BTC Sessions - SAMOURAI WALLET FOUNDERS ARRESTED! ep409

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Tune into "Simply Sessions" this April 25th, 2024, as we delve into today's top Bitcoin news. We'll spotlight the arrest of Samourai Wallet's founders, explore Elizabeth Warren's Bitcoin tax proposal, and discuss the IMF's acknowledgment of Bitcoin for cross-border payments. Join us for these important updates and more! —————————————— BOOK private one-on-one sessions with Bitcoin Mentor! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted. https://bitcoinmentor.io/ 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: BITCOIN WELL is the quickest and easiest way to get Bitcoin directly into self custody. They also offer non-KYC sells and bill payments. Transparent 1% spread, no additional fees and no withdrawal fees. Check them out today! https://bitcoinwell.com/btcsessions COINKITE offers the BEST Bitcoin hardware on the market. Use this link to get 5% off anything in their store: https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions NUNCHUK WALLET and their Honey Badger plan is a best in class assisted mutisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ SEEDOR is one of the most robust metal backups on the market today. Get your SEEDOR starter set today! Use this link for 5% off. https://www.seedor.io/discount/BTCSESSIONS?redirect=%2Fcollections%2Fprodukte For US based customers: https://www.seedor.io/btcsessions Canadian customers: https://link.thecryptoboutique.ca/BTCSessionsSeedor HODLHODL is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION DEBIFI is a non-custodial Bitcoin backed lending platform with institutional grade liquidity providers and no rehypothecation of your funds. Find them at: https://debifi.com/

What is going on? Everybody, welcome to this show. Another Thursday, another episode of Simpley Sessions. Nico is waiting in the wings for us to bring us the latest and greatest or the most dire in what is happening in the Bitcoin space. So we're going to be chatting about that. I hope all of you are having a decent week dealing with some of the news items lately. I hope your resolve is not broken and you remember why we're all here. And so we'll dive into that in a little bit. 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 this things, help the time getting this content in front of more eyeballs.

I am Ben with the BTC. This is your simply session. Before we bring in Niko, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. This is timechain calendar.com and simultaneously I'm going to pull up the live chat. Everything you say into the chat from here on in will be live for the world to see for better or worse. Time change calendar we're sitting at $64,724 per coin. A single US dollar will snag you 1,545 sats in terms of fees. Holy hell.

Thank God. We're seeing double digits. We're down 45 sats per byte next block, 16 sats per byte anytime. That certainly beats the quadruple digits that we saw during the having over this past weekend. You know, 200-something odd dollars to get a transaction through if you were at the wrong time. And that was kind of base. Yes. So hopefully you had thought ahead and utilize some of the tools out there. peruse the channel for some tutorials on how to mitigate fees with that.

In terms of Bitcoin mine, 19.69 million of them, that's 93.76% of the total supply. Let's take a quick word from our sponsors, and then we will dive into the show. On a mission to enable independence by being one of the easiest and quickest ways to purchase Bitcoin in Canada and the U.S. And the best part about it, every buy goes directly into your own self-custody. They never hold your coins. You can add a Bitcoin address as part of onboarding. There's a transparent 1% spread, no hidden fees, no withdrawal fees. Plus, they have KYC free sales and bill payments on their website.

They're also a publicly traded company under the ticker BTCW on the TSXV. Check them out over at Bitcoinwell.com. Check out my full tutorial on how to use them. and you can check out the links in the show notes down below and sign up today. linkai.com 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. And 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 these show notes down below. When it comes to assisted multisig and inheritance planning, it's hard to beat nunchuk.io and their Honeybadger program. On your mobile device, they allow you to set up a full multi-signature vault. And once it's done, you have baked in inheritance planning so that your Bitcoin gets to your next of kin if anything should happen to you. On top of this, the entire thing can be set up with devices like the tap signer, the cold card, and plenty more options,

and the whole thing can be done without K-Y-C. You don't need to give up your personal information to have it set up and working for you. You can check them out today over at nunchuk.io. All right, let's get Nico in the room and we'll start chatting news, buddy. Good to see you. How are you doing, man? Yo, preparing,

sending up the live stream and the Gullog. So we will be able to do a simply session from the Gulag. And that's what's important. And so we won't stop getting content to you guys. I'm, yeah, do you have a bunk there for me? I feel like I need to be moving in pretty quick. Yeah, absolutely. I got you the top bunk.

And then I got, I got the guards to be okay with like this small little streaming setup. Okay. So we're good to go. Yeah. Sounds pretty sophisticated. Yeah, we're sophisticated cycle. Dude, this, this week is thrown me for a loop. This is, you know, I do, why are we bullish every Friday?

And sometimes there's weeks where it's just, you got to find that silver lining. And I think it's important to have those things. And, you know, I ran, why are we bullish through the entire bear market and stayed bullish. But there's certain weeks where regardless of price action, there's definitely concerning things. That's some of the stuff that we've been seeing this week. So either way, I'll let you dive into what is top of mind for you. But we'll get started and you can take us on a journey wherever you like. Yeah.

