five tickets left guys five tickets left uh so if you're thinking about coming grab them quick uh they will be gone by the time conference time rolls

around. Also, if you do need a bundle of an actual cold card and all the peripherals and everything, you can grab them there to be picked up at the event, and then you won't have to pay for shipping to get it to you. So yeah, you can book those all through my website, which is btcsessions.ca. Tons of resources and stuff there. I'm getting started and just sharing with general people, but you can also book me for private one-on-one sessions there. And then on the far right, that's where the in-person workshops are. And that's where you'll find the Miami link. And you can grab tickets there.

And that's it. With that, again, thank you guys so much. If you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. You don't need strike to use it. Just head to strike. comme slash BTC sessions. Type in any amount you like. Hit the tip button.

You will see a lightning invoice. Or if you prefer, tap the arrow to the right. You'll see a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I am out. have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. I'll see you guys next time for your daily session. We have ETC sessions. Bitcoin is after your money.

You can't stop it. Get yourself some Bitcoin and hold it yourself. Pure to pure exchange. You know, people are going to organically come to it and gravitate towards it, especially in the world we're living in now. It's incredible. It's a great tool and I can't wait to see it proliferate everywhere. Total Web Bitcoin.