BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: Senate Goes After Mining ep328

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

Senate hearings on the impact of Bitcoin mining, Silvergate liquidates, tax reforms for hodlers and much more on today’s show. 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Nunchuk Wallet and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted mutisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Use awesome hardware options like the Tapsigner, Coldcard and others to secure your stack with spending limits, emergency lockdowns and more. Pass on your savings to your loved ones with ease in a simple claiming process with full customer support. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab an Embassy today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/ HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Furthermore, you can check out their Lend platform for p2p loans that are never rehypothecated. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION Coinkite offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions The Miami Bitcoin Conference is the largest Bitcoin event in the world! Come check it out in Miami Beach Florida on May 18-20th. Use code BTCSESSIONS for 10% off your tickets! https://bm.b.tc/btcsessions Free video tutorials not enough? Need some extra hand-holding when mastering self-custody, multisig, coinjoin, running a node, or other skills? Book me for a private session on my website! https://www.btcsessions.ca/ Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions ⚡[e-mail]

What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. We got some news to chat with you. It seems everybody's piling on to Bitcoin the last couple of days. Well, I mean, the Senate, there's been some interesting testimony last little bit. We're going to be chatting about that. We're going to be talking a little bit about Silvergate and that implosion. And I don't know, the Fed being the Fed, being a little stubborn.

a whole bunch of fun topics. We've got our buddy Nigo here from Simply Bitcoin. We're gonna be chatting all kinds of news. Of course, 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 write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks. If you haven't already, like, subscribe, share, all those things. help a ton. Thank you to those that do it on the regular. 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. We've had a little bit of a dip. I'm having trouble placing specifically why people are

selling the Bitcoin other than just not understanding Bitcoin, I think, is the primary factor, but there's any host of news stories that people will point to and say, this is why. But actually, it's just weak hands. So, so yeah, diamond hand it, everybody. Nothing has changed.

Nonetheless, we're sitting at $20,296 per coin, a single US dollar today. If you're looking for a deal, you can pick up 4,90027 sats. 91.97% of all Bitcoin have been mined. That's 19.3.1 million of them. In terms of fees, holy hell, JPEGs are back with a vengeance maybe. I don't know. But look at that mempool. 47 sats per byte next block.

I haven't seen that in quite some time. Even if you're willing to wait, 25 sats per byte, that's that's yeah quite a bit and then in terms of the mempool itself look at this on timechain calendar dot com 585 worth of blocks in the queue to put that in perspective the average person's mempool holds about 300 megabytes so it purges all of those transactions afterwards basically the mempool is purging anything sub two sat per byte right now. So if you want to be in the mempool at all, you're going to be at least three or four sats per byte. And even then, I'd say it's chancing it. Nonetheless, use RBF.

Yeah, but, you know, this is, this is the reality that we live in. So plan accordingly. It, you know, even in a bare market, we're getting a lot of demand for block space. It is precious. So use lightning, use what you need for day to day and plan accordingly for on-chain stuff. Yeah, here we go. Shout out to sponsors of the show, hoddlehottle.com. If you're stacking sats and you have a few priorities in mind, things like peer-to-peer training, things like instant self-custody, things like no KYC, that's an important one. You can check out hoddlehawdle.com.

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I was out last week. I couldn't do a while we bullish because my eye was like swollen shut. It's better, as you can tell. But we're back. And so, you know, you can hit us up on Fountain if you want to listen to the show and send in some booster grams, but just a quick shout out to Dennis, saying great show and to Michael,

saying bullish, unorganic Bitcoin adoption in Africa and Joey, Unreal Rip folks, very valuable episode. I'm starting, starring this one for reference. Thank you guys. If you want to send over some booster grams, hit us up on Fountain. You can listen and stream sets over there for this episode

and any future ones and any past ones, if you so choose. With that, let's bring in my good friend here nico how you doing buddy man i'm always i'm always doing good when i see you bro well i'm i'm so glad i'm so glad to have you here i'm so glad to talk news and uh and i'm i'm getting hyped from miami man it's coming it's soon it's soon and it is so cold here right now and i can't wait to get to the hot hot hot heat so that we can touch our hot hot tips together it's gonna happen oh man but anyone who

who doesn't know is probably terrified, like, oh, my God, what are they doing? They're flirting on air. But my wife is bringing the hair dye. It is going down. Hashtag Benico. Hashtag, touch the tips. It is happening. It's happening.

