BTC Sessions - Putin Just Made A HUGE Move In Bitcoin! ep432

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

🔴 LIVE: HUGE Bitcoin News! Putin, Musk, Tether, IMF, El Salvador & More! 🚀 Join us in today’s jam-packed episode as we dive into some of the most groundbreaking news in the Bitcoin world! Tune in live to hear us discuss: • Putin Legalizes Bitcoin Mining: What does this mean for the global Bitcoin landscape and has game theory begun? • Elon Musk’s Battle: How Musk is taking on his detractors and fighting to keep X alive. • Tether as a CBDC?: Could Tether be the Central Bank Digital Currency we’ve been speculating about? • Morgan Stanley & Bitcoin ETFs: Why advisors are now pitching Blackrock and Fidelity Bitcoin ETFs. • IMF’s U-Turn on El Salvador: What’s behind the change in stance and what it means for Bitcoin adoption. • Democrats Bullish on Bitcoin?: The ‘Crypto for Harris’ campaign and its implications for the upcoming elections. • Michael Saylor’s Insights: How recent events are shaping Bitcoin’s future, according to one of its biggest proponents. Don’t miss out on this episode! Hit the notification bell and join the conversation live. 🔔 If you enjoyed this show don't forget to like, comment and subscribe! #bitcoinnews #bitcoinnewstoday #bitcoin #crypto #cryptonews

Yo, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show, another Thursday, another episode of Simply Sessions. I am still on the road exploring the west coast of Canada with the fam. So I'm out on Vancouver Island right now, but we're still bringing you the news. Nico is in the wings right now, waiting to give us the latest and greatest in everything Bitcoin. And yeah, I hope you guys are having a good week. Lots of interesting stuff afoot. And we're going to be diving into it. And I'm also going to be bringing you the tech updates and some free sats along the way. Yeah, how can you complain about that? Of course, this is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live.

Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. If you have not already, please do like, subscribe, share all those things to help a ton getting this content and for them all of my eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your Simply session. Before we bring in, NIGA, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. I'm going to bring up timechain calendar.com.

What's I get it on my screen here? There we go. And simultaneously I'll get that live chat over on the right hand side of the screen. Everything you say from here on in will be live for the world to see for better or worse. But looking at timechain calendar.com, we're looking at 6,0003,000. $1868. $1.68 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will grab you

1,643 sats in terms of fees. 10 sats per byte next block. We've, we dipped all the way down to three

anytime six sats per byte. And in terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.73 million of them. That is 93.98%. We're rounding the corner of 94% pretty soon here of the total supply.

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on your mobile or desktop today and use the link down below to get 5,000 sats for free and have the chance to win even more. All right, we are back in. Let's get Nico up here. Yo, buddy, why you're so small? I don't like that. There we go. How you doing, man? Yo! What time? Bro, I forget you were traveling. Yeah, man. On the road, I've been gone for eight days now. I've got another 10 ahead of me, And then I'm off to get home for one day.

And then I fly to Riga for Baltic Honey Badger, which is going to be a blast. Dude, do you feel, yeah, I've never been to that one. But it looks so cool. They absolutely nail the branding and stuff. How like I feel like this year was the year of Bitcoin conferences. I don't know if I could do as many next year, man. I got to start being a bit more picky. There's a lot going on.

And yeah, it can be tough to juggle. I've still got a few things going on. I'm going to be hitting up Lugano in October. There's an HRF thing that's just kind of like a small group of human rights people. And then I'll be seeing you in Vegas, correct? Yeah, I think we'll be hosting something. Yes, it'll be pretty cool. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

Mel hit me up, and she's like, the videos. you sent me are absolutely epic. So it's going to be funny when they drop on social media. Yeah, they haven't dropped yet, have they? People are in for a treat. God. Oh, yeah, it should be a good time. So, man, what's going on?

What's, uh, what's top of mind? What's been going on this week? What's exciting? Yeah, man. Well, dude, it's never, it's never, uh, a quiet week in, in Bitcoin world. And, uh, of course, the orange man, uh, went on this guy's, uh, stream Aidan Ross and apparently it was the most one of the most popular streams in history. Got millions and millions of views and the reason I'm bringing this up is because they were

talking about Bitcoin like specifically like to be fair he would they just said they just kept saying crypto but the crypto that they're referring to is obviously Bitcoin and it's just crazy that you know our industry we've come such a long way that you know this is now being talked about in the mainstream which is something that we've been talking about a lot on the show which is this idea of how do we break the echo chamber i think we've done that already the echo chamber has been broken uh walker is is in the chat so things will never be the same um But Walker's mom is a regular viewer. Just to be clear, he was asking if she can see the chat.

But yes, absolutely. Walker's mom knows about the tips? This is going poorly already. Did you know that Trump is running on a no tax, no tax on tips platform? That's excellent news for you and I. Yeah, it's all coming together. Do you think he means like no income tax or like I'm assuming so, right? I think so.

