BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: US Treasury Sanctions Open Source Software ep279

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

The Treasury has placed sanctions on Tornado cash, setting a scary precedent. Blackrock partners with Coinbase to offer Bitcoin to clients. Iran uses "crypto" for $10m of imports for the first time. ���� 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 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

What is up, everybody? Welcome to the show. We're doing the news a little bit early this week. I'm going to be out of town, but I didn't want to leave you hanging here. So here we are on a Tuesday doing the news. And luckily, there's no shortage of it. Even this early in the week, shit has been hitting the fans. We're going to be talking about U.S. Treasury sanctioning some open source software. We're going to talk about Coinbase and BlackRock. What's going on there? We're going to talk about Iran. And then, that's, using not specifically Bitcoin. We don't really know, but cryptocurrency in relation to imports to evade sanctions. So not really light news this week, but we'll be touching on it. And we've got our friend Nico from Simply Bitcoin coming back to fill us in on what the hell is going on. But of course, 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 fucking thing sucks. If you have not already, like, subscribe, share. All that helps get this content in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the VTC sessions.

This is your daily session. Before we get into the news, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. we're sitting at $23,149 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will snag you 4,319 sats. 91.03% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, a little steep today, which was super helpful when I was trying to make my fucking tutorial the other day and I kept on having to bump the fees to no avail.

But nonetheless, 35 sats per byte for next block, even if you're willing to wait an hour or more. it's still looking like between 10 and 20 some odd sats per bite. So, yeah, use RBF, bump fees if necessary, but, you know, keep an eye on them if it's something that is pressing. Of course, shout out to sponsors of the show. CoinKite.com. These guys literally just have the best hardware in the game. I love my cold card mark four.

And I've just got a plethora of cold cards that have been sitting around regular use awesome and multi-sick. I love the air-gapping. It's a thing of beauty. If you haven't played around with open dimes or the sats card, you don't have a block clock kicking around. They've just got so much great Bitcoin stuff and it's just a treasure trove every time you sort through. They're also, they've got the tap signer going, but they just drop the sats card as well, which is like a multi-use open dime. If you're unfamiliar with any of that, I've got tutorials on all of it and I'm going to be getting my hands on SaaS cards really quick. But again, shout out coin kite links are down below and you can use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything in the

store. Up next, shakepay.com if you're in Canada, easy way to be stack and sats, e transfers in and out, thin spread. And if you sign up with the link down below, after your first $100 purchase, it'll give you 30 bucks for free. If you have friends and family, sign up with your link and do the same. You'll get another $30 for each of them. You can also shake your phone every single day for free Sats. They have a Satsback Visa card. They got all kinds of awesome stuff. So check them out. Link are down. Links are down below rather. Lendon.a. you can use your Bitcoin for a ton of different stuff. For me, it's been super useful whenever I'm in a pinch. I need to get my hands on dollars for some cash flow related issue. But I don't want to sell my Bitcoin because that's a

taxable event and I don't want to have to buy back in at a higher price. Well, I can deposit Bitcoin here, get dollars to my bank, a loan of dollars to my bank. And when I pay back those dollars, I get back the same amount of Bitcoin. They also, We also have the same, they have savings accounts rather for Bitcoin and USDC with proof of reserve audits on the regular. So you're not you're not getting jerked around. They have their B2X offering. They have Bitcoin backed mortgages rolling out across Canada and soon to some select US states. So check them out, start.ledon.com.com slash BTC sessions.

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wallet. So get it at privacyprose.io. And with that, let's really quick do our shoutouts and get into the news. This is the helipad boost tracker over on my umbral. And this just tracks any boosts that you guys have sent in listening to the pod. So first off, thank you guys for doing that. Shout out to Michael Matiluf for the bull here, 500 sats. Hi from Eliobi. Appreciate your work. You do honest, helpful knowledge. You continue to spread. Cheers. This is from BOS Strategies. We'll do it live from Sozell. Zika boy, hurry up and get rid of Trudeau clown, Ben. Yes, I will do my best. I'm working on it, man.

Fuck Craig wrong. Absolutely. Contractillion dude. Salman Hippo. Great show. Thank you. Thanks, man. And ZapRite. There's a suggestion for ZapRite in terms of sending invoices and stuff like that

and getting paid in Bitcoin. I checked it out. Looks kind of cool. I'm going to play around with it. be able to a tutorial. So thanks from Kate for that suggestion and everybody else that sent other boost via fountain app. Again, great wobb again from Cliff Jay Banger, Michael Madoff with another bull. Never disappoints. Thank you, Ben and guests from Fistful of Sats. Thank you, everybody, for all of the boosts. But it's time to bring in our resident expert.

on the show last week. We brought him back because he's just so goddamn good at what he does. So let's bring him in now. Nico, dude, it's good to see you. Wow, I just got complimented by BTC sessions on air. Damn, I'm turning red a little bit. Man, I'm super happy to be here. I absolutely love this show, but I tell you all the time off here, you're a huge inspiration for us. Dude, well, I'm glad to have you and you're making my life easier because you just do such a good job at encapsulating what's going on with the news and you can break it down more eloquently than I. So I just need to have you in the room. So let's change the ambiance here. Simply sessions.