Yeah, absolutely. Let me redecorate here for a second. Boom. Awesome. So what's been going on, man? what's what's top of mind this week for you? This guy, this guy, Senator Markey. Yeah, so crazy, you know, I think we're entering,

then they fight you stage, Ben. I think it's been very clear to us, but one of the attack vectors is the Bitcoin mining's energy use, right? And yeah, I went through like this rabbit hole of like, okay, you know, maybe these people don't know any better. They're not educated on the subject, but once you have over two years of research, you know, Nick Carter,

so many good research papers into this particular subject, and they continue to use debunked material. It makes you question what their true motives are. So this is environmental impacts of crypto mining under microscope in Senate. It goes on to say companies operating facilities that mine cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin, should not be allowed to, quote, grade their own homework where greenhouse gouse, greenhouse gas emissions are concerned.

U.S. Senator Edward Market, he's the one who introduced the bill. Anyways, goes on to say, Bitcoin mining operations, which use computer banks to generate the digital currency, create electronic waste, and demand large amounts of electricity to run. Quote, with an environmental impact like this, Bitcoin is more like digital coal than digital gold. When carbon-free energy is diverted from powering our grid to wasteful cryptocurrency, something has to make up the difference, Alderberg said,

and that is often fossil fuels. We must, quote, we must carefully study the environmental and grid impacts of cryptocurrency mining methods, she said, and implement appropriate statues and regulations to prevent the damage it is doing to our public health and the environment. Quote, overreaching laws and regulations could drive emerging technologies overseas, often to countries that have fewer environmental regulations of the United States. Quote, if the industry is confident in its positive contributions to the environment, they should welcome the transparency of the Crypto Asset Environmental Transparency Act. And what this is, right, is it would force all Bitcoin miners to register their energy use with the state. Basically, the state wants a list of all big Bitcoin miners. Like, and where do you think that's going?

Like, do they have a list of all big gold miners? Like, why isn't the gold industry made to adhere to this? And I think it has to do with the fact that they can't control Bitcoin. Here's the official press release. Here's this great thread by Jin Erso. and she kind of summarizes, she says, my thoughts on today's hearing, quote, air, climate, environmental impacts of crypto asset mining. From the start, Senator Markey opened the hearing from a biased position that Bitcoin mining is the vampire of energy intensive computing. He claimed that Bitcoin mining's impact on our health, communities, environment are set to explode.

Much of the arguments centered around a handful of examples of Bitcoin mining being co-located with fossil fuel plants in Pennsylvania. of the focus was on strongholds coal redimiation plans which are 60% subsidized by the state and presumably the remaining monetized by Bitcoin mining. So again they're picking and choosing specific examples to

fit their narrative. Shout out to Cynthia Lummis. She had a great video, she had a great five minute bit where she debunked a lot of this, you know, asked very basic obvious questions. I do have the video Ben, if you want to play, but it is a tad

long. Let's, it was so good. We got a, we got to do it. Okay. Let's go for it. Let me, let me pull it up. Here we go. All right. All right. It is ready to go. There we go. Okay. Let's give it a watch. I got to say she knocked this out of the fucking park, but, but let's let's let people watch and enjoy. Question is for Mr. Altenberg. What does a, what does a digital asset mining operation look like? I mean, are there shovels digging in the ground? What does it look like? It depends where at the location, though the mining sites that are being placed at our fracked gas wells. They're essentially semi-trailers that have methane gas power generators that are plugged into the well and big shipping containers full of racks of Bitcoin miners.

Okay, and a Bitcoin miner is actually a computer. Yeah, it's about the size of a toaster, and it uses three times the energy of a house. Okay, so there is a bunch of toasters in a line. Sometimes they're dipped in fluids, so they run cooler, they can be air-cooled, they can be water-cooled, but it's basically just a computer. Yes. So is that computer that's mining Bitcoin? directly emitting pollutants?

No, it's energy source. It's electric source is what's emitting. Okay. So now let's take an EV charging station. If that EV charging station is powered by electricity from natural gas or coal, shouldn't it also have the same monitoring that is being requested by this bill?

