BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: Sats Center To Educate Regulators On Bitcoin ep223

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

A new non-profit aims to provide education on Bitcoin to the public, elected officials, and regulators. This and more on today's news roundup. 💪 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

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. Welcome to the show, everybody. Hope you're having a good week. We got some stuff to talk about, some news to go over. We've got a new organization that's looking to help educate the public and members of government as well about Bitcoin. We've got some institutional stuff to chat about, some new things that are coming up. A little bit of everything. And then, of course, you know, inflation is on the business.

dock at s as per usual. As always, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. Of course, if you haven't already, be sure to hit like, subscribe if you're not subscribed already, and share this out. It really helps get more people watching this show. And as always, I am Ben with the BTC Sessions. This is your daily session. Before we dive in, let's take a look at the Bitbo.io dashboard and see where we are at in the market today. We're sitting at $47,665 per coin.

A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 2,098 SATs. Guys, we passed a bit of a milestone here. Over 90% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist have been mined now. the next 10% is going to take roughly 120 years to be fully mined. Although I should add the caveat that by the time, I think it's 2035 will be up to like 99%. So that last percent is going to take quite some time to get through. In terms of fees a little bit up today, not much though. Eight sats per byte will get you into the next block.

Be willing to wait about an hour. Two sats per byte should do you. Of course, shout out too. sponsors the show. Shepay.com. If you're buying Bitcoin in Canada, this is the place to do it. No deposit fees, no withdrawal fees. The spread is super thin. And it's just all around awesome. When you sign up using the link down below, if you haven't already, after you buy your first hundred bucks, they'll give you 30 bucks for free. They've also got their brand new Satsback Visa cards. So you can spend disgusting dollars and earn Sats back in the process. I've been using it for the past

couple of weeks here. It's pretty badass. So be sure to check them out. They're awesome. links are in the show notes. Ledin.com. You can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different things, namely if you need to get your hands on dollars, but you don't want to sell your Bitcoin, because why would you want to do that? You can deposit Bitcoin, get a loan of dollars to your bank account. And when you pay those dollars back, you get back the same number of Sats or the same amount of Bitcoin. That's the important number. They do have savings accounts for both Bitcoin and USDC as well. And if you're feeling mega bullish, they have their BT. 2x offering. You can check them out.

And that is all listed down below as well. I do live on Bitcoin and Barry Fill helps a ton with this. They work in a bunch of different countries and they just have every gift card you could imagine. It's super easy to pay with Bitcoin, either on chain or using Lightning Network for those cheap and fast transactions. And again, you earn Sats back as you shop, which is just a godsend when you're living on a SAT standard.

So they are down below. they also have a pretty good referral program too. The Keystone, one of my favorite and most used hardware wallets. It is 100% air gap, meaning you don't plug it into anything internet connected. It's all done offline via QR code. It works with all of my favorite wallets, blue wallet, wasabi, spectra, sparrow, you name it, they got it. Really great in a multi-sig setup as well, and I've covered it in many, many videos. So check them out.

Links are in the show notes. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, be sure. don't just leave it in paper. That doesn't cut it, guys. Fire damage, water damage, you know, the drill. Getting in solid steel with the bill foddle at privacy pros. Dot I.O. It gives you that peace of mind.

It mitigates all those risks. So check them out. Again, they're listed in the show notes. And with that, let's get into the news here. A bunch of things to cover. So I'm going to start here from Bitcoin Magazine. It's talking about German savings bank is going to offer Bitcoin trading. So Spark is.

A German savings bank is working to implement a Bitcoin trading offering for its 50 million customers, according to a report by Finance Forward. The old municipal institution is reportedly preparing a service in which clients could start buying and selling Bitcoin as early as next year. The report said the previously secret project is located in the center of the DSV group, whose subsidiaries and associates companies are closely involved with the savings bank's organization. Sparkas. Yeah, so this is, again, just more of the same from what we've been seeing. A lot of banks kind of jumping on the bandwagon of saying our customers want a product

that we haven't been offering. And so I guess we're just going to go ahead and do that. And why wouldn't they? Now, I am firmly in the camp of not your keys, not your coins. And, you know, if I'm buying Bitcoin from a bank, I want to be able to, with draw to my own custody. It's a different world when you're dealing with an asset that can't be printed. And so when you get things like FDIC insurance on dollars in your bank account, that's because

