BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: The Wreckage Of Blockfi, 3AC, Celsius and More ep269

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

Blockfi facing a day of reckoning, 3AC insolvent, Grayscale sues the SEC, onerous EU regulations coming, 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 $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 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

What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Happy Thursday. I hope you're having a good week. Got lots of news to talk about today. The bloodbath continues in and around crypto companies. Yeah, we're going to be talking a little bit about BlockFi. FDX just trying to buy everything. Voyager. We're going to talk about Celsius and kind of the fallout from all that. We're going to cover the gamut. We're also going to be talking about grayscale suing the and plenty of other stuff, some new content dropped this week from Gigi that I want to touch on. But nonetheless, this is live. Anything can happen.

So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share, all those things really do help. drop comments down below if you can.

Again, thank you to everybody that's been doing that. 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. I hope you're stacking some sats because we're sitting at $18,806 per coin. A single US dollar will pick you up 5,316 sats. That's a lot of sats for one buck. 90.87% of all Bitcoin have in mind.

14 SATs per byte next block in terms of fees, but anything beyond that, one sat per byte should be just fine. So again, fees a little volatile, like the price apparently. So, yeah, you know, I wouldn't be too worried about lower fees as long as it's not absolutely imminent. You need to have the transaction confirm. Shout out to sponsors of the show, shakepay.com.

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because then it works really great with Blue Wallet, Sparrow, Specter, awesome in a multi-sig, all that great stuff. I have a full tutorial on it, but a link to pick up one of those is in the show notes. And finally, Bill Fottle, if you're backing up anything important when it comes to Bitcoin seed phrases, you don't want to put it on a piece of paper, you know, then you've got to worry about fire damage, water damage,

all that kind of stuff. Somebody misplacing it because it's just a slip of paper. The bill foddle over privacypros.io, this is how I back up my stuff, solid steel, kind of hard to damage and screw that up, and it gives me that piece of mind. So be sure to check them out. Again, Privacypros.com.

Links are down below. And with that, let's get into the news. I want to start by playing, A little clip, and this is Fed Chair Jerome Powell, talking about the absolute surprise that was inflation. Yeah, I'll just play this for you guys here because, holy hell. One way to say it would be we, I think we now understand better how little we understand about inflation. No, you know, honestly, this was this was unpredictable. I was looking at the time of our June meeting one year ago, of the 35 people who filed with a survey professional forecastors,

34 of them had inflation below 4% for last year. Of course, it was way above 4%. So really, really everyone had the same model, which was the Phillipsburg model, and it just was not capable of producing high inflation. But what it was missing was something that's completely missing in the beta for 40 years, which is basically a collapse on the supply side. You know, the U.S. economy is famously adaptable. You know, it has the minimum of structural rigidities, all that kind of thing. And yet here they are.

So what you have? In saying that people in charge of kind of analyzing and predicting and figuring out how the economy is going to work, neglected to incorporate supply into something that basically is dictated by supply and demand. That's 50% of the equation. But nonetheless, obviously totally blindsided by inflation, the people that run our money. Meanwhile, Bitcoin Twitter, screaming from the rooftops at the time of early 2020 when they started printing, screaming well before that, pointing to issues in the overnight repo markets as things were starting to implode well before, shutdowns and lockdowns and all that stuff. So, you know, I would take a look at the receipts and maybe get your signal there first and

then continue to do your own research from there. But let's move on to kind of the stuff that I alluded to at the very beginning. Now, I want to touch on BlockFi because there's been some rumblings of shit going down with BlockFi about them having exposure to a number of firms that were basically. like running full-on Ponzi schemes and issues in the back end of BlockFi. Now, there was this article that came up from CNBC earlier as well as a number of other sources. I'll read this first, but then I want to then read a tweet from Zach at BlockFi because this may not be verbatim exactly what's going on. Either way, it still sounds bad.

