BTC Sessions - NYDIG: 100s Of Banks Want To Offer Bitcoin ep171

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Open a lightning channel with me! Would recommend anywhere from 1-4 million sats. 03[e-mail]:9735 📰 Hyper-Integration: NYDIG says hundreds of US banks will enable customers to buy, sell, and hold Bitcoin through existing accounts by year’s end. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/05/bitcoin-is-coming-to-hundreds-of-us-banks-says-crypto-firm-nydig-.html 📰 Blockchain data provider Coin Metrics gets a $2.2 trillion institutional investment — lead by Goldman Sachs. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-05/goldman-sachs-leads-investment-in-crypto-data-firm-coin-metrics 📰 Ebay CEO says “cryptocurrency” could be a future payment option on its platform. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ebay-ceo-says-looking-cryptocurrency-145737517.html 📰 Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary predicts that “sustainably” mined Bitcoin could command a premium among institutional investors. https://twitter.com/YahooFinance/status/1389289214156673029?s=09 📰 Comically Weak FUD: Bill Maher mocks Bitcoin and Elon Musk while invoking climate-change fears… https://decider.com/2021/05/01/bill-maher-ridicules-bitcoin-elon-musk-hbo-real-time/ … leading to an easy debunking from Nic Carter… https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1388616111579713537?s=09 … and an easy reminder from the Internet about his Peter Schiff-esque prescience. https://twitter.com/PessimistsArc/status/1388657288810991623 📰 Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger calls Bitcoin “disgusting”. It could change civilization as we know it, you guys 😲 https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/01/charlie-munger-calls-bitcoin-disgusting-and-contrary-to-the-interests-of-civilization.html 📰 Alex Gladstein publishes an epic deep dive on the “hidden costs” of the US Petrodollar. https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1388207306110689281?s=09 📰 All eyes are on miners as the Taproot signaling period begins 👀. https://taproot.watch/

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Happy Thursday. And we've got a news roundup going on for you today. We've got lots of stuff to talk about. Lots of movement in the part of institutions, banks kind of getting their hands, dipping their fingers into the Bitcoin pie.

They want a little piece of the action and they're realizing that it's in their best interest to do so. So we're going to be chatting a little bit about that. As always, please do smash that like button. Give this a share. Let's get even more eyeballs in here watching. As always, this is live. Anything can happen. So a quick disclaimer from my friend Bill here.

We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. So I hope, you guys, have been having a good day. I'm very excited for the show.

Let's get this thing rolling. As always, I am Ben with the BTC sessions, and this is your daily session. All right, so before we dive into the news, let's take a look at where we are in the markets. We're sitting around $56,290 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will buy you 1,000, I'm sorry, 1,77s. Stack them while you can. 89.06% of all Bitcoin have. been mined. And in terms of fees, we did see fees drop off a little bit in the past few days.

Actually, I was getting some transactions through for like six sats per byte the other day, which is wild to see first time in a while. But right now, next block, it looks like 93 sats per bite will do you. But if you're willing to wait an hour, five sats per bite will likely do you. So get those transactions through while you can. In terms of price action, it's, We've been range bound forever. So before we really dive in here, I'm going to give you a little bit of a history lesson. So if you have only been around for this year or maybe just kind of like started joining in the last couple of years, and you didn't experience the bull run of 2017, you may be unfamiliar with kind of the sentiment that can happen,

the craziness that can happen, the allure of other coins that do tend to pop up. up. And the narrative that Bitcoin is old news. It's the my space of the crypto space. It's, you know, it's not doing anything. And you see the sideways price action for a while and all a sudden, all of the alt coins are going crazy. So my lesson would be this. This is exactly the same thing that happened in 2017 with a whole list of other coins. So what we would see is, is Bitcoin kind of is a front runner out the gate. It does incredibly well. It blasts through previous all-time highs and does multiples of those.