I think so. That's the assumption I'm running under. Walker's getting defensive now. Oh, man. Sorry, not sorry, Walker. Okay. So yeah, let's check out this video and just replace the word in your head when he says crypto, just reperson it with Bitcoin because it's really what he's talking about.

Let's check it out. You know, I know I saw you when you went to go speak in Nashville. You talked about crypto. You said that crypto can help with debt. You mentioned that it's somewhat like gold. Do you think that, you know, when you get back in office, you would still fully support crypto? And I just saw that the U.S. government, ever since you spoke about it, they're selling crypto. They're selling it. What would you do if you were in office with crypto? It's something they shouldn't be doing because they should be trying to build it. So if we don't do it, China's doing it. Other places are doing it. And they're doing it anyway.

Yeah. And it's a very modern currency. It's a very modern form. And I know a lot of very good people that are really into that world and into that market. They're smart. They're good people. And they think it's going to be very beneficial. And remember this.

So it's very important. It's like AI. Do you love it? Not like it? If we don't do it, China's going to do it. Or other people are going to do it. And we can't be left behind. And crypto is right in that sphere.

And it is a form of currency. And China's already doing it. But if we don't do it, they're going to do it. You know, I know. Okay, so, and we talked about this in the show, but I think we should break the news, but because Trump is using the word crypto instead of Bitcoin, BTC Sessions is officially changing his name to shitcoin sessions. It's a long time coming.

Long time coming. Can officially confirm it here on the show. A little bit of rebranding. You know, I strongly considered Salana Sessions, just the alliteration. with the S is. It could have been pretty, pretty solid, but, you know, we'll just go that way. And I can't. It's simply simply, simply, it would be, it'd be simply Solana or simply.

Oh, God. Can you imagine, do you imagine the garbage that would enter the chat with that rebrand? Oh, man. All sponsors gone. All audience gone. Yeah, yeah. Channel going to zero. Yeah, man.

Oh man, but hey, look, the, what I got to say about this, though, in like in all seriousness, because I think a lot of people, including my team included, was like, yo, Trump's such a shit coiner and like whatever. Okay. What I will pass to everybody, though, and I'm not trying to make excuses for him or anything, but do you remember the first year that you got into Bitcoin? Like, you have to have climbed or went through the trenches of shit coinery in order to find out that Bitcoin is the king.

Like, it's like a one way road. Now, this is a 78 year old man. Like, this is his first kind of exposure to this. So if in five years, he's still shit coining, then okay. You know? Yeah. Yeah. But just saying.

Yeah. Yeah. It's tough. And a lot of us had the, the benefit of going through our shit coin phase out of the public eye, you know, and. So, you know, I had like, you know, one of my earliest tutorials, I was doing like a treasur tutorial and I used Ethereum as the example like for transactions and that I shudder to think. But I've left it up because I want to show the growth.

I want to show that like, you know, it's like, yes, I too had those moments of like maybe this is a thing that is. And it was through reading and kind of understanding the, what the actual value proposition of this thing is and what is required to make a global permissionless censorship resistant currency work is what Bitcoin has and what everything else has foregone in in lieu of that to get, you know, whatever little features that can be added in second layers for the rest of us if we want them. So yeah. Yeah. True that. I feel like you have to go as a Bitcoiner. Like it's almost like a right of passage.

Like you have to do a little bit of shit coining almost. You know, like it's. It happens to everybody. And luckily now I find that when people come in brand new, if they get on the right track, like if they get exposed to material that talks about why Bitcoin only, it's a very quick path to kind of figuring that out and getting. on that road. It's just the people that aren't exposed to it and don't know why that they can get pretty deep down that Shikwin rabbit hole. And sometimes when you get really far down there,

it can take a while to get out of it because you've kind of committed so much to that stuff that it can be hard to do a reversal. Yeah, yeah, 100%. 100, man. But, you know, it's time in the market's the best teacher. And, you know, hopefully Trump and his kids don't get. get wrecked. Yeah, well, they'll wreck other people. I don't know, Don Jr. I get a greasy feeling about that. All right. So one of the things that we've always talked about on this show is we've always talked about freedom speech. We've always talked about speech in general. I think it goes hand in hand with the Bitcoin Revolution and essentially the way that we've been framing it is, I call it the great disintermediation, one of information, and then one of money.

And the one of information is fascinating, because I say, like, we're already more than halfway through that one. But just take a look at, like, the last five years. I think now it's apparently obvious that the legacy media, like, they're no more, they're no better than propagandists. And it seems like the future of media, or honest media, better said, would be, like, peer-to-peer media. So like social media. Of course, we're all fans of Noster as Bitcoiners, but the reality is that most of most of the volume, it's the reason that we still post on YouTube, Ben, right? Because the

volume is on YouTube. You know, most of the volume is on X, right, in terms of written content and all that. So, you know, maybe in the future, if, you know, if they successfully take on Elon and take on X, maybe like Noster kind of functions as like, the last like the alamo you know like the holdout of last resort uh but you know with elon at the helm of x um you know and him being more pro free speech i'm not saying it's perfect um but it's definitely been really really helpful now they did file a lawsuit um and essentially they're making the case like this whole paragraph it's by the CEO of ex uh linda yaka yaccarino and um essentially she was making the case that this entity called Garm. By the way, they shut down today officially, this entity

