BTC Sessions - NEWS ROUNDUP: White House Aims To Regulate Mining ep260

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

The Biden administration aims to cut down on Bitcoin mining's consumption and emissions, inflation remains high as interest rates follow, mining in the middle east, and 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

Welcome to the show, everybody. Hope you having a good week. We are here to do a little bit of news roundup. A few things going on this week, in particular with the White House, looking at Bitcoin mining or saying that they're going to look at Bitcoin mining. Anyways, we'll get to the bottom of that in a moment. As always, this is live. Anything can happen.

So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can. I'll write it. and we'll do it live.

The fucking thing sucks. If you haven't all already, like, subscribe, share. All those things really help get this in front of more eyeballs. And I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. We'll do it live, apparently. All right. Let's take a look before we get into the show.

Where we are in the market today, this is the bitbo. Dotio dashboard. We're sitting at $30,341 per coin. single US dollar will pick you up 3,296 sats 90.90.75% of all Bitcoin have been mine. Fees have been kind of ping ponging a bunch lately. I saw some 20 sats per byte earlier today, but sitting at 11 sats per byte for next block right now. If you're willing to wait an hour, two sats per byte should do you. I've sent through a few transactions for low lately.

I've been trying to hit that happy medium doing my tutorial. and everything. So anyways, just be conscious of the fees. Use RVF, all that kind of stuff. All right. Show to sponsor the show, shakepay.com. If you are in Canada and you're buying Bitcoin, super easy way to do it. Each transfer is in and out, no deposit or withdrawal fees, then spread at the bottom there. And use the link down below. You, after your first $100 purchase when you sign up for Shake Pay, we give you $30 for free. You get the same deal for referring friends and family. Then, of course, you can also shake your phone every single day for free Sats.

And they've got their Sats bag visa card. They also have shake paid, by the way. That's where if you use the Satspack visa card, there's a chance you could get the entire thing paid back in Sats. So check them out. Links are down below. Lendon.io. These guys are awesome.

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And beyond that, they're getting into Bitcoin-backed mortgages rolling out here in Canada and soon in the U.S. So be sure to check that out. Also, of course, have their B2X. If you're feeling mega bullish on these dips here, perhaps check it out. Again, links are down below. Bitrefill.com. One of the easiest ways to help yourself live on Bitcoin. I use it all the time.

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With that, let's dive into the news. It's talking a little bit about the White House. What's up with them? What's up with Joe? So this from Bitcoin Magazine, White House, White House, to craft Bitcoin mining policy addressing energy use.

So the Biden administration is crafting policy recommendations aimed at lessening the energy consumption and emissions footprint of Bitcoin. and other proof of work cryptocurrencies according to a report from Bloomberg law. The publication said it spoke to the principal assistant director for energy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who offered some insight into the impending policy attempts. I like that word, attempts.

It's important if this thing is going to be part of our financial system in any meaningful way, that it's developed responsibly and minimizes, emissions. We think when we think about digital assets, it has to be a climate and energy it has to be a climate and energy conversation.

What about legacy finance? Hmm. Seems to be lacking from this conversation. Regulators were tapped by President Biden's administration earlier this year in a whole of government approach to understanding and regulating

the broader cryptocurrency space as Biden signed an executive order. The order sets timeframes most within a 120 to 180 day period to publish reports in conjunction with other governing bodies intended to guide the administration through a largely misunderstood market. Yeah. So anyways, for the comments here from the same individual, we need to think about what would be appropriate policy responses

under a world that shifted to proof of stake, or a world that has some continuous mix of proof of work and proof of stake. Proof of work is energy intensive by design, but it also increases security. Well, at least there's some acknowledgement there. We've seen reports on noise, local pollution, older fossil generators being restarted in communities. These are not trivial loads. Nick Carter had a good thread on this that I'm going to touch on. He said, if you want to understand how absurd this is,

think about this case study, but with gold mining. For context, emissions associated with gold mining are around two times those of Bitcoin today. So let's say you're the USG and you want to end gold mining in order to save the sea turtles or whatever. You could ban gold mining in the US. The US is the fourth biggest country for gold mining. But gold is a globally distributed commodity. It's still going to be mined. In fact, this would be a huge subsidy to miners in the other big regions, Russia, Australia, China.