But nonetheless, FDX is close to finalizing a term sheet to buy BlockFi and a deal is expected to be signed by the end of this week. It comes after FDX provided a $250 million emergency line of credit to BlockFi. The price tag is 99% below BlockFi's last valuation, leaving equity investors in BlockFi wiped out and writing off the value of their losses. So, yeah, basically they're saying that they would pay $25 million to purchase BlockFi. The largest valuation that they ever got for the entire company was $4.8 billion. The last valuation that they got, and it kind of, it dropped before at one point it was $3 billion. Then they were trying to raise money when they were valued at $1 billion and nobody was buying. and now we see this rumor.

You know, there was a rumor of them being bought for 250, but now we're seeing $25 million, which would denote a, again, basically a total wipeout, 99% wiped out in the value of the company. However, just to kind of show that, and who knows how much of this you can believe coming from somebody that's very interested in it not being sold for $25 million, but Zach Prince tweeted out lots of market rumors out there I can 100% confirm that we aren't being sold for $25 million.

I encourage everyone to trust only details that you hear direct from BlockFi. We will share more with you as soon as we can. And then he said if you're curious to learn more, check out this podcast. If you haven't yet, I discuss multiple topics related to the current market activity. Yeah. So again, I don't know how much. you can trust anything direct from Zach Prince, as much as he's saying, only trust stuff coming from BlockFi. I mean, if people would have only trusted stuff coming from BlockFi,

everything would have been hunky dory until recently. So take, I would take just about everything out there with a grain of salt right now. Nonetheless, it does not seem good, and I would tread carefully there. It is not a rocket ship, and I would not hop on board. Let's move on. FTX passes on a deal to purchase Celsius, reportedly due to deficient balance sheet. So FtX has been shopping around, seeing if they can get some sweet deals in the midst of all this chaos, it would seem. So it passed on a deal to purchase the beleaguered crypto lender Celsius after examining the poor state of its finances. FDX had talks with Celsius over an acquisition, but walked away on account of a $2 billion.

dollar hole in the lender's balance sheet, according to the report, which cited two people with knowledge of the matter. Sam Bankman-Freed's crypto exchange also found Celsius hard to deal with. One of the sources said, Celsius woes have been among the major touchpoints in the recent troubled conditions in the market. On June 13th, the lender paused withdrawals citing extreme market conditions. Those extreme market conditions, by the way, they didn't have any money. The lender's SELCEL token, whatever, sell token is down 13% on the day.

This is dated, by the way. This is like from 823. I have no idea what the price, nor do I care of sell token is right now. But I mean, the long and the short of Celsius is it kind of, it sounded a hell of a lot like the way BitConnect worked was they basically had a token and you could buy the token and then you could lend the token and then somebody would use the token to generate yield, which you would get a piece of.

That's how BitConnect worked. You had to buy their token with Bitcoin. You would then have their token. You could then lock up their token or lend their token and earn interest. And I'm not sure how it works with Celsius, but you would earn interest in BitConnect in their token, which you could then trade for Bitcoin if you saw fit.

But it turned out that it was just a giant Ponzi scheme. Similar here, I don't know. But yeah, the long and the short of it is, I mean, Celsius seems pretty fucked at this point. I mean, a $2 billion hole in their balance sheet. Not good. You know, and let's keep going here. There's lots of stuff going on, including with Three Arrow's Capital, which again, was effectively just like borrowing and,

gambling with other people's money. And okay, so crypto brokerage Voyager Digital has issued a notice of default to three arrows capital after the hedge fund failed to make the required payments on its loans of $15,250 Bitcoins and $350 million in USDC worth about $670 million total in current prices. Voyager also announced it has drawn down $75 million of the emergency $200 million cash and USDC credit approved by Alameda Ventures. That facility also included a revolver of $15,000 Bitcoin. As of Monday morning, the company has $137 million of cash and crypto assets on hand. The exchange has also retained investment banker Moellas and Co as a financial advisor.