And I think that's an incredibly important point, right? The, you know, to stay optimistic throughout all this. And I think the key here is we are winning. If this wouldn't be happening unless we were, if we weren't winning this, they wouldn't care, right? The fact that they care so much the way they do tells me that they see Bitcoin, they see what Bitcoin represents and what it enables as a clear and present danger to their system. And that's really why I kind of wanted to start it off with American Hoddle's opening dialogue to the cheat code event that Peter McCormack hosted because he absolutely crushed it.

And I think it's important, you know, as we enter the second part of the cycle, right? And, you know, we start seeing those crazy, that crazy number go up technology to do its thing. It's important to remember why we are here, right? It's like, okay, came for the wealth, but what did we stay for? We stayed for the revolution. We stayed to avoid things like this, right? And it's kind of like a joke, but at the same time, it's a little bit of truth in it. Anyways, let's check it out.

That's the sort of conviction that I have about this thing is that it really is nothing. I am all in on Bitcoin. I'm 100% in, net worth invested. I don't have another way out. I don't have a backup plan. And the more conviction I find and the more I go in, seemingly, the better my life gets, right? The systems that we find ourselves ensnared in today, this invisible slave system, whose only justification for existence is to steal our time.

I think we know that, right, like that all of our politicians are basically stealing everything. that isn't nailed down. It doesn't matter if you're in the UK or in America. It's happening everywhere. It's a global phenomenon. It's a global phenomenon because of fiat currency, by the way. But it only ends when we have the ability to fight back, and Bitcoin has given us that ability. Basically, they encroach, and we relent. So they encroach further, and we relent further. And we keep giving up our freedoms. For what? What are we getting for it? And meanwhile, most of us are hand-waving it away saying it's not happening, and we're concerning ourselves with what's going on in the drama at our local pub or what's happening with the princess or the game or

whatever it doesn't matter you know the only thing that matters is that we protect ourselves from the people that are every day all day long trying to steal from us the line must be drawn here in bedford this is where we draw it right here uh no no more no more encroachments no more bullshit no more self-justification no more kicking the can down the road bitcoin gives us the ability to say no to insults on our sovereignty, on our dignity. It makes us owners in our society and not just renters on government land who are doing what they're told because they're forced to and they're scared. And if you wandered into this room today and this is your first encounter with Bitcoin,

today during the panels and the speeches, you're going to hear about this cheat code. You're going to hear about the most important thing that's happening in your world, in the world, but also in your world and what's most important to you. So you have two choices once you hear. this. You can either take the blue pill, you bury your head in the sand, you wake up in your bed and you believe, whatever you want to believe, right? Or you take the orange pill and you see how far the rabbit hole goes. My call to you is that I dare you to make the bold choice, to seek a meaningful and substantial life, to resist nihilism, to believe that your life can be more,

to pass something on to the next generation, to pass something of great importance forward, in the blockchain of humanity. I dare you to play your role in the greatest story of our lifetimes, the monetization of Bitcoin. Thank you. So starting it off hot, man, giving me chills, but I think it kind of sets the tone and the vibe for today's episode, which I'm going to go on record and say this. Maybe it's bold. I think this is going to be one of the most important episodes.

One of the most important simply sessions we've done just because of the historical context and just the overall picture of what's going on, Ben. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, again, everybody here that's in Bitcoin needs to remember why Bitcoin was important in the first place and how it came to be. right so she didn't uh create it in a um in an in an in an overt way and then uh reveal his identity and and come to the masses and come to the powers that be and say hey uh i'm making something that's going to compete with the u.s dollar and every other fiat currency out there um is this okay no he he made something he made a system silently kind of released it to the world and didn't ask

permission it's the only reason that this thing was able to grow to a point where you know the the the powers that be have embraced it in a limited sense in that it can be a financial tool baked in with legacy financial markets um but clearly they don't want it to be anything more than that. They just recognize that they can't stop it from being at least that. And yeah, so remember not only why you're here, but why Bitcoin was started in the first place, and don't let it become less than that. Oh yeah, 100%. I 100% agree with that. Like, we're here, obviously. We love NGU, but it's important to kind of zoom out and ask yourself why we're here in the first.

first place. What is actually going on? And then when you're aware of what is what is actually going on, I think you have an ability to kind of zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Anyways, you guys know that I love reading passages from the sovereign individual. I'm not going to bore you reading you the same one that I always do, but this is a new one. And shout out to Michael Ruiz. So I think he's currently living in El Salvador. I think it's really kind of a representation of where we are in the movie, what's going on. But anyways, it goes on. to say the rise of the sovereign individual will not be wholly welcomed as a promising new phase of history, even among those who benefit from it most. And many will despise innovations that undermine the

territorial nation state. And it is a fact of human nature that radical change of any kind is almost always seen as a dramatic turn for the worst. What may someday be seen as a new renaissance from the perspective of the new millennium will look frightening to tired 20, century eyes. There is a high probability that some who are offended by the new ways, as well as many who are disadvantaged by them, will react unpleasantly. Their nostalgia for compulsion will probably turn violent. Get ready to duck. You must understand and prepare for such unpleasantness. A transition crisis lies ahead. The new information and communication technologies are more subversive of the modern state than any political threat to its predominance since Columbus sailed.