the banks inherently know, even if things go totally sideways and they screw up beyond all reason and they lose all of their money, there's a historical precedent now for them getting bailouts and effectively the government printing money and just handing it to the banks to make them whole again because they're deemed too big to fail. Not so much in the case of Bitcoin because you can't just print it. They could print dollars to try and buy back that Bitcoin. But in that instance, it gets to the point where if it's a big enough failure, you can't print enough dollars to purchase that much Bitcoin. So yeah, I'm not a big fan of Castelio options in this sense,

but stories like this do legitimize the idea of Bitcoin and the eyes of people that maybe previously would have been dismissive. So that's a good thing. And again, they just talk about cutting down middlemen like Bitcoin exchanges and not requiring additional verification procedures or intermediary transactions, like sending money from a bank, to an exchange. But again, the tradeoff here, as I imagine, is that you're probably just going to get

exposure and you're not going to actually be able to withdraw, which for me, not super interesting. But hey, we're going to see more of this. Speaking of more institutional options and products that are jumping on the Bitcoin train, institutional Bitcoin broker Nidig is now valued at $7 billion after a $1 billion. funding round. So it raised on Tuesday a stunning $1 billion in a funding round that will value the firm at $7 billion and potentially expand Bitcoin's reach into an industry.

This from CEO Robert Gutman. The round was led by Westcap and joined by Bessemer, venture partners, fintech collective, and existing investors, a firm, FIS, FISA, Mass Mutual, Morgan Stanley in New York Life. It reflects nighting's move to become something of a hybrid in terms of Bitcoin infrastructure, straddling both institutional trading and looking ahead towards customer uses. Now, there's a quote here saying, instead of trying to build a retail crypto exchange that was out competing, well, out there competing for customers,

we wanted to empower incumbents to be able to offer access to Bitcoin in a variety of ways. And so they went on to say that they're looking to offer not only ways to embed wallets into anyone's applications, which would be like a bank offering, trading or the ability to access Bitcoin, but they also want to branch out into giving customers Bitcoin rewards for hospitality or other services, which I am a big fan of. I do like the idea of earning Bitcoin back on purchases, especially taller purchases. And then people getting exposure to that saying, oh, well, just like my credit card or my Aero Plan miles or whatever, instead of getting these points, which really don't mean anything

and can be devalued and changed at will, I'm getting Bitcoin, which then if you can withdraw to your own custody, could be used anywhere that you please or just saved, right? And I think that will be a seed that is gradually planted in people's minds as they see it more and more. And they do say that one of the quotes here is this round is what it is because the value proposition has resonated across the entire country. Starting next year, America is going to see Bitcoin showing up everywhere in all kinds of applications. And that is NIDIG's business model. I can't complain about that. I like that.

I think that's pretty solid. Yeah, so they are now the largest fundraise. So far, it tops FTX's 900 million funding round in July, although they're looking to do another funding round for $1.5 billion pretty soon here. So anyways,

I think in general this 9-8 thing is a net positive. Yeah. Let's keep going. Ledden, you guys know them. I've dealt with them a lot. They sponsored the show. They raised $70 million in a Series B financing round,

and then they announced a mortgage product. So it's kind of in early stages, but they announced a Bitcoin-backed mortgage product. I haven't dove into it too deeply, so don't quote me on everything here. But effectively, they let customers use their Bitcoin Holdings to purchase real estate, allowing them to acquire a property while benefiting from Bitcoin's price appreciation. Quote, clients will be able to blend an equal amount of Bitcoin and property

collateral as part of the mortgage loan. This unique collateral structure, which relies on the stability of real estate to buffer against the volatility of Bitcoin, was designed to provide clients with a generous window to service their Bitcoin collateral during times of high market volatility. It's currently in pilot mode. The company expects to launch the product broadly to its U.S. and Canadian customers early next year and is targeting over $100 million in Bitcoin-backed mortgage originations by the end of the first quarter. Yeah, that's pretty wild. And so the quote from founder and CEO Adam reads, most people that hold extensive wealth in Bitcoin still can't utilize their assets to qualify for a mortgage at a