There we go. And yeah, man, let's chat news. I'll bring up your screen for you, but let's chat. What's on your mind? What do you want to touch on this week? Let's start with the good news. We're going to talk about the Black Rock scenario. We're going to talk, not the scenario, the Black Rock situation. We're going to talk, and what it means, of course. We're going to talk about the U.S. Treasury and the implications of the U.S. Treasury sanctioning, not an individual, not an entity, but a technology. I believe, Ben, this is a precursor to what's to come and have a passage from the sovereign

individual to back up that theory. And last but not least, I'm going to tie in the Iran thing and how they used, I hate using this word. This is BTC Sessions, crypto, whatever, to be truthful to the article. How they use, go ahead. I was going to say, I'll let it slide. How they use crypto, so, you know, according to the article, to facilitate a trade, right? And I'm going to kind of tie that in with what I believe that has to do with the U.S. Treasury's move. Anyways, let's start with BlackRock, the BlackRock news, Ben, if I can. Let's go.

Let's do it. All right. So there's an article by Bloomberg. Black Rock teams up with Coinbase in Bitcoin, shit coin market expansion. Guys, I want you to pay attention to the word crypto. Down here, it says, will initially be on Bitcoin. So Bloomberg, another fail. You guys are lying.

It really means Bitcoin market expansion. Anyways, BlackRock, Inc. is partnering with Coinbase Global Inc. To make it easier for institutional investors to manage and trade Bitcoin, taking the world's largest asset manager into a cryptocurrency market hammered by plunging prices and government investigations. Blah, blah, blah. So much fud in that.

I don't know why they have to do that. Coinbase searched 15%. Whatever. That's the coin base price. But here's the actual signal guys. Top BlackRock clients will be able to use its Aladdin investment management system to oversee their exposure to Bitcoin along with other portfolio assets such as stocks and bonds and to facilitate financing and trading on Coinbase's exchange.

according to a statement Thursday. The focus on the partnership with Coinbase, the biggest US crypto trading platform will initially be on Bitcoin, BlackRock said. For anyone who doesn't know who BlackRock is, they have 10 trillion, that's right, with the T, $10 trillion under management. They are one of the largest index funds in the world.

If you look at any Fortune 500 company and you look at who the shareholders are, you can bet your bottom dollar, that Black Rock owns a good chunk. It owns a good percentage, right? So there's an extremely influential company. Larry Fink, which is the CEO, he inherits the voting power of holding all those assets. So it's not necessarily that he owns all of them, but he has them under management. Therefore, he has that voting power. Therefore, he is one of the most influential people on the face of the planet.

And the fact that they're bending the knee, mind you, Ben, two or three years ago, Larry Fink was talking negatively about Bitcoin. But here you go again, Jamie Diamond, Larry Fink, all bowing down to the king. And of course, the king is Bitcoin. So Larry Fink, if I'm not mistaken, he was not a fan. And did he have a problem with proof of work? I thought he had a little bit of a, he wasn't super keen on it.

But then I guess the reality of the situation just kind of slapped him in the face. And he was like, well, I guess if enough people want it, then they got to offer it. I'm, I'm torn here because, God, Coinbase fucking sucks. And like, it is what it is. It's always interesting because it comes from both ends. You get the people that are most disenfranchised from the current system that they get it and they start utilizing Bitcoin to help them in their situation so that they can escape the current system.

But you also get the people that are in the best position in the system that start to understand it and realize, oh, we can capitalize on this in some way and get in somewhat early, not as early as a lot of the plebs. It's one of the first times that regular people can front-run huge institutions like this. But, you know, they're basically next in line and then it'll work its way in from the fringes to your everyday normie.

Is that how you see it playing out? Look, it's what you said, man. Coinbase is definitely done to me of Bitcoin. Larry Fink is a huge proponent of the ESG movement. the ESG movement is an attack on Bitcoin, but it's exactly what you said, Ben. No one can resist Bitcoin's incentives. And here is the market forces doing market forces things. I'll give it a separate analogy of that.

Back when Cash App was enabling Bitcoin withdraws, I predicted six, seven months earlier. I said this is going to force PayPal and Robin Hood to eventually add withdraws. So here's the market and here's BlackRock. preemptively saying, hey, hey, hey, we're not going to give up market share for institutions that are holding Bitcoin. We want those customers. We want those clients. So here is another example of Bitcoin's incentives doing its thing. But Coinbase and Larry Fink with his whole ESG stuff, I don't know, Ben, very not not the best people to have in your corner.

Yeah. Yeah. I'd say, you know, to those watching, I guess, overall not bad for Bitcoin this happened but what's better for Bitcoin is if rather than going through the products offered by Black Rock and Coinbase you just get your own Bitcoin and you hold it in your own self-custody I think that's general consensus awesome well let's let's move on down the line I'm I'm interested in this next couple of stories here so I'll let you take it away what's next on the docket here this is the big Kahuna this is the big news of the week. The implications of this, Ben, are absolutely, man, they're very big, and I believe this was

coordinated. I believe this was strategic move by the Treasury. Before I get to it, let me read you this passage from the sovereign individual. It's from the Wikipedia page. It says, lacking their accustomed scope to tax and inflate governments and even traditionally civilized countries will turn nasty as income tax becomes uncollectable, older and more arbitrary methods of extraction will resurface the ultimate form of withholding tax, the de facto or even overt hostage taking. We're not there yet in the movie, but stay tuned. We'll be introduced by governments desperate to prevent wealth from escaping beyond their reach.