This is important because those in power have seldom reacted peacefully to the developments that undermine their authority. They are not likely to now. So why are we saying all of this? Why are we talking about this? Well, before I get to the... Actually, let's start with the Samurai news first. severe escalation.

This really started with the tornado cash. The tornado cash set a precedent. It normalized it in the eyes of many people. The U.S. government won many cases. Coin Center appealed. The U.S. government won that case. And tornado cash was something really not that well known, right? So they didn't go after a big fish initially.

they went after a very small fish. When they realized they can get away with it, less than a year later, they up the any. And that's exactly what happened. So for the audio listeners, Samurai wallet founders arrested and charged with money laundering

unlicensed money transmitting offenses. Now, I believe eventually they're going to go after self-custody altogether. This is just one step. The further criminalizing, and villainization of privacy. Completely against the Fourth Amendment, I might add,

which is no unreasonable search and seizure. 95% of transactions using Samurai are just people seeking privacy. 5% could be connected to illicit finance. However, you know, that doesn't stop them. I might add also that every major bank in the world has money laundered, they've facilitated illicit finance.

The difference between a bank doing it and a developer doing it is that a bank gets a slap on the risk and they see it as a cost of doing business. When a Bitcoin developer does it, when someone does it from outside the system, without permission of the system, they lock you in a box. Remember Ross. Remember Assange.

Remember the Samurai Wallet founders. remember the tornado cash founders. This is where we are in the movie. This is a separation of money and state. Ben, do you want to say anything before I keep going? Yeah, I don't know that there's much more that I can add to that. It's the hard times are coming. The weak men have made their bed and the hard times are here.

in that fourth turning-esque escalation. I think that's what we're seeing. We're seeing that fourth turning come to an absolute head. So things in a fourth turning get the roughest before they start getting better. And this is a sign of that in my eyes. 100%. And again, guys, this would not be happening unless we weren't winning.

This would not be happening unless they did not. not feel threatened by the system. That's why I started with the sovereign individual kind of quote from the book just because it's extremely fitting for these times. Anyways, I'm going to read you a little bit from the no BS Bitcoin article. Goes on to say federal prosecutors charged the samurai wallet founders, Kean Rodriguez. I don't know if I said his name, first name right. I'm sorry about that. And William Hill with conspiracy to commit money laundering on Wednesday. Samurai's web servers and domain have been seized and seizure warrant for Samurai's mobile application was served on the Google Play Store.

Per Department of Justice to application will no longer be available to download from the Google Play Store in the United States. According to a press release, the duo developed marketed and operated the mixer, which facilitated more than 100 million in money laundering transactions from illegal dark web markets. Quote, as alleged, Keon Rodriguez and William Hill are responsible for developing marketing and operating samurai, a cryptocurrency mixing service that executed over $2 billion in lawful transactions and served as a haven for criminals to engage in large-scale money laundering. Rodriguez and Hill allegedly knowingly facilitated the laundering of over $100 million of criminal proceeds from the Silk Road, Hydromarket, and a host of other computer hacking and fraud campaigns.

Together with our law enforcement partners, we will continue to relentlessly pursue and dismantle criminal organizations that use cryptocurrency to hide illicit conduct. Prosecutors also indicate that Rodriguez and Hill garnered about $4.5 million in service fees for their coin journal services they provided. IRS Special Agent, IRS, it's interesting. Special Agent charged Thomas Firtasso said $2 billion in transactions with an unlicensed money transmitter means $2 billion. flowed without any oversight from whoever to wherever. Samurai wallet is now closed for business. The charge include conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to run an unlicensed money transmitting business. These charges could lead to a maximum of 20 years and five years retrospectively. So I mean, dude, like, this is absolutely disgusting and it's a whole different set of

rules, dude. And I just kind of want to compare and contrast with this. This is Gaber Gubukas. I can't sorry if I butcher your name, bro. But he said samurai founders are nuns compared to the bankers. Since 2000, regulators fined banks 7,400 times totaling to fines of $380 billion for various offenses. Either banking is criminal by definition or the rules are broken. Why aren't bank CEOs in jail? These are the total penalties. And banks are known to be some of the largest money launders in the world. But they're part of the system. Why did no banker go to jail for 2008?

I think 2008 and 2009 had a lot more, did a lot more damage to the public and the savings of people, people's housing, than these people providing samurai as a service. What damage did this do to people? I would say 2008 and 2009 hurt a lot more people financially than what these two gentlemen were doing at Samurai. This is absolutely disgusting. They're operating by a whole different set of rules than the rest of us. You know, it's like they have a special privilege or something. Ben, here's where I'm going to pass it on to your expertise because this is just not up my alley.

