BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: Russian Bitcoin Ban ep230

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Russian central bank proposes ban on mining and use of Bitcoin, Tonga receives BTC donations after tsunami, El Salvador President visits Turkey 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 Get Wasabi wallet for Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Keystone Wallet: secure your Bitcoin! http://bit.ly/KeyStoneSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Welcome to this show, everybody. I hope you're all having a good day. Hope you're not freaking out too much with the pump and then the dump and all the exciting things happening around the price. Don't fuck with leverage, guys. This is what happens. You can't get pushed out of a spot position. You can stack sets and huddle and ride the wave.

And you don't have to worry about a particular price point making your stack just completely disappear. Leverage is scary. Don't do it. Don't do it. As always, 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'll write it and we'll do it live. Friken thing sucks. Plenty of fun things to talk about today.

We're going to be chatting about the potential or the proposed Russia ban that's in the cards Tonga getting some donations after their tsunami El Salvador president visiting Turkey interesting

a whole bunch of stuff in the pipeline please do like subscribe share all those things super super important really do help the show and with that I am Ben with the BT sessions this is your daily session All right, before we dive into the news, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. It's been an up and down day.

I think the mini pump actually happened because a bunch of people on Twitter were purposely pretending that the meeting between the Salvador and President. and the Turkish president resulted in Turkey saying that they're going to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. And so they were tweeting about it and a bunch of people got all pumped up. And it seemed like it may be made us drive the price up a little bit. It went from it was sitting kind of like close to just under 42. And then it kind of pumped up to around 43 and a half. And then just recently, along with a sell-off in equities, so the NASDAQ just got destroyed. Bitcoin also has dropped.

We're sitting around $41,000 per coin. And a single US dollar will pick you up 2,439 sats. 90.17% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, next block, you're looking at seven sats per byte. If you're willing to wait an hour, one sat per byte will do you. I think that's about that for stats there. Of course, shout out to sponsor to the show, shakepay.com. If you're buying Bitcoin in Canada, one of the easiest and best ways to do it.

No deposit fees, no withdrawal fees. They cover that Bitcoin on-chain fee for you. Thin spread. And if you use the link down below and sign up and buy your first hundred bucks worth of Bitcoin, they'll give you $30 for free to stack some extra stats. You get the same deal when you refer friends with your own link. And on top of that, you can then shake your phone, every single day for free sats. They also got a Satsback visa card, which I'm using on the regular

now to just so many ways to stack Sats. So be sure to check out ShakePay down below. Leadn.O. You can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different things. For me, it has been primarily a way to get my hands on dollars when I'm in a pinch and I need them, but I don't want to sell my Bitcoin because, you know, taxable events, buying back in at a higher price, all that kind of stuff. Very easy to deposit Bitcoin, get a long. to your bank account within 24 hours. When you pay back that loan, you get back the same number of SATs. They also have Bitcoin and USDC savings accounts to earn a little bit of interest on that.

And they have a B2X offering. If you're feeling mega bullish, you can check them out. Links are in the show notes down below. I live on Bitcoin. Bit refill helps a ton with this. You can buy all kinds of gift cards in a ton of different countries with Bitcoin on chain and lightning. And you earn stats back as you shop.

And they also have a referral program to earn you some extra sets. If you see fit, check them out down below. You guys know Keystone, one of my favorite and most use hardware wallets. I love it. It is 100% air gap, meaning you don't plug it into anything internet connected. Everything is done offline via QR code, and this keeps the keys to your money safe and away from internet connections. It works with all my favorite wallets, blue wallet, wasabi wallet, specter, sparrow, all the good ones. It's awesome and multi-sig.

Check it out. Links are down below. I also have some tutorials on that if you want to. learn how to actually use the thing too. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, Bill Fottle over at PrivacyPros.com. Get in in solid steel, guys. Paper isn't going to cut it, you know, water damage, fire damage.