Voyager's shares plunged more than 60%. last week after it disclosed it had exposures to 3AC, which had previously said that it suffered heavy losses from the sharp downturn in the crypto market. Yeah, not good. Again, this contagion just keeps on wiping more people out. We'll see how far it goes. Let's move on a little bit, though. So, Gary Gensler was being interviewed recently on Squawk Box on CNBC, I believe.

And they were asking basically at the state of things. regulation in around Bitcoin versus crypto, so and so forth. He had some interesting things to say. So the SEC chairman, that's Gary, Gary Gensler, said Monday that Bitcoin was the only cryptocurrency. He was prepared to publicly label a commodity rather than a security. The debate over whether any particular cryptocurrency can be labeled a commodity rather than a security has far-reaching implications because financial instruments that are securities can only be legally sold to the public if the issuer registers with the SEC and adheres to strict disclosure regimes. Many of these tokens, this is a quote from him, many of these tokens, the investing public is hoping for a return,

just like when they invest in other financial assets we call securities. Many of these financial assets, crypto financial assets, have the key attributes of a security and are therefore under the SEC's jurisdiction. He said some like Bitcoin, and that's the only one I'm going to say, my predecessors and others have said they're a commodity. He said he added noting this classification gives the CFTC or Commodities Futures Trading Commission a key role in overseeing Bitcoin markets. Yeah. So I mean, Bitcoin is the only one he will publicly say if, you know, if I were to, oh, wonderful this. if I were to really go ahead and look at the way things are rolled out,

there's a beautiful video. I can't remember who put it out, but basically a Vitalic buterin sitting there saying like, well, we want to raise this much and we're going to raise this much based on a price of this much per ETH token. And, you know, people would buy this in the hopes of, of the price going up and we've got a good foundation. And so basically like talking about marketing and all of this stuff.

So, I mean, just in watching stuff like that, it was very clearly security. Okay. Are they going to give it a pass? God, I hope not. But there's a very real possibility that will. Nonetheless, even though he seems favorable in terms of, and let me step back for a minute and say here, I'm not hugely pro regulation here. Like I would prefer a world where maybe we aren't babysat as much and people can make their own financial decisions.

And then through that, they learn to make more prudent financial decisions. They learn to kind of more closely scrutinize where they're putting their money. And in a world also where Bitcoin becomes money and in the long term, as people, more people are using it more consistently. and there's just kind of like this gradual deflation to it, people won't necessarily have to become expert investors. They can just save their money and gain an expertise in a field and get really good at it and just earn money and save. And then those that choose to invest can more carefully scrutinize what they want.

Yeah, I mean, that's my kind of utopian vision of it. But regardless, despite him seemingly being favorable to Bitcoin, in terms of, well, you know, this is decentralized and everything else doesn't seem like it is. Still, the SEC refuses to approve a spot Bitcoin ETF. And because of that, Grayscale is now suing them. So, gray scale investments, one of the world's largest digital asset managers, is suing the U.S. SEC after the regulator denied its application to convert its flagship Bitcoin fund, GBT, into an exchange-traded fund, ETF per a press release. Quote, as Grayscale and the team at Davis, Polk, and Wardle have outlined the SEC is failing

to apply consistent treatment to similar investment vehicles and is therefore acting arbitrarily and capriciously in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and Security Exchange Act of 1934. They announced basically through the ETF application review process, we believe American investors overwhelmingly voiced a desire to see GBDC converted to a spot Bitcoin ETF, which would unlock billions of dollars of an investor capital while bringing the world's largest Bitcoin fund further into the U.S. regulatory perimeter. Yeah, so basically, the reason they're so pissed off is, one, they've got, you've got futures

ETFs that have been approved and actively traded all over the world. here in Canada in the U.S. And I'll just show Amsterdam just approved an ETF, spot Bitcoin ETF just the other day. Like it's clear that these things work and function in markets. But the U.S. keeps on refusing. The SEC keeps on refusing to approve any of these products. In the meantime, you've got Grayscale. And that's a closed end fund.