But a lot of people were saying basically that apparently like if you were caught up in the whole samurai stuff, You could potentially be affected. Here's Francis Puglio, founder of Bull Bitcoin. He says, let's hope that Samurai servers are well encrypted, or they manage to wipe them remotely because otherwise the users are effed. Here's No Sphere 888. Says World Pale Coordinator never touched Xpubs. It's Seth for Privacy.

Shout out to him. He's done an incredible job kind of covering all this. It says all samurai websites down, get lab down, coordinator down, can't even mix via Sparrow, a sad, sad day that has me shocked and disbelief. But we won't stop fighting for our privacy. So, I mean, Ben, I'm going to pass it on to you. Like, what, if someone is, was using, you know, Samurai, I don't even know if I could say this. Yeah.

I understand. So, so again, people were using samurai or sparrow. They're using the whirlpool system in order to, again, have financial privacy, right? They don't want anybody to be able to look and discuss. over their net worth, right, or see every financial transaction. And that's a pretty reasonable thing that you don't want to go to a store and purchase a t-shirt and have the merchant be able to trace back and see the entirety of your life savings, right?

Because then the person shipping you a t-shirt knows your address, and if you have enough Bitcoin, it may be worth a plane ticket for them to come kicking your door and threaten you with a $5 wrench. And so what are the implications of somebody that has been using samurai? So this is pretty nuanced and I may not have a perfect explanation here. But in the process of coordinating coin joins, which is effectively you, a coin join is you sending your own money to yourself, but doing it collaboratively with a number of other people. So in the whirlpool coin joints, there'd be five people. they would all send funds to themselves.

They never lose custody of their own coins, but because they do it at the same time as other people in a collaborative transaction, there's no indication. There's no pure cut and dry, finger-pointing way of proving that one person is holding which UTXO on the other side of the transaction.

Now, in order to do this, the coordinator or, you know, the process required knowing the ex-pub of the user if you're using samurai wallet. The way around this was if you were running your own Ronan Dojo or running your own samurai coordinator in the background, the Whirlpool, GUI. Or Sparrow also did not leak that information, but the mobile samurai client did if you weren't linked to your own samurai work. whirlpool client. And so it's, you know, there's nobody knows for certain if that information was, was held somewhere and was now accessed.

There's speculation as to whether that data was held long term or whether it would be accessible or if it's been wiped. But basically, if you weren't running your own whirlpool client in the back end or if you weren't doing it through Sparrow and you were doing it through just the mobile. Samurai app, then for safety sake, you should consider those whirlpool transactions not private. And you should move funds as you see fit. And if you want to regain privacy, there are still tools out there that exist to do so. You know, there is join market, which you can host on your own Start 9 server. I know people don't like Wasabi because of

their practices beforehand. But hey, if you can get into a coin join round, then maybe, I don't know. There's other mechanisms that you can use as well. But nonetheless, some samurai users have been curious, like, well, if nothing's working, if the servers are down, how do I even access my Bitcoin? Nico, do you mind if I take a sec? Just really show people how to do this. So I'm going to do it really quick.

I had this queued up here. So I'm just going to share a screen here. So if you guys have a samurai wallet and you're like, I don't know how to access my funds, here's your crash course. Okay. I have a dummy wallet that I have set up. So number one, do not update Sparrow wallet yet to 1.9.0 because that deprecates all of the world pool capabilities.

So I haven't updated yet. I don't know exactly how it will be deprecated if you can easily import things. But just to be safe, don't do that yet. Go from the main screen, go import wallet, or just say file and hit import wallet. You're then going to use your words. You're going to hit, Samurai was always 12 words. Forgive this is going to take just a second here, but I really want to show. And again, this is a dummy wallet.

I'm not super worried about it. But cabin, steak, panel, uphold. Tidious. That's okay. head traffic source skirt crater source skirt crater source skirt crater fiscal gospel mimic fiscal gospel mimic okay so that is a valid check sum I'm going to most of them do have pass phrases associated with them this one was no no exception so And what I'm going to do is I'm going to do that off on the other screen just for a second.

Give me a moment, gents. And then you hit the Discover Wallet button, which it is doing right now. It does like a little check for it, and then it'll find a wallet. Give it a name. Hit Create wallet. I'm not going to do a password for this one. But basically it's going to check for any previous transactions. You'll see some old previous test transactions that I did with this one.

And then all you need to do, because this is just the base wallet, you need to go to settings, hit add account. There's a drop down and choose Whirlpool accounts. Hit OK. This will add your deposit, premix, post mix, and bad bank. And you should have access to all your funds through that. If you need to watch this back, go back through the stream. I'll probably clip this up later and I'll plunk it in directly on Twitter and Don Noster later on.

So hopefully that's helpful to you guys, but that's how you reaccess your funds. And Nico, I'll toss it back to you if you have anything else. Dude, that was a beautiful, beautiful tag team, man. Love that. News tutorial. That was special. I like that. You know, that made me smile in these interesting times.