Unlucky individuals will find themselves singled out and held to ransom in an almost medieval faction. Now, this is the part that applies to where we are in the movie. Businesses that offer services that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals will be subject to infiltration, sabotage and disruption. Of course, you know, the tornado cash is not technically a business because this is a decentralized entity, but you could definitely see how that applies. Anyways, let's move on to what the hell happened. This is Roman Smenov, and he is building tornado cash or was building tornado cash. My GitHub account was just suspended. Is writing an open source

code illegal now? And what is he talking about? Crypto mixing service, tornado cash, blacklisted by U.S. Treasury. Let's check out the reasons why. The Treasury Department has banned all Americans from using decentralized crypto mixing service tornado cash. Tornado Cash has been a key tool for the Lozzeres group, a North Korean hacking group tied to the 625 million March hack of Axe's Rhone Network according to the Treasury Department. Now, before you guys were like, hey, it's North Koreans, that's bad. You know, it's a totalitarian country. That is the excuse. And let me make my case as to why that's the excuse. And our friends at Coin Center came up with this beautiful piece. It was released, I think, yesterday. Let's check out what they have to say. Tornado Cash, the website and

associated Ethereum addresses has been added to the OFC Office of Foreign Asset Control SDN list. Ben, do you recognize that name, OFACC? Mm-hmm. The old back list. Marathon Mine. Remember this guy's marathon mine's first OFAC compliant Bitcoin Block. They're the same government agency that pressured marathon pool to do what? To make Bitcoin an extension of the current existing surveillance exclusionary financial system. That's who OFC is. So here we go again. What are they trying to do? They're trying to co-opt the Bitcoin network. What does this mean in practice? It means no American can send or receive money to or from the addresses without violating sanctions law. It doesn't sound too bad as of yet, but check this out, Ben. What is the OFACSSDN

list typically meant to do. In general, it is a tool to identify persons involved in terrorism, enemies of the state, or other state sanctioned activities, and ensure that these individuals cannot get the benefit of the U.S. financial system. You're like, okay, you know, North Koreans, it's bad, but check this out. As such, today's action does not seem so much a sanction against a person or entity with agency. It appears instead to be the sanctioning of a tool that is neutral in character and that can be put to good or bad uses like any other technology. It is not Any specific bad actor who is being sanctioned, but instead it is all Americans who may wish to use this automated tool in order to protect their own privacy while transacting online who are having their liberty curtailed without the benefit of due process. If it was the Treasury's Department intent to sanction some groups who have actively maintained to promote tornado cash, that would be one thing.

Sanctioning a tool that is not an alias of any person, meriting sanction is substantially different from typical usage of the SDN list. It is a ban on a technology and not a sanction against a person. An American who has sent money from the tornado cash address is not even able to reject the transaction and yet may be at the moment technically in violation of the OFC rules. This is a limit on any American who wishes to use her own money and a freely available software tool to maintain her own privacy, including for otherwise entirely legal and personal reasons. The particular usage of OFAC raises heightened constitutional concerns because it is, again, not a ban on one non-US person's ability to use the financial system. It is instead a ban on effectively every American's ability to use a particular open source software tool. You know what Bitcoin is, guys. You know where this is going.

Bitcoin is open source software. How long in five years when they say, hey, wait a second. Bitcoin is being used to circumvent sanctions. Remember, Bitcoin Core, even though it's not completely dependent on GitHub, it's a very convenient site to do the development. So, Ben, the writing is on the wall where this is going, right? And I think the sovereign individual, like it always does, predicted this was inevitable. It's crazy to see because, I mean, I think there were some bad takes on this on Twitter. There's a bunch of people hopping on this saying, oh, you know, like, ha ha, Ethereum, it's not decentralized, everything like that.

My takeaway, though, was the precedent being set by sanctioning a piece of software, right? I think, and I'm surprised that it was able to be done in the first place, given the president set by some early Supreme Court rulings in and around the cyphor punk movement in the 90s, that code is effectively just a form of speech, right? And you can't ban speech. There's a lot covered. Yeah, exactly. And so what was it? Buckley versus Vallejo and Citizens United versus FEC.

Yeah. So, I mean, there's some precedent here in and around these cases. And so I'll be surprised if there's not challenges. to this. However, it is scary. It does set a precedent and it does then question, well, what about other pieces of software? Because if they're able to just sanction a piece of software, then they can sanction any sort of service that, or not service, but any software that allows you to increase your privacy on Bitcoin, too. and it can be harder to nail down, but it's still possible.

So one thing I found funny about this is the second that they did this, there's some guy on Twitter that went and put a bunch of Ethereum through tornado cash and started sending 0.1 to all of the public.eath addresses of the largest accounts. So they sent it off to like, and like celebrities too. So like Shaq and Jimmy Fallon just got ETH that's been sanctioned by the Treasury Department. There's a huge list of people that are starting to suddenly get all of these different, like Zuckerberg's sister, I think, got some too. Yeah, so there's a bunch of people that are getting all of this sanctioned Eith sent to them. And they can't say no to it.