You could impose very hostile regulations on gold miners in the U.S. and demand they jump through all sorts of ESG hoops. Okay, that just makes them less competitive. Again, a subsidy to their higher emitting competitors abroad. You could ban gold ownership in the U.S. That would surely reduce the demand for gold, the amount of gold mine, and thus, associate emissions, right? Wrong. Banning gold ownership in the 30s increased production and real price of gold. You could replace gold by law with some kind of emissionless fiat substitute, like proof of stake. Everyone would simply adopt that, right? Wrong. Going to full fiat increased

demand for gold by a lot. Moving to fiat meant households and businesses just to buy gold to deal with fiat volatility. This is why I keep saying, if you want to understand Bitcoin energy debate, you need to understand the previous gold resource cost debate. It's the same debate. The U.S. is trying to reduce Bitcoin's energy consumption. That's just a longhand way of saying they want to reduce the value of Bitcoin. 30 to 45 million Americans own some degree of Bitcoin.

An interesting strategy for the most popular administration and living memory. Can USG reduce the price of Bitcoin? Probably in the short term. They could go full CCP and jail devs turn Bitcoiners into dissidents, arrest CEOs, etc. Does that help them with legitimacy? Does that enhance U.S. as the number one property rights respecting nation? Or is it a self-owned? Yeah, good points there.

Again, like he's talking about if you get overburdensome regulatory, it's just going to be a boon for other markets. Like, here's an article about oil companies in the Middle East, using excess gas for Bitcoin mining. Again, so this is Crusoe Energy. It is a U.S. firm that specializes in using excess natural gas for Bitcoin mining. It will be deploying generators and mining equipment to capture flared gas in Muscat, Oman, as the Middle East looks to cut emissions, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Chase Lockmiller, Caruso CEO, explained in the report that the company felt it was important to have a presence in the Middle East and North African region as the location accounts for 38% of the world's burning of excess natural gas from oil wells. Quote, having to the buy-in from nations that are actively trying to solve the flaring issue is what we are looking for. Now, beyond this, here's another article, Kenya's largest power provider to offer geothermal energy to Bitcoin miners. So Ken Jen, Kenya electricity generating company PLC, the leading supplier of electricity in Kenya, wants to provide excess geothermal power to Bitcoin mining companies according to a report from Quartz Africa. Quote, we have the space and the power is near which helps with stability. Ken Jen's geothermal development director reportedly explained in an interview.

Kenya is the top producer of geothermal energy in Africa. delivering over 14,000 megawatts of power with the equipment capacity of only 863 megawatts. Holy crap. They're not even using one-fourteenth of the energy that they can produce. Along the Rift Valley Circuit Zone, an estimated 10,000 megawatts of geothermal energy lies largely dormant. I think that's on top of the 14,000. Wow. Miners looking to take advantage of this offering have already approached.

to discuss the offer, and some have requested to start with 20 megawatts and upscale later. Considering there are no Bitcoin mining farms currently in Africa, it is reported that those interested in the offering are expected to be mainly from the U.S. and Europe. Currently, over 80% of Ken Jen's produced power is provided from renewable energy, sources like hydro and wind, in addition to geothermal usage. However, Ken Jen does not openly disclose its excellent. excess power capacity. I mean, it kind of does in the way that they only have the capacity to handle

863 megawatts and they've got 14,000 plus 10,000 dormant. Is that not a little bit of a disclosure, I guess? I guess they're not disclosing their excess in terms of the 863. But anyways, again, these are just examples of areas that will benefit if you get overly burdensome regulations out of the U.S., which they're very well may be. And to be honest, at this point, I don't really give a shit because this is a global network and people outside of those poorly regulated jurisdictions will directly benefit. And those jurisdictions that have overregulated it, they're going to be the ones that hurt.

And eventually they're going to have to reverse course if they want to remain competitive. It's not like the days of old where you can just say, oh, well, we're going to set the president and the whole world will listen. No, this, you can, you can mine from anywhere. There's, there's not a whole lot of gatekeepers there if you're mobile. So, yeah. Anyways, speaking of things that the Biden administration can't control, let's talk inflation. So Janet Yelling came out, the Treasury Secretary, former head of the Federal Reserve. She concedes she was wrong on the path that inflation would take.

