BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: Second Lightning Network Bug In A Month ep301

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

LND bugs exploited and patched twice in a single month, Snowden dunks on Craig Wright, Russia aims to legalize international but not domestic Bitcoin payments, and much more on today’s show. 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Shakepay is the easiest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada Sign up now and get $10 free after your first $100 purchase! https://shakepay.me/r/BTCSESSIONS ALSO search/subscribe to Shakepay on YouTube! LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $10 free with a savings balance of $75 or more for 15 consecutive days! https://start.ledn.io/btcsessions Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Hello, everybody. Welcome to this show. It's time for some news. We got our good pal, Nico here. He's going to take us through what's been going on this week. It's been an interesting week. How's your lightning notes holding up? Good, I hope. A little bit of a cluster fuck last little bit. But I will get into it momentarily. But I seem to have everything resolved. And my C lightning node is. running just fine L&D is back up and good but nonetheless a few moments we'll chat about it anyways I digress

again hope you guys are having a good week we're gonna chat a ton of different stuff lots been going on this week of course this is live anything can happen I defer to my friend Bill here we'll do it live okay

we'll do it live do it live! Do it live I can write it and we'll do it live I'm fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share. Do it, do it now. It really helps the show.

It helps get in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we dive in, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is bitbo.com. We're sitting at $20,245 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will grab you for $4,000. 39.

Sats. 91.42% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, 16 sats per byte for the next block, but anything beyond that one sat per byte should do you just fine. I don't know.

For some reason, just next block seems to be the one that's been filling up. Even if you look at Mempool, it's like 17 sats for the next block, but the block after is sitting at around 3.3. You could get in probably with four.

Nonetheless. Yeah, let's keep going here. Show it to sponsors of the show, coin kite.com. Love these guys. Best damn hardware in the game. The Mark 4 cold card is beautiful. I love it.

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I don't want to have to worry about fire damage, water damage, all that crap. So this is how I back up my important wallets. Again, privacypros.com. slash BTC sessions will get you a little deal at checkout. That's it for the sponsors. Really quick. Just a reminder, I'm going to be in LA, Pacific Bitcoin next week. So stoked.

Can't wait. If you're there, check out the Pleb Party on Wednesday night. take a peek that's listed in the satellite events on pacific bitcoin.com i'm going to be doing a workshop following the event on the 12th and that is on the cold card and guess what i'm doing a little giveaway we're doing a little giveaway right now uh all right contest time just so you know if you're going to be in l a if you're going to pacific bitcoin if you're going to be there the day after you must be available on the november of the 12th between 1 in 5 p.m. That's when I'm running my workshop. All you need to do is you need to go on Twitter

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Go ahead. Give it a like. Give it a retweet, reply. I'm going to be letting somebody know in the next 24 hours that they've got a free cold card mark four and a free workshop to learn how to use it. don't miss it. Share it around. Love it. And last couple of things, quick shout out here to the Sats boost tracker.

Gupta-Doo says technology is deflationary in the next 10 years. What do you think people want to spend their sats quickly rather than save? I think they'll save and they'll also spend their sats. Jaff 2100, thanks. I wish also to sample episodes for beginners for visual learnings. Thanks, man. Zika boy, fictoshi is a cunty-cunt-cunt. May the real Satoshi bent him over the table, get wrecked, fake toshi cunt.

Thank you, man. You're a real wordsmith. I love that. Michael says Bitcoin offers complex custody solutions that make it extremely hard for the state to seize if done properly. In effect, it destroys the state's clever ways of obfuscating its coercion. Bitcoin makes state violence more. open and transparent, which we hope will open more eyes and minds to the state's true nature. Absolutely well put men, almost as well put as Zika Boys, Kunti Kuntkappa, comment.

And then we got some bowls and we got some corn from both Michael and cryosats. And shout out to this anonymous person. They shot over 10,000 sats, also from a podcast platform I was not aware of called CuriousCaster. Apparently with Curious Caster, you can also stream Sats. All right. We're done here. I'm going to bring in our good friend. Nico, man.

How you doing? Yo! Happy to be here, man. I'm stoked to have you. And I'm stoked to see you in person in less than a week now. It's going to be a good time, man. I am so pumped. It's going to be great.

And let's, where is it going to be here? The, boom. Beautiful. All right. Simply sessions. Let's do this thing. Let us know. What's going on, man?