bank. Our clients want to diversify their portfolio in order to protect their wealth and then utilize that wealth for instances such as purchasing a home, but one should not come at the expense of the other. That is why we were launching this product in order to provide access to key financial products for those who choose to invest outside the mainstream legacy banks. Now, this last point about people having a fair amount of wealth in Bitcoin and not being able to utilize it as as collateral and to qualify for a loan. Now, I know a friend of mine earlier near the beginning of the year, he was buying some property. And, you know, he's got a fair amount of wealth in Bitcoin. And he's got less wealth in fiat. Right. And so he goes to the

bank and he literally said, listen, I've got this much in Bitcoin, which at the time was realistically more than enough to pay off the entire property. And they would not, as long as it was sitting in Bitcoin, they would not extend him alone, even though he at the again, at the time, could have paid off the entire property all at once. And so what he had to do is he actually had to sell Bitcoin. And this was when it was around 30,000. So he had to go and sell a couple of Bitcoin to and then just park those dollars in the bank so that they could see the dollars sitting there as he was being approved for the mortgage and locking down the property, which was super unfortunate because, you know, obviously it's appreciated since then.

And so I think Bitcoiners do come across this. I would equate. Now, I would caveat this by saying, you know, be conscious and careful of how you utilize something like this in the context of how much Bitcoin you own. And what I mean is if you're using Bitcoin as collateral, even partially, and Bitcoin takes a big dip, then you could be required to add more collateral. So if you go and you put all of your Bitcoin as collateral for a loan towards getting a house and then it takes a huge hit and you don't have Bitcoin to add to the collateral, you could get liquidated.

And so you've got to be, you've got to be conscious of stuff like that. And so I would say in doing so exercise an extreme amount of caution and only use a tiny, tiny percentage of your Bitcoin if you're looking at doing something like this. Either way, though, for those over time that become kind of wealthy in Bitcoin, it's going to be important to be able to utilize that capital as collateral to get loans and kind of go from there because if you have to sell bitcoins right off the bat, I think that's, it kind of puts you a disadvantage. And so I like the idea that there's going to be more products that allow you to leverage.

Leverage is a bad word, but allow you to utilize the value sitting in your Bitcoin as as kind of proof of solvency. So I like that. Let's keep going. So I was talking about there's a nonprofit called Sat Center. And they have launched and their goal is to educate U.S. regulators on Bitcoin. Actually, it goes beyond just U.S. regulators. But let's read a little bit.

Leaving Bitcoin companies have launched Sats Center, a nonprofit business league dedicated to fostering an innovative environment for Bitcoin. The organization said in a statement Tuesday, nonprofit will provide education to the public, elected officials and regulators seeking to learn more about Bitcoin and how it can empower economic growth and financial inclusion. The quote here, Sat Center will focus primarily on the state and local level, filling in knowledge gaps about Bitcoin and the opportunities it can bring to communities. The company said in a statement, the organization will also create an environment for

innovative open source industry to connect with regulators and community leaders. Okay. So first off, I like that they're kind of starting at a lower level, so kind of more local. Because if you try to do top down, it's just, it's a losing battle, right? It's got to be a little bit more grassroots. You've got to go to, you know, in terms of governments, you know, you maybe want to go to, you know, mares, which we've seen a lot. We've seen Suarez in Miami.

We've seen, I can't remember the new mayor of New York. We're seeing a representative challenging Brad Sherman that is being orange-pilled. You see Representative Warren David, I believe his name was. You know, Cynthia Loomis in Wyoming. So you're seeing kind of like state and local level government officials that are cluing in and seeing value there and trying to cap. capitalize on it, which, you know, Bitcoin kind of seeps into lots of people's purview, regardless of where they're sitting.