I've heard horror stories of people discarding their backups because it's just a slip of paper lying around. Protect yourself from all those worries. Get some peace of mind. This is how I back up all my stuff. With that, let's get into the news here. Let's talk about Russia. So a lot of the headlines here I've been saying Russia, the country and the government proposes a ban on the use and mining of cryptocurrencies.

That's not exactly the case here. This is coming from the Russian central bank, which what entity would have any more incentive to ban the use of Bitcoin than a central bank that wants to hold on to its control? and power. So I'm going to read a little bit from this Reuters article here. I've got to say the authors, I believe, is two of them. Yeah, Alina and Alexander. They seem a tad biased in it. They come off as just they've just kind of read whatever the mainstream flood around Bitcoin is and they've just kind of gone with that, not questioned it. But anyways, let's read a little bit here. Russia's central bank on Thursday proposed banning the use of and mining of cryptocurrencies on Russian territory, citing threats to financial stability, citizens' well-being, and its monetary

policy sovereignty. Should we comment on that? Let's comment on that. Yeah. I mean, financial threats to financial stability. So they're saying that a fixed supply, currency could threaten the stability of their own currency. That sounds like a you problem, not a Bitcoin problem. Citizens well-being, I mean, yeah, you don't want people gambling, right? You don't want people going in. I mean, people can do whatever the hell they want, but like in the interest of people not losing their net worth, you know, you probably want to discourage in some way people

trading on leverage and stuff like that as a normal action. So, okay. And protecting its monetary policy sovereignty. Last time I checked, Bitcoin existing doesn't prevent anyone from deciding what their own monetary policy of a particular currency is. It just presents an alternative if you do a bad job. Anyways, let's move on. The move is the latest in a global cryptocurrency crackdown. As governments from Asia to the United States worry that privately,

operated and highly volatile digital currencies could undermine their control of financial and monetary systems. There's some bullshit and there's some truth in there. Again, governments from Asia to the United States worry that privately operated, privately operated. These are not, okay, some of them are privately operated. In fact, a lot of them outside of Bitcoin are, I could argue, are privately operated. There's a definable individual or group or board or whatever company that you can point to and be like, hey, they created this.

They've still got a fair amount of influence over this. And then probably whatever they say would go. Bitcoin is not that. It is it is a public good. Anybody can utilize it. I would argue that nobody can meaningfully change the base layer rules. Like you're not going to get a hard fork through it this time. unless it's an absolute necessity and everybody sees the writing on the wall of,

oh, this will be crushed if this isn't changed immediately. Something like, hey, it's going to, you know, there's an inflation bug and it's going to inflate the currency, you know, by billions of percent overnight unless we do this or transactions will be broken and blah,

then yeah, you could probably eke out a hard fork in that instance, but it's not looking to, likely in any other instance. So when they say privately operated in reference to Bitcoin, that's a load of bullshit. If you want to talk about privately operated, central banks across the globe tend not to be a public, uh, tend not to be a public infrastructure, Federal Reserve in the United States, Bank of Canada, the ECB.

All of those are private entities separate from government. You cannot vote on monetary policy. It's in no way public. It is private. Central banks are private. Bitcoin is public. It is a public good. Anybody can partake.

Anyone can fork the code if they see fit. And if enough people believe that your fork of the code is the one that deserves the attention and the user base, they will migrate. Yeah. So anyways, poor wording there. Anyways, privately owned and operated and highly volatile digital. currencies could undermine their control of financial and monetary systems. Well, yeah, because you cannot control Bitcoin. That's what it's designed to do is to undermine your control because you're doing a poor job.

Let's move on. Russia has argued for years against cryptocurrencies saying that they could be used in money laundering or to finance terrorism. That is the richest thing in all of this. Russia arguing against cryptocurrencies in regards to money laundering, Russia is arguing about this, guys, guys. It eventually gave them a legal status in 2020, but banned their use as a means of payment. Again, that does sweet fuck all.