So what that means is there's a set amount of shares that are available. and there's X amount of Bitcoin in the fund. And they can add Bitcoin into the fund, but they cannot remove it. And so what ends up happening is if you don't have direct convertibility, then you're not going to have a direct price correlation, meaning that if you can't actively remove Bitcoin from the fund and as well as put it in, then at times if people want to sell or move Bitcoin out of there, then, and there's not enough demand to gobble up those shares, then there's going to be a discrepancy in the price.

And right now, the discrepancy is to the downside to the tune of more than the 30%. So people that bought in at times at a premium higher than the spot price of Bitcoin are now sitting 30% below Bitcoin's regular price in the midst of a bear market. And that's got to hurt. So all these investors that are sitting on GBT are getting arguably pretty hurt specifically by the SEC. So I don't know. Will we see this ETF approved? I don't know, but it looks, I saw some rumblings that there should be a decision on this within a calendar year or so. But I mean, strap in because this doesn't seem like it's going to be resolved anytime soon.

I honestly thought that an ETF approval, given that so many were being approved elsewhere, was going to be approved in the U.S. sooner rather than later. I thought maybe end of 2021, early 2022. Now I just feel like they're being stubborn about it. I don't, I don't know. It's crazy. Let's keep going here. This thread, I'm not super excited about this thread, but I'll present you with a solution. thereafter. So this is from Ernest Erdison and who is Ernest? He is an economist, wonderful,

a diplomat, vice president of Greens EFA. And so he basically is working on the European anti-money laundering rules as they pertain to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. So here's his thread. Deal. After months of negotiations with the council, we agreed to the most ambitious. travel rule for transfers of crypto assets in the world. Great job for you there, man. Wonderful. We are putting an end to the wild west of unregulated crypto, closing major loopholes in the European anti-money laundering rules. Thread. So he says, all crypto asset service providers.

So crypto asset service providers, they call Casps, C-A-S-P-S, so if you hear me say that, all of these casps become obligated entities under AMLD. Crypto ATMs are captured under these rules. The travel rule for crypto will apply to all transactions from and to casps from the first euro. So he's saying literally all of these like overbearing AML, any money laundering regulations, literally start the second you send any amount of money. like a single euro to and from any service provider. That's fucking insane.

Here's why he says, this is because transfers of crypto pose increased risk of smurfing. Smurfing is when you have a transfer that is technically over the anti-money laundering threshold, which would be in Canada and the US. I think it's $10,000. I don't know what it is in the EU. but smurfing would be when you

basically split that up into multiple pieces. So you'd send over like a thousand and three thousand, five thousand split it up so that it's never over that threshold. But he's saying from the first euro, so somebody's going to send like 10,000 individual one euro transactions to get around this.

He said, but the rules won't apply to peer to peer transfers where there is no obligated entity involved. That's because that they can't regulate it. And they will if they can. Keep that in mind. They absolutely will if they can. And this is where we need to be careful. But I digress. Let's keep going. The regulation will also apply to transfers from and to unhosted wallets. Fuck, I hate that term. It's not even a real thing. Unhosted wallets means that you own your own money. Unhosted wallet. and this is, we'll get to an article later,

but it means an independent wallet. There's independent wallets and there's permissioned wallets or permissioned accounts where somebody else is holding your money for you. An unhosted wallet does not exist because somebody has the wallet. You either have the wallet or somebody else has the wallet. There is no such thing as an unhosted wallet. There's an IOU. Okay. Casp's will be required to collect information and apply enhanced due diligence measures with respect to all transfers involving independent wallets on a risk basis.