So like, I don't view it as like trying to appease government, but it's more trying to find people that see the value of Bitcoin and echo it because there's going to be people in every industry that do so. And we're starting to see that everywhere. What I do like that they say here is they say that they're talking about, oh, here we go. The dynamic became clear on Wednesday as lawmakers and house financial service communities hosted a hearing to better understand the nuances of Bitcoin technology. Most of those present bundled the sound monetary network and, quote, digital assets into the same basket, discussing how Congress could help regulars such as the SEC and the CFTC embed them into current rules,

dismissing critical differences between the two technologies. Sat Center's mission intersects with that reality. The nonprofit says it envisions a future where Bitcoin is leveraged to enable commerce, access to financial services, and individual economic sovereignty. To achieve that, Sat Center said it would build a grassroots community of education, educators, supporters, and advocates working together to inform people and build that future. So I love that they're focusing on the Bitcoin and they're trying to actually really drive that differentiation between Bitcoin and everything else because there is a stark difference.

So some of the people behind this organization, Bitcoin Magazine, BitBlock, Boom, BitRefil, Kasa, Compass Mining, Core Scientific, Marathon, Riot Block, chain, rebel financial, swan Bitcoin, and upstream data as well as many others. So, uh, kudos to them. I, I hope this helps further orange pill people in, in all walks of life. Uh, Russia central bank to ban Bitcoin. Oh no. Anyways. Uh, so, so this is not a fully cut and dry. Uh, so it says here, uh, this from Reuters, by the way, uh, central bank is now in talks with market players and experts about a possible ban if approved by lawmakers, it could apply to new purchases of crypto assets, but not to those bought in the past, said one financial market source who

requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. Yeah, another source told Reuters that the central bank's current position is a complete rejection of all cryptocurrencies. I mean, guys, stories like this, I find funny because at this point, We have a perfect example of what happens when one of the largest nations in the world just does an outright ban on everything Bitcoin, which was China. And that thing that happened was effectively nothing, right? There was a little bit of a spook. People got worried, you know, mining was completely banned within the country.

And then just like water, Bitcoin went the path of least resistance, right? miners just packed up their infrastructure, moved their mining rigs, and just relocated to parts of the globe that were more hospitable to it. And this will be the case if Russia were to come out and say, hey, you can't buy that. Just like Nigeria did, they cracked down on Bitcoin trading or purchasing a Bitcoin and other currencies. Well, what happened, peer-to-peer went through the roof. like the volume on peer-to-peer exchanges within Nigeria is insane now.

They can't get a handle on it. And so they take it from something that would be a little bit easier to get some insight, at least into what's happening in case the government was curious. And they just pushed it out to like, you know, people grabbing coffee and people in streets and like, you know, behind closed doors just doing whatever they want, right? And that's fantastic. I love that. but the government doesn't look at that too favorably.

That is what would happen here. Right? Like when they say, oh, you know, Bitcoin's banned. You can't buy it anymore. Do you think people that are using Bitcoin are going to just be like, oh, I guess I'll just get rid of all this? No, no. They're going to find ways to get it, hold on to it, and purchase it peer-to-peer through alternative means.

And that's what's going to have it. By the way, one of those ways is BISQ, B-I-S-Q, and you can do peer-to-peer on there with no need for any sort of K-Y-C or ID or anything. So that's just one example. Anyways, I kind of feel like this story, much like any sort of ban news, will amount to a big nothing broker. a fun little article here also from Bitcoin magazine today's economy parallels Weimar Germany's hyperinflation but now we have Bitcoin so a lot of this seems to be coming from a book called When Money Dies by Adam Ferguson and it chronicles basically exactly what happened in Weimar, Germany over the course of the early 1920s when they experienced hyperinflation and then kind of juxtapultation

And then kind of juxtaposes that versus what's going on today. And it definitely rhymes. I got to say, I read that book. And I was like, this, the early stages are sounding very familiar to today. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, it's going to happen at this kind of a pace. But like the trajectory is clear is that the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, even as the World Reserve currency, but certainly all other fiat currencies around the globe is a grand. gradual trend towards less and less purchasing power. Especially, I mean, and then at the opposite end of the spectrum, while volatile,

we've got, you know, Bitcoin on the opposite path. And so, yeah, it compares a few things. It shows that, you know, like a loa bread in Berlin would have cost around 200 marks in January 1923 or sorry, yeah, in 1923, it rose to 200. 200, what is that? 200 billion marks. Jesus. Okay, so a billion-fold increase by November 23,

November of the same year. So within, oh, my God, within 11 months, I had forgotten how quickly some of that happened. So he draws parallels here in this article amongst a number of things, like the M2 money supply. And it basically having the same trajectory, maybe just a little, you know, a little shy of what Weimar was doing.