Central Bank said speculative demand primarily determined cryptocurrency's rapid growth, and that they carried characteristics of a financial pyramid, warning of potential bubbles in the market, threatening financial stability and citizens. Again, we need to separate Bitcoin and crypto here because the pyramid scheme comparison has been used a ton in relation to Bitcoin. And the thing is, there's nobody at the top of it. If people find value in a particular currency or a particular stock or a particular whatever it may be, or I guess the better comparison would be something with nobody at the top of it.

gold, right? Any sort of commodity? That's kind of what we have here because there's no person to point to that directly benefits exclusively from people buying into this thing. In terms of crypto, yeah, you could probably point to a lot of instances and there's a ton of scamy garbage out there. But again, the largest pyramid schemes on earth right now are fiat currencies. They depend on people continuing. It's literally a built house of cards entirely dependent

on increased debt. You need more and more debt in the system and if they're not adding debt, the system is collapsing. So again, it's should we even bother continuing on? Anyways, the long and the short of it is they're like,

hey, we should ban mining and we should ban exchanges within Russia because it's not good for our central bank if people were using it. Also, actually, it should be noted that Russia is number three in terms of mining on the globe right now. Now, that's about 11.2% of the global hash rate. Listen to this quote, though. They're talking about mining.

They said, in August, Russia accounted for 11.2% of global, quote, hash rate. And then they say, crypto jargon for the amount of computing. power being used by computers connected to the Bitcoin network. Crypto jargon. Everybody, these authors are very dismissive. But regardless, okay, what's a worst case scenario here? Russia just outright bans it, no exchanges, no mining. We already saw what happens with that with China as like the largest miner of Bitcoin

on the planet previously. All that happened was. hash rate migrated elsewhere and we've since surpassed all-time highs in hash rate. So in the end, who cares? Who cares? Go ahead, Bennett. You'll just kill that industry within your own country. People will still use it.

By the way, a good chunk of hash rate still is running in China. It's just under the radar. But you can see it's in China. There's still a good chunk of it. And it's not like people on China don't use big. Bitcoin. If you think that people aren't using Bitcoin and finding ways to use it within China, you've got another thing coming. So realistically, it's just going to drive the, the behaviors that they don't want totally underground. And then the rest of it will migrate elsewhere outside of the

country and bring business to alternative, you know, alternative countries. There you go. That's exactly what will happen. The same thing that happened with China, But with way less impact because their portion of the global hash rate is less than China's was. So in the end, who cares? Tanga. So recently in Tonga, there was a massive eruption of a volcano. And this resulted in a tsunami that hit a bunch of the region, one of the main islands, took out a ton of the villages. Really unfortunate.

I think mortality I think was quite limited but still there's a lot of rebuilding to be done Lord Fasitua from Tonga has been a big Bitcoin advocate and he has been recently speaking about basically mirroring exactly what El Salvador did more or less presenting the same bill with a few little tweaks to make Bitcoin legal tender

within the island nation of Tonga. So anyways, this tsunami happened tons of damage the extent of damage is pretty severe and so somebody basically prodded Lord Fasitua to get a donation address

going he does have one going now this article that's in front of me right now from Coin Telegraph is a little old from a few days ago but the address that he put up so far has had about half a Bitcoin worth of donations or around 20,000 So anyways, if you do want to contribute to Tonga and some of their rebuilding, then you can do so.

Just go ahead, find Lord Fasitua on Twitter, and you'll be able to find an address there. Just be wary. Be careful. You're not going to the wrong person because I'm sure by now there's some scam accounts too. But you can cross-check that with the address that I have on the screen right now. it ends with 5CUN. So just again, if you are donating, just be cautious that you don't end up donating to a scam account. Moving on.

We already kind of briefly touched on this in the intro. But El Salvador, the president, Naib Bukkeli, is in Turkey. Currently, he had some visits, including with the president there. Erdogan. I'm not even sure how to say his name. I think Erdogan. Anyways, so this visit was primarily not like there was no Bitcoin agenda set up for this. But basically, I'll read a little bit here from writers as well.