What's been happening? I alluded to this one. You did allude to it. Lightning did not just break once. It broke twice. And the same individual broke it twice. And you know things are bad when Ben the car man says,

quote, this is bad. So introduce you guys. to Barack. He's, you know, an Ann-on on Twitter, and he did some interesting things on Lightning. First one is learning from the LND bug

that could have robbed the Lightning Network. Unfortunately, not enough things were learned. Check out the date. This was October 25th, 2022. And what broke this thing was a multi-sig transaction. Check this out, Ben. of 998 of 99. And it only costs $4.90 in 90-cent transaction fees.

Wow. And that broke everything. I'm going to try to read as little as possible. Says on October 9th, 2020, Barack from Bit Matrix, created and broadcasted transaction on the main Bitcoin network,

spending UZXO with a transcript multi-sig with a 99% of 99th threshold. The transaction had 98 individual signatures is in the witness field and was almost 0.1 megabytes in size, kind of hilariously reused the exact same publicly for every one of the 99 participants in the multi-sig. This transaction caused a massive disruption for the Lightning Network by exposing a bug in L&D and BTCD.

Why did this affect L&D? Given that many people run Bitcoin core underneath their LND instance, it is because L&D use the same code BTCD. does to receive and process blocks. So even if your LND node was running on top of Bitcoin core, which would have properly validated the relevant block and not stalled, your L&D instance would have refused to accept that block and stalled even though your main chain node continued progressing properly. So it wasn't exploited. It wasn't widely exploited. He broke it. You know, okay, found a bug, but not too long after November 1st, not even two weeks later, second critical

L&D bug and less than a month causes L&D nodes to fall out of sync with chain again. Apparently, Barack is a bit of a troll. In the OP return data, he'll said, you'll run CLN and you'll be happy. He's referring to you'll own nothing and be happy. Absolutely hilarious here. Some of the bullet points. Shout out to no BS Bitcoin. It says only impacts L&D nodes.

Other lightning implementations are still in sync. L&D teams is working on a fix that should be released shortly. nodes, it has been relief since then. Nodes can still make en route payments but are not aware of current chain state until updated. Nodes that do not update will be vulnerable to malicious channel closes by peers. They have channels with once their channel time lock expire. So it's important that you

update your software. The default time lock is two weeks. Bug was triggered by same dev that triggered the last sync issue and all the rest of the stuff is things that I've already covered. So Ben, this is if you look up like if you open a dictionary and you look up the definition of cluster fuck this will be the example yes um i've seen a lot of back and forth on twitter about this and some people saying oh this is totally irresponsible this is why we have responsible disclosure all that kind of stuff i to be honest i kind of don't think he did anything wrong in my

eyes. I want to know if shit's broken and I want people to test. And first off, this is why we have layers, right? This is why we've scaled Bitcoin and layers because this kind of shit on the main chain would be catastrophic. But it wasn't on the main chain. It was on layer two. And from Javier in the comments here, and you said in the article, but Javier says it didn't break lightning. it broke L&D an implementation of lightning. I use C lightning and it hasn't been affected. And that's true. I also have a C lightning node going.

I do have an LND node as well. That one was affected. C lightning was not. This is the important thing of how Bitcoin is being built out. Again, main chain, totally fine. Layer two, different implementations of the lightning network, one affected, one not. and the more implementations, the better, I think, in the future. And so I think it's a positive thing overall that we're seeing this now.

I would rather, again, you can go back and forth on whether it would have been better to disclose it a certain way or just attack it. I'm kind of all for it, though, man. Like, this is, you know, we're going to be dealing with trillions and trillions of taller at some point. And I think we need to grapple with the fact that this is live. People are using it everywhere. And the next time, it might not be somebody who's going to even say anything about it.

They're just going to start exploiting these things and stealing money. So at the end of the day, even if you don't like that that's happening, it's going to happen. and those things happening will will further bolster the security of the network over time. It's pretty early days in lightning though. And we did have some scary shit early days in Bitcoin as well. So this shit's going to happen. I don't know what else to say.

