BTC Sessions - SIMPLY SESSIONS: Texas Anti-Mining Bill DEFEATED ep346

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

-Texas Anti-Mining Bill Defeated! -Sustainable Mining In Uruguay -Saifedean Becomes Economic Advisor To El Salvador This and more on today’s show!   💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: 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 multisig setup with built-in inheritance planning and NO KYC. Pass on your savings to your loved ones with ease in a simple claiming process with full customer support. Check them out today! https://nunchuk.io/ Start9 is your Bitcoin & lightning node, and full personal server - enabling you to take back control from the gatekeepers of your money and data! Grab an Embassy today and become truly self-sovereign! https://start9.com/ HodlHodl is a NON-CUSTODIAL, NON-KYC solution to stack sats peer to peer! Buy and sell Bitcoin while maintaining privacy. Furthermore, you can check out their Lend platform for p2p loans that are never rehypothecated. Sign up and try it out today! https://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSION Free video tutorials not enough? Need some extra hand-holding when mastering self-custody, multisig, coinjoin, running a node, or other skills? Book me for a private session on my website! https://www.btcsessions.ca/ Been watching the show for a while? Like what you see? Help me cover my video costs by sending some sats over on my Geyser Fund page! https://geyser.fund/project/btcsessions

What's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Thursday, another episode of Simply Sessions. We've got our resident secondary hair streak in the room to be chatting us up about what's been going on this week. Lots of stuff. Some Bitcoin wins this week. A few exciting things that could have been negative, turn positive. We've also got some, you know, some saltiness on Twitter. We've got all kinds of, and, you know, the EU being their typical draconian selves. But we'll get into that momentarily. But first, of course, this is live. Anything can happen.

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

If you have not already, like, subscribe, share all those things. They help a ton getting this in front of more eyeballs. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we dive in, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is timechain calendar.com. We're sitting at $26,931 per coin. A single US dollar will pick you up 3,713.

In terms of fees, next block, 60 sats per byte, if you're willing to wait a bit, 31 sats per byte. Memple is purging anything below 8.44 sats per V byte. And then in terms of mining, 92.33% of all Bitcoin have been mined. That is 19.39 million of them. Shout out to sponsors to the show, hoddlehottle.com. if you're stacking sats and you have some priorities in mind, peer-to-peer trading, instant self-custody, no K-YC, this is the place to be. You can sign in, log in with nothing more than an email address.

Really simple. Scroll down. Choose a currency, a payment method, and an amount, and start viewing offers right away and be stacking those non-KYC sats. They do also have a lending platform in which nothing is ever re-hypothicated. Check them out. Link is in the show notes. Now, when you do start stacking those stats,

You're going to want to secure them, rather, with some of the best hardware on the market, I love everything Coin Kite does. The Cold Card Mark 4 is a staple of any Bitcoiners arsenal. But other great things as well. They do the tap sign or the Sats card, the Block, the Open Dimes, all this great stuff. And coming soon, very excited for it, Cold Card Q1. I reserved mine, have you? If not, head over to CoinKite.com and grab anything else.

that I may have mentioned here. And you can use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything in the store. If you're looking to go beyond single sig in your security setup, you can check out the assisted multi-sig program from Nunchuk known as Honeybadger. I've done a full tutorial on it, but it's really, really easy to set up. You can do it via your mobile. You can use hardware like the tap signer and cold card and a ton of other great options out there. And once it's all set up, basically they are going to have a single key.

You're going to have the rest of the keys in the quorum. There'll be your signer of last resort. But it's not just multi-sig. It has baked in inheritance planning so that you know that your sats are getting to your next-of-kin, if anything should happen. And beyond that, the whole thing is non-KYC. No personal information needs to be given over to Nunchuk in order to make this work, which is super awesome, sets them apart. So check them out, nunchuk.com. And finally, start nine.

I'm going to get to rant about these guys a little bit at the end here because I'm, I'm excited about what's coming and what I'm doing with my setup at home here. But nonetheless, these guys are your sovereign computing solution. You can build your entire online stack here. Bitcoin Core, Lightning, MampoolDospace, Join Market. You can host your data, passwords, files, photos. You can host Noster Relase, Noster Clients. The list goes on.

You can head to Start9.com, and they have a variety of different choices for you, from entry level light nodes to kind of mid tier to the really pro stuff for hosting everything. You can check them all out again, start nine.com. With that, I'm going to stop my ranting. I need to get my buddy in here. Dude, how you doing? See, we forked. We did.

Is this the first, this is the first one since the actual live stream of the touching of the tips, I think. Totally, 100%. And I think our videos are inverted. so the tips are on the same side. Oh, yeah. Wow. Weird. So I'm like trying to figure out what I need to do here.

It happened before. There we go. There we go. This is what it was like in the stream before. Okay. Okay. I think we were equally skilled when we did it right beside each other. How do we do this?