Salvador and President Naib Bukkeli will travel, and this is from a couple days ago, we'll travel to Turkey this week to meet Turkish counterpart Taib Erdogan in a bid to boost mutual cooperation and investment in the Central American country. The government said on Tuesday. Yeah, so he did some meetings yesterday and today. He did meet the president. And then the quote here, El Salvador has explored opportunities for Turkish firms to invest in El Salvador, specifically in energy and tourism,

setting out the advantages of the coastal strategy known as Surf City. The Salvadoran government said in a statement. Now, the interesting thing here is that obviously in El Salvador, Bitcoin is now legal tender. And Buckele even tweeted out a little hand holding up from the matrix, holding up the red pill, aka the orange pill. And then just with the quote, should I? Basically saying he wants to orange pill the president of Turkey.

Now, Turkey has its own unique situation right now because they are going through massive bouts of inflation due to the mismanagement. of their local currency and they have all kinds of controls around that to try and stem it. But it has not been a fun time and people within Turkey have been looking at things like Bitcoin. And they have a proposed law coming into effect potentially at some point this year in and around Bitcoin and I guess other cryptocurrencies. Although it's not really specified exactly what that would look like. Also, Erdogan has been, I would say not particularly. excited about Bitcoin in the past.

I think he likes his control, but hey, who knows? Maybe some of the conversations that were held behind closed doors may have, you know, planted some seeds there. I guess we'll see. I'm not super confident that this would make much of a change. But again, I was saying at the beginning of the show, a bunch of Twitter plebs were bullshitting and changing their avatars and pretending that they were like Bloomberg. that Turkey was now going to make Bitcoin legal tender.

That is not the case. If you see that, obviously it's bullshit. I did find it funny. It takes two seconds to look at that headline and be like, who said this and actually checked the handle? So, you know, don't get conned by people making jokes. Regardless, you know, these conversations could take time. And I think it takes a lot of touch points for people to actually see the value here.

And maybe this is just the first of many. And speaking of Buckele, Moody's. Okay, so Moody's is a ratings agency that rates debt, the likelihood that somebody will repay their debt. Moody's also famously was featured in the big short, if you have seen that movie. They were basically rating all of these bonds, these mortgage backs bonds, during the, just prior to the financial crisis of 2008, would they triple a rating when they were clearly dog shit, when they were filled with with loans that would never, ever be repaid with people with

basically no job, no income, nothing like this. But they would rate them triple A because all of this shit was just piled together. And if you got enough of them all in one place, they would consider it diversified, well diversified and thus safe, which was just total trash. And so basically it got built up to a point where all of these these loans started failing and and and they kept on rating them as triple A in the meantime as banks were, were getting basically insurance on all of this stuff in the background. So they kind of had to wait until shit hit the fan to even change the ratings of this stuff. But they were more or less

they were doing it because they were like, well, if we don't do it, they're going to go down the street to the next guy and get them to rate the bonds. So we have to give them a AAA rating. Otherwise, we'll lose business. So pretty much, we want money. So we're going to lie about how sounds these investments are. So Moody's has now downgraded El Salvador's sovereign debt due to Bitcoin trades. So they downgraded El Salvador from, I'm not even sure what they were rated. They didn't have a great credit rating in the first place, but they downgraded them specifically now because they own Bitcoin. And then Naïbe Buckele retweeted this and said, breaking, El Salvador doesn't give a fuck. I mean, that's funny.

I mean, don't get me wrong. Bitcoin can go down, but could go down plenty from here. And it could be a temporarily bad thing for them, particularly if they needed to use it immediately. But at the same time, it's super funny to see ahead of state basically telling the IMF and Moody's and anybody under the sun that that has anything to say about them to more or less go fuck themselves. I think that's super entertaining. So we'll see how it pans out. But yeah, you know, people, people aren't going to need the IMF anymore. I'm very interested to see how the bond offering from El Salvador goes.