But yeah, if you're running a lightning node, maybe consider running both types of lightning nodes, run C lightning, run LND. and then kind of split your channels between them and maybe connect them both with a big beefy channel between them and then and then you're kind of covered in either instance so yeah absolutely and shout out to Javier for that correction I that's absolutely right it wasn't lightning that broke it was an iteration of lightning also another thing is right the you said it you said it best Ben the different layers right the base layer not affected it was a second layer and lightning kind

has been taking this approach of moving fast and breaking things while bitcoin is taking the approach of moving very slowly and make sure we don't break anything at all because of something like this happening on the base layer i think we might have to change the name of the channels to like you know fiat sessions or uh simply fiat uh because it would it would be really bad um and the loss of confidence it would be it would be bad right so so yeah uh but again this needs to be bro like these types of things, they need to be tested. They need to be broken. And then also nation state attacks, man.

This will come. You know, so you're trying to tell me a nation state attacker isn't going to try to find exploits, you know? So, so and try to use that to, you know, find an advantage for themselves. Yeah. I don't think so. Anyways, you go ahead. I was just going to say one last thing.

If you're, if you're a person running a lightning node, again, the tradeoff here between main chain and lightning is Bitcoin has like the most security, right? It's it's the most secure way to hold and deal with your Bitcoin. Lightning is inherently less secure. One, because it's always on a hot wallet, but two, you're using different implementations than a secondary layer in order to achieve faster and cheaper transactions. And the tradeoff there has always been out in the open. The tradeoff is it's less security.

you get greater security on the main chain. We've always known this, but now we're starting to see it in the wild. So don't allocate funds to a lightning node that you may not be willing to lose. What I'm getting at is don't have your entire stacks sitting on a lightning note. That's all.

Yeah, they don't call it reckless for no reason, right? Indeed. You know, there's a reason for that. Anyways, okay, so this is kind of some drama type of thing, but I think it's definitely news. Edward Snowden, you know, was basically wishing, you know, Bitcoin a happy birthday, you know, was 14 years ago, yet 14 years ago today, yet Satoshi remains anonymous, remarkable. Our friend, when I say that, I'm being sarcastic, Craig Wright said, I was never anonymous,

you traitors. Like, Satoshi would say something like that. And then, you know, why is he calling traders? Because, you know, Edward Snowden is known for leaking or exposing some, you know, Depending on the way you look at it, some, some, how do I say this? Some interesting decisions by the United States military. No, the NSA about them spying on American citizens. So I mean, kind of depending on the way you look at it,

but would you say that Satoshi would call someone who did that a trader's? I don't know, man, but that's just my personal opinion. So it goes on to say, Edward Snowan, that's the point, brother. Remember two weeks ago when the court affirmed that Hado not calling new, epithetic scammer, cringe, clearly mentally ill, repeatedly a fraud was okay and ordered you to pay like $348,000, laughing my ass off, using Craig's own language against him. Welcome to Law. And hey, while we're playing the memory game, the next time you want to tell Twitter you

were never anonymous, try and keep your story straight, you miserable corncob. The memes that they made of the corncob? of Craig Wright as a court com? I didn't see them. I didn't see them. Bro. That is fantastic. I love this.

I love it so much. I think it's too. Funny, funny. Mine looks a little different. What's weird? What's happening? No. It's like, oh, I see.

Weird how that happens. It sounds like you upset the corn cob. Yeah. So, but yeah, no, I, look, I just wanted to bring it up because it's awesome, you know, just Craig Wright being dumped on. And I thought it was notable. But anyways, so this was a very, very big deal. This is an article by The Intercept, coincidentally released after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and said that he was interested in bringing more. free speech to Twitter. It's interesting how this just happens. Very big coincidence.

Anyways, this is just, the article is too long to read all of it. So I found a Twitter thread that summarizes it really well. And it says, leaked documents outlined Department of Homeland Security plans to police disinformation. Remember, in the United States, the government is specifically barred from policing speech by the First Amendment. Not to mention, over the last two or three years, right, there are certain things that you couldn't say on Twitter and not too long after, you know, they were acceptable. So it's very interesting. And I'm going to get to why this relates to Bitcoin in a second. But anyways, it goes on to say, Doc show Facebook and Twitter closely collaborating with Department of Homeland Security, FBI to police disinfo, plans to expand censorship on topics like withdrawal from Afghanistan, origins of the thing that we can't say on YouTube, the virus.

Info that undermines trust in financial institutions. You hear that last part, Ben? Info that undermines trust in financial institutions. FBI agent Laura Demoff was in communications with Facebook that led to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 over the false allegations that it was disinfo. This year, she met with Twitter and Department of Homeland Security to stress, we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.