My eyes were like this like the entire time. Yeah. That was a good time, man. It was good to hang. out down there. It was a great time, man. It was great to have you in my hometown. And, you know, we had our little adventures, you know, so that was a whole lot of fun. Got to meet Mrs. Sessions, which is absolutely great. My first interaction with her was her dyeing my hair, which is phenomenal. Nice to meet you. Can you put some foils on my head, please. But it was a good time. It was a good time.

Yeah, it was awesome. Well, I'm glad Opti obviously was in here last week. He did a killer job. So hats off to Opti for that. And now we've got the streaks are reunited. So shall we, I guess. Let's do a little redecoration here and get it all fancy. Shabam. Awesome. So what's been going on, man?

What is top of mind this week? What do you want me pulling up here to kick us off? Yeah, let's do with the screen share first. And we'll kind of do a little bit of an update on, you know, the separation of money and state. You know, this is the Mika laws. They finally, they finally passed, you know. This was, the Mika laws was, or basically I'll get into it.

But basically, that was what Christine Lagarde, who has the famous words, you know, if someone has an escape valve, they'll use it. Many times on TV, she mentioned the Mika laws as like this salvation to stop or to slow down the adoption of Bitcoin. in the European Union. So I'll get to it, but so first of all is a Coin desk article for audio listeners. This is the European Union formally signed its landmark, landmark markets and crypto assets regulation into law on Wednesday,

taking the block closer to becoming the first major jurisdiction in the world with Taylor rules for the sector. The law was signed by European Parliament President Roberta Metsola and Swedish Rural Affairs Minister Peter Koologran. alongside a separate anti-money laundering law that requires crypto providers to verify their customer's identity when they transfer funds. And that's the part that I really want to focus on. It's always under the guise of, you know, this is for your own good citizen. Forgive me if I'm a paranoid Bitcoiner. And after seeing how the current administration in the U.S. has treated Bitcoin up in Canada as well, you know, their feelings against Bitcoin.

forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical, you know, if they say the reason for passing this law is for your protection and to stop money laundering. But here specifically, I think this is going to have implications, Ben. Ben, you cover a lot of tech. You do amazing tutorials for, you know, the latest Bitcoin gadgets and software and all this. I think this might have applications at least for software in Europe. And I'll get to why in a second. So it says, the text, which was provisionally agreed by Parliament and Council negotiations in June 2022 aims to ensure that crypto transfers, as is the case with any other financial operation,

can always be traced and suspicious transactions blocked. The so-called travel rule already used in traditional finance will in future cover transfers of crypto assets. Information on the source of the asset and its beneficiary will have to travel with the transaction and be stored on both sides of the transfer. The law would also cover transactions above a thousand euros from so-called self-hosted wallets when they interact with hosted wallets. I want to pay attention to the words, right? They're trying to make it seem like the hosted wallet is the norm and the self-hosted wallet is the not normal. I don't know about you guys, but I've

never seen that term self-hosted wallet in the Bitcoin white paper. And it goes on to say, managed by crypto asset service providers. The rules do not apply to person-to-person transfers conducted without a provider or among providers acting on their behalf, their own behalf. And this part, Ben, how do they enforce that? This does not seem to me as an enforceable law. And I'll add to that and I'll say, what if you have a mobile wallet, specifically on an iPhone in Europe, right?

That's a very easy target, very low-hanging fruit for these bureaucrats. It's very easy for them to put pressure on the app store and on the iOS store and say, hey, you know, you can't do this unless you have K-Y-C transit. You need to know who you're sending this Bitcoin to. And mind you, Apple has a history of blocking Bitcoin wallets on their app stores. So they've done this before in the past. I wonder what the implications are going to be of this. But again, I think that this is, you know, I always sweet this, Ben.

I said, I'm more bullish on Bitcoin adoption in the Global South than I am in the developed world because the developed world doesn't have the massive incentive that people in the Global South have, which is that double-digit inflation, right? I don't believe them. I don't think it is for money laundering and whatever. Christine Lagarde said she was putting her hopes on this. I think this is an attempt to stop or slow down Bitcoin adoption and to use Christine Legarde's own words. I think this is an attempt to at least try to close that escape valve because if you don't have it closed, people are going to use it.

Dude, this is, this is their inroads to creep into the software that we use. And we've seen little bits of this. And we've seen, I mean, I don't want to like throw too much shade here. Like we had wasabi wallet voluntarily, quote unquote voluntarily. I don't know what was going on behind the scenes, but I mean, they basically said, hey, we're going to, we're going to use some sort of on chain analysis in order to vet everybody entering our coin join rounds, like proactively have done them. There must have been pressure behind the scenes, but, you know, like, great.