We see some other coins do well alongside it, but maybe not reach their all-time highs from the previous run yet. Then when Bitcoin cools off for a little bit, and we see this consolidation for extended period of time. And it's been a while, right? Like if we zoom out here, basically we've kind of been range-bound. as far back as like February, right? And we're starting May here. So we've had a good couple of months in this range. And so what happens is a lot of the time,

the people that have made some money on Bitcoin and they're looking around and they think, they get impatient. And so then they start dabbling in other things. And you see, because they're less liquid, You see a lot of these other coins just start to pump. I mean, Dogecoin is like, it's number four of all cryptocurrencies. That's wild to me.

Number three is literally a token started by an exchange. And then number two, of course, Ethereum, which was designed to be the decentralized world computer, has very much not come through on all of those problems. You can't run a node. You can't so verify. The monetary policy itself is entirely malleable. So, you know, take everything that's happening with a grain of salt. This sideways action for Bitcoin, I imagine, goes on for some time. And then all of a sudden, it just explodes. And when you get caught with your pants down sitting somewhere else, you can feel left out. And a lot of people tend to, when they get bored, they want to capitulate and start dabbling in other stuff. But be careful.

I did make a video called should I buy altcoins or should you buy all coins? I can't remember which. Anyways, it's probably the perfect video to watch right now because what it did is it went and looked at a quote unquote, well diversified crypto portfolio around this stage of the bull market last time around. So like, you know, midway through the year. You know, we're still not quite midway through the year. But it'll give you a good idea of what would happen post-mortem if you were to diversify and just hold on to a bunch of other coins through the bull run, but then into the next year and the year following.

What would happen to you? What would happen to your portfolio over that timeframe? And if you're not just looking at this to make a quick buck and then cash out to, dollars if you're looking to be in this long term that video is very very important to watch so please do go check it out to search search on my uh you can also look of at look up the uh i have a playlist called avoiding shitcoins 101 very helpful if you're feeling a little unsure of yourself right now anyways before we dive into the news of course shout out to sponsors of the show leden dot i where you can use your bitcoin for a variety of different services of course they have their

Bitcoin-backed loans, which have been the services that I've used the most. When you're in a pinch, you need to get your hands on dollars, but you don't want to sell your Bitcoin because, well, that's a taxable event and maybe you're worried about having to buy back in at a higher price point. This could be for you because you can basically deposit Bitcoin, get dollars in your bank account within a day. And when you pay back those dollars, you get back the same amount of Bitcoin, which for me is the important number. Of course, they also have their Bitcoin in USDC savings accounts with interest rates of up to 12.5% annually paid monthly and their B2X offering uses the same loan mechanism to instantly buy you more Bitcoin

if you're feeling mega bullish. Be sure to check them out. Links are down below. If you opt to get either their loan products with that link, they'll give you $25 for free into your savings account. Up next, I do live on Bitcoin. One of the ways I'm able to do so that really helps me out is Bit Refill. These guys allow you to purchase basically any gift card you could imagine in any country

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it's also a little bit of a privacy, it helps with privacy, in that you can make purchases and not have everything be on chain. You just make a single purchase here for a gift card, and then after that, the links of what you're purchasing are effectively gone.

Up next, of course, when you're backing up your Bitcoin wallet, please do be careful. Paper isn't always the best solution. You can get fire damage, water damage. You can accidentally throw the thing out or somebody else might. I've heard some horror stories this year. Having it in solid steel is how I back up my wallets and can give you some good peace of mind. So check out the bill foddle over on privacy bros.com.

There's a link down below. And then finally, of course, if you're using the internet, in any public place, a VPN is a must for your privacy. You don't want people peering in on what you're doing, especially if you're dealing with Bitcoin in any way, shape, or form. I do use NordVPN. Very easy. You can change your location, change where it appears that you are.

And this also allows you to unlock Geoblock content, which is kind of nice. I just used it on a video about liquidity using the Liquid Network, so you can head over and check that out. But anyways, links are down below if you want to grab it. there's a two-year plan. You get a one-month free. It ends up being, I think it's like $3 and something per month. It's super cheap.