So then what happens? Like are there like because they've received this, are their addresses or their, because it's an account based system on Ethereum. So like are there accounts now just like sanctioned at this point? That remains to be seen. But I do worry about the precedent that this sets. And I think that we need to be conscious and working towards. building tools that make this type of legislation extremely difficult, if not impossible,

to enforce. Because right now, you can easily kind of point to an equal output coin join and be like, well, that was a coin join right there. Not as possible with a two-person coin join or a pay join or pay to endpoint. So there's some stuff there that can be done. But yeah, there's definitely a lot of work to be done. Are you concerned? What's your takeaway here?

Like, do you think that we're ready for this kind of heat? Or do you think it's kind of like you get ready after the heat comes? Yeah, man, look, I think that we're not even in the first inning. This is the separation of money and state. The separation of church and state was a very bloody affair. And I suspect that this will not be. as bloody, but it will still be contentious. And I think that this is the very first inning of this. Dude, they have a monopoly on the creation and the control of money. Why would they give over that

power gently? These bureaucrats are addicted to it. And I think that this was very strategic in the part of the Treasury Department, because it's what we were saying, Ben, they're trying to set a precedent. They're trying to say, hey, this technology is what is enabling the, you know, the, the overstep of sanctions, right? Therefore, certain technologies can't be allowed, right? That's basically what they're hoping to get away with. At the end of the day, the United States has politicized the U.S. dollar, and because it is the world's reserve currency, people are forced to use it, right?

Either to buy oil to trade with other countries, and that gives the U.S. government a tremendous amount of power, of which they have abused tremendously. And here comes Bitcoin, right? And, you know, I hate using this word, but crypto. You know what? Actually, I'm glad that I use this word. Let me tell you why, Ben. Okay?

I'm glad that I use the word crypto. Let's talk about the false financial sovereignty that crypto provides. This is Circle. Circle is basically the developer of the largest, of the second largest stable coin. And you know what Circle did? Circle Internet Finance, the issuer of the USD. stable coin froze over 75,000 USDC and funds linked to 81 sanctin addresses at the cryptocurrency mixer tornado cash on Monday. So that being said, yeah, I'm glad I said

crypto because crypto gives false financial sovereignty. But yeah, Ben, this is the bureaucracy trying to maintain power. That's exactly what this is. The interesting part here is, is the base layer infrastructure of Ethereum and how it's reacting to this because it's so centralized and can be co-opted versus the base layer infrastructure of Bitcoin. So what I mean is if you're not running a node, you don't really get a say in what you can and cannot interact with. while a large majority of nodes are run either through Amazon web services or Infura or Alchemy. And I'm talking about Ethereum nodes. Well, Alchemy and Infuri have in Infura have blocked access to tornado cash so that anybody that's using a node that's connected to them can no longer utilize tornado cache, even though it's open source software. your wallet just won't allow it.

And so I think that's a scary precedent, whereas if you're running, say like a samurai whirlpool back end and you're running like a Ronan dojo, it just functions. You're running that infrastructure yourself and therefore cannot be shut down. Now that's a separate issue than, you know,

if somebody goes and it goes so far as they're going to kicking your door and haul you off to prison, and if they find out that you're doing it. But it still stands that you can access that if you need to. And in certain jurisdictions, when there's a tyrannical state afoot, then, yeah, you may need access to that kind of thing. And so with Bitcoin, that's still accessible. With Ethereum, it depends on who you are and what kind of infrastructure you're actually running your

And for the vast majority, it can be out of reach to be able to run something like that. So yeah, anyways, any final thoughts on this before we jump to something that I would say is related? Yeah. Dude, this is, it's what you said, Ben. It's like in I think the design of the Bitcoin network, the fact that nodes are so resource, they're not as resource intensive as Ethereum allows everybody. to basically the barrier to entry is very low. Versus if you look at Ethereum's because it's so resource intensive, the majority of Ethereum nodes that we know for a fact

are run on AWS servers or servers in general. That means that if you want to know who's running Ethereum, search a Google picture of Jeff Bezos and put it on your wall. That's who you should be worshipping if you hold Ethereum. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'll add one last thing here too. in the comments here from I.O. 321. GitHub is centralized like the Google Play Store.

This is a good reality check. Git software allows collab in a very anti-fragile way and doesn't inherently rely on big server infrastructure. This is a good point. And back in 2018, a lot of people were raising red flags about the fact that Microsoft acquired GitHub. And everybody's like, oh, shit, this is bad news. We're going to see shit start to go sideways.

And others, including Microsoft, tried to quell that worry and say, you know what, there's nothing's changed here. We just, you know, we acquired it and it's everything's business as usual. But fast forward four years. And sure enough, a piece of open source software has been sanctioned and removed from GitHub. And contributors to that piece of open source software have had their accounts banned on GitHub as well. So if you want to get around that kind of stuff and you want to be able to still work on. on this, you know, a perfect example, like if you're running, say, an umbral mode, you can download an app called Gitea, I believe, something like that.

But basically, you're running the infrastructure yourself. You're kind of interacting peer to peer. You can host open source software on your own node. So there are better platforms. You can migrate. You can host it yourself. But it's, again, the reality is beginning to hit that if you're not hosting it yourself, there's a chance you might not be able to access it.