that X and Rumble, by the way, Rumble joined up in this lawsuit. They jointly sued this, I don't know, what we call it an entity called Global Alliance Responsible Media, for Responsible Media, and essentially, it was a bunch of really well-known companies that were under this, and they kind of acted like a monopoly. And this entity would essentially, dictate, you know, what type of content is okay and what type of content is not okay. And essentially what they would do is they would be kind of political. Like certain viewpoints, they would be like, no, that's not okay. And then because they control all the advertisers, those advertisers would say, no, we can't

advertise with Rumble or we can't advertise with X because this platform or this institution is basically saying, no, like, no, those guys are extremists and we're not cool with that. So, and it seems like the lawsuit worked because like I said, this entity shut down officially today. But yeah, I think big news in terms of on the media front. And let me give you kind of like an example of what I mean by the legacy media acting like propagandists. So this is Financial Times.

I love to call in the Fiat Times. They've been relatively, not as bad as the New York Times, but they've been relatively, they've had a relatively negative look towards the industry. And I'll read you some of these bits. So here it says Elon Musk fails to convince doubters that he will save Twitter. And another bit says Elon Musk X continues to die slow and tedious death. Maybe we should be grateful. And then shortly after, an associate editor with the Financial Times tweets can't say this enough. Not shortly after, maybe like a year after. Can't say this enough. Elon Musk's menace to democracies intolerable. He's using the largest and most influential platform in the democratic

world to stoke racial conflict and civil breakdown in his own posts and what X promotes democracies can no longer ignore this. So it's like freedom of speech is a danger to democracy. And again, here they're projecting. They're saying like X is going to fail and now they're admitting like X is the most successful platform. And by the way, X is kicking ass. So X right now is the most download a news app in the United States and essentially worldwide. And if you're in legacy media, think about it. Like, you know, all these editors and professional newswriters and journalists and like whatever. And it's like, no, people would rather just do their own research because they're just tired of getting fed like a certain type of lie. And now here's Elon responding to this.

And I think it summarizes it perfectly. Elon's responding to the associate editor from Financial Times. He says, he doesn't like competing with the truth. We'll add him to. the lawsuit. I think that's so spot on. And it kind of reminds me of this article that was written by Buckele. I've read this passage multiple times. I'm just going to read like towards the end, but he says, of course, they also own the armies, the loans, the money supply, the credit ratings, the narrative, the propaganda, the factories, the food supply. They control international trade and international law, but their most powerful weapon is the control of the truth. And they're willing to fight, lie, smear, destroy, censor, confiscate, print, and do whatever it takes to

maintain and increase their control over the truth and everything and everyone. Like that, that isn't like, you know, just Bitcoiners talking on the internet. That's Bukele, right? And again, he's focusing on that word truth, very similar word to, no, the exact same word that Elon was referencing. So yeah, I mean, bro, like, it's super exciting that we live in these times where, you know, we have the ability to do our own research and consume our own media versus how the world functioned prior.

Yeah. Yeah. It's anytime somebody says that you need to prevent somebody from saying certain words to preserve democracy, you've lost. Right? Like if you cannot win the hearts and minds of people,

if somebody else is allowed to speak and say their peace, then you've lost. you know like you you needs to in my opinion like you cannot achieve a civil society by shutting one group of people up you you need the messiness to get to the truth and I'm not saying that every post on X is going to be truthful what I'm saying is when you have something that is a bad idea don't combat it by shutting it down. Combat it by presenting better ideas. I think that's kind of what needs to happen.

That's what they're trying to do with X. And like, again, like you said, it's not perfect. And there's still problems there. But it's better than what you're getting through, you know, Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and all of these other platforms where if you say something that's out of turn with the people that are currently in positions of power in those companies, you get shut down, you get de-platformed, you get whatever happens. But here, not as much, you know, like it's definitely done a full 180.

And there's a lot of things that got exposed after he took over in regards to the backdoor dealings with governments and three-letter agencies basically saying like, oh, if you're, you're going to see these stories, we need you to go ahead and flag those and, and let people know that it's disinformation and everything, when in fact, it wasn't. It was the government trying to say this is a bad story for us. So we need to like put a lid on it right away and like prevent people from talking about it. And that's a dangerous spot to be in. And we're seeing, you know, we're seeing more of that right now in the UK. And I don't, sorry if I'm stepping on anything else you were going to mention, but people that are familiar, there's, there's been a lot of civil unrest in the UK regarding, regarding a lot of protests in and around, you know, people that aren't big fans of like the state of immigration, the UK.

and they're beginning to crack down on people, not even just posting, but retweeting information, like criminalizing it. And that's insane to me. Nico, I see you, which one do you want me bring up here? The video. The video. Okay, all right.