You can, you can, you know, enjoy some privacy as long as the state deems it so. So, like, you know, what is that? We also see potential pinch points for confiscation, even just with, like, the ledger drama before. Oh, no, we can't possibly give up your private keys. I mean, unless we get subpoenaed and then, yeah, you know, we could do it then. But like, so, you know, in those instances, with those. types of services where people have information on what you're doing, you know, the app stores are a single point of failure and it is terrifying. And it makes me bullish on progressive web apps,

which for those unfamiliar basically means you go to the browser, you go to basically like an application style website. And then in the little settings, you can say install as an app. And I literally just did this with something I'm going to talk about later at the end when I'm finishing up here. But yeah, I mean, I feel like in a world where the government is clamping down so much that they're trying to tell you what software you can and cannot run. And the alternative is using their CBDC funny money. Progressive web apps are going to be, we're going to return to it rather than. you know the app store days that we have right now oh you're muted buddy oh sorry about that yeah 100% uh you can't such it says a rookie mistake um yeah um you can't uh you know you can't

stop this this is unstoppable you know and then another thing also ben that then i was thinking about this today um is that eventually they're going to have to reveal their cards Eventually the White House and Europe and these countries, they're going to have to admit that they want people to use their money. This has nothing to do with the environment, as in the case of the Biden administration's great excuse. There's nothing to do with money laundering or terrorism. They want you to use the money that steals from you. Okay, period. And it's interesting.

Like, you know, back here in the U.S., you know, they're redefining the term. I think this is very, and words are very powerful. This is an update from the IRS. says January 24th, 2023, the Internal Revenue Service today reminded taxpayers that they will, that they must again answer a digital asset question and report all digital asset related income when they file their 2022 federal income tax return as they did for fiscal year 2021. The term digital assets has replaced virtual currencies, a term used in previous years, right? They don't want people thinking that this is a currency. This is a digital asset. You know, currencies can only be issued by the government, right?

And more, more crazy stuff coming out of the IRS as well. For anyone who's not American, it stands for the Internal Revenue Service. It's an internal revenue service to send agents abroad to fight peer-to-peer, mixing defy and crypto crimes. I mean, the part to me that I think is very, very striking is the peer-to-peer stuff, right? So it goes on to say, quote, IRS criminal investigation will launch a pilot program in June, where cyber at the stage will deploy to four continents across the globe to combat cybercrime focusing on tax and financial crimes that use cryptocurrency,

decentralized finance, peer-to-peer payments, and mixing services. I think they're going to have a really hard, they're going to have a really, really difficult time. And I think what this is going to do is is going to force people as predicted in the sovereign individual to vote with their feet. Like this is nuts. This is nuts. The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world where if you leave and you move to another country, you still have to pay federal income tax, right? Which is absolutely bonkers.

And of course, you know, the expenditures from the federal government kind of makes sense. but if people have an option to opt out of inflation, people have an option to opt out and not only vote with their wallet, but also their feet, I think you're going to see an acceleration of that for sure. Yeah. Dude, IRS is insane. I mean, Uncle Sam is crazy.

He will hunt you down and shake you down to the ends of the earth. Like when I see this IRS, like the thing that plays in my head is like the Team America World Police theme song, except for it's like team IRS and they just come and like rob people. It's it's crazy. And again, you're right. You're one of the only, I think there's only two countries on planet Earth that try to tax you regardless if you live there anymore or not. There may be a couple more, but it's like it's like the U.S.

And then like these tiny little countries that basically just are trying to like rip off their citizens and and discourage them from leaving whatever. hell whole they lived in. So yeah, dude, crazy, crazy stuff. Crazy, crazy stuff. And then what is, so it's safe to say, right, that the U.S. is weaponizing the dollar. They're weaponizing the monetary system, and they're weaponizing it not only against their own citizens, but also countries abroad. And then what is that going to do? It's going to force their citizens to seek alternatives, seek better jurisdictions, more friendly jurisdictions. And of course, the part that is so incredibly obvious because humans, you know, like they, you know, they're intelligent people and they think and they seek other alternatives.

Because they politicize and they weaponize the dollar, it's going to force countries that are hostile to the U.S. to seek an alternative to the dollar, which means that it will threaten the global reserve currency status. This is not only just me saying this, Marco Rubio, which is a senator from Florida, said the quiet part out loud on Fox News. All right, let's take a look. Today, Brazil, the largest country in our part of our suburb, located in the suburb, established, I've got to trade, which has been took over the country, from now.

Atnini, they're going to trade in their own values, to buy the course of dollar. They're creating in the world, second-economic economy, completely new, we're getting the... I totally didn't realize I tolered the Russian version. I apologize. That's right. For our Russian viewers, they're very thankful. That's all right, though.

Okay, we'll give us the gist of it. Yeah. Basically, he was saying, like, he said the quiet part out loud, right? Basically, that the idea is that, you know, China and Russia, they're seeking alternatives. The U.S., like, if the U.S. keep sanctioning these countries, that's what's going to happen. And it's like, no shit, Sherlock. I mean, you guys kind of put this upon yourself. what did you expect China and Russia to do, right?