Verification of the identity of the beneficial owner of the independent wallet will be mandatory for large transfers above a thousand euros. Is that what passes as large transfers nowadays? large is a thousand euros. I don't know if you've been paying attention to the purchasing power of a thousand euros, but it's becoming sweet fuck all. And this is where they get you, they get you because the thresholds stay the same or get lower. And the value of what you can actually purchase with that amount of money is less and less and less. And pretty soon, you're barely able to buy anything and they've got their fucking nose and everything. Above $1,000 in case the transfer is made.

to or from the wallet belonging to the cast phone client. By 18 months after entry into application, the commission will assess the need to review deregulation to add measures to mitigate the risk of independent wallets. Casp will be required to adopt internal policies, procedures, and controls to ensure compliance with targeted financial sanctions. This is very relevant as, of course, they're going to throw Russia in here.

As Russian oligarchs use crypto to circumvent EU and international sanctions. Dude, literally fucking anybody can use this. Some dude on a yacht doesn't matter. And by clamping down on this, you're also clamping down on individuals, fundraising for literally any protest anywhere. So fuck you. New risk mitigation measures will be in place. Casp will be required to perform enhanced due diligence before establishing a business relationship with Casp's operating in third countries. So business

to business, specific enhanced due diligence will apply to unregistered and unlicensed entities. Robust safeguards for data protection, information will only be available to CASPs, executing the transfers and confident authorities. CAST will have to ensure and to handle and store the information securely in full respect of GDPR requirements. So they're talking about data collection and how it's going to be their responsibility as individual entities to store all of your data securely. Yeah, we've had a great fucking record with that. And I'm talking with like legacy financial systems. How often does everybody's bank account information, sin numbers, all of that stuff get hacked on the regular?

And people get identity theft and all of this. Imagine the fallout of individuals. And let's just, you know, rainbow in your head. Let's just picture this hilarious utopia that they're picturing. And then all of the sudden, all of the politicians that pass this, all of their private information gets hacked. And all of a sudden, everybody can track every single one of their wallets and every single transaction from here on in. So, yeah. Let's keep going here.

A list of casp providing services abusively in the EU will be introduced in the context of the mica regulation. Intermediary casp can perform transfer on behalf of another casp will be included in the scope and we'll have to collect and transmit the information on the initial originator and beneficiary along the chain. Travel rule will come into application when the mica regulation will apply 18 months after the entry into force. This is in any case much earlier entry into the application than originally foreseen as the file has been fast-tracked regarding the rest of the AML package. So here's the deal. All of this is super shitty for privacy. And basically if you're in the EU and you're dealing with any company that has any sort of ability to transfer or custody funds for you, you're going to be captured in this.

Unless you entirely opt out of that system. And what I mean is you don't use anything that requires KYC. And you also observe privacy measures on Bitcoin. Now, I do have a playlist on this. So there's a few suggestions I have for non-KYC Bitcoin. RoboSats, super awesome, peer-to-peer, overtore, completely anonymous, anonymous, more or less. the only data that may be leaked is depending on how you're paying the individual from which you're buying Bitcoin,

there could be some sort of, like they might see a transfer coming from somebody via whatever method you're sending them money. But there's no implicit on-chain transaction that denotes that your transfer from that centralized third party or whatever is in any way related to a Bitcoin transaction. So that's super helpful. The same applies to BISC is another decentralized way of doing it. Hoddle, Hodel. You do have an account, but that can just be a dummy account with an email address. But again, just keep in mind that there is some record of transactions held there and you know, there's chat logs and stuff like that.

So you just got to be careful. But nonetheless, Robosats, BISC and Hoddle, Hoddle, Hodel, peer-to-peer non-KYC methods of transacting into and out of Bitcoin. You can also, one of the sponsors of the show, Bit Refill, you know, you can use people like them. You can use the Bitcoin company to get, those are both places where you can grab gift cards and stuff like that. And coin cards is another great one. So there's a bunch of places that you can use. Now, in terms of other privacy, if you want to ensure and you want to break the links between you and your coins, I would recommend checking out samurai wallet or

downloading sparrow wallet for desktop. Both of them use Whirlpool and you can basically use CoinJoin to break the links between potentially somebody knowing that some coins are yours to not being able to decisively and deterministically track the coins that you own. I've also got videos on Ronan Dojo, so running your own back end for that. so you're not leaking like network data. Beyond that, Paynems is very useful. You can have a public ID that does not show on-chain addresses. So you can have that between you and another individual,

and they'll be able to generate addresses for you without having you send them over individually. And then there's no kind of trace of that. There's still obviously on-chain transactions happening, but there's no like public trail of, oh, this person tweeted out. or sent a DM with a particular address. So that's the benefit of Payneems.