Because again, if they're able to raise a billion dollars with this offering, then that really cuts out the need for the IMF, right? If you can basically crowd fund stuff like this. So we shall see. We shall see. Let's move on. Intel, they are jumping into the ASIC chip manufacturing realm. So they are looking to present the Bonanza Mine, which is an ultra-low, energy-efficient Bitcoin mining ASIC,

at an upcoming ISS-CC conference on February 23rd. Now, they also just announced that they just closed a sale for its upcoming mining chip. So it says here in a Bitcoin magazine article, market leader in the computer chip manufacturing Intel has already secured at least one buyer for its upcoming Bitcoin mining chips, according to a registration statement filed last month with the SEC. The deal was first reported by Fox Business and provides Bitcoin Miner grid with fixed-price Bitcoin mining ASICs hardware by Intel for orders placed before May 2023, as the world's biggest chip maker tiptoes into the industry.

Intel and Grid agreed on the purchase last September, but the disclosure was only made public a few months later through the filing. Quote, on September 8, 2021, Grid entered to a supply agreement pursuant to which Grid may purchase Intel's design basics. The Intel supply agreement is for an initial four-year term and will automatically renew thereafter for one year period unless either party provides at least 90 days notice prior to the end of the initial term. The agreement also provisions that subject to unspecified conditions, grid will be entitled to purchase at least one quarter of all qualified Intel design ASICs

through approximately May 2025. So this is interesting. You know, more chip manufacturers is better, right? Because you don't want just a few chip manufacturers sitting on the sidelines and supply issues playing into it, which we've seen plenty in the last year. And it becomes a centralization issue. The more people that are getting their feet wet building Bitcoin A6, the more kind of decentralized that creation of A6 becomes. So Intel jumping in? Fantastic. Let them. Let's move on. Bitmex is buying a bank. Leading cryptocurrency trading platform, Bitmex has taken steps to acquire the German bank. Bankhouse von der Height.

The company said Tuesday in a statement sent to Bitcoin magazine, a purchase agreement has already been signed, but is still awaiting the green light of German regulators. Quote, Bitmex Group is pursuing the ambitious goal of establishing a one-stop shop for regulated crypto products in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and thus becoming a strong player in Europe in addition to the group's global ambitions. So this is a common play by companies where if they're not already approved within a certain regulatory framework, they'll just buy a company that is and then they then obtain all those

licenses. So that kind of seems like the play here. Bitmex will, well, it's large enough that it can just. buy a bank so it doesn't have to go through all the hurdles itself. It just absorbs all of the abilities that that bank previously had. So, I mean, is this a good thing? I mean, me, I don't really know how to think of this. It's, it's funny because again, you see it happen all the time in other industries. Obviously, it was going to happen here if enough capital was sloshing around. and maybe that's just kind of how you basically Trojan horse your way into the existing system

and then shake it up from within while others shake it up from without. We will see. Anyways, Bitmax bought a bank. Google cards to store Bitcoin and crypto. All right. So Google is tiptoeing into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as the company's payments division struggles to gain significant market share in the payments industry and touts adding custody capabilities of such assets to its digital cards according to a report by Bloomberg.

Quote, crypto is something we pay a lot of attention to. This from Bill Ready, Google's president of commerce. He said, as user demand and merchant demand involves, will evolve with it. So apparently they've formed partnerships with Coinbase and BitPay. Good job out the gate, Google. So they want to use them to enable his new functionality. The executive told Bloomberg that his team is looking for additional partnership opportunities, though the company still isn't accepting Bitcoin for transactions.

Yeah, it'll allow its customers to hold Bitcoin in their digital cards. I imagine Google Pay, I think is what they're referring to, while spending fiat currency and an arrangement that doesn't precisely use the peer-to-peer asset as a medium of exchange, but enables users to spend their Bitcoin holdings. So effectively, it kind of sounds like you'll have a card on like your Android Google Pay app or whatever, and that card will be linked to perhaps a Bitcoin balance. And then when you tap your card, it'll auto convert to $2 or whatever your local currency is.