I'm joined by Matthew Thompson now to talk through this. So, Matthew, the last point there is crucial, isn't it? Some people might be sharing simply to warn their friends, but it could be considered an offence because they're amplifying this. Absolutely, and that's the key message, is that however you think you're acting innocently on social media, whatever platform it is, you're just sharing something for whatever reason, that could potentially be a criminal offence.

And look, it's not an idle threat either, because the crime prosecution service were keen to point out that they've made a number of charges in relation to stirring up of racial hatred online, one of which this morning was for distributing a recording that could, in intending to stir up racial hatred. And so they are actually already bringing charges in relation to this sort of thing. So it's a very, very clear message

based in the harsh reality, if you like, that if you do this kind of thing, you are potentially committing a criminal offence. There he said it. They've got teams of people scouring the internet looking for this sort of thing. And if you are in the business of sharing, retweeting, whatever platform it might be,

potentially criminal material, well, then you could find yourself prosecuted. That's terrifying. That's insane. Imagine retweeting something and finding a police officer at your door. That is that is draconian as fuck. That's insane. It's crazy, dude.

And this is this is like this is what Buchela was talking about. Like this is why they're saying stuff like X is a danger to our democracy. No, no, no. X is a date like freedom of speech is is it just makes you look bad and all you're doing is just like oh it's a danger of democracy it's racist like things that just make you look bad instead of taking personal responsibility and taking that as feedback you're basically saying like no I don't care we just need to shut that down um so yeah man it's it's freaking crazy and you know like that he's basically saying if you retweet something you might be considered a criminal it's not even something

that you came up with originally. It's just you're retweeting a certain thing. And what? So if you live in the United States, you can retweet whatever you want. If you live in the UK, there's certain things that you can't retweet. Like, so dystopian, man. Yeah. That is absolutely wild.

And again, so I see some people in the chat, you know, letting me know, like, right here. Yeah, I'm in the UK. Yes, this is absolutely true. It's happening. And, uh, yeah. That's scary to see. That's a scary place to be at as a society where you can't, you can't even share somebody else's idea without risk of reprisal by law enforcement and potential imprisonment. That's insane.

Yeah. It's absolutely clown world. And, you know, but again, like it doesn't surprise me from a historical perspective. where we're living, like what we're living through the moment in time. And I got to just say, like, I got to give credit where credit is due, like, the wisdom in the First Amendment in the United States is nuts. Like, it's nuts because it's saved, like, it saved us from so much of this stuff, like here, at least in the States.

But it's almost like they knew tyranny when they're fighting that war. Like, all right, people need to have guns and be allowed to say whatever they want. Yeah. Oh man. All right. Well, I was saying like I was bringing it up earlier, right, which is the idea of the disintermediation of information. So that's what I believe we're living through. I think we're already halfway through. But I think the next battle to come is the disintermediation of money where I believe we're in the first stages of that. And from a historical perspective, the Trump speech at the Nashville conference was a huge milestone in that. So and I think that's the next battle to come. And I just don't think they're, they're like, I, it's If you see them being hardasses with information, they're going to double down with money. And the reason for that is because the amount of power that they get. Here's Justin Amash, a really good tweet kind of describing it. And he says, Bitcoin puts at risk both a CBDC and the state's monopoly on money,

which is why the federal government will do everything it can to prevent its success emergence or that any alternative currencies. We need to fight against laws and regulations that hinder money's independent development, it, good money, whatever form it takes, is indispensable to a free future. I completely agree. Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's, uh, because I mean, it realistically, money is now, and in a way, always was a form of speech. You are taking your, your thoughts and your values and you're taking the fruits of your labor and communicating your values based on where you put that value. 100%.

Yeah. 100%. Well, the next bit, today's title headline, Russia legalizes Bitcoin for international trade to bypass sanctions, but we got some breaking news in this regard. The law actually passed, which I never would think I would be reading something like this, but it goes on to say Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law legalizing cryptocurrency mining in Russia, making a significant shift in the country's stance on. digital assets. This move is seen as a bullish development for the cryptocurrency market

and could potentially lead to increased adoption of cryptocurrencies in Russia. The new legislation allows specific persons to engage in cryptocurrency mining, reflecting Russia's entry into the global crypto mining arena with legal backing. The decision comes after state Derma passed two bills on Tuesday, which Putin signed into law on August 8, 24. The law legalizes both cryptocurrency mining and cross-border settlements and exchange trading in digital currency. Effective from November 1st, 2024, the move is seen as a strategic step by Russia to bypass Western sanctions, keep trade flowing, as well as to protect its Bitcoin holdings. Look, this is, and shout out to Max Kaiser because he coined the term global hash war,

this is the Bitcoin's incentives playing out. Do you think Putin wakes up and he's like, I love Bitcoin, going to tune into BTC sessions today and learn how to use a hardware wallet. No, he probably despises this. However, the incentive is there. If the United States is going on and they're becoming the hub for Bitcoin mining, now all of a sudden, you look stupid if you're the Chinese government. And if you're in Russia, you're like, I don't want to let the U.S. get ahead. And then not to mention the amount of energy that Russia has is insane.