And then Mercury Wallet is an interesting one. It uses state chains so that you actually swap individual UTXOs with other users with no on-chain implication that there's been a transfer fund whatsoever. It's literally like if you know what an open dime is. It's like me having an open dime and you having an open dime and then us trading them for the same value and then walking away. nothing has happened on the Bitcoin blockchain, but we now own different Bitcoin. That's effectively what Mercury does in a on-chain way.

So it's really, really cool. Highly recommend checking out all of this, and I'm going to try and keep adding to this. I also highly recommend watching stuff from Matt O'Dell and Citadel Dispatch to go down that privacy rabbit hole. What else do we want to do? And in the realm of privacy, just to further bolster that.

Coinbase, they've been providing geo-tracking data to ICE, just so you know. In August 2021, Coinbase sold a single analytic software license to ICE for $21,000, following, followed by a software purchase potentially worth $1.36 million the next month, but details of exactly what capabilities would be offered to the agency's controversial Homeland Security Investigations Division of that were unclear. Nonetheless, Coinbase is in bed with the feds. If you're using Coinbase, maybe transfer all of your money off of there. Stop using Coinbase and then Coin Join your funds. But yeah, check out this Bitcoin Privacy playlist.

It'll hopefully get you started down that rabbit hole. Now, in the vein of the language, I was kind of getting feisty around the word unhosted wallet because it's just such a bullshit term. But Gigi dropped this awesome article called The Words We Use in Bitcoin, and he goes through various terminology, how the terms that we have now are less than perfect, but there has been changes previously to the terms that we use. Wallet is not a great term because it's actually a piece of software that holds keys, private keys.

He goes through, he talks about what a key itself is. there's a push to change um change hardware wallets to signing devices and i think that's uh probably a good push but this illusion of wallet of wallet holding money and that's not actually what it holds um he goes into the idea of unhosted wallace and man does he have a lot to say about that addresses and again it's just a good kind of analytical look at a lot of the terminology that we use and and how it can be used for good or bad and how we need to start shifting language so that it can be capitalized on by by people like this shitbag that are passing regulations

that don't make any fucking sense and basically trying to make this draconian drag net for every single person that just wants to hold their own money um in that same realm uh wanted to let you guys know there's a new update for nunchuk.io which is a basically a collaborative multi-sig wallet. It was actually used by myself and others with a Canadian

trucker convoy as a way to hold keys. So it's awesome. These guys are awesome. These are the guys that wrote back to the Ontario Supreme Court and basically told them to go fuck themselves and said that we don't have any information

nor can we freeze anybody's funds. And when the Canadian dollar goes to zero, we will be here to serve you too. It's a hell of a letter. Anyways, they just released a major update with major privacy improvements. Highly recommend you check them out. I do have a tutorial on them,

but pretty good thread on what they've done here. Kudos to the Nunchuk guys. Keep on building. I love to see the innovation that comes out of the bear market. because nobody's going to think, and this is what I love about the bear markets too. Think of how freaked out everybody is about privacy right now, myself included. But you got to think back.

In 2017, all of the stuff around scaling was reaching a fever pitch. Like, holy shit, how are we going to scale Bitcoin? Everything. And the big narrative was, oh, we got to make a million shit coins. We've got to fork Bitcoin. We've got to change it. We had no scaling whatsoever up until around the summer. or the fall of 2017.