But yeah, there you go. So you guys have a set of actions. that you could take if you've been caught in the crossfires of all this. Now, what is next? And again, this is speculation. But I got to say, though, we've been pretty right. We've been pretty on point on Simply sessions, right? But this, it just looks like it, just based on the wording, and just based on where this is going.

And this is something that we've been on top for many, many months now. And again, this shouldn't be surprising. if you've been paying attention to what's been happening. So the next thing, and I say this and I understand how strong this statement is, and I do not say this with any type of hyperbole, I don't say this lightly. It's just something that I feel. It's in my gut. And it's just based on their own wording.

I believe that they're going to go after self-custody. I believe that's their end goal. I believe that's what they want to do. It's very convenient for everyone buying the ETF. It's not very convenient for millions upon individuals, millions upon millions of individuals taking their sovereignty back by taking self-custody. So I believe this is, you know, the incremental steps and the wording that they're going, they're starting to use to start to plant seeds in the public.

So this is a public service service announcement that came from the FBI. And it says the FBI warns Americans against using cryptocurrency money transmitting services that are not registered as money services businesses. According to the United States federal law and do not adhere to anti-money laundering requirements, a few simple steps can prevent unintentional use of non-compliance services. For example, avoid cryptocurrency money transmitting services that do not collect know your customer information from customers when required. That's really important.

And I know what a lot of you guys are thinking. Nico, you know, my wallet isn't a money, how? How? What stops them from saying Sparrow is not a money services business or money, not money services provider? And it's interesting when you take a look at more of the wording, right? So it goes on to say the FBI has no, this is in regards to the samurai stuff, but it says cryptocurrency money transmitting services that purposely break. the law or knowingly facilitate illegal transactions will be investigated by law enforcement. Using a service that does not comply with its legal obligations may put you at risk of losing access to funds after law enforcement operations target those businesses.

Tips to protect yourself, right? It's just so interesting how they word it. Before using a money transmitting service, check whether it is registered as an MSB with the U.S. Treasury Department's financial crimes enforcement network. It goes on to say, beware of financial services that do not ask for KYC information, including name, date of birth, address, and ID before allowing you to send or receive money or cryptocurrency. Understand that just because an app can be found in an app store does not necessarily mean it is a legal service and it is complying with federal requirements. Avoid using services that advertise themselves for illegal purposes. be cautious when using cryptocurrency services known to be used by criminals to launder their funds.

I mean, like, how long until they say Bitcoin Core is being used by criminals to launder funds, right? Like, do you understand what they're doing with the wording? And again, you'd be like, Nico, you're seeing shit. What are you talking about? Here's Dylan LeClair. And all of this happened on the same day, I might add. Like this all happened all at once. The FBI released, the Samurai News,

SEC served consensus with a Wells notice and alleged MetaMask is operating as an unlicensed broker dealer. Dylan LeClair says, MetaMask is a self-custodial wallet. He goes on to say, it's only for shit coins is exactly what was said when they arrested the developers of Tornado Cash. They're coming for self-custody.

Remember Tornado Cash. We warned you guys when that happened. We said, going to set a precedent. Why did they focus on tornado cap? Because no one cared about it. It was very small. They couldn't start with samurai. They couldn't go after the big fish first. They had to set the precedent. They won the cases. They won the appeals by coin center. They won the lawsuits. And then they went after the big fish. Coincidentally, after the ETFs have been approved. And you guys want to see something else interesting? Remember the letter to FinCEN that was written

because Elizabeth Warren in the Wall Street Journal used bullshit information that said that Bitcoin was being used by terrorists to quote unquote launder money for terrorism. And then it was Representative Tom Emmer that got the FinCEN head in congressional testimony to admit that terrorists actually prefer the traditional financial system.

Well, FinCEN never retracted that proposal. And now what's really interesting, is that when the 26 Bitcoin company signed a letter to FinCEN, against the proposed surveillance rules, you know whose, you know whose name is at the very top? Samurai wallet. It's not a coincidence. This is a message. They're saying, they're sending a signal. They're sending a message to you that you play by a different set of rules than they do. Here is Ryan Adams. He goes on to say two more privacy developers arrested in the U.S. today. this time for building a Bitcoin privacy service. Where does it stop? The samurai wallet developers should have known you can't host a centrally operated mixer. Okay, well, the tornado cash developers deployed privacy as immutable code.

Nothing centralized. They also got arrested. Up to 25 years in prison for writing code that helps people keep transactions private. The UN estimates banks facilitate nearly $2 trillion dollars in money laundering each year. Not through custody. not through code, but as willing intermediaries. Dozens of major banks have been fined billions of dollars for money laundering over the past decade.