And they don't really have a really big populace for the amount of land that they have. Like that is a like a nirvana for Bitcoin mining, you know, the amount of energy in the frozen tundra in the middle of nowhere, like just waiting to be tapped to be turned into sweet sweet Bitcoin. Like man, it's it's a huge opportunity. So this is this is massive. Max absolutely nailed this when he's talking about the global hash war. This is Bitcoin's game theory, you know, playing out. And no one's better than that. in their incentives, including someone like Putin, that you could say that he's somewhat of an authoritarian. You can make an argument for that. You can make a case for that. So an authoritarian, like,

Putin's basically saying, like, oh, like, our country needs to be mining Bitcoin. Like, you know, he wouldn't be doing that for no reason, right? Yeah. Yeah, this is, this is going to be interesting. And it's going to be really interesting seeing the response to this. Because right now, again, in the U.S., you've got two parties, one position. positioning themselves to be very friendly to this stuff and sees kind of the writing on the wall that there's there's this hash war and that you know you want to position yourself to to benefit from what's coming and then you've got another you've got another party that is just mind bogglingly opposed to this you know like the the the the VP pick for uh miss kamala there doesn't seem to be one of those that's on the whole Bitcoin train there, at least previously. He sounds more like an Elizabeth Warren camp type person to me. And that's kind of wild to see.

And so you see a situation where if Bitcoin is as important as we all believe it's going to be and it's happening a lot quicker than I thought it would because, you know, you see El Salvador jump on this train. I thought that you'd see kind of a lot of countries that are kind of at more of a middle ground make that leap next. And now it's just injected into like the world's superpowers as election issues. And that's, that was a huge leap. And so it could get very interesting with either party in power in the US because in one, you've got like this straight up competition of like who's going to come out on top as like

you know having more hash and you know having more coins and all this kind of stuff on the other it's total opposite it's just like russia gets to be like bam ours we'll take we'll take a larger percentage of that global hash rate while you guys f around and find out so regardless of what happens uh this fall it's going to be an interesting uh next few years here for sure Absolutely, 100% man. To say the least, we got Walker in chat basically saying, breaking news, everyone. Walker is a statist and he put, quote, govern me harder, daddy. Interesting. He says not a lot, to be fair. Yeah. This is very interesting, man. No, I'm just kidding. He wrote, there is no red, there is no blue, there is the Fed, and there is you. Yeah, it's beautiful. I agree. I agree 100%. Both regardless of what political party gets in power, they both fundamentally do this thing. Anyways, also breaking news.

This, we keep seeing a heartbeat like every, like every couple weeks or so. The Democratic Party signals that they are essentially launching a crypto, quote unquote, crypto initiative. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to appease to, Trump voters because they see what happened with the Nashville conference. They see RFK speech. And, you know, there's probably a big percentage of the Democratic Party that are Bitcoin holders. And how it stands now, the Democratic Party has been following the Elizabeth Warren camp as it regards to our industry.

So, but again, like, they're trying to have their cake, but not have to pay for it, essentially. Like, vote for us, even though we're not going to give you any type of. concession whatsoever as it relates to Bitcoin policy or crypto policy in the United States. Here's one of the latest headlines. It says Democrats launch crypto for Harris campaign to counter Trump's industry appeal. But it's like, yeah, you could put together a live stream with Mark Cuban and Anthony Scaramucci and you can have, you know, House representatives there. But the reality is that the current Democratic Party has had a terrible kind of a stance towards the industry. And this tweet actually came out today.

And it was so, you know, Caitlin Long put it beautifully. Like she's basically saying like this wasn't this, they did this on purpose. And what I'm talking about is there is an enforcement action today. The Federal Reserve issues and enforcement action against the customers, customers bank. and Nick Carter says customers was one of the biggest pro-crypto banks out there. Fed and FDIC are systematically dismantling all crypto-friendly banks one after one. Caitlin Long replies, anyone who thinks the timing of the Fed dropping the enforcement action during the crypto reset meeting is purely a coincidence.

I've got a bridge to sell you. Operation chokepoint 2.0 is still alive and well in D.C., unfortunately, and the Fed just proved that. sent a message, right? There's the elements of the Democratic Party is saying, hey, we got to be pro-crypto. And then the executive branch, right, is basically saying, no, no, no, no, no. Our policy remains exactly the same. But it's funny because they can't say that openly, because I don't think it's a very popular, it's a very popular stance. Here's Belagie, and he goes on to say the Dem scam. In VC, it's not real until money is wired. And in D.C., it's not real until Gensler is fired. That's why crypto for Harris is a scam. They want crypto's votes without spending

any political capital. If the policy shift was real, they would immediately fire Gary Gensler, free Roman Storm, by the way, this was the tornado cash developer. So not only free Roman Storm, but also free the samurai guys, repudiate the unrealized capital gains tax and stop the SEC show trials. And that's just a start. Obviously, the party could do this instantly. After all, they just got a sitting president to stand down by threatening the 25th Amendment, pulling his donor support, and smashing him in the press relentlessly,

so Gensar would fall through a trapdoor in a second if the right people push the right buttons. What the party is trying, however, is to see whether crypto voters are idiots. If the Dems can get by with words rather than actions, if they can pretend their hands are tied till after the election, they can get crypto votes without having to spend

any political capital in return. So Crypto for Harris is, just another damn scam. Great deal for them, terrible for you. Make them spend political capital now. Otherwise, you're falling for the scam that says, hey, send me one BTC today and I'll send you two policies tomorrow. So yeah, I completely agree with this. It's, you know, talk is cheap. Actions are expensive. I think it's time to put up or shut up if, you know, the actual Democratic party that's in charge is really serious about this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, Like it's the exact same thing that Bitcoiners go by.