So they weaponize the dollar not only against their citizens locally, but they also weaponize the dollar against their political opponents. And obviously, whether you know, you're a citizen of the U.S. or your political opponent of the U.S. like currently like China, like Russia, of course you're going to seek an alternative. Well, at least, you know, our Russian listeners got to understand what Marco said, but I tried to summarize it as best as I could. dude again like of course it was going to happen like the second a lot of people woke up to it

the second that russia's reserves were ceased it's like oh this is no longer kind of like an equal footing for everybody to use at least as a reserve asset that's no longer the case whatsoever if somebody doesn't like you and what you're doing then your assets are gone even when it comes to being a state. And that was, I've seen a couple people say this was, this was the beginning of the end for the dollar reserve currency status. 100%. And it was self-inflicted.

It's self-inflicted. They abused this crazy privilege that allowed them to print a ridiculous amount of money that no one else is able to print and they abused that privilege. Anyways, more on the, on the good news. front. This all happened this week. Incredibly bullish nudes. Also shout out to Pierre Richard because he was heavily involved in this. This is Daniel Badden. He said in the last 72 hours in this tweet went out May 30th. He says, has been a golden spell for Bitcoin mining. Texas anti-Bctrine mining bill, SB 1751 is dead. Joe Biden's proposed 30% Bitcoin mining tax is dead. Tether

tether is mining Bitcoin in Uruguay using renewable energy is born, right? Here is, you know, Pierre Richard. He says lots of wins on the Bitcoin policy side this quarter. Said the things that I just said. It says Texas will continue to be Bitcoin country. Thank you to all the legislators, staff, and stakeholders who contributed to these wins. Shout out to the Texas Blockchain Council. Shout out also to the Satoshi Action Fund.

Dennis Porter played a big part in all. all this. And on the other side of the world, Tether out of, you know, all people is basically saying that they're going to start mining Bitcoin in Uruguay. Here's some information about it. It says, Tether the company behind tether.tto, the blockchain enabled platform powering the world's first and most widely used stable coin announced today that it is investing resources into energy production and the launch of a sustainable Bitcoin mining operation in Uruguay in collaboration with a local licensed company. With this, Tether has to be able to be. expanded its reach from finance and communications to include the energy sector.

It is its goal is to become a global tech leader and the latest initiative showcases Tether's commitment to energy innovation and the future of cryptocurrency. As part of this new venture, Tether is investing in renewable energy sources to support and promote sustainable Bitcoin mining, an essential component in upholding the world's most robust and secure monetary network to accomplish this ambitious objective. Tether is actively seeking to augment its team by recruiting experts in the energy sector. This project represents a note worthy milestone where the realms of energy and Bitcoin really converge harmoniously. So very, very, very cool. And what's interesting about tether and perhaps a lot of people don't like, like no, is that

because they're holding all of these and it's not exactly like it's not, they're not just holding these dollars in a bank account. They're holding a dollar equivalent. So there's treasuries, equities, all that stuff. And the thing is, they make a return on that. They make like a 6 to 7% return every year. And what's the current market cap of tether? It's in the billions of dollars. So they're making a nice amount of change holding all those reserves, right?

And what are they doing with that? Well, we saw Samsung now tweeting about it during the week. They're buying Bitcoin with some of those profits. And now it looks like they're supporting the Bitcoin network by getting involved in Bitcoin mining. What I find interesting, though, is that they said cryptocurrency, but then two sentences later, they specifically said Bitcoin mining. So that's interesting. Yeah, yeah.

It also, again, too much to the chagrin of, say, Greenpeace and change the code people and all of that. in that article there it said something like 90% or a high double digit percentage of of the energy down there is is renewable. So it kind of like, you know, for the people that were hating on Bitcoin for that reason of, oh, it's it's dirty when it's plugged into the same grid as everybody else. Well, okay, well, here's an example of it plugging into a grid that is a lot of wind and solar. regardless of what you think of, you know, how efficient that is. It's the same. You're still getting, you're using the electricity for this purpose. So it just points out, well, if you're going to get angry at the energy mix, get angry at the grid, not at the thing plugged into it.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And Pierre Richard said it best, bro. This is deadpaned, like, comedic thing. Like literally holding it's like there's no CO2 on this like and it's like that's the misrepresentation. It's like the so what about electric cars? That's not being talked about. What about washing machines? That's not being talked about.

Why is it that it's Bitcoin mining? Perhaps maybe, maybe perhaps it's a crazy idea. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Bitcoin is a threat to these governments. It's a threat to their privilege of being able to create money for free that everyone else has to work for. and the tremendous amount of power that they get from that. Anyways. Anyways. Dude.