Facebook and Twitter created special portals for the government to rapidly request takedowns of content. The portals along with NGO partners used to censor a wide range of content including obvious parity accounts and content disagreeing with government pandemic policy. Now, check this out. This is a tweet by Natalie Winners. Representatives from J.P. Morgan Chase attended virtually all DHS meetings about federal government efforts to censor disinformation and social media. Are they laying the groundwork for debanking to become an even more mainstream strategy. Remember, guys, remember PayPal. Remember what PayPal did. They included that in their policy. They walked it back because of the nightmare PR. And then they, whenever, when they calm down,

they included it back in where PayPal could find you $2,500 for saying certain type of speech. Now, how does this relate to Bitcoin? I said, hold up to some original thought. I said, hold up. So the U.S. government specifically, DHS got caught asking social media platforms to police, police speech, why wouldn't they use the same censorship power with central bank digital currency? So the same people that are asking us to trust them with all powerful central bank digital currencies are also breaking the law specifically in the United States because the government is barred from policing speech, but they got caught doing so. They also, on the other hand, want us to trust them with a money that will give us, give them total control over what

you can purchase, over what you can do with it. It's insanity. And this kind of leads to this, you know, and I went kind of on a tangent earlier on this week, Ben, maybe you saw some of the tweets. I said, in our future, we have two options ahead of us. We have a future of freedom and that future is Bitcoin, or we have a future of slavery, and that future is central bank digital currencies and the current system that they're setting up today. Connect the dots. PayPal, look at what happened in Canada, look at the Biden administration's push for central bank digital currencies.

It's very scary, man. And things like Bitcoin is what makes me hopeful about the future, because if it wasn't for Bitcoin, man, this would be very, very dark. and I do not like where all of this is heading. And they just don't care anymore at this point, which is the really scary part. It's terrifying. And the other terrifying part of it to me is people are so short-sighted

that there's going to be half of the population that cheers for it, right? It's interesting because I think the political pendulum is on its way back from an extreme right now. And so all of this kind of, it kind of gives me hope that that pendulum is swinging back because all of these draconian measures may actually roll out at a time where the system doesn't necessarily favor one side or the other. And the pendulum is kind of like bottoming out. and if the timing by some miracle happens to work out, then everybody's going to hate it, right? Everybody's going to call it out because they're going to realize like,

hey, I may not like what this other person's saying and I may want them to shut the hell up, but I need to realize that this applies to me too. And I think a lot of people are starting to realize how shitty it was to be a conservative on Twitter over the past few years because they've been fact checking the White House and there's been some interesting things. Just like, oh, people wanted this context added.

There's something like the old age pension or whatever. They said something to the effect of, oh, we're raising the old age pension by the most that has ever happened in history. But the context was that Nixon instated a cost of living kind of correlation between that. And so the only reason it went up so much. is because inflation is so bad. Yes.

And then the White House deleted the tweet after a context was added to it. So like, yeah. But Ben, like that's the, you hit the nail on the head is that they are going after people that have been caught lying. Like that that that's the means. Sorry, they're going after people even though they're the ones that have been caught lying. Right. And now things are just starting to change.

you said about the political pendulum starting to swing back, but they also lost control of Twitter, right? So all of a sudden, the people that were the ones doing the fact checking are getting fact checked, right, themselves, man. But it's just, it's just crazy, man. And at the same time, remember the digital assets framework being pushed by the Biden administration. They're advocating for central bank digital currencies, but behind our back, this is what they're doing. So are you trying to tell me that they're we won't do that with money of course you guys will abuse that power no one deserves that type of power yeah anyways and that's what bitcoin does it it removes power and gives a level playing field for all at least in a monetary sense um so hopefully that that permeates

other aspects of society but we got a lot of work to do man a hundred percent speaking of a lot of work, more hopeful news. And I always say this. I say, I'm more hopeful of Bitcoin adoption in developing countries than I am of developed countries. And the reason for that is the incentives. In developed countries,

right, the inflation rate, what it should be at is 2%. It's ever so little that you don't really notice that you're being stolen from. In developing countries, you do not have that privilege, right? You know, and as in the case in

Nigeria, the inflation rate is actually 20.77%. It's an insane amount. And because of that, there's a great incentive to find an alternative. And that's exactly what's happening. It says Nigeria ranked Africa's first in adopting cryptocurrencies. We know that cryptocurrencies provide a false sense of financial sovereignty. An example is Ethereum, right? Since they've moved, migrated to proof of stake, we already know that over 50% of Ethereum validators are already actively censoring for the Office of Foreign Asset Control, right? So you can only really find true financial sovereignty and know that your currency isn't going to be debased. There's going to be a cap supply. The only way you're going to find that is in Bitcoin because it's true decentralization.