Anyways, let's dive in here. Lots of stuff. In regards to the markets, I want to read you guys a little bit of a thread here from William Clemente. He's been on the show before. In fact, I think he was just on last week. And he's talking about the markets in general, what they're doing. He said, this Bitcoin bull market is far from over.

Here's why. For starters, Bitcoin tops are marked by increasingly parabolic price action until a blow-off top occurs and demand steps back. We are not seeing that. There is a massive base of capital on-chain volume building at these levels. Cycle tops have very minimal distribution. Topps are also marked by spikes in dormancy, old coins being sold into strength. The opposite is occurring. Dormancy has been going down since February, meaning old, hold.

holders are waiting for higher prices to unload their bags. Next up, let's look at a liquid supply. In my opinion, this is more important than coins moving off exchanges. Coins are consistently moving to clusters of addresses that are statistically very unlikely to sell. This phenomenon is showing no sign of stopping. Next up, the MVRVZ score. This takes a ratio of market cap to realize cap.

Capitalizations are based on the price when coins. last moved, and it adjusts for volatility. This metric gives distinct cycle peaks. We are seeing the opposite of the top. We're seeing a downtrend. Just a few more. Please bear with me. Now, we have reserve risk.

This measures the confidence of holders and is calculated as price divided by huddle. When price is high and confidence is low, RR goes up. This metric is also far from overheated. More food for thought. Each cycle has three distinct peaks of supply being held by short-term market participants. We are cooling off after just the first peak of the cycle. And that's kind of what I believe, too, that peak around 64. We cooled off all the way into the 40s, 47, I think.

It seems like we're kind of rounding that corner and heading into the next little peak that we'll be seeing. What will that peak be? I have no idea. And then finally, he said, I'm sure you're. you're wondering, so okay, well, this sounds great, but who is selling? The answer is newer inexperienced market participants. The average age of coins being sold has been steadily trending downward since February. So what does this all means? Coins are moving from weak hands to strong hands. We are in a massive midway consolidation of this cycle. Don't let short-term

price action freak you out. This bull run still has a long way to go before becoming overheated. Hoddle on. This guy just pumps out amazing content regularly. I encourage you to follow him on Twitter. He's just got great takes and he uses a lot of interesting metrics to measure them. Let's move on to more of the news. CNBC, Bitcoin is coming to hundreds of U.S. banks this year, says

Crypto custody firm Nidig. Banks are asking for Bitcoin because they see their customers sending dollars to Coinbase and other crypto exchanges, according to Jan Zhao, president of nine nine dig uh they are planning on rolling out uh basically ways where you can hold sell and buy bitcoin through existing accounts in actual banks after rolling out the initial bitcoin product nightig plans on other services including debit card rewards paid in bitcoin and a new type of bank account that is fdic insured but pays interest in bitcoin I'm interested in those things.

I would love a debit card with Bitcoin rewards. I would love a savings account that gives me Bitcoin interest, although the interest rate that the bank is going to give you is probably going to be trash, so you may as well just take your savings and put them directly in Bitcoin. But this is a double-edged sword, right? More access to Bitcoin for regular people

that may have never bothered. But at the same time, it's going to, deter people from using self-custody, right? It's going to be easy at their fingertips. And I'll just put some Bitcoin in my bank account. Long term, I don't think that's great. I don't think that it will be helpful because you could get into a situation

where banks are trying to fractional reserve Bitcoin. Now, the thing is, if they do so and shit hits the fan eventually, that could be incredibly catastrophic. for them because Bitcoin is easily auditable 24-7 and there's no lender of last resort. If they lose or if they get called in and people start trying to withdraw their Bitcoin, one, if they're fractional reserve, not everybody's going to be able to get their Bitcoin out. So, you know, don't leave with the custodians.