It makes me wonder how much the dude from the OC got handed under the table for his foe outrage. Oh, man. Oh, man. All right. All right. Next coming up, Ben, this is absolutely historic, absolutely crazy. This is more historic than our touching of the tips ceremony in Miami. It just surpassed it, I would say.

Just by a little bit. Just by a little bit, I would say. So this is the Bitcoin office in El Salvador. And it says, When the author of the Bitcoin Standard met the leader of Bitcoin country, great things were bound to happen. We are excited to announce that Safe Aene is joining us

as economic advisor to the National Bitcoin Office of El Salvador. Welcome to the winning team, Dr. Amos. And BeautyOn, I think, says it perfectly. And BeautyOn, by the way, for anyone who doesn't know, he's the founder of Azteco. And he goes on to say, there will not be enough gold to pave the streets of San Salvador. Such will be the win of that great country. It's like a dream, astonishing.

In case you don't know what this means, Professor de Saffedine, Austrian School Economist, that is, that right there is a signal. Okay. Most governments are run with the economists that they, you know, that they, that they breed, that they train, Arkansasian economists, right? it is unheard of that you have an Austrian school economist on the on the economic advisory of this country that is unheard of that is absolutely nuts it goes on to say beauty on goes on to say in the very rare example of an Austrian school economist who also understands bitcoin will now be advising el Salvador where bitcoin is legal tender this means the possibility of mistakes being made by El Salvador are drastically reduced because literally the best economic mind in Bitcoin is working for them directly. If you imagined a dream team like this spoke the words, you would have been called delusional, but it's real. And bear in mind also that the history of fiat and economics, Safedin, will bring to the table, will greatly help El Salvador avoid other mistakes and other parts of the

economy, further accelerating hyper growth across the entire country. 100% Stacey and Max are historic figures. Shocking. Right here is a picture already of Safedding literally delivering bring a class in the slide for audio listeners, it literally says what is money and Safedane is doing his thing. This is crazy, dude. This is absolutely nuts. I cannot believe it. What are your thoughts? I mean, can you imagine what that country is going to look like in a decade or two? Like, this is the stark contrast

that a place like Singapore saw over, you know, three or four decades, that's going to be El Salvador. Like, it's going to it's going to completely change their fortunes. I mean, they've already sidestepped the IMF and told them to go fuck themselves.

I mean, that's of any major action that you could take to improve the economic welfare of your country. It would be that. And I say that strongly because I am just about done Gladstein's book on the IMF. And it is, it is infuriating how awful the IMF and the World Bank are, just the examples and the historical behind us. So that's step one. But then to replace that, replace all the awful advice you're getting from those, those parasitic organizations. and replace it with advice from an Austrian economist that understands Bitcoin and literally

wrote the book on it. They're going to be fucking laughing, man. They're going to be laughing. And years from now, people will say, wow, that was a very good idea. No, exactly. It's going to be so obvious in hindsight. What do you think the IMF and all the Kansas? All the central planners, right, they're watching them.

and they're probably scared. I feel the fear. I feel the fear. Yeah. But yeah. I mean, there's going to be a lot of people. I've already seen, what was it? I saw some, some, I think it was somebody that Safe was arguing with, calling it like

crypto-colonialism. Like, what? Sorry, sorry we're bringing all the freedom to you. Like, yeah, it's laughable, but it's going to be labeled. it's going to go through the again the same same mill that pumps out the garbage from the new york times it's it's going to it's going to be new york timesified and uh but the economic reality will be in stark contrast to whatever the stories are saying 100% man 100% i'm so optimistic about el salvador in fact i'm optimistic about all of the global south like i think that this is

a phenomenon that's going to happen. El Salvador doesn't dictate their, there we go. Roman, Safedine took a few minutes of his day to reply to a nobody like me on the Orange Palap this morning. What a legend. I know, Ben, you're on the Orange Palap. I'm on the Orange Palap. I am. Yes, I had a little meeting earlier today, just chatting, chatting with the guys, seeing how things are going. And Nat Brunel just joined up too, and she's helping out. So, yeah. Beautiful. Get OPA. It's you can you can link up with local clubs and everything it's actually very useful traveling too by the way like if you're if you're in a town and you're not there for like a bitcoin related event even if you are but like if you're just traveling and you're like i wonder if anybody's around

there's always somebody around no matter where you are you're like hey are you into bitcoin cool we're best friends now and then you just go hang out and it's like a family reunion i'm i'm a huge fan i love uh did you know that uh matthia stayed on my couch in Miami. You told me that. That's awesome. Yeah. Big fan, big fan, sponsor.

Love those guys. Great, great, great app. Highly recommend. And I do take the time to go through them, to go through the messages and reply. Anyways, so in other news, on the regulatory front, things seem to be heating up a little bit.

So actually, Ben, do you mind playing the video, the one that's not Elon. Yes. And it's not in Russian, I promise. There we go. This one will be German. German.