Don't trust verify. And the verification comes in the form of actual actions. Like what how are you treating things? Not how are you saying you're going to do things like show show us the money. Show us an actual positive development, especially with the Democrats that are in power now. like fucking do something about it like actually change something actually and so like you know when when you've got somebody in an active power that can do something and they don't and they're making empty promises while they could be doing something then yeah they may lose power to the other

people that are saying they're going to do something you can't really verify than them but you can verify that the other person's sitting on their thumbs doing nothing so absolutely and it's not even doing nothing like they're actively being hostile right yeah exactly so like yeah it's you know talk is cheap actions are expensive and other news talking about another big win um i love reading these i mf uh you know press releases because the way they read is is hilarious so this one came out august 6 2024 and it's a recent update on el salvador here they talk a lot about like kind of the policies, a lot of the, you know, a lot of the current things that's happening. But buried under here is a quick update on Bitcoin. And they're just eating their tongue. And you can tell they're

very salty about this. So they start off with on Bitcoin, well, many of the risks have not yet materialized. There is joint recognition that further efforts are needed to enhance transparency and mitigate potential fiscal and financial stability risks from the Bitcoin project. Additional discussions in this area and other key areas remain necessary. Talk about a salty ass post. I love to that they're like, we need additional transparency. Bro, they shared their addresses. You can literally see the Bitcoin, like that chart of the holdings where it's like just

literal like it's a staircase of building bitcoin it's it's hilarious it's like way more transparent than any other government with with anything else it's like naturally so because you can't get that kind of transparency into the traditional banking sector so it's it's laughable for sure and you know what it reminds me of like when you're hearing of like words like democracy and we need to protect democracy and like, you know, like certain posts are racist. Like what I hear from the central bankers is I'm seeing like whenever I see the trigger words, I'm like, oh, they're projecting here. And of course, the trigger words here are transparency, mitigating potential fiscal financial

stability. Like they keep saying those things over and over again. And my response would be like, what about the financial stability of, what about inflation? Like what about the ravages of inflation? What about that? Like that's never talked about. That's not a problem. It's always like financial stability, transparency,

enhance KYC, AML. But it's like, don't judge me based on the results. Judge me based on the policy, right? Like it's absolutely insane. But I mean, but it also tells me that we're winning big time for them to have to eat their tongue and admit this, you know? Yeah, yeah. I love. Well, I haven't materialized yet, but at some unknown point in the future,

it's all going to go tits up, everybody. Exactly. We know what we're talking about. We're the IMF. Anyways, that was basically all the news for this week. And yeah, guys, this was your Simply sessions. Ben, I'll see you next week. And good luck with the traveling, bro. That sounds rough. Thanks. Yeah, I know. It'll be a good time. I'll talk to you soon, man. Thank you very much. See you soon. I'm in, dude. Take care. Bye.

All right. And everybody else. Stick around because we're not through yet. First up, we're going to say a quick shout out to our sponsors. But when we get back, I'm going to be giving away some free sats. And I'm going to be hitting you up with the tech updates. So stay tuned. Don't go anywhere. Cheers to the damn near 3,400 people that have already been here.

So make sure you tap that like button. You give this a share wherever you're watching it. And we will be right back in just a moment to give away some sats. Get your lightning wall. It's ready, friends. has some of the best hardware on the market today to secure your Bitcoin. The cold card queue is an absolute powerhouse and is my daily driver. On top of this, they have plenty of other goodies, including the Mark 4,

the tap signer, open dimes, the block clock, and much more. If you head over to their website, make sure you use code BTC sessions at checkout to get a nice discount. Links are in the show notes down below. All right, and we've got one last quick shout out to our. friends over at Hoddle Hoddle. And then we're going to be giving away some sats over here at Bitcoin Well. Waiting and lending, instant self-custody and no KYC. Hottle Hottle is the place to be. You can sign up with just an email address. And once you're there, you can start browsing offers immediately, whether you're looking to buy and sell or whether you're looking to lend or borrow. You can check them out

today at the links down below. All right. I hope you have your lightning wallets ready. We're over here at Bitcoin. Well done. They're in the Canada and the US. And the way it works is if you sign up for an account or if you're buying Bitcoin or if you're referring friends, then you earn points. And you can use those points to basically toss a coin in the well and get anywhere from 500 to a million sats. And you can redeem them with any lightning wallet that accepts LN URL withdrawals. So I'm here on my main screen. I'm going to go ahead.