Segwit wasn't even enacted for on-chain scaling. Now, look what we've got. We've scaled on-chain. We've added Segwit. We've added Tapper, which will also help a little bit with scaling. We've also added the Lightning Network, which I use literally daily now. I can now receive like fractions of a penny minute by minute

for people listening to this podcast. There may be somebody listening to it right now, streaming sats to me, hitting that boost button, as I say it, and just doing little bursts of sats. So the scaling in Bitcoin went from no solutions available on chain at all whatsoever to where we are now, which is like we have massively scaled in a short period of time. Number one concern for most Bitcoiners right now is the regulation coming down the pipe in regards to privacy and trying to get this dragnet going.

And we already, I just showed you that playlist. We already have all of these tools available to us in regards to privacy. It's far from perfect. There's a learning curve involved. But the tools exist now when the worry is getting, I would say it's mounting quite a bit. Think forward five years. Do you think we're going to be in an even better place than we are now? I think the innovation in and around privacy over the next five years is going to be equal or better than what we've done with scaling.

I very much look forward to it. I have to dive into something called Fedimins. Jeff Booth told me to check that out the other day. So anyways, I am very, very bullish on what's going to happen in the privacy space around this. So I'm very excited about that. Shout out to also the random like porn bots that are hitting up the chat now. Just I, you know, maybe don't click that. But just so you know, don't condone that.

Anyways, let's keep going here. Just a few more things I want to touch on. Again, shout out to Nunchuck. Tomorrow is Canada Day. Tomorrow is Canada Day. I first of all, I want to wish a very happy Canada day to a number of gentlemen that are very near to near and dear to me. I don't see and talk to them nearly enough. But happy Canada Day from the bottom of my heart to Greg Foss, Jeff Booth, BJ Dictor, and Nick, aka Nobody Caribou.

Gentlemen, I'm sorry I don't get to talk to you all the time. but, you know, I think you guys are all incredible. I think everything that you do is important, and I'm glad to have been able to stand alongside you, at least in part through the beginning of this year. And so for Canada Day, Peter Chilanga over at Bitcoin Magazine, he wrote an article, and actually, you know what?

I'm going off screen for a second, because I've got to grab a copy. I'm still here. hopefully you can still hear me hold on hold on i can't i can't not show this i'm super excited about this and let me just kill the screen for a second here somebody showed me the cover of this um when i was in when i was in norway for the oslo freedom forum and i teared up i genuinely almost had a good cry and i'm tearing up a little bit right now um Because this means a lot to me.

The beginning of the year was pretty rough. And I was very shaken by what happened here in Canada. And I was more shaken by a large portion of the country, more or less cheering on some of the draconian measures that were taken against a large portion of the population. You know, it was written off as fringe minority. it's a bunch of, you know, name, name derogatory term for people. And don't get me wrong.

There were a few shitbags down there, right? Like, but you, when you take a few people and you paint an entire movement around, around those few people, it becomes a problem. And I don't think it's indicative of the majority of people that partook in this particular protest. And so, you know, there was a bunch of Bitcoin that was raised in the face of every other legacy financial rail freezing funds. And I think it's important to look at what happened through Canada this year and learn from it. And hopefully use it as a template to be able to continue to continue. to transact in the face of adversarial governments.

Yeah, I don't quite know what else to say. I enjoyed this article. Shout out to Peter. And I don't want to get nitpicky here, but I just wanted to mention, he mentioned that tally coin in the article. He mentioned that tally coin allows you to generate a new address for each new donation. But at the time of the convoy, I don't know if it's changed since then, but at the time of the convoy, that wasn't the case. So it was a singular address. And that was one of the major

missteps and problems, in my opinion. And I think that would be on me because I didn't realize the scope that this would have. But yeah, so in terms of tally coin, the singular address was one of the major problems and it was just very easy to track from there on in and thus addresses were able to be flagged. Nonetheless, a large portion like 70% of the Bitcoin actually got to individual truckers that could then use it. And you just can't say that about any of the other fundraising efforts. So in the face of huge oversights in terms of privacy, which I'm trying to correct for now, again, see said playlist. In the face of like the odds being stacked against them,

people still got money. People were still able to donate. And hopefully we learn and grow from this. And yeah, that's what I'm going to be thinking about this Canada day. But a huge shout out to Bitcoin magazine. I got like a stack of these. I'm going to frame one of these on my wall. This is probably one of the more important.