I think the issue is looking at how efficiency is measured. It's all sources of electricity, whether it's the lights or the speaker system here, are going to use electricity and produce a certain amount of work for that electricity. The issue with Bitcoin and proof of work cryptocurrency is the work that we are doing is not actually necessary to have cryptocurrency or to have block currency. or to have blockchain technology. Okay, let's talk about gold. Where does gold come from?

It's mine. It's mine, okay. Is energy expended in producing gold? Yes. Okay. Is gold absolutely essential? For certain technologies it is. Is it Congress's job to decide,

whether an energy use is worthwhile or not. I mean, surely you've heard that Bitcoin is digital gold, because it is limited to 21 million Bitcoin ever to be mined. It is permissionless, which means you don't have to rely on a third party or trusted third party to do transactions in it or to hold it. It is a store of value, and that is commonly a great. to. Okay. So you've got gold, it's a store of value, you've got Bitcoin, it's a store of value. They both consume energy to produce. Now, is it Congress's role to say gold is a more worthwhile

use of energy than Bitcoin? There is a long history of that very thing. We have energy efficiency standards for appliances. We've got CAFE standards for vehicles. And for most air pollution, for most new air pollution sources, there's legal requirements that before they operate, they install the best available technology to reduce the pollution. So we do make those decisions every day. So we're still mining coal in this country.

We're still producing natural gas, and we have the cleanest burning natural gas in probably the world here in the United States, and produce it in the most environmentally sound manner. But it's a hydrocarbon. So if my car is oil consuming or natural gas consuming, is it a less worthy use of energy than energy that comes from coal and natural gas, but is converted to electricity for an EV?

Well, there are for, you know, using vehicles, using our entire transportation network requires a certain amount of energy. And there are economic benefits that we get from that transportation network. I have one, and on my time's about up, so thank you. I have a question for Ms. Detlinger. Do you view digital asset mining operations as a negative for the power sector? I certainly don't speak for the entire power sector, but within the state of Nebraska, we've actually seen benefits. We have not seen the drawbacks that have been mentioned during the hearing today. And most of those have just been managed locally, whether by the municipality, by the county, or by the Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy.

If you have a natural gas well and you're venting the natural gas because that well, is not hooked up to a gathering line. Is it better to vent it into the atmosphere, or is it better to use the energy to produce something of value? In my opinion, it's much better to actually use the energy and produce something of value. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.

Thank you so much. I'm a big fan. I'm a big fan. She nailed that. Like just the the cohesive line of thought of like, okay, so, you know, like just the simple question that the average person who has an opinion on this, it wouldn't know would be like, well, are the machines themselves emitting like actual carbon? Well, no, it's a computer. Well, so then isn't it the grid that is then? And I hate like in the in the article that you brought up with the bill put forth by by Edward Markey.

And he's talking about he's basically the fallacy of opportunity cost, right? And we've seen this in Texas before with the grid there where all of the miners have basically local agreements with the energy producers saying, hey, if there's ever the need for all of this. additional energy, we will power down, which literally just happened in the past calendar year, we will power down so that there's that influx of power that you can then send to the grid or allow to continue to flow to the grid so that you have it when you need it. Beyond the idea that while these miners can be anywhere, and so that includes stranded sources of energy where literally no one could use the energy. So it's just, oh.

Dude, 100% spot on. And you brought it up, right? It's absolutely terrifying the way that Cynthia Lummis framed it. She said, okay, wait a second. So EV good, Bitcoin, bad. And is the government in the business of deciding what type of energy use their citizens are capable of how they use that? What is allowed or what is not allowed? right and that is a terrifying precedent because that's a very slippery slope until they say you know

you can't use gas stoves oh wait a second they they're saying that already right so yeah man it's well i mean gumball gaming in in the in the comments what about christmas lights yeah right what about everything what about televisions televisions having televisions is incredibly wasteful video games all that stuff uses a lot of energy are we in a position where we're the you know where this guy gets up and says well it's it's not necessary though okay for you but i don't think it's necessary that you got in a car and drove here because your opinion's bad like at what point do we where do the moral lines go uh if we're going to start moralizing energy use instead of just allowing it to have a cost and then allow the

individual to decipher whether the cost is justifiable. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. It is. And who decides whether it's justifiable, right? Like, can you really trust that person, right? Yeah. Is it this guy?