So let's jump, man. Let's jump to this last story. What do you got in store? Absolutely. So it kind of connects with what I'm talking about. Why is the Treasury Department making these moves? Because the writing is on the wall, right? I've said this many times, right?

You could regulate the on and off ramps, but you can't regulate Bitcoin. If you could regulate Bitcoin, it would defeat the purpose of Bitcoin, right? So, but that doesn't mean they're not going to try, right? So right now they're trying to set the precedent saying a certain open source code. We got to sanction it. And like I pulled up with the example with the marathon, Maripool, right, they, you know, they are trying to only allow OFC compliant blocks. That doesn't work, right?

The worst that they could do is slow down certain transactions of being added to the blockchain, but you can't just stop it, right? Is an Iranian mining pool is going to say, hey, give me those blocks. We'll take them. Right. Anyways. So, Iran Place's first crypto-funded import order worth $10 million. Iran registered its first import order to be paid in crypto since the government strapped for foreign currencies due to sanctions. There is a key word due to sanctions. Amended digital assets legislation to allow locally mined cryptocurrency to be used for purchases.

The order is valued at $10 million. The report cited a tweet from Al-Zera Payman Pach, an official. at the Ministry of Industry, Mine and Trade, which said that by the end of September, Iran's use of cryptocurrencies and smart contracts will be widespread in foreign trade with target countries. If you want to know why the U.S. Treasury is doing that, there's your answer.

Remember, guys, there's no conspiracies, but there's also no coincidences. That's crazy, man. Like, this is, it's so interesting because again, even as Ukraine was beginning to heat up and they began sanctioning regular Russian citizens and the Russian

government and they, you know, started cutting people off from the banging system from the SWIFT network. All of this stuff, the writing was kind of on the fucking wall, man. Like it was it was like why would people hold U.S. dollars as a Treasury reserve asset anymore if you don't know as a country if you're going to be able to access any of those dollars down the road depending on whether or not the u.s thinks you're friendly and so

the u.s really seems to have shot themselves in the foot with that action i mean don't get me wrong it was always going to be bad because the the the the the privilege of being able to be the World Reserve currency has come with a lot of great kickbacks. But those are dwindling as people kind of realize the Ponzi scheme that's happening and are looking for outs. And the fact that they decided to just sanction Russia and basically confiscate their U.S. dollar reserves just expedited the process. And I think in doing so, it's expedited the process of exploring other options, one of the BRICS countries coming together and creating their own trade and their own currency, but also options like this, where Iran with their own resources is mining Bitcoin and other currencies and they're utilizing that in international trade. This is an insane development. it's an expected one in my opinion,

but nonetheless, it doesn't become any less crazy to actually read that this has happened. Can you imagine reading this article four years ago? My mind would have been blown. Now it's blown, but it's like, kind of rightfully so, I guess. Dude, I think we all knew this was coming because I think we all, as Bitcoiners,

we have an appreciation for the game theory of this, but it still doesn't take away from the fact of the of the actual event happening, right? I think we all expected deep down inside of Bitcoin becoming legal tender of, you know, a public company putting Bitcoin on its balance sheet of, you know, countries that are victims of the United States policy decision of weaponizing the dollar to circumvent the financial system using Bitcoin. I guarantee you, by the way, and this is just speculation, that they're just using crypto for SEO purposes, but most likely that's freaking Bitcoin.

Why would they use stable coins? They wouldn't use stable coins for this. Right? So what else are they going to use? Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. I, okay, so quick question before we wrap the news here, but it's so interesting because Bitcoin is kind of built with,

is built with freedom in mind. And so it's kind of the antithesis of, what a country like China would want, right? They want the most raconian measures possible. But China is also allied with the BRICS nations. And we've seen kind of these weird dichotomies where like, you know, China is trying to get away from the U.S. system and basically just reinstate themselves in the top slot. You've got Russia where that's probably not going to happen, but they see the writing on the wall. Putin's not an idiot. He knows about the debasement. He knows. he knows the implications.

He knows what happens when people start shifting away from the U.S. dollar. And he's capitalized on this. The value of the Russian rubble has fully recovered from the initial shock of the initial drop and then some and continue to go up and accrue value. And then they've also been friendly on a state level to Bitcoin, but at the same time come around and said, hey, yeah, for me, but not for the citizens. And same even happen in Ukraine. They're more than happy to accept donations, but God forbid an individual citizen within that jurisdiction, use Bitcoin as a way to preserve their own wealth and potentially move it to a place that isn't currently a war zone. And so I worry about the precedent being set because I do think that in the grandest,

kind of high level view of draconian totalitarian governments versus at least relatively freedom-minded ones or ones that were founded with a mindset of freedom that naturally the freer ones will gravitate towards the freer option just out of necessity. But I worry in the midterm when they see nations that they don't like escaping their dragnet, you know, World Reserve currency payment rails, and they knee-jerk go on a banning spree and a sanction spree. In the meantime, that can be a huge pain in the ass until a light bulb goes off and the tables turn. And I'm really unsure how those tables end up turning, how those scales begin to tip. because right now it's obviously the ones that are most disenfranchised by the current system

are the ones that are going to pick up on the alternative first. But I think that Western nations are the better fit to be picking up on this freedom technology in the long run. So I don't know, man. Like what do you think that inflection point would be where bad people are using it? Oh shit, actually, we should use it because it's more beneficial for us. And the totalitarians over there are actually going to shoot themselves in the foot by introducing it in the first place. Dude, that, that's the million-sat question, right?