The difference here, I will say, is that in Weimar, you had the sanity check of, of regular economies that weren't hyperinflating outside of it. Whereas today, that signal is not super clear because the entire world has been debasing its money at break. next speed. You just notice differences in and who's doing it just a little bit faster. Like the U.S. is seeing higher inflation numbers because like they they really went balls to the walls with printing Canada a little bit less. Although like compared to where we were at, like we definitely, our debt levels went up percentage wise quite a bit more. But we were sitting pretty pretty low in terms of like central bank assets that were on the balance sheet. the Bank of Canada. Regardless, I digress. It's hard to get, it's hard to get an accurate

measurement when there's no actual good measuring stick for anything, right? Like when Weimar was hyperinflating, you could, you could look to like the British pound or the US dollar and say, like, hey, well, you know, in comparison, this thing is devaluing way faster. And so that was kind of like their their norm versus the craziness in Weimar. Right now, it's like, how do you really get a handle on that? I mean, you get a basket of goods, but we know that the basket is, is always changing and they're swapping things out based on price. Oh, that's too expensive. Nobody buys it anymore.

So we'll swap in something cheaper. But that doesn't accurately reflect what it costs to maintain a standard of living. So anyways, it talks about some of the craziness in the 20s when people started investing in just things that really didn't make sense and kind of refused to work because there was often a better return speculating on bullshit than there was actually being productive and creating stuff in the economy because you get paid in. marks and your wage wouldn't keep up with things. So it was better to speculate. And then it draws the comparison to kind of like craziness that we're seeing with like Wall Street bets, you know, buying into like AMC and and GameStop to business models that like, you know, the writing is on the wall.

I don't know that anybody would look at that and say like, hey, a brick and mortar video game store to buy physical discs, how does that make sense in a world of like, we're trending towards streaming games or at least very, at the very least digital games, right? And same thing, AMC, people are way less likely to go to the theaters. People are way more likely to just get a streaming service or get it online as much as I hate that because I really do love going to the theater and I'll continue to go. but they compare buying into like the craziness in the 20s in Wimar to that and then things like the NFT craze like you know $600,000 for a JPEG rock right like it doesn't make sense like some of these NFTs that are going for tens of millions of dollars are selling for higher amount from artists that are actively alive and continually pumping out more works selling more for more. than historical artists that are dead and can never create another piece.

You know, you got to question it like at the very least. Yeah, it continues to talk about like assets on the balance sheet, all of this kind of comparison. And yeah, it's pretty interesting. Also, the rise of populism during these times. We definitely see a lot of that. interesting read. Either way, I recommend you check it out over a Bitcoin magazine.

It's called Today's Economy Parallels Weimar, Germany's Hyperinflation, but now we have Bitcoin. Take a peek. Good read. Also read when money dies. Great book. Let's keep going. Thread by Preston Pish. This was a banger.

I really like this. I'm just going to go through it really quick here. Why does everything feel like the world's falling apart yet the stock market has looked like this since 2009? Well, here's a thread with some interesting charts that will help you understand what you see is not what you get. So he's got a chart here of basically like the the chart of the stock market, just going up and to the right consistently forever, right?

Just always, always going up, up forever. And then he said, let's start by looking at how major stock indexes around the world have recovered since the 2009 pop, right? India is up 638% USA, 533, Japan, 275, Korea, 181, Europe, 172, Canada 155, Hong Kong, 84, and China, 75. So, you know, India, damn, 638% growth since 2009. Pretty good. Now, he says here, but those were different currencies.

This chart is now standardized for a common currency, which is the US dollar, because different currencies are inflated at different rates. So here's the same chart with every index in dollar terms. USA now on top with its previous 533%, India drops to 396%. So that means that they basically debased their currency at twice the rate of the US over that time. Korea 264, Japan 224, Canada 153, Europe 142, China 89, Hong Kong 83. So it really changes the trajectory when you start with a baseline on the U.S. which is the World Reserve currency and go from there.