But two, if they get called on it, again, there's no bailouts for this. They get bailed out in terms of dollars. But if it comes to that, are there going to be enough dollars to ever buy that back, that amount of Bitcoin. Probably not. Regardless, I think overall for price, this could have a very positive upward momentum as this gets rolled out. They're talking about hundreds of banks diving into this. So there's quite a bit. And then of course, these are like smaller banks initially, but you know, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, all these places, they're going to feel that pinch when they're not offering it and smaller banks are and people kind of flock to those.

So keep that in mind. Now, in the same line of thought, Goldman Sachs leads investment in crypto firm Coin Metrics, this from Bloomberg. Coin Metrics, a cryptocurrency and blockchain data provider to institutional clients raised $15 million through investors led by Goldman Sachs Group Incorporated. The firm founded in 2017 plans to use proceeds to grow in Europe. and Asia, create new products and expand offerings. Tim Rice, a co-founder and the firm's chief executive officer said in an interview, he declined to give a valuation for the company based on the latest investment.

Matthew McDermott, Global Head of Digital Assets for Goldman Sachs Global Markets Division will take a seat on the board of directors. Yeah, so Goldman Sachs making some moves, and that's not the only move, because we just saw this just earlier today a couple hours ago. Goldman Sachs launches new Bitcoin derivatives. So derivatives are these ones in particular are not settled in Bitcoin. They're settled in dollars, but basically Goldman Sachs enabling people to speculate on the future price of Bitcoin. So it says here this on you today.

US banking giant Goldman Sachs has started offering Bitcoin backed non-deliverable forward contracts to Wall Street investors, according to Bloomberg's Matt Lising. It relies on CME Group's Bitcoin Futures to hedge against the cryptocurrency's infamous volatility, conducting block trades on the Chicago-based futures exchange. Crypto asset trading company Cumberland DRW acts as Goldman's trading partner. The new derivatives product was quietly introduced to Goldman clients last month. So it's been kind of under the radar for a little bit here. Now, moving on to again, we're going to be diving. into people trying to regulate this stuff a little bit here. So while back, India seemed to be

banning Bitcoin a second time. Now, this did happen a few years back. They tried to ban Bitcoin, which effectively had no bearing whatsoever. It didn't work. Then all of a sudden, people started dealing with Bitcoin again within the country. And then they recently again decided to ban it. Now we see that the Reserve Bank of India has refused to block the movement of funds for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency trades. Instead, they told banks to make their own decision. The NPCI is an initiative of the Reserve Bank of India and an umbrella organization for operating retail payments and settlement systems in India by the central bank. So effectively, the central bank has said, we're not going to stop people. If individual banks want to do anything, your call.

So yeah, is this a little bit of bending the knee? I guess. like the central of anybody to be opposed to Bitcoin, a central bank, you would think. I feel like now individual banks are not going to have much of a like to stand on in terms of that within India. More schmuckery from Kevin O'Leary, this from Yahoo Finance. Kevin O'Leary has this thing where he thinks there's such thing as clean and dirty bitcoins. So he said there is a big problem brewing in the crypto space. There are many institutional investors that don't want to own so-called blood coin from China. As a result, Bitcoin mined sustainably could be worth more than just a generic coin.

This is a total crock of shit. And I'll tell you why is because you can't tell you, I guess you could designate what mining pools originally mine Bitcoin. But as soon as that starts to move around, you're going to be paying Bitcoin transaction fees to to move those funds and you have no control over who mines that transaction next which means you could then be paying miners based in China

trying to cordon off jurisdictions with a global immutable ledger if you're attempting to do that you're going to have a bad time now Iran is now trying to do the same thing they're trying to say the central bank has declared that transactions

of cryptocurrencies which were mined outside of Iran are forbidden. In Iran, one can only transact with locally mined coins. This is just so fucking insane to me. You cannot stop it from happening. In fact, your coins, as you spend them, as I just said, will be linked to other coins because the transaction fees you pay, you have no control over who picks those up. And so miners outside of the country will mine.

those coins and in essence that then taints the coins that have just been spent by their rules. So my guess is some bureaucrat made up this rule and then said, okay, now go and enforce it to law enforcement. It's just not going to work. And then finally, the most ridiculous, Marathon mines Bitcoin block that's verified as compliant with U.S. regulations. And this is so stupid.