How many bankers have you seen go to jail? No banker went to jail for 2008, 2009, and that did materially more damage to millions upon millions of individuals than the fucking tornado excuse my language, than the samurai wallet developers. That did a lot more damage to people. Anyways, he goes on to say,

they're making an example of crypto because they don't want us to have private peer-to-peer transactions. Not by passing laws in the democratically elected chambers, not by issuing public guidelines. They just come to your house and take you away. Who's safe from this regulatory terrorism? And that's fundamentally what it is. And that's what it's about. Now to kind of tie it up with a nice bow on top. Here's Lynn Alden, and she's describing to connect it with the sovereign individual piece in the very beginning, why this is all happening, why they're doing this in the first place.

She goes on to say, the entire developed world tax apparatus that was built in the 20th century and extends into the 21st century depends on ubiquitous financial surveillance. They're not going to give that up without a fight. I have been saying at a number of conferences and podcasts that privacy is the main battleground for the next decade. back in the 19th century before money was mostly private. There was plenty of dictators, but there was no major method of surveilling all transactions. Therefore, things like broad income tax were untenable to enforce.

But in the 20th century, as money increasingly moved around at the speed of light, people needed bank accounts to keep up. It wasn't all forced on them. They chose it. And those banks were centralized, surveilled, and ruggable. This allows authorities to switch to income taxes, which required ubiquitous financial surveillance to work. and ultimately allowed them to switch to Fiat currency altogether. Now in the 21st century, Bitcoin and its various layers allow people to hold and move around money globally without permission banks.

They can do so peer to peer or they can do so with custodians, open layers, etc. Unlike the base layer of Fiat, the base layer of Bitcoin is permissionless. But this represents a threat to the entire current system of taxation and financial control. if Bitcoin and particularly various private methods on top of it were to be adopted at a massive scale, the entire tax structure and other things would need to reshape themselves around that reality. And so they won't make it easy. They will try to criminalize financial privacy as much as possible while the network is still pretty small. The only solutions are to make privacy tech so ubiquitous that it can't be isolated

and can spread organically in a distributed way to apply, legal pressure when possible so that governments sort of have to operate within the bounds of their own law like the First and Fourth Amendment, even though they're completely ignoring that. But I think Lynn absolutely hit nail in the head, you know, and can I kind of connect this with the passage from the sovereign individual? And it explains what's happening right now so that this argument that it's for your protection, like these words from the FBI, tips to protect yourself. Dude, I'm protecting myself from the ravages of inflation, my bro.

that's what I'm doing you know so like it's just crazy hypocritical different set of rules for different players but again you know why are we bullish I'm bullish because this tells me that we're winning I'm bullish because this tells me that we're over the target and flack is heaviest over the target yeah yeah I agree again like these increased attacks again as you as you said early in the episode it they just didn't know that um there's actually something to worry about and that the powers that be are recognizing it. And so I mean, what's the end game here? They want to extract as much money from you as possible.

They want to have as much control over your life as possible. I just want to, there's something I want to bring up and I know that, I mean, I kind of feel like this is the thing to talk about today and this is just what we're we're going to focus on. But I want to bring up one thing. I'm going to, again, bring up my screen here. So I don't know if I'm spoilt. And we're running long anyways. So I'm just going to go into it. But Biden proposes 44.6% capital gains tax, the highest in history. The proposal also includes a 25% tax on unrealized gains for high net worth individuals. And I shared this and said, the first income tax in America was a flat 3% tax and it was marketed as only being applied to

high net worth individuals. Make no mistake, they intend to apply this to everyone eventually excluding themselves, of course, because they'll always have loopholes. And this kind of ties into where everything is going. People are seeing the cracks in the system. People are seeing that they're getting screwed, that they're effectively, to quote, to paraphrase Robert Bure, you'd love. If 50% of your income goes to the government, you are working for free 50% of the time directly for the government, which means you're 50% slave because 100% slave means you work 100% of the time for somebody else. 50%. This is a great tweet from Joey from Canadian Bitcoiners podcast, but he said, the whole don't use any Bitcoin services bit from the U.S. government

is indicative of a few things. Number one, no matter how they posture and shriek Bitcoin is money. Also, there is a need to stop people from profiting on Bitcoin unfairly. Only insider trading by elected officials is allowed. ATMs are going to be banned probably soon. There will be an attempt to collect unrealized gains on Bitcoin. And maybe most importantly, in advance of the greatest, most obvious, and most damaging debasement event ever, likely coming inside of five years, all exits need to be tracked, blocked, criminalized, or there will be an incredibly obvious stratification between those who understand slash understood and need to be listened to going forward. The regime relies more on narrative than on any other tool, and it's getting harder and

harder to convince people not to believe their lying eyes. Incredible tweet from Joey. If you don't follow them, please do Canadian Bitcorners podcast. but yeah man this is this is where we're at this is this is what's coming i i i'm sure you would echo that yeah 100% and you know you put it so beautifully and those both both two things to kind of you know echo basically the the the general theme of this episode which i'm saying it again like i think this is one of the most important simply sessions episode that uh that we've done on a historical basis because of really what's at stake, you know, what, what is, what's the road in front of us during this,

this transition, right? You know, do, what future do we want our children to live in, a future of slavery or a future of Bitcoin, and are really, really going to allow them to tell us that somehow writing down 12 words is a danger to society, because that's what they're going to try to convince people of, that software code is somehow a weapon. and you know what joey so beautifully put and it's something that naeem bukele has said as well that their most important weapon is their control on the truth so how do we fight against that we tell the truth we tell people what's going on we tell we bring people together rather than divide them on the whole left and right BS and we tell them like hey look it's not democrats it's not