He goes on further. He's like, but now that we have everything in dollar terms, what if the dollar itself also was changing over time? For instance, if we look at the M2 currency supply, how has it changed since 2009? Well, below is the chart of the M2 currency supply debasing since 2009. So what would that make the chart look like if we adjusted for the increase in money, a.k.a. like the total value in the economy, how has the stock market performed in relation to that?

Because that can skew a lot of things. If there's more money, it stands to reason more of it flows into the stock market. Well, here it is. Global indexes converted into dollars and normalized for money printing. USA 139 down from 533, right? And that was the highest. India 92. Japan, 19. Korea. and 19 Canada, negative 6, Europe, negative 10, Hong Kong, negative 27, and China, negative 31. Then he says all those lines can make it hard to understand which indexes are really driving the markets. So they took all of this and he consolidated all of the top 80% of global indexes into a single line. market weighted for the size. It represents in the global economy.

So basically normalizing for like how big are the economies of various countries. And he said, as you can see, the global market is up 171% since 2009. But he said, let's not forget you got to adjust that consolidated global chart in account for the debasement. Here's that chart. up 6.9% since the 2009 bottom 12 years ago. So a real return 6.9% since 2009 if you adjusted for debasement and normalized across all of those different economy. So the global economy has increased 6.9%. He said the point is central banks are trying to do everything possible to keep the global economy afloat

Through their constant manipulation of currency supply, they are obliterating the middle class and adding a measurable systemic risk to the system. These actions are punishing more and more equity, pushing more and more equity into the hands of a few while causing the rest to go deeper in debt while owning nothing that generates free cash flow. Yeah, it's crazy. He goes on to finish. He's like, expect lots of volatility. Cascating credit impairment is akin to predicting avalanchevailing. And then he says, it's not about nominal fiat gains. It's about protection and growing buying power.

If there's one thing I'm confident of, it is this. The manipulative actions of central banks will continue to accelerate and fiat debasement will keep getting worse, plan accordingly. Damn, it's a lot for a thread there. Thank you, Preston, for that. On the same note, we have a US producer price inflation, PPI, jumps to 9. 6% year over year in November. So the PPI, it tracks the average changes in selling prices that domestic producers receive over time.

So 9.6% over the 12 months ended in November. It was the biggest jump since the data series was first calculated in November of 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now, stripping out prices received for food, energy, and trade. services, the index still climbs 6.9%. Why would you strip out food, energy, and trade services? Like, what part of that is not useful for producer price index? Now, what I want to zero in on here is the fact that the PPI tends to be a leading indicator of the direction that the CPI is headed, the consumer price index, which is a basket of goods that pertains to you and I, what we expect for inflation and the cost of our goods. And the reason that is, producer price index

are the people that are making the goods that are then going to sell them to us. So they just experienced damn near 10% inflation year over year, and they're buying all their products to make their goods and services that they're about to divvy out to the economy. If their expenses are 10% higher this year, you could probably expect them to have their prices that they then market their products at up in line with those increases. So, I mean, just get ready for shit to be more expensive because we can see it through what the producer price index is telling us. And again, let's get into some more Weimar vibes. This Eric Heakes, he wrote the seventh property, excellent book. He said, the first euro's currency was the Continental, which inflated

2,000% in its first five years from money printing. The government blamed the unpatriotic speculators just before implementing price controls. And then he has this clip. I'm not going to play it right now, but basically it's the White House press secretary. She's being asked about inflation and, you know, some of the causes of this and everything. And then at one point, there's a soundbite where she zeroes in and is basically saying it's predatory pricing from, various industries and she zeroes in on meat and says like, hey, there's there's there's these, um, this whole industry that is is screwing you guys by by pushing the price of meat up

unnecessarily. And not drawing the, the second order and third order effects that it's having of creating, you know, 30 to 40% more dollars than there were last year. let alone the money multiplier of of banks lending, right? Because they can do fractional reserves. So for every new dollar created, like 10 can be lent out. And I mean, they had removed all of those reserve requirements for a little bit during all the lockdowns. But I digress.

The reason that this stuck with me so much is I didn't interview with Mario DiBarber LaMalle, again, co-founder of Leiden a while back. And he is from Venezuela, which has experienced insane hyperinflation. And so the interview that I did with him, which was like a couple years ago now, he basically went through exactly what happened and the steps that were taken in Venezuela, which was at the time on the way to becoming one of the wealthiest nations in Central and South America because of its oil reserves. And then money printing just started going insane.