This is from Bitcoin magazine. covered this. Marathon has mined a Bitcoin block deemed fully compliant with U.S. regulations, effectively censoring transactions in the process. Now, here's the problem. Marathon is a small miner. They're only a portion of the hash rate. I'm going to read a little bit from the bottom of this article. So it says here, the mining business is a purely free market. Miners can join and leave as they see fit and validate whichever blocks they choose. Their actions and most other Bitcoin participants, are dictated by the game-theoretic nature of monetary goods.

As free market believers, most Bitcoiners ultimately trust that the market will handle itself, with game theory helping it gravitate to the most efficient side. It is important to note that Marathon is not a particularly influential mining pool. The company's hashing power accounts for less than 6% of the total Bitcoin hash rate at the time of writing per blockchain.com. Therefore, Marathon's decision to mine only clean blocks currently pose a minimal threat to Bitcoin users having their transactions censored. The mining pool would need a much more significant share of Bitcoin sash rate to start causing an actual impact.

And most miners, which are mostly geographically dispersed outside of the U.S., have little to no reason to discriminate transactions based on American legislation. So let me tell you the game theory behind this. let's say, and like Marathon is 6% of hash power right now. So 94% of all other miners on the planet are going to pick up any fucking transaction out there. They don't care what's happening. They just, they just, it's a transaction as it should be in a global decentralized immutable currency. I just, anyways, let's, there's 6%. So basically, if you put out a transaction, it doesn't matter what it is.

It's going to be picked up. But let's just kind of game theoretically say that they had a larger amount of hash rate. And they started to actually get up to like 30%, 40%. How's that going to affect you? Well, it might take a little bit longer for your transaction to get through because then you've got to wait for like the six and 10 chance that the next block is going to be mined by somebody other than marathon. And for them to get 40% would be crazy. but maybe a bunch of other miners start doing the same thing. So what happens then?

You're going to attach a higher fee to your transaction to ensure it gets included in a block by somebody who's willing to mine it. That means that anybody who's willing to mine your transaction will now be at a significant advantage in two ways. One, they're going to be paid higher fees to mine your transactions. Two, they're not going to have to do the due diligence to check every goddamn transaction that they're putting through on the blockchain. So it makes marathon incredibly inefficient if they continue to go down this route. Hey, more power to them. I think game theory here will do its thing. Now, some more dumb shit that came up this week.

This is a little bit old news, but hey, Bill Maher was, and a lot of you probably don't even know who he is. Anyways, I think he was big in the 90s, but he had a show called Politically Incorrect. I'm not sure what it's called Real Time with Bill Marnell. Anyways, he was ridiculing Bitcoin and Elon Musk for a variety of things, basically saying like, oh, it's not real. It's not real money. It doesn't come from anything. It doesn't make any sense.

He even starts the whole segment off, which is eight minutes long, by saying, I've had many people try to explain it to me and I don't get it. And then he proceeds to shit all over it and try to explain it, even though he just said he has no idea how it works. So clearly, it's pretty stupid. He goes in and he said, I understand that our financial system isn't perfect, but at least it's real. Apple stock is worth money because Apple makes thousands of dollars of phones that everyone buys and drops in the toilet. So he's making fun of it, but also saying that it doesn't produce anything. Neither do dollars.

That's not how money works. money is meant to be a medium of exchange that actually holds your time and effort and value that you've created until you can spend it at a later date. Okay. He goes on to say, let's read a little bit. He said, nothing is ever actually being accomplished, no actual product made or service rendered. Yeah, again, he's saying that it's fake. Then he goes on to compare it to other cryptocurrencies, which is a total misnomer. He talks about Dogecoin being a joke.

Of course it is a joke. We all know that. It's a total mania right now. Then he talks a lot about the fud around environmental impact. And this is where he really gets it wrong. He cites an article or a study that says that Bitcoin alone could eventually warm the entire globe by two degrees. It's total bullshit. That study was terrible.