I've said this many times, right? Is that, and you actually touched upon this as well, the countries that have the most to lose because they have this very strong fiat currencies are going to be the last to adopt Bitcoin versus countries that don't control. their own monetary policy like the Central African Republic, like El Salvador, they're going to be the first ones to adopt Bitcoin. The transition period is going to be crazy, but Ben, I think that governments right now are in this bargaining phase. They're like, we're going to make blocks OFC compliant, but I think that they're slowly starting to realize you can't change Bitcoin. Bitcoin in fact changes you. Yeah, but you can change Ethereum.

You sure as hell can. Yeah, yeah, this is a lot of news for the first couple of days of the week, man. Big stories. So, dude, I appreciate you bringing this all to me. Everybody watching, of course, you got to go follow Nico on Twitter. And you got to go subscribe to Simply Bitcoin because you're doing the news six days a week. And more in-depth than we've even covered it here. you're just all over this stuff.

So yeah, man, I appreciate you. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, Ben. All right. Cheers, man. All right. So everybody, what do you think? Happy to have Nico on again.

What a boss. So glad to have them help me through the news here. And I wanted to tie in the second part of the show here with a lot of what we're talking about in and around sanctions, in around privacy, in and around unstoppable code. Okay? And so I wanted to bring up my screen on a number of things that I've been covering, I mean, partly since the trucker protests here in Canada earlier in the year, but even before then,

earlier last year, but I've gotten more of a focus on privacy-related technology since, you know, February, March of this year. So I dropped a video earlier today, and it is a full walkthrough of a flow forgetting and mixing and storing non-KYC Bitcoin. So what I went through is, and by the way, this particular tutorial here, and I guess I should switch it so, but this particular tutorial here takes you through utilizing something called RoboSats, which is peer-to-peer exchange to be able to purchase Bitcoin from another individual through a variety of different means privately.

And so I go through using that to purchase Bitcoin. I go through using Sparrow Wallet on desktop to then coin join those funds so that you break the links between you and that purchase. And that just prevents the individual that sold you Bitcoin from tracking that Bitcoin from there on in and seeing, oh, where did this go? And what are they using it for and maybe being able to find out who you are or if they know who you are being able to see how much money you have? It breaks those links and makes that not possible. And then I show how to mix directly into cold storage, in this case, a cold card. And so I go through all of those steps one by one, buy non-Kyc Bitcoin, coin join it, and then mix it directly into cold storage. So if you're interested in that, check that out.

And in the show notes of that video, you'll see in-depth tutorials for each one of those individual things for RoboSats, for Sparrow Wallet, for multi-save, for all kinds of stuff, for coin join, for cold card. It's all there, but this is just the flow of what that would look like altogether. Another thing I wanted to touch on today is we were talking about with Nico here, we were talking about the infrastructure in and around tornado cache and how in Fuera, one of the largest provider of Ethereum nodes, started blocking access to this application. And if you're running your own full node, then that's not an issue for you. You can just use it as you see fit.

But if you're not, then, you know, they can block access, right? And so an example of having that full back end for privacy preserving technology would be running a Ronan Dojo node in this case of Tonto. So I was in Miami and I was able to get my hands on a pre-built plug-and-play Tonto node. and I did a walkthrough of how do I set this thing up? How do I link Samurai wallet to it and set up a world pool so that you have continuous mixing going on the background linked to your mobile phone? So if you want to check that out, of course, that's in the archives there.

You can check it out on the YouTube channel, but just search Ronan Dojo Node on YouTube. Now, there's a couple other things in terms of getting no KYC Bitcoin. of course, RoboSats, that tutorial is there. But Hoddle, Hoddle and BISC are other options in and around getting non-KYC sats. And if you have non-KYC sats, then it takes some of that heat off. Whereas if you've obtained them through a KYC exchange, then there's record of you having Bitcoin. And even if you coin join them afterwards, there's still the record of this person bought Bitcoin. Then a coin during happened.

And so you're then tasked with, if somebody kicks in your door, you're then tasked with saying, what happened after that point? And so it's something to keep in mind that just because you've coin joined doesn't mean that you've erased evidence of you owning Bitcoin. So keep that in mind. It still helps privacy-wise forward-facing. The exchange can't then look and say, this person then took Bitcoin and then purchased this thing. And then they were put in a wallet and then later spent with other Bitcoin. And that means that they now own this much. And we know how much they're worth and so and so forth.

So it is helpful, but just keep in mind that coin join doesn't erase your history. I do have a thread called Bitcoin Privacy. And it talks a lot about different facets of how to use it privately. Obviously, getting non-KYC stats is in there. Samurai wallet, whirlpool, even within Sparrow, the Ronan Dojo Tanto. It also talks about paynims used with samurai wall. wallet and Sparrow. And it talks about Mercury Wallet, which is effectively trading UTXOs with other individuals.