Republican, it's not conservative, it's not liberal. It's really Bitcoin or Fiat. You know, like, what side are you on? What side, what future do you want your children to be living in? And I'll tell you what, guys, I think 99% of people, right, and the 1% that are not included in this are probably part of the political establishment. They have a lot more in common than they have divisions. I think the illid, the divisions is more of like this divide and conquer illusion that they used to keep people divided and believing in this system of theft because essentially that's what it is, you know? So things are getting a little bit heated. This is the separation of money and state after all, but I think we're going to win at the end. So that's why I'm bullish. I know it's Thursday,

but I love it, man. I love it. Yes. Everything in the end is good for Bitcoin, just not necessarily good for some bit corners, but those that remain will make this thing stronger and find new solutions that become resilient to the types of attacks that we see. So looking forward to that. Absolutely. Don't want to keep you more. It's a long show today, but it was a very important topic. All right, guys, this was your Simply sessions.

Nico out. I'll see you next week, man. Later, buddy. Everybody stick around. We're going to quickly go through the tech updates here as well. important stuff to touch on, of course, not least of which, Sparrow version 1.9.0 if you were running your samurai wallet beforehand and you want to recover it, don't update to this yet because it deprecates a lot of the functionality for the multiple accounts. Otherwise, it's going to be a bit more

of a manual process and you'll have to learn the derivation paths of the samurai wallets. It's much easier to go back, scrub back through the episode where I showed exactly how to do it. I'll clip that down. I'll share it to Twitter after this and to Noster after this. But nonetheless, before you upgrade, go through and recover anything that was in Samurai very easily with Sparrow. Moving on, Primal introduces top zaps to all of its Noster clients. So it will prioritize the top zaps and show all of the different, it will show all of the different little messages with them. That's really cool. We just release all updates. to all primal clients.

You'll notice now we render several top zaps at the bottom of each note. The top zapper gets their zap message displayed so you can see it coming in here, hot on a Cali note. Finney by Nunchuck. I was retweeting this earlier today. Finney lets your family hold the reins, ensuring complete financial autonomy and security with Finney. One can enlist one's own family to hold a backup key or backup keys

instead of relying on a trusted third party. So this is really, really cool. I love what Nunchuk is building. Tons of support for various hardware, tons of options when it comes to both assisted and self-sovereign setups for multi-sig. They keep killing it. If you haven't checked them out already,

head over to Nunchuk.io. This is a really cool offering. Strike now launches services in Europe. You can stop tweeting when you're up, but I can continue to tweet when Canada. I'm thrilled to announce today. Strike launches to eligible customers in Europe, giving millions of people access to buy Bitcoin with free, instant unlimited deposits, sell, send, and withdraw Bitcoin, global payments, Bitcoin and Lightning Wallet features,

and more. That from Jack Mallors. So there you have at Strike in Europe, and it will continue to expand. Moving on to Zeus, rolls out community sponsors. Also, there were some other new updates, so I want to cover those as well, but 0.9.0 Alpha. become a community sponsor. You can check out the sponsor board here and you can help with their development, but version 0.9.0, added watch only accounts. You can import XBubs. You can now use hardware wallets with Zeus, which is awesome. Cold card Q, seed signer, passport foundation, and more. You can batch channel opens, batch on chain transactions, closed channels to external addresses, improved payment path views. More features will be released through the closed alpha program,

saw above. Zeus is putting in the work. I got to say, Evan is killing it. So awesome for Zeus. Let's keep moving. El Salvador's Chevo wallet, source code and VPN access was leaked. Good? I guess.

Like, open source is the way to go anyways. So, like, I feel like this was, you know, again, good. According to Block, the hackers released the stolen information to the public to punish the Salvadoran government for refusing to engage with them. It's unclear what the hackers want to discuss with El Salvador officials. This time, I am bringing you the code that is inside the Bitcoin Cheva Wallet ATMs in El Salvador. Remember that it is a government wallet. And as you know, we do not sell. We publish everything free for you. And this from whoever the Cyberintelligence CVSV sent and opposed. The files reportedly contain snippets of the wallet's code and VPN credentials

associated with Sheville-Wallis-ATM network. The group recently disclosed the personal data of props approximately 5.1 million Salvadorans in a separate exploit. See, that's super shitty. The doxing stuff is shitty. The open-sourcing code, I think that is desirable.