Pretends to be shocked. Let's read a little bit here. So the U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted Tuesday that she had failed to anticipate how long high inflation would continue to plague American consumers as the Biden administration works to contain a mounting political liability. I think I was wrong then about the path that inflation would. would take. Now, of course, back in 2021, her comments, she said that inflation posed only a small risk. The admission that this admission was the latest indication that the administration's

expectations of a normalizing economy were thrown into disarray by continuing pandemic and the war in Europe. Was it thrown into disarray by that or by just printing a fuckload of money and it gradually sloshing around the system. I'm not saying those other things don't have an impact as well, but maybe there's an underlying issue there somewhere. Yeah, as I mentioned, there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy

that have boosted energy and food prices and supply bottlenecks that have affected our economy badly, that I didn't at the time, didn't fully understand, but we recognize that now. So anyways, she came out and did this announcement and now we're seeing breaking, Biden White House, putting together new team to lead economic messaging, de-emphasizing the role of Janet Yellen,

and elevating Brian Dees and Gina Raimondo. So Brian Dees is the White House director of the National Economic Council, and Gina is the Secretary of California. commerce. And she, D.S., sorry, Brian Dease is likely the person who put together the recent Wall Street Journal opinion column from Biden. And just to give you a taste of that particular column, Biden, quote unquote, wrote, with the right policies, the U.S. can transition from recovery to stable, steady growth and bring down inflation without giving up all these historical

gains. We'll get to have our kick and eat it too. To achieve this goal, he proposed passing clean energy tax credits to bring down gas prices, improving infrastructure, cracking down on greedy corporations. Man,

run of the gamut. Just really ticking all those boxes, ramping up housing construction, reducing the cost of child care, and empowering Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies. Okay. So rather than me go on a disjointed rant here, I found an article that kind of nicely sums up why this is just such a load of shit.

This is an article called Three Reasons Biden's New Plan for Fighting Inflation is a joke. Number one, it completely ignores the real root cause of inflation. While many factors influence price levels, rampant money printing by America's Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, has played the biggest part in our ongoing inflation spiral. the Fed created trillions of dollars out of thin air to stimulate the economy during the pandemic. The inevitable result was that dollars in circulation lost value and prices rose. Rather than addressing this by scaling back the Federal Reserve, Biden's proposed plan for fighting inflation is to keep letting the Fed wreak havoc on our economy. This is from the president as well from that same article I talked about.

First, the Federal Reserve has a primary responsibility to control, inflation. My predecessor demeaned the Fed and past presidents have sought to influence its decision inappropriately during periods of elevated inflation. I won't do this. I have appointed highly qualified people from both parties to lead that institution. I agree with their assessment that fighting inflation is our top economic challenge right now. So his plan is to do nothing? While the Fed is supposedly independent and not under Biden's control, he has bizarrely appointed central bank officials who reject the principles of sound money and instead embrace the same money printing philosophy that got us into this mess in the first place.

He even renominated Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, who oversaw his calamity over the last few weeks. Now, number two, he actually calls for more government spending and intervention. Quote, second, we need to take every practical step to make things even more affordable for families during this moment of economic uncertainty and boosts predict. capacity of our economy over time. So he's calling for more government spending on energy subsidies, childcare, housing, health care, and more because these areas are seeing the biggest price increases.

He also calls for a variety of regulations, race caps, and forms of government intervention. So price controls and then spending a fuckload on government programs to fight the inflation on those things. Now, one, where's the money coming from? Because you're not going to be able to tax that. And two, if you print it, then you're causing more inflation. It goes on to say the iron here is really quite something. Housing, health care, and energy are already some of the most highly regulated

and subsidized industries in America. They're expensive and the rising costs despite these efforts. But because of them, that's right. plan for fighting inflation only doubles down on the failed big government economics that got us into this mess in the first place. And third, gaslighting Americans about reducing the deficit. Biden's third suggestion for reducing the deficit is actually on the right track. He said, third, we need to keep reducing the federal deficit, which will help ease price pressures. The problem is that Biden's policy since taking office had made our budget rolls much worse,

not better and his attempt to take credit for deficit reduction is gaslighting at its worst. In its first year in office, the Biden administration did indeed bring the deficit down to $2.8 trillion, a deficit still nearly tripled out of 2019 and the second largest in history. In fact, a congressional budget office analysis concluded that the federal deficit would have fallen more than twice as fast, a decline of more than $870 billion, if the White House had not implemented new spending programs, adding to the absurdity of Biden's claim is that he would have spent even more if he could have gotten the approval for it.