Anyways, it goes on to say, in Africa, Nigeria is the leading country in terms of cryptocurrency adoption according to a blog post from chain analysis. a U.S.-based blockchain analytics company, the index published by the U.S. claims aims to distinguish countries based on the maximum amounts of financial resources that individuals and non-professional investors are willing to invest in those digital assets. On a global scale, Nigeria is the 11th. It is not the only African country in the world's top 20. However, Morocco ranks 14th, while Kenya ranks 19th.

The three countries are part of the group of 10, where average incomes are considered to be below global standards. Nigeria may owe its position as the leading African countries, with the highest crypto adoption to its population of over 200 million people. Moving on to this Coin Telegraph article says Nigeria's growing interest in crypto is fueled by inadequate financial services in the country, something that has been a key reason for crypto adoption across Africa. As Coin Telegraph reported in April, nearly 17.36 million people, 52% of Nigerian crypto investors have already allocated over half of their invests assets to

cryptocurrencies. Nigerians started using crypto as a viable alternative to store and transfer assets. Now, people started noticing this. In fact, there's an article that we covered, Ben, not too long ago. Released is a blog post by the United Nations. It's funny, their slogan says prosperity says, it says, United Nations spells out actions to curb cryptocurrencies and developing countries. They recommend how to curb them. They recommend central bank digital currencies. And that's exactly what the Nigerian government did. They launched the E Nera, and this is why I wanted to cover this today, because this article came out today. The E Nara, Central Bank Digital Currency, a massive failure, despite Nigerian central bank's claims to the contrary.

Oh, man. Check this out. According to Bloomberg, less than 0.5% of Nigeria's 211 million population is using the E NARA digital wallet. And this is a quote from one of the people that are in charge of it. We hope this engagement will improve everybody's understanding of Inara, know its benefits, and that the people will engage will help us drive its use, as well as educate people about it, what it is. It's like they're talking about it as if it was Bitcoin.

Now, I love this part. Commenting Guarmo, I think he's the journalist covering, it says, an assortment of elites, including academics, central banks, and politicians were closely following the Enara and an attempt to gauge the public's response. He continued by referring to the CBDC as a tool of enslavement. Critics argue that the mechanics of CBDCs infringe on personal property, I mean personal privacy and leave citizens vulnerable to tyrannical leadership. Now, why did this happen, Ben?

Why did the E. Nara fail? Why will the U.S. CBDC fail? And it's funny because in the report, the future of money released by the White House, that whole report, they mentioned stable coins, they mentioned payment platforms, but they never mentioned Bitcoin. And I really believe, Ben, that they never mentioned Bitcoin the same way that this United Nations report never mentions Bitcoin. Why are people choosing to use cryptocurrency in the first place, specifically Bitcoin?

Why? It's not because of the ease of payment. It's not because it facilitates payments. It's because people are trying to save themselves from inflation. and it's such a hot bud, it's such a hot but an issue, Ben, that they cannot mention it. The White House can't mention it.

The United Nations can't mention it. And you want to know why the ENARA is failing because the ENARA does not fix 20% inflation. You know what does? Bitcoin does. Which is why Bitcoin's popularity in those countries is where it's at.

And it's why CBDCs in those countries continue to be unpopular. What are you going to pick? What provides a better incentive? All they have left is a stick. What we have is the carrot. I'm a big believer that incentives are always going to win over coercion.

And I think that this is exactly what's playing out. And I'm just really happy that this is happening, Ben, after this article came out. United Nations take that. We'll loss again against the Honey Badger. I love it. Yeah. It's, I mean, you're exactly.

right. People aren't going to, people don't like changing their day to day unless what they're moving to is an order of magnitude better, right? And so Bitcoin is like multiple orders of magnitude better when it comes to being unable to be inflated and when it comes to censorship resistance. And with the E Naira, you get neither of those things, right? Like you, you're not going to protect your purchasing power. And in terms of, in terms of censorship resistance, you're not going to get any of that. Now, obviously within the country, you know, there's not a lot of banking infrastructure. So if Bitcoin didn't exist, then maybe, yeah, they could have maybe on board of people onto an easier way to pay. And they would have been like, well, still sucks with that

20% inflation, but at least I can pay people quicker. But now that they have, have a different option, why the hell would they step backwards? Right? It's hard enough to get people to switch. But if you're like, no, no, no, don't use that that fixed supply money that you left our currency for. Come back. We've got a digital version that will allow you to pay faster.