But the doxing of individuals, fuck those guys. Okay, moving on, Blockstream Green, desktop version 2.0.4, passphrase login and more. So they've added BIP 39 passphrase logins, external BIP 21 payment support, and support for message signing with software wallets and more. That's cool.

Aqua Wallet, this is a big one. The one gripe that I had sending lightning transactions from Lightning Wallet was it didn't work with LNURL and it didn't work with Lightning addresses. Well, with the newest version, great. Lightning addresses and LNURL pay, LNURL Withdraw will be supported in future versions. They also added support for BIP21. Those are the unified QR codes that are both on-chain and lightning. So it'll ask you which one you want.

Also added automatic refund and claim transactions to submarine swaps using Native Rust Library. USDT is still a default asset but is removable in settings. So if you don't use Tether, you can take that away from your main screen. improved wallet restore workflow, added support for Aqua to Aqua Lightning payments. So if you tried to pay another Aqua user via Lightning, it would give you a bit of an error because in the back end it was using bolts. So you were like kind of paying bolts through bolts. And they added, for those of you that wanted the security addition, you can add biometrics

for authentication. So if somebody gets into your phone and gets through your lock screen and you're and gets to Aqua Wallet, there can still be an additional biometric. So good, I guess. Brains pool lightning payments now available for all users. Lightning payments are here, get ready for the halving with instant daily payouts with no minimums or fees. So if you're mining with brains, you can now withdraw via lightning. This is super desirable for those of you maybe just running little space heaters and things like

that at home. Hey, now you can get little trickles of sats. and you don't have to wait for those larger thresholds for on-chain transactions. And then finally, tomorrow, keep an eye out. I will be dropping a tutorial in the realm of privacy in and around FETI, the FETI app, Fetamints. This is with tradeoffs, instant, free, and near-perfectly private Bitcoin transactions. Again, with trade-offs, you have to watch the video to kind of get more in depth than that. But if you're curious, go ahead, head over to fetti.xyz slash builders, and they have all the links for the apps. Or you can just search FETI within your app store, download it, or install the APK file

from the website. Either way, I'll be touching on that a bunch more. Very interesting for community, custody, and for better privacy and for day-to-day cash transactions with spending money. And with that, we're going to start to round out the show. I also did want to to throw one thing out there. As of last Friday, we announced we officially launched my new company with my co-founder, Mike, and we are launching Bitcoin Mentor. So this is a company that I think is important. And it is for those of you or people that you know that perhaps they're going through the tutorials, everything's hunky-dory, but you kind of hit a wall and you need a little bit more one-on-one help with your learning journey. Well, I've been doing this one-on-one with people for

quite some time, but there are only so many hours in the day. And it's honestly gone to the point where I just, I don't have additional time to do more. And so the solution for me was to aggregate a team of mentors that I have personally vetted and personally trained. And we're putting together basically various learning tracks in ways that you can book either a la carte sessions or that you can book actual full learning tracks that lead you towards being a self-sovereign bitcorner or towards using an assisted multi-sig setup with nunchuk as a back end. There's a whole bunch of different things. And of course, we're going to cover plenty of other options.

I'm very happy. The people and the team that we put together, I think, are absolutely killed. And again, we're going to cover all tons of things, wallet configuration, storage solutions, collaborative custody, legacy and inheritance planning, nodes, mining, privacy, layer twos, all kinds of stuff. So if you or anybody else, you know, is in danger of taking a custodied option like an ETF and you don't want them to get rugged and you say that you can do self-custody, you can always send them our way and our team will make sure that they are self-sovereign as possible.

So that's just over at Bitcoin Mentor.io. I link that in the show notes down below and feel free to share that. I also pinned it on my Twitter profile and I'm going to integrate it with my website as well, BTCSessions.com. So anyways, you're going to be seeing more of that. I'm going to also start having some of the mentors on the show so that you guys can get familiar with them because they're really awesome people. They're really amazing teachers, and I'm very happy to be working with all of these individuals.

Just incredible educators out there that were just kind of like hiding in the wings, waiting to be discovered. And side note, I'll say that we had 350 applicants. We're launching with 16. So we really whittled it down. So they're super awesome. If you can give that a share and make people aware, that would be amazing. This is a new venture for me.

and I'm just very excited to try to scale Bitcoin education as best I can and hopefully be able to bestow some of the stuff that I do upon many more people than I would be able to reach as an individual. So anyways, guys, thank you for helping me with that and being so supportive all along the way. With that, I'm going to round out. Everybody in the chat, thank you for being here. Again, lightning goats.

I'm going to give you a shout out. I love seeing you in the notifications now. Shifu, Alejandro, Contagian, everybody that's in there. Sean, again, everybody, good to see you. Thank you for being here, Diana, Narwhal. It's always great to see you guys and see your comments throughout the show. Really, really appreciate it. Anyways, going to round out.

I'm getting rambly here. So have a wonderful day or evening. Of course, like, subscribe, share all those things important. Sponsors are down below. With that, I'm out. I'll see you guys next time for your. daily session.