I think that's the case. I, you know, to me, I prefer the opposite. it. So like I'm at the beginning I was talking about I used my shake pay card. That has Canadian dollars in it. And when I tap it, I get rid of my dollars and I earn Bitcoin back as rewards points. I much prefer that end of the transaction. I'm not really looking, you know, and I do say like I live on Bitcoin. And the idea is through my spending, you know, it makes it more painful to spend because I don't want to spend the Bitcoin that I have. So hopefully that limits it. And psychologically, you know, it does hurt when you're you're converting Bitcoin to fiat in order to pay for something. So that's kind of my thinking mechanism there. But I do get dollars in some way, shapes, and forms. And so when I do, I try to use that within like a card that'll at least get some stats back through those transactions.

So yeah, I don't know. Are they making the same mistakes that many made? in 2014 and 2015, where they're trying to get people to spend the good, like to convert the good money into bad money, because that was the early push, right? 2014, 2015. It was like, oh, merchant adoption. We need merchant adoption. We need people to accept Bitcoin so that people will buy Bitcoin to spend it, which didn't

make any sense. Why would somebody buy a new currency to then immediately turn around and through some loopholes and additional hoops spend it because of the fees incurred hopping into a cryptocurrency, then hopping out of it also incurring a fee just in order to pay in the original currency that you already had. So I think in the interim, Bitcoin is kind of better viewed as like a savings technology unless you're just like fully on Bitcoin, then absolutely, yes, spend it. But if you're if you're earning dollars and then you're trying to build up a stack of Bitcoin, why would you then spend that Bitcoin as kind of undoing what you what you're trying to do?

You know, like if if you're going to go down that route, then just be all in Bitcoin, live on Bitcoin. But if if there's a separation of your Bitcoin and your like regular, you know, bank account and dollars coming into it on the regular and the dollars is kind of the larger. chunk of your monthly cash flow, then what are you doing? Like it's it's it's it's introducing hoops that people won't necessarily want to jump through for no clear benefit. So anyways, yeah, moving on. Anyway, speaking of shake pay, congrats to them. They just raised $44 million in series A funding. So they put a little blog about it, but they said, we're thrilled to share that after a year of exciting growth, we just closed a $44 million series A funding. round. That's like 850 Bitcoin for those keeping track. It's a big step in our mission to help

usher in the golden Bitcoin age. Yeah. So they had a number of different investors that took part in this. And yeah, so they basically say that funding is going right to work to bring you more products and services to help you earn access and build wealth in Bitcoin. So yeah, I'm very happy for them. And another one I wanted to give a shout out to another front of the show Voltage. They just also closed a funding round for $6 million. So Bitcoin and Lightning Infrastructure Company Voltage just raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by early stage venture capital firm Tramel, venture partners, blah, blah, blah. They said, quote, at Voltage, we are building the tools and services needed to make Bitcoin,

take Bitcoin into its next phase of adoption, this from the CEO Graham Kreisek. By creating a simple and easy way to interface with Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, we are ushering in a new wave of users and use cases. We are grateful for the community support and will continue our mission to provide easy, scalable solutions to fast-track a Bitcoin standard. Bolter said the round would support its growth plans and aid in its hiring efforts as it works to expand and approve its enterprise-grade Bitcoin and Lightning Infrastructure Solutions. So, hey, if you're looking for a job, maybe hit up Voltus.

because they just got some funding and they could probably afford to hire some people if you're looking to work in the Lightning Network space. Check them out. All right. Last bit of idiotic news. Oh, Lord. So Twitter, since Jack Dorsey has left, has gone full shit coin.

You can now have an NFT as your profile picture. And so you connect a wallet. and then it will then have your NFT as like an image, but it'll be in a special hexagon shape. Fucking hate NFTs. It is so, so stupid. Anyways, yeah, so you can have an NFT as your profile picture, which will be in a hexagon shape.