I will add a caveat to that, that just be careful with that because if you trade a UTXO and somebody literally had that UTXO from like a hit job that they did, then maybe you don't want to own that UTXO and trade your like KYC to UTXO with them. But it does allow you to swap Bitcoin with an individual with no indication that it happened on-chain. So that's kind of cool. I like that. And then you can maybe coin join it afterwards. Nonetheless, there is concern around, well, couldn't they sanction open source software

and then, like, quote unquote, have tainted UTXOs in Bitcoin? This is a possibility and we shouldn't pretend it's not. However, you can use certain tools that allow you to then spend your Bitcoin K-YC free or obfuscate where those coins have come from or that they've been in a that they've been coin joined and spend them freely as you see fit. So I'm going to kind of discuss some of those tools here. And we'll just kind of go through the gamut. And this will be a future video, I think, to take.

tag on to how to buy mix and store KYC free coins. I think there should be a sequel video of how to spend KYC free coins. So one option, a simple one, depending on how things might be implemented. And maybe they say, hey, that UTXO came from an equal value output coin join. It's sanctioned. Or you're not allowed to spend it. or we need a whole bunch of different things in order for you to spend it at a merchant or something like this. Because I see comments here, stop recognizing sanctions.

I'm not saying that I'm going to be recognizing sanctions, but you need to recognize the fact that there will be businesses that exist within certain jurisdictions. And if they accept certain money from sources that are sanctioned, then that entire business could effectively be. blown up by the state, not physical. Well, I mean, maybe physically blown up, but like metaphorically blown up by the state. They come in and say like, yo, you're getting transactions from people that are sanctioned. And we're going to make your life a living hell.

So we need to be conscious of that and at least give those entities the benefit of the doubt when they have to deal with accepting Bitcoin. So what can you use? there's a tool called Rikishay, and basically that's within samurai wallet and Sparrow, I believe, and it allows you to just make multiple hops before that Bitcoin reaches its final destination. And so when people are doing their due diligence, making sure that they're not accepting Bitcoin from a certain source, if they're forced to do so, they can't go back through the entire history of every single coin. But they can look back a certain number of hops.

So how many transactions prior, you know, if you go back X number, then was it associated with a coin join or something like that? And the further back you have to go, the more onerous, more difficult and basically impossible it is until you get to the point where all of Bitcoin is just tainted. Okay. So ricochet just adds however many hops you like before it lands in the destination address. Now, one of the ones that I really like is opening a lightning channel because you can open, you can take a coin joined UTXO. You can use it to open a lightning channel and then you can just use it however the fuck you want. Because if somebody's accepting lightning payments, the recipient, they have no way of knowing which channel that payment actually came from. They see the previous channel that connected to them, but that doesn't mean it's the actual channel that sent the payment.

It was just one of the hops along the way to get to them. And so everything is is onion routed and you can't actually see where that payment originated from. And so, yeah, it's as simple as opening up a lightning channel with coin joined coins and then making lightning payments. And there's not really a simple way to tell exactly what's going on there. Pay join is a wonderful thing. And this is also implemented in BTC pay server. This is where, let's say I'm making a payment to you, if you add coins to the payment at the same time,

which then makes it very confusing on the outside looking in as to who was paying who, how much was the final amount for, which was change, which was the actual payment, which was changed to the other person, Was it to multiple people? We don't know. So pay join is an excellent thing. State chains I discussed that's swapping UTXOs with other people.

And one that was brought up here by Stefan Lavera was Moon Wallet. And those are submarine swaps. And so this is where you're effectively swapping on-chain Bitcoin for lightning Bitcoin back and forth. And you can do this with a variety of different wallets. But Moon Wallet is one that does it in the back end. Phoenix wallet, Breeze wallet. They all have this kind of background stuff that's happening and automated so that you send an on-chain UTXO and it creates lightning channels for you. And you no longer have to worry about whose coins were whose because it's now going through the lightning network.

So there's a lot. There's, again, liquid pegging and peg out. The peg out is where it becomes difficult. So liquid is a side chain of Bitcoin. You can peg in. Anybody can peg into liquid. You then get a basically a one-to-one token that exists on the liquid network and then can be used and potentially pegged out. It's privacy preserving when in liquid.

The issue is getting out of liquid. You can use swap services like sideshift.a.i. But if those were to be shut down, then you're going to have to go through. a regulated exchange at which point it's going to be like, well, here's here's a questionnaire. We're going to need a blood sample. We're going to see a picture of your taint and we're going to need your first born child. So you know, you got to be careful there. But yeah, there's there's a ton of different tools. I'm going to go through these and I'm going to basically make a fully enveloping video on how to do this. I also did in that that playlist here and I might have to refresh

here because I just added it. But UTXO management is another big one. Understanding when you accept coins into your wallet that you, it's basically accepting different Bitcoin bills, right? It's like having a physical wallet where you accept a 10, a 20,

and a 50 and you've got all those separate bills in your wallet. If you spend two of them together, then they're linked in a way. And people can see like, oh, this bill and this bill belonged to the same person because they were spent in concert. So getting your head around that kind of stuff can help you with your privacy game in and around Bitcoin.

I'm just going to touch on some dumb stuff. I'm going to, let's lighten the mood a little bit here for the end. I got blocked by Nick Carter. So we'll just kind of finish with kind of the dumb shit that went on here. I don't know. There's so much. There's so much more important things that are happening in Bitcoin right now than all of this. But, you know, Nick is on his rant of being angry at Bitcoin Maximilus for not being stoked that he invested in like KYC'd dragnet ether wallets that can be used to log into websites.