Like, I don't trust this guy. Dude, I have a feeling that we're going to be having this conversation on the news show. A lot. For, for quite some time. I'll see you next year in the year after with a similar story. Well, Ben, remember when we started covering this in 2020. We'll be like 75 and gray.

Instead of the tips being blonde and white, it will be black. So they can stand out in the white beard. That'll be. That'll be it. That'll be it. It's going to happen. Oh, man. Oh, man.

But yes, yes. This is crazy stuff. Anyways, also big news for today. Silvergate, which for anyone who doesn't know, quite a very quick piece of context, right? Silvergate was the, what is one of the banks that a lot of the Bitcoin and crypto exchanges in the United States used to do a lot of their finance. So Gemini was part of it. Coinbase at one point was part of it. Paxful was part of it. And what happened is that they all pulled out at the same times. It's basically a bank run on Silver. And over like a week ago, when we were talking on Simply Sessions, we were respecting and we were saying, you know, most likely it's going to go under.

Well, that day has arrived and it has gone under. Now, I have a question for you, Ben, in the audience. Is this because they got involved in crypto? What if this was just a Bitcoin only bank? I don't think this would have happened. Anyways, Silvergate capital. Go ahead. Yeah.

I mean, yeah. Like, I mean, as soon as you, crypto is, is. is like fiat to the max. And so when you do fiat things, you know, fiat prizes, right? So. Yeah. Yeah. What's the definition of insanity doing the same thing,

expecting different results? I think this is the case here. Anyways, first headline says Silvergate plans to wind down bank operations and liquidate. And then the next one, it said, silver, Yeah, that's the story of, that's the story of crap coins. That's, that's 100% what happens.

And now, quick, quick reminder for everybody, Silvergate was the bank that Michael Saylor used in order to take that Bitcoin back loan. Now, to be specific, it's the company did release an announcement. They said that it doesn't have any collateral custody with Silvergate. but I mean it is a $205 million loan. I'm looking forward to any more details that micro strategy, you know, lets us know where is that loan going, right? I think it's good that it's not custody with Silvergate, right? But at the same time, like, why are they so silent about it?

You would think that they would try to get in front of it and say, look, here's the plan, here's what we're going to do. Maybe I don't, what the hell do I know? I'm just a YouTuber, but you're going to try to tell you, I don't know, bro. Yeah. Yeah. It's, oh, God.

I, uh, I think even Sailor, like, got ahead of himself with the whole idea of like, well, we'll just, you know, we'll use this as, as collateral and we'll get loans and we'll do all this kind of. I don't know. Like, it's, it's in, in, like, down the line, I'm not even convinced it, it will work down the line as, as, as, there'll be like a very short period of time where that might work. where you use Bitcoin and then you get a dollar loan in order to do whatever you want. But like at that point, that's on the way to dollars being worth nothing.

And if you can get a loan of dollars that you can pay back in like melting Fiat at that point in time, fantastic. But like the reality is Bitcoin is still volatile. were, as you said, at the then they fight you stage. And so all kinds of fun is going to be going back and forth. And when you secure alone and you're leaving in custody and all of these entities, you have no idea what they're, what they owe other people and where things are, it's all over the map. It's such a mess.

I wouldn't trust my SaaS with anybody right now. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. All right, bro. So here is the next one. Yeah, right? Not your keys, not your Bitcoin. It's so crazy.

Why hasn't people... You know what, though? Michael Saylor's paying his price and tuition like everybody else, right? I feel like a lot of us made that mistake the first time around. And it's only until later you're just like, O'Dell, stay humble stack sats. Yeah. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel. It's all going to be okay.

Anyways, before I get to the article, Ben, I have another awesome video. If you want to check it out. All right. Two videos in one day. I know. Things are changing. So exciting. Here we go.