Okay, perfect. Millions of people lost money in last year's collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. But a bill that's been sent to the governor's desk now aims to regulate this kind of digital banking in Texas. Here's KV's Deranisha Heron. If you're one of the millions of Texans who have invested in cryptocurrency, odds are you use the app like Robin Hood or Coinbase to do so.

Well, House Bill 1666 would make sure your money isn't caught up in fraud or stolen by these companies. We've seen it happen before with many digital asset providers, but notably what used to be one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms, FTX. The leaders of that company are still facing litigation after being accused of taking billions of dollars from customers. House Bill 1666 would prevent that by requiring digital asset providers to maintain enough funds to ensure customers can withdraw their assets at any time, eliminate co-mingling customer funds with company assets, and present a report to the Department of Banking for a yearly audit. State Representative Giovanni Caprilyione presented the bill and feels confident it will become law pending the governor's signature. You will be comfortable knowing that when you invest online, when you're buying cryptos, when you're trading it, when you're selling it, that those assets are being washed, that they are being managed, and that there's an audit trail that protects those assets. Failure to comply would lead to punishments ranging from a loss of license or criminal charges.

Capriclione says cryptocurrency is being regulated all over the world, but Texas would be one of the first in the U.S. to do so. So he hopes the federal government will follow suit and lightly regulate cryptocurrency. At the state capital, I'm Daryanaisha Heron. All right. So, okay, a couple things. Yeah, I have many thoughts, but I'm going to let you go. So shitcoin exchanges have to be fully reserved, right? What about banks?

This is what Caitlin Long just bought. for. Like, is it possible that I can do a bank that is full reserve? And they're like, absolutely not. Like, what? I mean, it's, but I mean, we talked about this, right? We talked about how if they had let her run a bank that was full reserve, anybody who just literally wanted a safe place for their money would flee the other institutions, which are

fractional as fuck. and cause insolvencies everywhere. Is this what they're trying to do with, because obviously a lot of this shit, a lot of the crypto shit is fractional currently, obviously. Yep, yep. And then what is happening? What is happening?

So exchanges like Gemini, which like promoted themselves as being, you know, one of the most regulated exchanges, you know, they're regulated in New York. city so like they have to be fully backed and all that stuff and whatever literally bloomberg article winkle vye twins attempt pivot after jemini loses money and employees mounting market legal regulatory challenges in the u.s cloud the firm's future as it seeks an overseas reset right so it's just

dude it's just so so freaking fascinating i'm not a big fan of regulation and government intervention you know so but again it's going to be very hard for shit coin platforms like finance to do business in Texas Texas has a tremendous amount of people has a massive GDP much bigger than a lot of countries in the world so there's a there's a tremendous amount of economic opportunity for these exchanges in Texas but if you're not fully reserved if this law passes you're not going to be able to do business there but again I just find it so hypocritical that banks that No, no. Even though banks do exactly the same thing. They risk, what do you think happened in 2008?

Like, you know, and then one last thing, right? Which is none of this would have affected you if you've taken Bitcoin into self-custody. If you've taken Bitcoin into self-custody, none of this matters. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. I mean, again, not your keys, not your coins, hold your own, hold your own keys, all that stuff that all of us know. the one thing that I want to say, and you kind of touched on it there, is these guys have gone out of their way to be insanely compliant. Like, these guys have, like, I know, like, if you've read the book Bitcoin Billionaires

by Ben Mesrich, I think, it basically chronicles the early days of, like, after, he's the same guy who wrote the social network about Zuckerberg and everything. And so his second book was actually about what happened to the Winklewurst Twins and when they discovered Bitcoin and they met like Eric Voorhees and Charlie, God, I forgot it, forgetting his last name. Anyways, it kind of tells their story and how like, you know, you had Libertarian over here with Eric Voorhees and he's doing all these different

things and Charlie was off. doing God knows what. And they were like, no, we have to be like super compliant and everything. And they they basically bent over backwards to blow the state like in order to stay as compliant as possible. They did every trick in the book to make sure that everything was squeaky clean. And they drove, do you remember the ad campaigns that the Gemini like, yeah, crypto needs rules or something like that. And it's like they literally are advertising how much they're going to comply. And even they couldn't make it.

Even they are like, shit, we got to get out of here, man. This is crazy. If the compliance bros here cannot make it work, what hope and hell does anybody else have? Like, the state doesn't want you just to comply. They just, they want you dead. They want it gone. 100%.

100, dude. I 100% agree with that. Holy cow, it is going to be a bumpy ride. And look, And it goes to show, like, you can placate these bureaucrats as much as they want, as much as you want. But, you know, at the end of the day, if you succeed, it's not in their best interest. You know, it's really not. Anyways, do you have time for another story?