Well, is there still inflation? Oh, fuck. Yeah. There's tons of that. But it's digital. So come on. Like, it's not going to play. It's not going to work.

No. And the signal, I think, to take. from all of this is in the White House report, in the digital assets framework, in the case with, you know, the Nigerian Central Bank and the INARA, they don't mention as to why people are seeking an alternative in the first place.

They say it's because of payments. People want more efficient payments, blah, blah, blah. They do not mention currency debasement because they can't mention it because then it gives up the rations. it gives it up they don't have a good response to bitcoin's cap supply and i think the more attention we bring to that ben the better because it puts them in a you know in a metaphoric chokehold anyways i thought this was pretty interesting as well more of bitcoin's game theory playing out um news from russia

a draft law designated to regulate the mining of digital coins in russia is also legalizing the use of cryptocurrencies and international settlements we were covering this a couple weeks ago, Ben. Looks like it's become more official. It has been submitted to the Russian parliament after the rejection piece of signal here, after the rejection of an earlier bill, which was aiming to allow domestic crypto payments as well. Now, I think the quote from the politician is hilarious. We have introduced a bill that legalizes mining. That is the issuance and circulation of cryptocurrencies, but cryptocurrencies can only be employed as a means of payment outside of our country in foreign jurisdictions.

Not how it fucking works, buddy. And you're exactly right. Alex Gladstein wrote an article called Bitcoin is a Trojan Horse for Freedom. I cannot read the whole thing because we don't have the time. But this one paragraph explains it perfectly. Bitcoin is not just number go-up technology. Hidden behind the eye-popping gains is a powerful freedom go-up technology

that its new adopters are knowingly or not pushing forward. NGU number go up and freedom go up are inextricable. So Ben, you were spot on when you said, that's not how it works, buddy. Yeah, it's, I love what's what's materializing there because on one hand, again, you get the game theory playing out of what happens when you monitor, when you weaponize monetary assets on on a nation state level. But you also get seeing this like this budding of heads of the state saying, okay, so we need to defend ourselves against that.

But we can't let our citizens have the same freedom. And they think that they can skirt that line. They think they can walk that tightrope. It is not going to work. When they, when citizens see, oh, our state is able to subvert all of these sanctions and transact freely because they're using Bitcoin. And then they'll be like, huh, our state won't let us do a lot of things with money.

I wonder what tool I could possibly use so that I have the same freedom as my state. Huh, head scratcher. It's opening Pandora's box. You're 100%, right? You can't just pick, you know, Alex said it perfectly. You can't just take the freedom out. Once you expose your citizens, it is like, wait, I could use that too.

Holy crap, you know? And then it's like, I'm empowered. What's going on here? You know, and then, you know, down the rabbit hole people go. Anyways, to tied up quick, this was massive news. Core Scientific cut to neutral at Compass Point on bankruptcy. Risk, Core Scientific is one of the largest Bitcoin miners in the world. And they basically said that they could no longer pay their loans.

And there's a chance that the miner files for bankruptcy where the equity value would likely be completely wiped out, right? That happened not too long ago. This was released today or no, it was actually released yesterday. Bitcoin miner, Iris flag, risks of default on $103 million loan. Two massive Bitcoin mining companies basically going bankrupt and then it is not getting better, my friend. That is the hash rate. and the hash rate continues to make an all-time high,

meaning the difficulty continues to rise, but the price of Bitcoin is down 70% from all-time high, meaning your profitability for your miner has never continues to go down the toilet. And remember why a lot of these mining companies are going bankrupt. They use a tremendous amount of leverage, and they took out a large amount of loans during the bull market, be a big bull market prices and now their profitability is down in the gutter and they can't pay back those loans. And I suspect that the hash rate continues to go barabolic because it takes a long

time to build out this infrastructure and all those miners that those companies bought using collateral, using leverage. Do you think they're just not going to plug them in anymore? You know, so they're all plugging back in. And if you look back in history, Ben, it actually took, if you look back in history in 2018, for example, the blowoff top 2017, 2018, it actually took an entire year, about nine, 10 months for the hash rate to actually come back down. So are we going to see that same thing play out? I suspect so, man. It is not a good day to be a Bitcoin miner if you don't have a good enough price of electricity. The least efficient miners are just getting wiped the f out. And I suspect you're going to see more large