We believe that innovation is very important over time to the economy. We don't want to stifle innovation. We don't want regulation to stifle innovation in a way that just favors incumbents and that kind of thing. But like everyone else, we're watching what's been happening in the crypto space. And, you know, what we see is, you know, quite a lot of turmoil. We see fraud. We see a lack of transparency. We see run risk.

lots and lots of things like that. And so what we've been doing is making sure that the regulated financial institutions that we supervise and regulate are careful, are taking great care in the ways that they engage with the whole crypto space and that they give us prior notice. And we've issued, along with the FDIC and the OCC,

a number of issuances of notices to that effect. Hmm. Interesting. Interesting, right. Does this, is this, do you think he's kind of speaking to the whole custodia bank thing a little bit, too? 100%. Because I was about to bring that up because it's like, we're not, we're not, you know, we don't want to treat the incumbents, you know, we don't want to give them in an advantage. And it's like, dude. Yeah.

Isn't that what you're doing? You just did that. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, Caitlin Long got screwed on that. Like to be sitting around and waiting and basically jump through every ridiculous hoop provided to her to have this entity that, you know, could become. I can't remember what the, they would get a charter from the Fed or something, be like a Federal Reserve regulated bank to custody, Bitcoin. And yeah, no, slap down. No, no dice.

Thanks for all the hard work. Go pound sand. How dare you peasants. You can't do this. Yeah, yeah. You can't get to a federal banking charter. And so, and I did a little bit more digging on that as well. That's the only way to actually become competitive because if not, you have to rely on

intermediary to do a lot of the things that you would normally be able to do if you had a federal banking charter. So like, she got screwed. And like honestly, I blame a lot of the Silvergate stuff on that. It's like so someone who checked all the boxes and tried to do it like the ethical way and the correct way, you slap down and then you get Frankenstein's like Silvergate. I don't know. It's my two stats on that. So moving on to the next one.

You touched upon this a little bit earlier. Sunshine, heat, and Bitcoin will reshape electricity in Texas. It goes on to say no electricity grid in the U.S. added more renewable power over the past decade than the Texas grid has. Back in 2012, both California in the Midwest generated more power from wind, solar, and other renewables than the Lone Star State. But in 2022, Texas was the winner. The future of the state's grid is a study in supply, demand, and uncertainty. One thing that is certain, most of Texas renewable generation today is from wind.

Last year, wind projects in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas generated more than 107,000, gigawatts hours of electricity less than a quarter of what wind produced but solar is growing rapidly and generating most during the hottest months when the grid is under the greatest strain to meet high demand less certain but still likely aircotts expects only a slight expansion of the wind power fleet from now in 2025 while solar is expected to surge solar capacity could double from 2023 to 2025 still less certain the weather Texas has a punishingly hot summer last year. There was 61 days from the start of May to the end of September that were the hottest in

the past five years. Hot weather started earlier than usual as well during the months when plant operators typically perform scheduled maintenance. It goes on to say, Bitcoin is the biggest element of uncertainty in the Texas grid. You hear that? Okay. So, fine. You know, it's a very strong statement.

But you know what? If it was by itself, I would say, you know, Nico, shut up. your conspiracy theorist. The thing is, I can't help but connect the dots with this. And I can't help to connect the dots with Cal Penn, who was part of Harold and Kumar, who used very similar language, didn't he?

Right? It's almost as if, you know, like, you know, you can't say for sure, but it sure does look like it. Now, to be fair, the article does give, you know, it does lay out the argument of Bitcoiners. But the thing I would like, like to highlight, though, is the beginning of this article where it said that Texas has become the

most renewable power energy state. Not to mention, if you take a look at the top five states that are prone to outages, Texas isn't even number one. Texas is number two after California. And California has very strong environmental laws. Why aren't they talking about California? right so I don't know man it to me it smells fishy maybe I've just been covering this for a year straight I'm seeing things that are not there but holy cow lots of coincidences man I mean it's everybody gets on everybody gets on a particular you know when the phenomenon where you'd see a movie come out and then like a very similar movie would come out all at the same time and it's happened many times it was like Armageddon and deep images

impact. Like, you know, there's, there's always like the same things happening at the same time. I think it's just, you know, for whatever reason, for whatever, like, whatever is in the water. But just right now, everybody's on this certain types of energy use are not useful because I don't understand it. kick. And, and I think we're going to continue to see that for an extended period of time. I don't know. I don't know. And it's, you know, it's subconscious too where like somebody will see something somewhere. Somebody reads some Godforsaken Digicononomist article and they get it in the back of their mind. And that's the entire basis for their entire identity is trying to

defend that, even though it's a hundred percent debunked. So I don't know. It's, it's going to keep happening. It's going to be, it's good. It's, it's all the, remember the old Andreas talks where he would talk about how, you know, cars and electricity, how they were villainized and nobody understood and there were all these campaigns put forth by, by the incumbent, incumbents about how these death machines rolling down the street, we're going to kill us all and how the wires in your house. we're going to murder you in the night. All of those things are going to come and are coming at Bitcoin currently. And all we can do is just continue to say that's incorrect and continue to show how ridiculous it is.