Spoiler alert, you can also just make a hexagon shape through something like Canva, which I did. Beat the system, you guys. I beat the system. feel free to right-click my NFT profile picture. Anyways, yeah, so they added NFTs to profile pictures. Yeah, NFTs, again, it's a token with a snippet of HTML code that basically points to a URL on the internet where the picture resides.

And that link can be broken. Like the image could be taken down on that particular website. you now have a token that points to nothing. So then it's just kind of like you have a signature because the image itself is not on the blockchain. It's in no way like actually linked to the token. Like it's it's not linked in a way that cannot be broken. So you're buying a signature.

So just keep that in mind. Also like the hype around the price of some of these things is fucking insane. Like, you've got somebody that basically can create a crappy pixelated image and then make minute, kind of, or like, automate slight changes to the image. And then produce just like a whole collection of potentially thousands of these very quickly within minutes. And some of these things are selling for more than like Picasso's and other like long dead artists that can never produce another thing. So, I mean, you tell me whether or not that sounds bubbleicious. But just to put it in context, in 2017, the ICO bubble, it was very novel at first. People thought, oh, wow.

So we can have basically issued currencies or tokens that represent a company. And you can buy into them. And the whole idea was, oh, you're buying. It seemed like you were buying part of a company. and it was dependent on what that company did, like the value of what the token would be. They were called utility tokens, more often than not.

It seemed like you were basically buying part of a company and it seemed novel until everybody and their grandmother was able to just create their own ICO as it became easier and easier and platforms were enabling you to do it and firms would do it for you for on the cheap. And soon the day, demand just totally dried up because most of these in no way had any sort of value, right?

Like there was no, you didn't actually own part of the company. You owned a token that maybe could be used for a specific purpose, specifically with what that company was offering. But the company could still do very well, but nobody would use the token. And those things would in no way be reflected above each other. Like if a company was still doing incredibly well, but nobody wanted the. token just because the company was doing well, it doesn't matter if there's no demand for the token. So those things were in no way linked and there was like basically no promise that came with said

token. The same is kind of true here. It's a misrepresentation of what you're owning because people think they're owning one thing in case of ICOs. They thought they were kind of owning like a piece of a company or something that would reflect the value of the company. in this case people think that they're owning a digital item but it's not in any way actually linked to said digital item on top of this everybody and their grandmother is now able to create NFTs so the the the market is sure to become saturated if not already which i would argue it is already saturated but these things can go for a while and so what's likely to happen well gets to the point where there's just there's no demand anymore. And so what happens then is the bottom drops out of the market.

Same thing happened with the ICOs. The difference with the ICOs, though, is that because those tokens for the ICOs were fungible, it was basically like you could then go on a market and be like, I want to sell all of my tokens and one token from another didn't differ. So it was kind of like a liquid market. As liquid as it could be, even though the demand was completely drying up, you might be to get something. But NFTs are different in that they're not fungible. So when you have a bunch of NFTs that you spend a bunch of money on and you realize the market is dropping out, you don't just market sell your NFTs and say like, hey, here's all my NFTs. They're here and it's on an order book and somebody's just going to like place an order of I'd like to buy 10 NFTs indiscriminately

and I'll just load it up. No, they have to actually go to you specifically. and buy your NFT that you have. And that's an entirely different story. And people are going to find out that liquidity is a big issue in that context. And I think a lot of people are going to get pretty screwed here. Anyways, you can have an NFT as your Twitter profile picture, the end. Okay, so time again for your pick for Bitcoin content of the week. I said, what is your favorite new piece of Bitcoin-related content?

this week, pod, article, book, anything that caught your eye. I got to give a shout out to, I got to find them down here. Come on. I did have them pulled up before. Maybe I'll. There we go. So I'm going to give a shout out today to the Canadian Bitcorners podcast. Len and Joey are fucking awesome.