And so what initially happened is, you know, they're printing money. They're appropriating property and personal property for government use. And then they get to a point where the government says, hey, you know, these farmers, they're overpricing the meat based on my numbers here. Like they're charging X number of dollars per pound of meat. I think it should be $1. And this was Hugo Chavez saying it. We're going to force all of the farms to reprise their meat at $1 a pound. So you could go to the store.

You could buy like rib-eye steaks for like absolutely nothing. And the people were ecstatic about this. They were like amazing. And they all rushed to the grocery store and they pick up their rib-eyes and everything. Well, the farmers are going, oh, my God, this isn't sustainable. Like this isn't in line with the actual costs that we're dealing with based on on the currency that we're dealing with. We can't sustain this.

And so the government basically said, well, either you do it or we take your farm. And so some tried and then failed and had to shut down. And others just, they were like, here's the keys. Take the farm. You figure it out. And what ended up happening is it wasn't sustainable. And so then they would, you know, all of these farms basically failed. The entire industry fails.

They did the same thing to chicken. They go to try and import stakes at whatever cost from external. which was like the real price of meat on top of the shipping costs. And then they stock up the grocery stores with those. And then again, people are happy again. They can go buy their meat. But eventually it's not sustainable. And so then you just get empty shelves because you can't sell something forever for less than a cost to produce.

And that's what they tried to force. And so this worries me when I see government officials, let alone the press secretary from the White House, saying that the prices of meat are predatory and we need to like not explicitly but basically signaling hey maybe we should do something about this maybe we should implement price controls that's scary that's not a situation that you want and if you get that you get empty shelves so we'll see how that that pans out I'm scary anyways keep your eyes open read this book for the love of God, read when money dies because the rhyming between yesteryear and today is astounding. Okay, let's finish off on a couple other fun things that lighter note.

I did a video. So a bunch of you have probably watched my video on how to set up a lightning node. Most common question I get asked, I need inbound liquidity. I need somebody to open a channel to my lightning node. And a lot of people ask me personally to do it. But the thing is when 60,000 people watch a lightning node video, I don't have a million sats to open up a channel to all of you. I'm not that rich.

But I did a video on Voltage Cloud and their product called Flow, which is basically you can spend a couple of bucks to get voltage to, it's called a sidecar ticket. It's basically a voucher that you can use. with your note, whether it be umbral or my note or whatever, you go into one of the apps there and you put your voucher in. And in my experience, it took about 24 hours. I had a channel open to me for a couple million sets.

Now, I'm not buying the sats, right? It's just somebody opens a lightning channel to me so that I can then receive payments very easily through my lightning node. So if you're a vendor, like if you're a business and you're going to be planning on accepting a lot of lightning payments, getting inbound channels through flow might be a pretty attractive proposition to you. It could also be used in kind of like building up your node and getting things established before opening other channels and doing cooperative loops with something like Lightning Network

Plus, which I covered as well. Anyways, I'm getting kind of deep in the weeds here. But anyways, if you do have a lightning node and you're trying to get inbound channels, check out my video on Voltage Cloud's flow, because it's probably pretty pretty. useful to you. And then finally, just a dumb little thing. We're doing an elf on a shelf with my daughter. And it was dad's turn yesterday.

So I put my, we have Satoshi here. And he's teaching the elf and everybody how Bitcoin works. He's got the white paper. I thought it was fun. I don't know. I thought it was hilarious. Anyways, guys, I'm going to wrap up there. Thanks.

Thanks for being here. Smash that like button. Give this a share. Subscribe if you're not. Of course, if you want to help with the show in another way, you can hit up the sponsors. I mentioned purport down below. Shake pay, lead, and bit refill, keystone, Bill Fottle,

all of them are in the show notes. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip. You can do that actually right in Twitter. I do have the tipping function right on Twitter there. But you can also go to my strike.me page. That is strike. dot me slash BTC sessions.

You get there, 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'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. And I will see you guys next time

for your daily session. Oh, my Bitcoin.