How if I plug in an electric vehicle versus a Bitcoin miner to the same source of power, how somehow my computer is destroying the environment, but your car is not. it's silly on his face. Totally silly, but I completely agree. I think it is going to, not only is it going to keep happening, I think it's going to accelerate. You're going to hear even more of these narratives.

And you see it is the writing's on the wall. And I would even add to this, Ben. I would say, I think that some states are even taking preemptive measures because they see the writing is on the wall. So Missouri State Committee passes bill, protecting the right to run a note, and mine.

And specifically, digital asset mining protection act versus, let me read this one. If I could find it, here we go. The Crypto Asset Environmental Transparency Act versus the totally lost it. You got he's got what I'm trying to say, though. Yeah, yeah. All of the language of whatever bills are. specifically tailored to to lean to whatever side of the the issue the person is on. And obviously this one, oh yeah, digital asset mining protection act.

There you go. Yeah. Yeah, it should be. But the thing that I love, though, is seeing that trying to stifle Bitcoin miners, even in the U.S. is going to be a losing battle because you're getting individual states being like, no, no,

we're already going to legislate this so that you can't come in after the fact. So like from state to state, you're already going to have minors be like, I'll just go to this state, let alone if somehow, some way, on a federal level, they were to either outlaw

or make it incredibly difficult and onerous to mine in the United States. States, there's still 180 other countries to choose from on Earth. Those companies will move there. So good luck getting blanket legislation on the globe to stop Bitcoin mining. And even if you do, what's our perfect example? China. China banned it. And there's like 20% of hash stills in China. It might be a little bit less right now. But like, you know, last time it was checked. It was in and around that amount in the largest totalitarian state on earth, 20% of hash is still humming away.

Calarious. Exactly. They made it stronger, right? They try to kill the honey badger and they made the honey badger stronger, man. So, yeah, this thing ain't going away. I think we, yep, we got time for one more story, Ben, real quick. You guys remember our friend. The final part.

You guys remember Augustine, right? This is where the inflation goes. That's a joke. It's a joke. Maybe it's a bad joke. Okay. Anyways. So this is what Mr. Augustine has been up to.

He seems very upset. This is what, hey, Augustine, Bitcoin. That's his face. Anyways. Bank of International Settlement says hub and spoke cross-border transfers offers benefits to retail CBDC. The Bank of International Settlements and Organizations and Organizance. organization of the world's leading central banks. That sounds very scary. Said the cross-border

payment model for the central bank digital currency or CBDC it explored in Project Icebreaker, ooh, it sounds like a shit coin offers benefits to both the benefits and retail customers. The project, which was concluded with the help of the central banks of Israel, Norway, and Sweden, used a so-called hub and spoke method to connect between the country's different national CBD systems. A retail CBDC is a digital currency issued by a central bank that can be used for payments by consumers. Now, I want you guys to focus on the hub and spoke aspect of it. Okay, I'm going to put you guys these two things. Okay, point to point versus hub and spoke. All right. This is Bitcoin. Actually, Bitcoin is a level above this because Bitcoin is peer to peer anywhere.

Now, this is hub and spoke. Now, why do they? want it like this because they need the intermediary without the intermediary they can't control millions upon millions among millions of people transacting with each other but you know what they can control a hub right so they need this but what do you think sounds better to you ben it's like they're trying to justify the reason for their existence it's like look i get it i get that it's cool but you You still need us. You still need us intermediaries, which is really what I see banks as. I mean, this image is like the poster child for centralization.

There is a giant circle in the center with all arrows going to and from it. So what we want as central banks is to have a central figure to be in the center of all people. Wait, did you say a central figure in the middle of everything? I mean, he's got the gravity for it. He's upset. He's upset. He's upset. I'm sorry, Augustine. Oh, God. He didn't like that one. He didn't like that one. But yeah, man, it's total clown world. Like, this sounds so Project Icebreaker. Oh, hub and spoke, baby. Hub and spoke.