Because I know we're almost at time. Yeah, we can do the last one here. Okay, cool. I'll go through it very quickly. So, Michael Saylor said the quiet part out loud. He said, this is a quote from Elon from this interview. says, quote, pretty soon $44 billion won't be worth that much anyway. And Michael Saylor did a little bit of a troll here.

And he said, Elon Musk on Bitcoin. He tagged Elon on Twitter. Ben, do you mind playing the video? Yeah, there you go. This is a gift. It's an IOU worth $44 billion. Thank you. So.

Well, you know, pretty soon, $44 billion won't be worth that much anyway. That's a good point. So my, bro, it's literally identifying, identifying, you know, the, the problem, mind you, he's wearing a Doge shirt while he did that. But let's talk about why he probably feels that way. So here is the amount of cash to Tesla is a public company. So they have to reveal this. This is the amount of cash that Tesla has.

Tesla has on hand. So in the Tesla cash on hand for the quarter ending in March 30. first 2023 was 22 billion dollars right so let's do the math real quick and we'll use the latest inflation numbers so we go plug in 22 billion dollars in here into this little calculator and we multiply that by 6% which is the last reported inflation number and Tesla is currently losing 1.4 billion dollars in purchasing power on a yearly basis and that makes sense why Elon would say what he said. Now Tesla, because they make so much money,

they're able to eat this. But what about the average everyday person, right? You know, and you have your savings in an account. That's 6.5%. If you're not making billions of dollars every year like Tesla, it's going to be really painful. So I suspect this is part of the influence as to why Elon said the things he said.

But hey, Michael Sailor's absolutely right. Elon, you have a solution, but you got to eat your humble pie. You got to eat your humble pie before you take the orange pill. I think Elon would be smart to do so now, kind of like Sailor did it. He pulled his trigger like during the last bear market, right? We were kind of starting to come back a little bit. And he was stacking Sat's low key. And then like partway through the year in 2020 made the announcement, hey, listen, I've been buying Bitcoin.

my treasury is in Bitcoin. This is the way we're going. You know, Elon missed that train. He came in. He came in much later, you know, kind of trying to follow along in sailors' footsteps. And maybe he can low-key, like, maybe he can eat some humble pie and stack some stats here. But I'm not hopeful if he's sitting there with a Doge shirt. I don't know that he's fully learned all of the lessons that are.

required to to stay humble and stack stats but maybe i'll be proven wrong i don't know yeah let's see let's see i i think all roads to lead to bitcoin but you know someone like elon right mckeyser says it best right you know ego maniacs and and and bitcoin you know don't get don't get along you have to you have to be humble to understand bitcoin you have to be like look maybe i can't do this better um that takes a lot of humility and you know perhaps Elon hasn't crossed that bridge yet Anyways, Ben, sorry, he's running a little late today, but really enjoyed it. And this was your Simplet Sessions. Dude, good to see you.

I'll chat with you next week and have a good rest of your weekend, buddy. Likewise, man. Travel safe. All right, later. All right, everybody. Don't go away quite yet. We got a few last things we're going to wrap up with. Also, if you're not already, go follow Nico.

Go follow the Bitvolt 7 over on Twitter. Follow Simply Bitcoin. they give you the new six days a week. This is just a taste, just a taste over here. If you're not watching simply, I don't know what you're doing with your life. Come on. All right.

So what I wanted to fill you in on, a couple of things that I've been up to this week. I dropped a tutorial earlier this week on something called pouch. And it's effectively remittances to the Philippines with Lightning Network. So super easy to use. Very similar to Blink, formerly known as Bitcoin Beach wallet, a ton of different features in it. And I think a good orange pill opportunity, like somebody's first steps into Bitcoin,

it defaults to Philippine pesos. So it is very much meant for people remitting home and somebody just wants pesos and then they want to be able to purchase whatever. But it's instance and like the fees are nothing obviously because you're sending lightning and all that. So yeah, I figured I'm, I might do a little bit of focus on some stuff like that where it's not necessarily a quote unquote Bitcoin tutorial, but it gives people their first kind of peek into, oh, you can just use this

and then they will begin to have questions about Bitcoin as they realize, oh, this is using Bitcoin somehow. And that's okay that they don't quite get it yet, but they will. All right. What else? So I've been really excited this week. Something is brewing. I'm making some changes to my home setup.

And so these changes are in and around the nodes that I am running. So I'm running, or up until now, I've been running, obviously, start 9, umbral, Razpie Blitz, Ronan Dojo, and my note. I had all these devices at home. And, you know, I'd play around with them, try different things. I've done mostly just to be able to do some tutorials and everything. But I am consolidating. I am consolidating to my StartOS, my Start 9 device, and I'm upgrading it too.