Nick Carter did an excellent job of dispelling it. There were three refutations of that particular study. And basically, the major problem in that study was they looked at Bitcoin. First of all, they looked at the energy consumption of Bitcoin. They assumed the type of hardware that was being used, which is not accurate because it's continually updated to be more efficient. They also assumed that the types of energy that were being used to mine Bitcoin were all like coal or fossil fuels, which is definitely not the case. A large proportion of it is hydro or geothermal. Anyways, besides the point.

And then they assigned a carbon emission to each individual Bitcoin transaction, which is another bullshit metric because as many of us know, each individual Bitcoin transaction could potentially. represent millions of off-chain transactions via lightning network, liquid network, via exchanges, via any other layer built on top of Bitcoin and then settle down to the main layer. So that is just thrown out the window. And then they extrapolate out as if individual transactions will be settled on main chain for every single human transaction that there is every day based on the entire global population.

and they extrapolate that out to how many transactions people do on the globe right now. And then they assign an emission rate, a carbon emission rate to that. However, Bitcoin actually has a limit on the number of base layer transactions that it can do. And they seem to have not even known that. So they're extrapolating out for like billions or trillions of transactions every single day saying that, oh, and this is the amount of carbon that's emitted for every single transaction, ignoring second layers, ignoring that there's a constriction on the number of transactions for base layer, and then saying that we're going to boil the oceans effectively.

So in the end, the whole thing was total garbage. Anyways, I encourage you to check out Nick Carter's little rebuttal here. He did an excellent job there. And just for a little gut kick for Bill Maher, there is a video of him that people put together a whole thread of him making bad calls on technology. There's one of him in 2003 reacting to the first cell phone with a camera. And his quote is, it's a phone. It's not a Swiss Army knife.

This is the most boomer shit I've ever heard. Let's move on. Charlie Munger, speaking of dinosaurs, this dude's like 97. From Berkshire Hathaway. Him and Warren Buffett, obviously, not big fan. of Bitcoin. Anyways, he went on a bit of a rant the other day. Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger's disdain toward Bitcoin has only intensified amid the digital assets record run this year. Of course, I hate the Bitcoin success. The 97-year-old Munger said during a Q&A session

with Berkshire's annual shareholder meeting Saturday, I don't welcome a currency that's so useful to kidnappers and extortionists and so forth, nor do I like shuffling out of your extra billions and billions of dollars to somebody who just invented a new financial product out of thin air. I think I should say modestly that the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization. Honestly, Bitcoin is the one thing that gives me hope for civilization. And I think he's just too old and decrepit to understand it. Again, he's talking about billions.

He's talking about that it's so convenient for kidnappers and extortionists. Hey, what's the number of currency, number one currency used for that kind of stuff? Of course the US dollar. Of course. There's so much money laundering through traditional finance. In fact, way, way more. orders of magnitude more, 2 to 4% of GDP, as researched by a former CIA director,

2 to 4% of global GDP is used for illicit activity with Bitcoin and the entire kind of cryptosphere as a whole. It's less than 1% and falling. So maybe check yourself monger. I don't know about that. Anyways, I don't know. He's just too old to understand. And in that same vein of thinking, as if our current currency system is some beacon of light and hope, there was an excellent article. I just listened to the audio podcast version of it on Bitcoin Audible over the weekend. Alex Gladstein from the Human Rights Foundation dives deep into the petrodollar and kind of the impact of on humanity and human rights that it has had. and it is absolutely fucking staggering.

Now, I've linked in these show notes to this tweet thread that he did on the whole situation and a lot of the terrible things that have come from the U.S. dollar being pegged to oil or being the only currency that you could deal in oil with. I highly recommend you give it a listen and or read because it's just mind-blowing the injustices and infractions on humanity that have come of this corrupt and perverted system. It's unbelievable. And honestly, Bitcoin fixes this.