Sweet Jesus. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a total clown world. I mean, it's a total clowner. It's just sounds so project icebreaker. Oh, oh, hub and spoke. Sweet Jesus. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I mean, It's, they're going to keep, and this will, the, the two kind of themes of the show will tie together, and they'll use the first part of the, the doomsayers saying that Bitcoin's going to boil the oceans to necessitate the, the Augustus Carson's, you know, central figure, you know, gravity well. You know, that, that's, that's what it's going to be. It's going to be like, well, if you don't want to boil the oceans, then you'll use this hub and spoke model. That's what it'll be. I have something to show you, Nico. I'm so excited. I think you're going to like it.

Here, I'm just going to get rid of Augustine here for a second. Hold on. All right. I'm going to share my screen here. This is, I don't know if you saw this already, but this would be perfect in response to that Senate hearing where Cynthia Loomis was questioning that guy. he was, you know, she was talking about the, well, so is it, is the minor actually emitting any, anything? Like, how is this any different from plugging in like an electric vehicle to the grid? So, Samson Mal created these stickers that say zero emission electric minor.

And you just, you just slap them on the side and you're good. You're good. There's no, there is zero, actually zero emissions coming from that minor. This is genius. This is so good. You're combating their mematics with army matics and army maddox are better. It's got a leaf on it. But it's true. It's not even a lie.

That's the funny part. Yeah, I know. It's great. I'm getting this. I'm getting it. I'm going to slap on. I got my S9 space heater sitting here. I'm going to slap one on there.

And then I've got an M30 plus. I'm going to slap one on there. And then I'll be good. Zero emissions, guys. Dude, you'd be totally green. Leave our toasters alone. Leave our toasters alone. I want these so bad.

I'm going to have to order a bunch. I hope if he's in Miami, maybe I can pick some up off of him. But these are fantastic. Like, what a great, like to go. I hope he goes and he sends packages of these to all of the data centers out there. And then like the CEO start picking it up.

like here at our at our zero emission electric minor facility look look they're certified they've all got the green leaf no but I love it bro because it just dude it it it ridicules how ludicrous what it is they're saying and that I never Cynthia Lummis she she absolutely nailed it you know she's like what's the difference between this and the EV station the guy's like oh well one is the efficiency of the Well, okay, but yeah, it's hilarious. Well, I mean, at least we're going to have good material for the foreseeable future. We'll have plenty to laugh about, cry about in some instances. But it'll keep coming.

So, Nico, my friend, thank you for coming and sharing your time with us. Always an honor, Ben. Guys, this was your Simply sessions. See you next week, bro. better. All right, everybody. A few more things before we wrap up here. Of course, go follow Nico. Go follow Simply Bitcoin. Give them a subscribe. If you're not watching them all and ready, they do the news six days a week, tune into their spaces, all that stuff, knocking out of the park regularly. So I wanted to hit on a couple things here.

one thing that we didn't touch on with Nico was this is a couple I'm going to get rid of this one though so apparently the Biden admin proposes a 30% tax on electricity use for Bitcoin mining from the New York Times and the quote from the White House it's hindering the transition to a low emission energy future is it is it god anyways so ridiculous in file it under karma uh paul kugman i'm air quotes economist um who who hates bitcoin because it's entirely unnecessary uh but he tweets out too busy to tweet but not to vent i've been using venmo for years but now it won't allow me to make payments i spent a long time in chat with representatives and they told me that they can't explain why or fix it the

software has taken control. If only, if only there was a solution that was a peer-to-peer money in which nobody could censor you. That might be useful in this situation. Anyways, the best part is that he got it resolved, but didn't realize the irony in how bad his solution was. He followed it up with, and tweeting got results, a representative called, and we seem to be up again. Well, that's nice, Paul Krugman, with 4.5 million followers having to

tweet out to your followers in order to get the centralized entity to bend the knee and give you back control of your account. I'm sure everybody has the same power as you to get shit done. My favorite reply was Niroj. He replied to him with a screenshot of a tweet. So he tweeted, I don't know how long ago, cryptocurrency lets you make electronic transactions, but to do so do bank accounts, debit cards, PayPal, Venmo, etc. All these other methods involve trusting a third party. But unless you're buying drugs, assassinations, et cetera, that's not a big deal. So with that quoted tweet, he replied, were you trying to buy drugs or assassinations? Oh, God. The rose. Sting on Twitter was just, it was so fantastic. People replying, oh, you should fax in to, to customer support. Oh, that was chef's kiss on that one. It was fantastic.