So I've just the past couple of days, I've been upgrading, or rather migrating my Umbral LND node over to my Start 9. And so I basically went in. It was actually very easy, but if you go into LND, there's an option import from Umbro. So if you've got two different devices, it literally just detects the other device in the network. You just put in the IP address for it and the password. And then it will grab your L&D information. It will shut down your Umbrel. You got to make sure you don't turn that on again because you have two lightning nodes that are the same lightning node.

And that could result in some channel closures if you do that. But nonetheless, it imported everything, shut down my umbrella, and now my lightning node, my big one that I've had for a long time, is now residing on my Start 9 server, which is awesome, super awesome. And also, furthermore, with the latest update, when you go to access your Start 9 device from your mobile, you can within the browser click the settings, and it gives you the option to install it as an application.

And what this does is it gets rid of all indication that it is browser-based at all. So, like, I, so, yeah, like there's no browser bar up top or anything. It's just like an app running on your phone. So that's really, really cool. And finally, if I have it here, maybe I don't. Oh, I got to find it because I want to, I need to show it off. I'm too excited about it. Yeah, so I've got a new device headed here.

I've got the server pro or the pure rather. And man, it is an absolute beast. So before the embassy one that I had was running on a raspberry pie. And a lot of people were running those. And, you know, they can do the trick for a while. But like if you're going to be serious about it and you're running a lot of stuff, then you're going to want to be for your machine. Now, Start 9 just did like an entire overhaul.

of their whole setup. They've got the server light, which is a RASPi, but doesn't have an external drive. It's all done off the SD card. And it's meant to be like a pruned node and run slim and quick. And that does away with a lot of the RASPI issues that people have. Their kind of mid-tier one is now like an Intel Nook style, like a good processor, lots of RAM. And like a good drive in it and everything. But holy crap, what I've got coming.

So I've got, it's basically an Intel I7 core, four cores, eight threads, 1.8 gigahertz, up to 4.9, 32 gigs of RAM in this thing. And I think I've got the 2 terabyte version, maybe the 4 coming. I'm not sure. Anyways, yeah, this thing is insane. So I'm super stoked. This is coming. And I'm going to be running everything. I'm just consolidating down to the one device. So I'll still be able to do node tutorials and everything, but I'm going to focus more so on the application I'm running because the applications are now becoming kind of like uniform across most options, whether you're running Start 9 or Umbreul or RASPI, you can get most of these applications and they'll behave very similarly.

So that's what I'm up to right now. I will have a tutorial coming out with the migration process for L&D. It's actually quite simple, but it's important that people be able to see it. and yeah, that's what I'm excited about. Also, I leave Monday. I'm heading to Prague. Anybody else going to Prague? Let me know.

I will be seeing you there. I've got a keynote. I'm talking about the trucker protest, basically how we can improve upon it in terms of fundraising in an adversarial environment and what tools we have at our disposal. So it's going to be something along those lines. I've got it pretty much done,

but they actually gave me a little bit more time. I've got a 25 minute slot. So yeah, it should be good time. Also, Jacques-Mozuko. I'm going to be emceeing for the Saturday, like the second half of the day. And one of the talks I get to intro is Jacques-Mozuko, and his talk is called Ordinals are retarded. So that's the thing I get to intro. That's very exciting. And then finally, tomorrow, why are we bullish? We've got Steve Barber from upstream data. We've got Dave Bradley from Bitcoin well, co-founder also of bold Bitcoin. And then we've got Julian over at kinetic finance, all of these Canadians. And more importantly, all of these

dudes are going to be joining me at the Bitcoin rodeo in Calgary, July 4th and 5th. So it's going to be a good kind of Canadian slash Bitcoin rodeo hangout prior to the event. And then I'm also going to be hitting the Canadian Bitcoin Conference just prior. And that one is going, what are the dates on this? God, I'm so confused with my dates. June 17th and 18th in Toronto, too. You can actually grab tickets for the Canadian Bitcoin Conference and the Bitcoin rodeo two for one kind of deal.

Or they have like bundled tickets for cheaper. So anyways, if you're in Canada and you want to tour around a little bit and hit a couple events, then there you go. You can get bundled tickets if you so. shoes. With that, guys, I'm going to wrap up here. Thank you so much for watching. Please do like, sub, share, all those things. They do help the time getting this in front of more eyeballs. You want to help the show in another way. You can end up the previously mentioned sponsors, Pottle, Hottle, coin kite, nunchucks, start nine. You can also head to my website,

BTCSessions.ca. A ton of free content there, but if you need an extra bit of handholding in setting up anything, if the free tutorials aren't enough, you can book me for one-on-ones right there. And if you really liked what you saw, you can scroll down a little bit at BTCSessions.ca. And there's a little lightning QR code and you can send sats there. If you click on it, it'll take you right over to my Geyser Fund page where you can set up an actual invoice if you so choose. Anyways, guys, with that, I'm out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening wherever you may be. I'll see you guys next time for your daily session. Hoddle by Bitcoin