How else do you say it? Bitcoin fixes this. Be sure to check that out. Please do I can't stress it enough. Just a couple more things I want to touch on before I finish up here. Taproot activation is on the way. Taproot helps with a number of things. In particular, it can help with a,

with anything related to multi-sig, with coin join, things like that. Effectively, it very much shrinks the size of transactions and can help condense things on the blockchain. It makes it so that a multi-sig transaction or a coin join transaction seems to be indecipherable from a regular transaction on chain. It helps also a little bit down the road with smart. our contracts, things like that. And the activation, it's already been merged in a Bitcoin

core, but people need to signal for it. Right now, about 54, 55% of hash rate is signaling for it. We have Antpool, F2 Pool, Pulin, Foundry USA, Slush Pool, a handful of others. One Terra Hash has been signaling previously, but that seems to have blocked out for now. Anyways, I would love to see this activated. If so, it will activate later this year. There's a, there's a period of about three months that we have to get it through. It's not going to activate this round within the, this two weeks, but it does have the possibility to activate within the next, possibly the next one or the one after every two week period. If you want to help with the activation, you can always start tagging Binance, btc.com, via BTC, and

Hiobi, Hiobi. You can tag them on Twitter and say that you'd like to see them signal for taproot activation. Right now, you can see kind of like the gradual influx of green blocks, and these are minor signaling that they're ready for taproot activation. So be sure to tweet some of those pools. Head over to taproot. Dot watch to watch progress. It's not going to activate this cycle. but now that we're seeing more and more green blocks coming in,

that looks more and more likely for a subsequent period. So be sure to check that out. And finally, guys, I'm digging into lightning like crazy this week. It's been so fun. I've got it up on my umbrella node. I've started using Thunder Hub primarily along with Lightning Terminal to manage my Lightning node via my umbrella. a lot of people have been asking me about this.

A lot of people have been saying, Ben, you've got to do a tutorial on how the hell to actually manage and run a Lightning Node. So I've just started kind of doing it. I've loaded it up with some SATs. I've started to make channels with other people. And this is above and beyond just using like a regular, not a regular,

but like an easier to use Lightning Wallet on your phone. This is like actually managing liquidity, potentially getting like getting paid a little bit and obtaining some fees for routers. There's a lot of different stuff you can do there. You can use Lightning Pool to actually sell liquidity. Lots of fun things you can do there. I plan on dropping this video at some point next week, probably at the latest Wednesday.

There's a lot of learning to do here. As I'm diving in, I have tons more questions, but I think I'm getting set up pretty well. A guy named Nate sat down with me for like a solid hour. Help me out a lot. Anyways, if you're already pretty lightning savvy, You can open a channel with me. I do have a link in the show notes right now that has my pub key. So you can open a channel if you like.

I would recommend trying to, I mean, it's up to you what you do for channels for liquidity. It tends to be difficult from my understanding to maintain channels below 1 million sats. 2 million to 4 million seems to be a bit of a sweet spot. if you go above and beyond that connecting through my node, at the current time, it might be a little bit of a bottleneck for you. But anyways, I encourage you to start up a channel with me if you'd like to.

Yeah, and I will be dropping that soon. Very excited. It's like learning about Bitcoin all over again. Really cool. Very excited about all of this. It's just a lot of fun to dick around with and start learning about all of this. So yeah, keep an eye out for that. Anyways, guys, I'm going to wrap up there.

Thank you so much for watching and or listening. As always, please do hit like, subscribe, and share. All of those things are super important, and they help get more people watching. I do see like 260 some odd people in here. Be sure to share this out. And thank you guys. I do see you in the chat. Hard to reply when I'm doing a news video by myself.

But I do really appreciate it. And as always, wherever you are, have a wonderful day. wonderful evening. If you want to drop me a Lightning Network tip, you can do so at my tipin.me page, t-i-p-p-in.me, dot me, slash at BTC sessions, and hit up the sponsors, leaden, bit refill, Bill Fottle, NordVPN, all of those are linked down below. With that, I'm out. See you guys next time. I'm Ben. This was your daily session.