Bitcoin mining companies, public ones, large ones going under. But if you're looking into getting into Bitcoin mining, if one thing I learned from 2018, this is the time. All you got to do is try to survive until the next bull market. If you're able to successfully do that, you will be greatly rewarded. At the end of the day, what Bitcoin mining is, it's a leveraged long. That's the way that you should be looking at it. Anyways, Ben, those are my two sets on all that. Cool question. You think we're going to see even cheaper ASIC prices?

I think, you know, that question, Ben, is like, are we going to see 10K Bitcoin, right? And it's like, yeah, we might. We totally might, but we might not. But I'll tell you this, when Bitcoin's at 100K, when Bitcoin's at 150K, do you care that you bought Bitcoin at 10K, do you care that you bought Bitcoin at 20K? You're not going to care, right? So it's the same type of thing right now. You're like if you don't buy an ASIC right now, what you're trying to do is you're trying to, you know, nail the bottom.

But I will tell you this, okay, based on the news that I'm seeing and I had a chance. And Ben Gagnon, he's the chief mining officer of BitFarms. He's a friend of mine. I suspect you're going to see more companies go under, more mining companies go wonder. And because of that, I think you're going to see a whole lot of not only cheap A6s, but also entire distressed mining operations. And I think you're going to see that in the next year or so. Not to mention that potentially we might be heading into a recession next year as well. Right. So all this this bloodbath is a great opportunity if you're looking into getting

to Bitcoin mining, not in terms of profitability, but in terms of this is the best prices to get those A6, this is the best time to get in. This is the best time to build out that infrastructure. Because when you wait until the bulls, the bull market starts, it's already way too expensive. You're going to get crushed, right? So, and I've seen that. I made that mistake in 2017. I learned from my mistake. I did not make that mistake this time in 2020. and I'm seeing a very, I'm feeling the same way that I felt in 2018, the same way, man. Like, you know, the mining interest has died down on Twitter, not that many people are running, you know, A6 at home. You're not hearing about it as much.

You're seeing the bloodbath and Bitcoin mining companies collapsing. Same thing happened in 2018, but the publicity wasn't there because they weren't public mining companies back then. Right. Now there is. So it's like when one of these things goes down, it's a huge splash. But it's just history repeating itself, but on a much, much bigger scale. Yeah. I'm very interesting. I'm, I'm feeling it where I'm like, maybe I should get one more. We shall see. It's really addictive. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure my wife's getting her, her interest has been peaked. She wants to see if we can funnel the heat back into the home since it's like cold as hell here. So yeah.

You totally, totally can. It's not going to look pretty, but you totally, totally can. Absolutely. Sweet. All right. Nico, I appreciate your time. That was fantastic. I can't wait to see you in, well, like six days here.

So I will see you in LA. And thank you so much for coming on. Likewise, man. It's always an honor. Guys, this is Nico from Simply Bitcoin. and this was your Simply Sessions. Thanks, man. All right, everybody.

A few last things to jump into before we get going here. Again, go subscribe to Simply Bitcoin. Follow Nico on Twitter. Awesome stuff coming out as the Simply team. Him and Opti hit it six days a week. This is just a taste. Okay, a couple quick things I want to throw out there.

Content of the week. I love Tip. If you are not following Tip underscore NZ on Twitter, you need to be because she is such an incredible content maker. So go follow her. But nonetheless, she dropped a new video this week. Normally what she does, she does a lot of wraps. Like she'll wrap over some images and she'll be talking about like some very technical

things in and around Bitcoin. or in and around like the ethos of Bitcoin, why it works, how it works, how it's different from other things. And this thing is a masterpiece. It's like six minutes long. It's called The Great Resistance, the story of Bitcoin. You can find it on YouTube right now. Go like it.

Subscribe to her. Geez, I didn't even like it yet. What am I doing? Okay. So go like it. Share it. Subscribe. Follow her on Twitter at tip underscore nz.