Yeah, so more or less expect more inflation over time. And even if it becomes a disinflationary environment, it doesn't mean that prices are falling. It means that things are going up less fast. When the CPI data comes out and it says whatever it may be at, let's say it goes from 7% to 6% to 5% to 4%. That doesn't mean that prices are dropping percentage points. It means that they're still going up.

They're just not going up at quite as fast of a rate. And it's it's and again like the public at large doesn't know a lot of these terms or like in general how bad inflation can be even in these single digit realms. It's pretty bad like your your purchasing power gets cut in half in very short order. Yeah, it's it's scary. Anyways, I guess what's what's the final word here on? all of this. I don't know. Governments don't know what the fuck they're doing, I guess. Insulate yourself.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but whatever. Let's move on. Best of luck, Joe. I wanted to talk about this a little bit. Ronan Dojo just had a new update. I did a video on Ronan Dojo a little while back. If you're unfamiliar, it's basically a node implementation, plug and play. It's a back end for Samurai wallet, for Whirlpool, Coin Join, all that kind of

stuff. You can link other wallets to it to refer to that node as their kind of beacon of truth. But anyways, they have a new update. They said, we are happy to get this release out for the next batch of Tontoes and hope to continue improving stability. So I upgraded mine today. It looks pretty, by the way. Purring away. It's been going for 43 days. Oh, log out. Too bad. Oh, well, you got to see it for a second. Anyways, update of Dojo. version 1.14.1.14.0. There is the newest version of Mempool space. There is a new debugging tool, and they removed Specter.

Hmm. What's that about? They put in brackets, we don't support KYC services. So this, I was like, what, KYC services? So Spector dropped an update where they basically have like a service that you can link in. You can link in if you have a Swan account. So if you're DCAing through Swan and you're purchasing on regular intervals, you can basically have it links.

So it will send addresses to Swan at certain intervals, not the full X-Pub. So not all of your addresses, but just like a select few addresses to Swan. and then you can just have it DCA directly into your wallet, which is kind of cool if you're using Swan, then that's fantastic. So again, I'm going to play devil's advocate here to Toronto Dojo in terms of what was said in the tweet. Spector isn't KYC.

They offer an easy plug-in so that if you're, if you are buying Bitcoin through, swan there's a quick link to be able to without revealing your ex-pub send over addresses automatically rather than manually sending to your wallet every single time so yeah like i don't know like if we're getting that nitty gritty about it i feel i mean they can do whatever fuck they want they built it it's i don't know that feels somewhat unfortunate but whatever i guess Um, you know, I, I don't use, I tend to gravitate towards sparrow wallet anyways, uh, when I'm using stuff. And I don't have access to swan. So kind of inconsequential for me. But when I, I don't know, when I see that, it seems unnecessarily, uh, sensitive, I guess. I don't, I don't know what the good word for it is. But I don't know. Like, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I scrolled through some of the comments and people were like

Ah, RIP, a good project. Spector isn't K-Y-C. You can just fucking run Spector and you don't have to use Swan. It's like a thing under a dropbox of services that could potentially be easily tied into the wallet if you decide to use them. Yeah, like, I mean, they should tread carefully. Like, you don't want to be inundated with like a ton of different like services. and crap as like tie-ins that you just don't want to see you should be able to like collapse or hide the services tab maybe would be ideal um but if people want to use that

you know it's it's it's not like an imposed thing so yeah i don't know i don't see the big fucking deal here to be honest you know rona dojo is awesome swan is awesome spectre is awesome and i don't see any problem really with any of this So anyways, I'll move on from there. Suggested piece of content of the week. It came across this. This is like a month, two months old. But it's hilarious. It's a guy from named Joma Tech.

I've actually never watched his channel before. He does a lot of different tech-related videos and everything, but he's been doing some skits and stuff too. He did a video called If Wolf of Wall Street were about crypto, It's basically like the Matthew McConaughey scene where he's going, uh-huh, and he's doing the like thub on the chest and basically telling, you know, telling Leonardo DiCaprio the ropes. But in this, they're talking about like defy and other shit coins and tokens and everything. And he's basically saying it's it's all bullshit. We're just, we just want to separate people from their money.