I'm going to hit play now. And I'm going to redeem 500 points. We'll toss it into the well and we'll see what we get. I'm going to make this larger so everybody can scan easily. One person is going to get this. There's your 500 sets. Anybody who scans it first will be able to redeem that directly into their wallet. So I'll give you a few last seconds here before I move on.

But if you do get the sets, make sure you do let me know either in the chat, or on X or on Noster or wherever you are viewing this. But congrats to ever gets those sats. And with that, let's dive into the tech updates. So Speed wallet, new update, new era of USDT payments. They are here. So if you're somewhere where you need that stable value, then here you go. Speed is all set to launch USDTL stable coin on the Lightning Network.

So this is now enabled through being able to have assets on lightning channels via taproot. So enjoy the stability of USDT with the flexibility and security of the Lightning Network. This means minimal transaction fees and instant payments, effortless, real-time conversion between Bitcoin and USDTL, enhanced privacy, security, and reliability. So congrats to SpeedWallet for that launch. Now, it's not all roses here today with our tech updates. We've got a bit a sad ado to Mutiny Wallet. And this does make me really sad because I really, really loved this project. And I think they're really on to something here.

So I hope that somebody sees what they've done and continue something in the same vein. So Mutiny Wallet to shut down at the end of the year. Our company is exploring alternative products. We'll be shutting down the wallet at the end of the year. but you can still self-host. So Mutiny Wallet will be phased out over the next few months with the final cutoff date at the end of the year. Users wishing to continue using the wallet will need to self-host it.

The team will discontinue hosting the web application, remove the wallet apps from Apple and Google, and shut down all services that support the wallet. Maintenance and support will also cease leaving it to community and self-hosters to keep the wallet operational if they choose to do so. quote, we've gone back to the drawing board and taken into account what we've built successfully and what we've not. Consumer phasing applications is a very technically challenging environment with a small team and resources are not for us. Our focus is on building services and tools

for our needs and others. Was stated in the blog post. Anyways, thank you again for all the support and believe many critical conversations with supporters have helped us during this time. We greatly appreciate it. And, you know, so what I'll say about Mutiny is I really enjoyed the way that their backend functioned. And what they integrated, number one, the fact that it could be used as a progressive web app, which takes away the choke point of the app stores. So that's huge.

Number two, the onboarding flow with what they did with, Fetamance in the background, I think was very, very smart because in a high fee environment, onboarding into full self-custody lightning can be difficult and prohibitively expensive, especially for your first transactions of maybe a thousand sats. It doesn't make sense. And so they added fetamints so that you could basically jump into a mint and start receiving lightning transactions right away. But then within the app, once you built the balance, there is an option to swap

to full self-custody, which would then create your own lightning channel. They also obviously had on-chain as well that you could use within the wallet. And then finally, their integration with Noster as a contact list was incredible. So you could import your Noster profile, you could see all of your contacts, and you could zap to and from them natively in the wallet. And you can also have your Mutiny wallet as the default zapping wallet within whatever Nostr app you were using. So again, just I feel like they did so much in such a short period of time.

I'm really sad to see this one go. And, you know, I'm just going to throw it out there to any developers that are watching this. If you could try to emulate even a little bit of what they've done and then iterate upon it, that would be huge. So hats off to Mutiny and the team that built it. Sad to see you go, but thanks for everything you did. Moving on, however, this is positive. Aqua, version 0.2.0 RBF, low liquid fees and native USDT transactions.

Aqua 2.0 is now out on iOS and Android. Go ahead and update your app. So liquid network transaction fees are now around 40 sats. So pretty cheap. Lead to what it was. It used to be a couple hundred or so. So those are all now cheaper. Native tether.

USDT transactions. So you can pay liquid network fees with USDT. You don't no longer have to have liquid Bitcoin if you don't need to. So a lot of people in the global South that will appeal to. And if you just need to only be using USDT, there you go. Added taproot swaps for cooperative instant refunds on failed lightning sends. This is thanks to bold Bitcoin and bolts. So that's awesome. So sometimes you might get an error when sending to a lightning address because in the background it's all liquid and it uses bolts in the back end well if that happened before you'd have to reach out to support they'd sort it out and you know you'd get your refund but with this it'll be automatic instant uh added more fiat currency display

options so more local currencies to display added replaced by fee for bitcoin sends which i'm super thankful for that's very useful internal send flow uh as another swap option in addition to the standard swap interface, added direct pagan. Okay, so this is the most important thing for me. This is what I wanted. Added direct peg in option for Layer 2 Bitcoin, which can be turned on in the advanced settings. This allows for liquid pegins from external wallets.

So what that means is before, if I wanted to get funds from, say, my hardware wallet into Aqua, but then also spendable on lightning, I would have to send from my cold card to Aqua. Once it was confirmed in Aqua, I would then have to hit the swap. and do another on-chain transaction to get it to liquid. Now you can hit receive, you can go to receive liquid, but there's a little button that says direct peg in. And when you hit that, it gives you a regular Bitcoin address.