A couple other things. So I did a tutorial earlier this week for Orange Pill app, although dare I say it doesn't really need a tutorial. It's pretty simple how the thing functions. But if you're unfamiliar with Orange Pill app, go check it out. You can check out the video. Pretty just a simple, like, location-specific way of connecting with Bitcoiners in your vicinity. I think it's going to be particularly useful for, especially for events, like Bitcoin-related events.

I found in Miami last year, there was so much going on that I actually didn't plan where I was going to be going for a lot of the evenings, for a lot of the satellites. events. And then one of the nights I ended up realizing that I couldn't get a hold of almost anybody because I hadn't planned ahead. And nobody's like actually checking their messages or phones or anything while they're there because, well, they're busy at the events. And so I ended up yeah, I ended up not being able to find anything one of the nights. So I feel like this would be super useful because they're rolling out an events section where you can just simply find and go to the things that you need to go to. And also just being able to link up with individuals and, you know, local, whether it be at home or events. Yeah, pretty awesome. Anyways, a bunch of people

have Dovan. Let me know what you think about it if you're already using Orange Pillap. But yeah, it's a lot of fun. Also, tomorrow, we've got, why are we bullish? I'm excited for this one. This is going to be a good one. Guy Swan, the most bullish person, given that he's been on the show the most times. So he's going to be on as well as Carla and Walker, the crypto couple. Love those guys. They're awesome. So this should be like a good, fun hangout, not to mention that they all have such

incredible rants and they're all so in tune with everything. Yeah, I'm super excited for this one. It should be a blast. A couple of other things. I was talking about events. I was talking about Miami. Heads up. The ticket prices for Miami go up tomorrow.

So in like one day and five hours, the ticket prices go up. So if you're thinking about getting tickets, probably sooner rather than later, and they're going to keep increasing at regular intervals leading up to the event. I think it goes up by like 100 bucks in the next day or so. So anyways, if you're going to grab tickets, you can get 10. 10% off with my code, just BTC sessions. So go to b.tc slash conference and use that code. BTC sessions, you'll get 10% off.

One other thing I'll note, if you're still on the fence about it, I found it really easy to be able to resell. So I had an extra ticket last year and I was able to just resell it on Twitter. So if you're on the fence, but you're worried about the prices going up, you can always get a ticket and then just resell it later if you can't attend. The other thing I was going to say is when in Miami, if you're in town, if you're looking to up your game, if you're looking to learn everything you need to know about a cold card,

be sure to hit up my cold card deep dive session. It is happening the day before the conference, Wednesday, May 17th. It will be a four-hour deep dive from 1 till 5 p.m. We're going to go through the basics of setting it up all the way through to some of the more advanced. features and everything in between, you will be a cold card expert walking out of that room. And there's very limited tickets.

They just low-key added it to a low-key event section on the Bitcoin Conference website. But that is going to be publicly announced through their channels as of, I think, the end of this week or the beginning of next week. So if you're looking to grab a ticket before they go, this is going out to all the main. list and everything soon. So just head over to my website if you want to grab a ticket, BTCSessions.ca. There's a little in-person workshop thing over on the right-hand side, and you'll find the Miami event there. And with that, we're going to wrap it up. Thank you guys so much for being here. Of course, like, subscribe, share, all that helps a ton. You can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below, hoddle, hoddle, coin kite, nunchuk, start nine.

of course, check out those tickets, check out the conference. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page, strike. Dot me slash BTC sessions. You don't need strike to use it. Just head there. Type in any amount you want. Hit the tip button. You will then see a regular QR code, sorry, 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. See you guys next time for. your daily session we have btc sessions bitcoin is a few money you can't stop it get yourself some bitcoin and hold it yourself pure to pure exchange you know people are going to organically come to it and gravitate towards it especially in the world we're living in now it's incredible it's a great tool and i can't wait to see it proliferate everywhere total the bitcoin