Like it's nobody knows what it means. Nobody knows how it works. It's not designed to do anything. We're not doing anything. Just get their money out of their pocket into your pocket. It's a great skit. I highly recommend you should check it out. What else was going on this week?

Shout out to Evan for this tweet because I also had some bit pay. Woes, I'll show you in a sec. Anyways, he said, I shouldn't have to K.YC to spend my Bitcoin at retailers, CC, BitPay, and Flexa HQ. And then somebody replied, it's hard to be excited about Lightning Network adoption. When it's this horribly bad, please address this BitPay. Requiring KYC for a simple purchase from a tech store is outrageous and completely unacceptable.

Absolutely true. Basically, if you're unfamiliar, BitPay is a payment service provider, which you can plug into your business to accept Bitcoin payments. However, they're required you like log in and, and get all of your KYC information just to like buy anything. It doesn't matter what it is. Like you could be buying, I don't know, something for like five bucks. It's going to be like, oh, sir, I'm going to need your ID.

I'm going to need whatever. And that's kind of the antithesis of the point of Bitcoin. You no longer need that because people have final settlement when they get it. They don't need to check if you're credit worthy to accept your payment. they have the fucking money, they can send you the good, especially for the small payments. Like, okay, sure, if you're buying something for 10 grand and you're in a jurisdiction that has those, you know,

AML requirements, then that's another story. But if you're buying something for 10 or 20 bucks, why are they going to require people to log in and sign up and KYC themselves to spend Bitcoin? Blow me. Funny enough, I got an email this week. week from somebody from the BitPay team looking for influencers and content creators to partner with. I didn't reply. I deleted the email. But I did tweet out, hey, you know what's better than using

BitPay is BTC pay server. You can spin it up yourself. There's no KYC required. You can accept payments from anywhere, anyone on the globe instantaneously. And you should go ahead and do that. So I did do a tutorial video on BTC pay server on May. I posted it a few weeks back. Anyways, check it out. I did it through Voltage as well. So you can basically sign up for Voltage. You can pay via Bitcoin.

All you need with Voltage is like an email address. It could be a dummy address if you wanted. So you can sign up. You can spin up a BTC Pay server and a Lightning Note if you want to accept Lightning payments. And then you can start accepting payments right away. You can spin up a store and use it. You can spin up a fundraiser, whatever it may be, and it'll just work. So anyways, if you want to check that out, well worth it.

The main thing I dropped this week was a tutorial on how to use Unchained for Multisig. I do really like Unchained. I think what they're doing there is important. I think banking in terms of how it will work moving forward will be this, where the bank doesn't have custody of your funds. They're just offering a service whereby if you screw up monumentally, they'll have your back and have like an extra key. And so you could lose most of what you have and still be okay and say,

hey, I just need another signature on this transaction to reset everything. So anyways, if you've been curious about multi-sig and curious about unchained, check that one out. I literally dropped it just on Monday. And of course, coming up tomorrow, we've got Why Are We Bullish? I've got Colin Sullivan from Mint Green, Mario Gibney, from Ledden. And we've got John Denahey, and he's from My First Bitcoin. They are running the pilot project for the high school Bitcoin course required for graduation.

The first round of graduates are coming up at the end of this month. So kudos to them. I was invited down for it. I just can't make it. but I'd like to get down there at some point this year. And then it's going to be expanding out to more schools in El Salvador. So kudos to John. But anyway,

very excited to have this panel on tomorrow. It's going to be exciting. It's going to be a lot of fun. So make sure you don't miss it. With that, I'm going to start wrapping up. Thank you guys so much for watching and or listening. If you're listening to this on the pod afterwards,

like, subscribe, share, all important. If you want to help out of the show on another way, you can hit up the previously mentioned sponsors down below. Shake pay, laden, bit refill, keystone, bill, funnel. They're all down here. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always drop me a Bitcoin tip at my strike page. Strike.me slash BTC sessions. Get there.

You type in any amount you want. Hit the tip button. You'll be greeted with a lightning invoice. Or if you prefer, tap the arrow to the right. You'll see a regular Bitcoin QR code. With that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be. See you guys next time for your daily session.

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