They bring the fire every episode. I've had them on before. They were on the Christmas episode, but they were also on another, why are we bullish? And you know what? Right after this, I'm going to DM them again and see when they want to come on. Somebody called out and said their safe a dean interview was very good. They've been having some killer guests on. And I've got to say every episode, they come with the receipts.

They know what they're talking about. They're good. These guys are awesome. They have some excellent ways of articulating what they want to say. And I got to tip my hat to them. So if you haven't already, go follow at Canadian BTC pod on Twitter. You can find them on Anchor. You can also find them on YouTube.

Just search the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. And you'll find them. They're going to start uploading shorter clips of some of their shows as well. They do live streams, all that good stuff. And they are quality content. and they deserve a much greater following than they already have. On Twitter, they've got 665 followers. I don't know what their YouTube looks like right now.

Let's pull it up. They've got 1,000 subscribers on their YouTube. You should go and follow both of those things right this moment because, again, these are our quality guys, and they're putting out some good stuff. So go check them out, and thank you for your recommendations to my Twitter question. In terms of what I've been up to this week, Monday, I dropped my top five Bitcoin desktop wallets of 2022. There's a lot of awesome desktop wallets out there now with just so many different features, so many different things to do.

Not all of them have everything that I want to need and I've got a wish list of some extra things. But I basically go through five of these desktop wallets, talk about what they have, what they can offer, how they differ a little bit, some of their unique features. And then at the end, I give my little wish list of like, hey, I'd love to see all of these things all in one. Devs get to work. Again, like, I'm very, it's a very ambitious list of an all in one. But yeah, if you want to check out some of my favorite desktop wallets for this year, then go find that on my YouTube channel. I also dropped a couple short tutorials. One of them is how to batch Bitcoin transactions using Blue Wallet or using Sparrow Wallet.

I do a demo with each of them. Batching transactions is when you send to multiple recipients at once. And it allows you to cut down in fees in high fee environments so that the way that the transaction is structured, it eats up less space on the Bitcoin blockchain than if you were to do the transactions separately. So I walk you through how to do that with both of those. And then the other one that dropped today. Yeah, I think today, was. another quick two minute session on how to withdraw from any exchange direct to a lightning wallet using moon wallet and Breeze wallet as examples. And in the example, I withdraw from shake pay direct

to my lightning wallet. So it shows you how to do it. It does something called a submarine swap in the background. And then you have Bitcoin instantly accessible on the lightning network, immediately withdrawn from your exchange. And you don't have to jump through the hoops of like, okay, now I have it on a regular wallet. Now I've got to jump over to a lightning wallet and do extra steps. No, withdraw. You're good to go on lightning. Okay, so you can check that out as well.

And then tomorrow, why are we bullish? Come check it out. We got Mario Gibney coming back. Maricio from Leden is coming back. I have not yet had Pozaius Carbon, Coach Carbon coming on. And the Bitcoin bang, another another newcomer to the show. show. So yeah, it should be a good, good riff. I'm excited to have a couple returning guests and a couple brand new guests for another Friday rip. So be sure to check that out. We're going

live tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern Time and come join me. Everybody that's in the chat, thank you very much for being here. I do see your comments coming through. It's just hard to comment on them as I'm doing a new show. Much easier to do it when I've got a panel to pick up, uh, to pick up everything. But bit paint, good to see you. Glad to have you here. Jason, Alexander, Randall, I see you guys. Thank you for being here. And, uh, yeah, that's it, guys. I'm going to sign off. Uh, if you haven't already, as I always do say, like, subscribe, share, all those things super, super important to the show. They really, really do help. If you want to help the show in another way, hit up the sponsors down below. Shade pay lead and bit refill. Keystone

Bill Fottle, all of them are down below. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my Twitter page. I do have that enabled. No NFTs accepted. Or you can hit up my strike page. That is strike. Dot me slash BTC sessions.

You get there. You type in any amount you want. Hit the tip button. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice or if you tap to the right, a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. and I'll see you guys, hopefully tomorrow, for your daily session.