So what are you going to do? Anyways, he was saying something about Matt Corallo and how maximalists are a dying breed. And he referred to it as brave. So, I mean, he really teed me up to use the, why would you say something so controversial yet so brave GIF? I thought it was hilarious. I thought it was kind of funny, you know, he didn't like it. So long story short, Nick Carter, no longer following me and also has blocked me, unfortunately, I guess. Oh, well.

But yeah, anyways, I guess I joined the toxic Maxi cults with a pretty mundane gif. What else here? Okay, I wanted to feature a couple things that I thought you guys would enjoy. It's movie time. It's a short one from Reason. But these guys, this is, I mean, we've been kind of talking political a little bit

in this episode. I thought this was hilarious. So take a look at this recent video from Reason. Hello, I'm every politician in Washington. Running the country is hard enough, but explaining myself to voters, that's impossible. Most of them went to public schools. That's why I use Grammarly, government edition.

It makes helpful suggestions to all my messages, so you mouth-breathing sheep see things the way I want you to. Oh, that's a good idea. All I have to do is set the party slider and choose whether I want to appeal to the country or my base. Grammarly does the rest, helping me energize support or manufacture outrage. Though honestly, what's the difference? Grammarly turns typical policy positions into clear, unassailable soundbites,

and changes messy, unassailable soundbites, and changes messy, unperienced, palatable issues into confusing but easy to swallow misdirection, like a spoonful of subsidized corn syrup. Sugar! With Grammarly, I can use the exact same budget numbers to claim a spending cut or a spending increase. Oh, that makes things a lot more clear.

Oh, that makes things a lot less clear. Oh, my donors will love this. Oh. Oh, yeah. It can even give conflicts, morally dubious. legislation a cute title that no real American could ever oppose. You may be thinking voters aren't that dumb, well, we wouldn't do this if it wasn't working. Grammarly government edition.

Helping Washington shovel all that bullshit you people keep beating. I can't say spaz anymore? I'm fucking love that. I thought it was so hilarious. Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to get a lighthearted piece of content here that accurately reflects the state of clown world. So kudos to reason for dropping that. that one. A couple of recommendations that I got from people on Twitter. Number one is finding

signal in a noisy world, a new article dropped by Jeff Booth. Definitely check that one out. And if you haven't read his book, The Price of Tomorrow, it is A-plus, absolutely top-tier signal. So be sure to check that out. And another great one dropping by Lynn Alden just recently. And that is a look at the Lightning Network, examining the scaling method of the Bitcoin Network. evolution from a store of value to a medium of exchange. Lynn always drop in awesome, awesome stuff. Now, guys, unfortunately, this week I'm not doing an episode of why are we bullish. Why?

Well, it is my wife's birthday, and we are off to New York City tomorrow. We're going to do a little bit of sightseeing. We're going to be enjoying the city for about six days. So anyways, I'm going to be in New York if you're around and you want to say, hey, and, you know, we're around too. Then just hit me up on Twitter, tag me, shoot me a DM, whatever it may be. Maybe we'll run into each other. I have some fun plans, though.

So I just wanted to show you guys. So I thought, well, I'm not doing a video this Friday. What can I do in the meantime? That might be kind of fun. So I fished out some open dimes. And I'm going to leave these open dimes strategically around New York. and then I'm going to, there's 200,000 sats on each one. So I've taped them to the back of some old business cards.

And basically, yeah, 200,000 sats on each one of these open dimes. Some of them are the old school ones, like the, the, like, nubby ones. I think like the first edition of open dimes. So anyways, these will be around New York. I won't say specifically where until I actually place them. And then I'll tweet out a picture. If you're in New York City, if you're in Manhattan, and, uh, and, and, you're, you can make it down to one of these locations, then,

hooray, 200,000 free sats for you. Come and get them. So keep your eyes on Twitter. I thought that would be a fun thing to do. But yeah, they are loaded. And just as proof, here's Open dime number one, open dime number two, open dime number three, all loaded up, ready to go. So we'll see in New York.

And actually, I didn't share that. There we go. Open dime number one, two, and three. I've got these ready to go from New York. So we'll be seeing you there, take a look for them. And with that, I'm going to wrap it up, guys. Yeah, so I'll be out of town this Friday, but super excited. Hopefully, maybe see a couple clubs in New York while in there.

So, yeah, be sure to hit me up. But nonetheless, thank you guys so much for being here. Please do remember to like, subscribe, share, all those things. Help a ton. They get this show in front of them our eyeballs. And I know a ton of you've been doing that. So thank you so much. Go follow Niko.

Go follow on Bitvolt 7 on Twitter and follow Simply Bitcoin and go subscribe to their YouTube channel because that's where you're going to get the highest quality signal for your daily, more or less daily Bitcoin news. You can also hit up their previously mentioned sponsors down below. Coin kite, shake pay, leaden, bit refill, and Bill Fottle at privacypros.io. And if you really like, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. strike.me slash BTC sessions. Type in any amount you want there. When you hit the tip button, you'll see a lightning invoice.

If you tap to the right, you'll see a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I am out. Have yourselves a good week, guys. And I will be seeing you soon. And yeah, I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This was your daily session. See you next week.