You will not regret it. It's fantastic. Can't recommend it. enough. Up next, I mentioned contest. If you guys are going to be in LA for Pacific Bitcoin, as I said, I am giving away free shit. So what do you need to do? Number one, you need to be in LA on November 12th, which is the day following Pacific Bitcoin. There's a workshop happening between 1 to 5 p.m. So what you need to do is you need to get on Twitter. You need to retweet this tweet, as long as you're going to be there in LA for that day.

And then you need to reply to that tweet with your reason why you want to master the cold card. What's so exciting about the cold card that you want to learn all about it? And when I pick a winner at some point in the next 24 hours, what's going to happen is you're going to win a ticket to the workshop. You're also going to win a cold card mark four, the cold power, the connector cable, the microSD card, and the battery. basically the entire cold card setup and all of that shit's worth like 500 bucks

so between the the ticket all of the hardware and the shipping that you would have paid to get it around 500 bucks were the stuff there for free so if you're going to be in la and you'd like to attend the workshop and get a free cold card out of it then jump on Twitter right now just go to my page and

I just retweeted it recently just scroll down a little bit You'll find it and let me know. Why do you want to learn about the cold card? It's going to be a great time. A couple of other things. I received my Start 9, what do they call it again? Start 9 Embassy 1 just the other day. Put it together and it's up and running and it's sinking right now.

It's on the shelf behind me. I've got five nodes currently running on my shelf. And by the end of December, I will have seven there. Now, why do I do that? It's strictly for educational material so that whenever somebody says, how do I run this node? What's this new feature? What's it? Now I will have everything running there.

And I can just jump over to that particular node, do my video and keep it running. Because I would always get questions like, you know, how do you use my node? And I did a mineud video like a year or two ago, but like I wasn't currently running it. And I was like, gosh, I better get it going yet. So now I'm just going to have all of the nodes running and then I will be able to do as much content as humanly possible about them. That's the plan. But anyway, start nine is there and it is running and purring away. It's sinking fast.

I think let's let's see here. There's my embassy. So this has been running for 20, around 24 hours. It's 74% synced. That's pretty fast. I don't think I've ever had a node sync that fast. I've had it take sometimes three or four days. Yeah, 24 hours to be 75% done.

That's pretty impressive in my books. Anyways, other thing I was checking out, John Carvalho has a company called Synonym and one of the offshoots of that, offshoots, I don't know, subsidiaries underneath, whatever you want to call it. Block Tank. I was checking that out and they offer inbound liquidity.

So I opened a 1 million SAT channel from BlockTank to my voltage BTC pay server node. And it cost me like, I don't know, 1,400 SATs, something like it was very cheap. Anyways, it worked like a charm. So maybe I'll be doing a video on that soon too. So again, love seeing these kind of lightning service providers out there. Awesome to see. And tomorrow, we've got a, we've got a little bit of a, why are we bullish takeover from, how do I say it, bridge to Bitcoin, bridge to Bitcoin team.

So we've got Hoddle Solo, James DeWar, Christopher Gordon, Peter Rounce, and it will be a good time. These guys seem like they know what the hell they're doing. One of the guys created the bolt card, open sourced it. the team is super awesome. If you saw some of the footage from the UK Bitcoin conference that happened recently, they created bolt cards, but it would be a picture of somebody's face and the laser eyes, the person was wearing glasses.

And when you go to tap it, the lies actually light up on the card, which is hilarious. And I love it. But nonetheless, it's going to be a good time. Make sure you come and hit the show tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern time.

It's going to be a good time. Anyways, I'm going to wrap up there. Make sure you hit up that competition. Give it a share, reply. Why do you want to check out the cold card? And I can't wait to see you guys in L.A. Also, there's a pleb party happening on Wednesday night.

Hit that up on PacificBitcoin.com and it'll be in the satellite events. You can use code sessions, by the way, to get some type of discount. I don't know what it is. Anyways, nonetheless, all done here. Again, hats off to Nico. Thank you so much for helping out with the show. you guys can like, subscribe, share. Those things help a ton.

You can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors. Coin kite, shake bay, lead, and bit refilled bill foddle. They're all down below. If you really liked what you saw, hit me up with a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. Strike.m.me. slash BTC sessions. Type in any amount you want. Hit tip.

You'll see 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. I will see you guys next time for your daily session. Hidal by Bixmoor