Whatever Bitcoin you send to that address automatically pegs in and becomes liquid Bitcoin. So I love that. They added side swap, side shift, and bolt swaps on a local database, which is shown in the transaction detail screen, Added Beaver Bitcoin is a marketplace in Canada, added pocket Bitcoin for Europe, and a number of bug fixes. So hats off to Aqua. This is a huge update. So I'm super happy about this one.

And Aqua just became much, much more useful for me. Moving on, general, some lightning network updates. So L&D blinded paths. So additional privacy there. CLN gossip, Eclare, CLN splicing. So having a singular channel and every time you send in an on-chain transaction, it will splice and create a larger channel for you. Trampoline nodes, which is great. And Bolt 12 anonymous contact list, bolt 12 being static payment codes so you don't have to create invoices.

Love to see that. Thanks, Dusty for the update. This is a big one. FETI, FETI launch event. So FETI company building upon the protocol that is Fetty. Fettamints, they've officially launched, which means now it is available for anybody to build their own mints with an easy to use environment. And so they had a full launch event just earlier this week.

I can't wait to dig into all of this stuff and start learning how to build mints myself. But I highly recommend you check out, just go to at Fetty BTC, and they've got the full thing there or go to fetti.xyz, the website, and you'll be able to see the full launch event, and they'll explain a lot about how this can benefit a lot of people, which is fantastic. They do have a full threat on it there as well. Just a quote, they say Fetty aims to become the community super app, a decentralized alternative to legacy apps driven by communities instead of corporations. The super app consolidates multiple functions into one platform, enabling secure

financial transactions, private chat, and social media all in one place. Quote, earlier this year, we rolled out FETI Bravo. It was a developmental release for testing and improving functionality that let us build community super app in active collaboration with our dedicated community builders, pioneers and Bitcoin enthusiasts. Thanks to their amazing work, we are ready to launch FETI for the entire world. So FETI users can join federations designed to build networks and reshape communities based on authentic relationships of trust, including families, villages, cooperatives,

collectives, nonprofits, or other affinity groups. I've previously done a video on FETI when it was in the Bravo stage, and it was really cool then, but it seems like a lot more has been built in, and I can't, I'm definitely going to be covering this again because I'm going to find it very useful. I hope to have something like this available for what I'm doing in Calgary with the SADMars, I think it's an ideal community app where you can communicate with everybody locally have built in additional like mods and stuff to get to all of your links and socials and everything within a singular app as well as be able to transact cheaply privately instantly natively I love it so anyways we'll be diving into that more

finally Raspy Blitz well not finally but Raspy Blitz version 1.11.1.1.1 WebUI setup and recovery redesign. So they did a redesign of the web UI setup process, which is fantastic. I've done a video on Raspy Blitz before. I got through it and everything, but it was, you know, it needed some work. So glad to see this. And I imagine this is going to make things a lot smoother for anybody running Raspberry Blitz. And finally, I want to give a shout out to Tom over at over at your life, your turn.

and the co-founder of Rockstar real estate. These guys, absolute legends out of Ontario, guys that got into real estate because they recognized that the money was broken and they understood that they needed a way to hedge against that to secure their purchasing power. But coming to Bitcoin, realizing that this is the most elegant solution out there. And these guys, as the name applies, are absolute rock stars, awesome guys.

And they're helping Orange Pill, a lot of people that were getting into real estate for the very, reason of the money being broken, they're now showing them the way of Bitcoin. And so I was on Tom's show the other day. It was a wonderful chat. So check him out. His at is at Tom Carraza. I don't know how to say it properly. K-A-R-A-D-Z-A. And give him a follow and check out that show, which I have retweeted already, but I'll give it another retweet right now if you're looking for it. And finally, I was mentioning earlier in the show, I'm going to be at Baltic Honey Badger in just a few. Man, it's coming up quick.

Like, I'm going to be getting into Regan about 13 days, less than two weeks. I'm very excited to be back. So if you're going to be at Baltic Honey Badger, then please do give me a shout. Let me know you can reach out to me wherever. But BalticHoneybadger.com, if you still need tickets, you can use my code. which is simply BTC sessions, and that will get you, I think, 10% off tickets, if I'm not mistaken.

And then finally, just to round out, if you are perusing the channel, you need some extra help as you're checking out the tutorials. They're not quite scratching that itch. You need some more handholding. Please do reach out to my team over at bitcoinmentor.io. We have incredible Bitcoin educators over there that can help you through everything that you need,

whether it be obtaining Bitcoin, hot wallets, hardware devices, multi-sig, running a node, home mining, you name it, they can walk you through it, and you can check them out today. Again, Bitcoin Mentor.io, you can book a free 15-minute session to get chatting about what you might need. And then if it works out and you would like to get in there and start learning, then you can go ahead with whatever program you desire. So with that, I'm out. Again, thanks everybody for being here for tuning in for the 4,100 people that enjoyed the show and the many others that will afterwards. Thank you so much for being here.

But with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening, wherever you may be. See you guys next time for your Simply session.