important moments of my life. Yeah, I'll leave it there. Thank you guys. I really do appreciate it. Okay. In that same vein, and this is what makes me happy, is I was just on a spaces chat with Bitcoin magazine talking about the article, talking about what happened in Canada and everything.

And I brought up this. Bitcoin is really, it's just, it's just an apolitical tool. that anybody can use. It is the definition of freedom money. Anybody can utilize freedom money. That's what it's for. It's for enemies. It's for people you don't like and it's for you. And every person that doesn't like it that uses it makes it stronger for you to use as well. And this is the world that we now live in. And I had this conversation with Jeff Booth and a girl named Luda that I met in Oslo for the Oslo Freedom Forum. with the human rights foundation.

And she's from Poland. And so she knew a number of people in Ukraine as things started to head south. And she wanted to get protective equipment. You know, so people could shield themselves. There was a lot of stuff that was happening. She basically just wanted like helmets and, like, vests for people to be able to wear. because a lot of people were forced to stay and fight. You know, some people were able to get out and other people were just forced to stay and fight.

So she wanted to be able to give supplies and just have people at least be able to protect themselves in some way. She went and looked at all of the fiat ways that she could go about raising money and buying supplies and getting them there. and it was going to take weeks. She had bank accounts shut down, all of the typical Fiat stuff that you deal with and legacy finance stuff that you deal with. She looked, and this was, you know, from both me and Jeff talking to her at this event,

this was one of like those moments that again, it kind of makes you tear up and makes you realize what an important tool Bitcoin is. She looked at the Canadian trucker protests And she said, this worked there. This can work here. So she raised money. She got just like all of these like protective, all of this protective equipment.

And she got into Ukraine on fucking day two. Nobody else was able to do that. But she did it because she used Bitcoin. And she did that because she looked at what happened in Canada. And that had a big impact on me as well. This has been a hell of a year. But I think a lot of people. in particular in terms of human rights are starting to wake up and realize like

Bitcoin doesn't care about your fucking opinion about it. It can just be used. It can just be used by anybody that needs it and that can be somebody you like and that can be somebody you don't like, but it doesn't matter. It's there for you. It's there for anybody. So yeah, anyways, if you're curious about that interview, I dropped it just the other day. So I It's one of the last videos on my channel. So go back and check it out. It was a really good chat. I really enjoyed it.

Luda is awesome. Jeff obviously is awesome. Yeah, again, another impactful moment brought about by some of the problems that we saw this past little bit. Anyways, I'm going to wrap it there. Got a hell of a panel tomorrow. Very excited for it. Yes, I am doing a show. I will have another fellow Canadian on, Brad Mill.

Also going to have Corey, here come Corey. Corey Clipson's going to be on. And I'm going to also have Nick Batia, author of Laird Money. Another awesome Bitcoin book. I highly recommend. Check it out. But yeah, stacked panels. Super stoked for this one.

It'll be a lot of fun. That'll be tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern time. So be sure to head on in and check it out. Guys, I'm going to wrap it up there. Thank you so much for being here. Canadian Bitcoiners. I see you guys there. Love you guys. Happy Canada Day in advance.

And with that, I'm out. Of course, like, subscribe, share. All those things are really important. Drop comments, all that stuff. Hit that boost button. If you want to, you can help out of the show by hitting the sponsor general below. Shake pay, lead, and bit refill keystone billfottle. Or you can drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page.

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