BTC Sessions - The B Word Features Both Great And Terrible Takes ep188

Episode Date: July 22, 2021

A brief recap of talking points from The B Word, EU regulations appear to be aimed at banning self-custody, and much more in this week's news roundup. 💪 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Buy Bitcoin In Canada With Bitbuy - after your first $250 purchase get $20 free! https://bitbuy.ca/en/sign-up/?c=BTCSessions LEDN Bitcoin backed loans –  get $25 free https://bit.ly/397rlLN Get Wasabi wallet for Bitcoin privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Keystone Wallet: secure your Bitcoin! http://bit.ly/KeyStoneSessions BillFodl: get your wallet backups in solid steel. https://privacypros.io/btcsessions Bitrefill: use Bitcoin to purchase gift cards https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/?code=O04UMic9 Like what you see? BITCOIN TIPS: https://strike.me/btcsessions

Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What is going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Hope you're having a good day. We got lots to talk about today. Of course, yesterday there was the B Word, which was an event hosted online, largely in part due to Jack Dorsey and the people at Square. And they had Elon Musk on and Kathy Wood, Nick Carter was there,

Lynn Alden. There's a lot of people chatting, but the big kind of focus was, of course, Kathy Wood, Elon Musk, and Jack Dorsey all speaking together. And we're going to cover a little bit of what was said there. There's some good takes. There's some bad takes. There's some in between kind of stuff. And we're also going to discuss a little bit more. We've got plenty of stories to cover today. As always, this is live. Anything can happen. I defer to my good friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live. Do it live. I can, I'll write it and we'll do it live. The fucking thing sucks.

Of course, if you're watching here, of course, smash that like button. Give this a share and subscribe if you haven't already. Let's get a ton of eyeballs in the room. As always, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. Before we dive into the news, let's take a look at where we are sitting in the market right now. we're sitting around $32,216 per coin. A single U.S. dollar will pick you up 3,103 sats.

That's obviously up from the, you know, the fud, the scariness that happened over the past week or so. We did dip down below 30,000. We seem to have rebounded back from that. But who knows where we go from here? It's anybody's guess, which direction. If we're just going to crab walk sideways for a little bit longer, maybe we'll have a bit of a boring summer.

We shall see. Of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, ledden.io, you can use your Bitcoin for a variety of different services. Of course, if you're in a pinch and you need to get your hands on dollars, but you don't want to sell your Bitcoin because that is a taxable event. And maybe you're worried about having a buyback in at a higher price. You could utilize their Bitcoin back loans to do this. You deposit Bitcoin.

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like Blue Wallet, for example, or Wasabi. So you can check that out. Links are down below. And finally, if you're backing up any important Bitcoin wallet, make sure you get it on steel with something like the bill foddle over at privacyprose.io. Paper sometimes doesn't quite cut it, opens you up to fire damage, water damage, or somebody accidentally discarding the thing if they aren't sure what it is. So steel gives you that peace of mind.

This is how I back up all my important hardware wallets. And with that, let's dive into a little bit of what was happening yesterday with the Bword, this online conference with a lot of quote-unquote big, names in the space. I'm just going to kind of highlight a few things that were said here, particularly around kind of the more kind of headline grabbing talk, which was Jack Dorsey, Kathy Wood,

and Elon Musk. You know, Musk's still kicking around. Anyways, Jack Dorsey, I think, had some really good takes in terms of he gets Bitcoin. He gets kind of what it's here for, what it's here to do, what it's. actually replacing. And so some of his takes were nice to hear. So one of them, he said, my hope is that it creates world peace or helps create world peace.

We have all these monopolies off balance, and the individual doesn't have power and the amount of cost and distraction that comes from our monetary system today is real, and it takes away attention from the bigger problems. All these distractions that, we have to deal with on a daily basis take away from those bigger goals that affect every single person on this planet and increasingly so. You fix that foundational level and everything above it

improves in such a dramatic way. It's going to be long term, but my hope is definitely peace. So, you know, some nice, kind of that sentiment of Bitcoin fixes this or Bitcoin fixes everything. Well, it doesn't necessarily fix everything. He's very, very right in that when the foundation of society is broken, then many facets of society will ostensibly also be broken. And when you fix the foundation, you can build some pretty impressive things upon it. So I love that sentiment. Also, we had Kathy Wood talking about the ways in which Bitcoin can help those that are kind of further down the pecking order. People that are living in places where they need remittances and the remittance industry is hurting them very much.

And she actually used a little tidbit of information that was first talked about on an episode of Why Are We Bullish with Lord Fissitua from Tonga? So he said, sound familiar. Lifted directly from my quote on BTC Sessions podcast, Kathy Wood gets it. Telling Elon Musk and Jack, Bitcoin will reclaim GDP of up to 30 percent, remittance dependent emerging markets like Tonga and El Salvador from a $700 billion annual remittance industry. So I was very excited to see that talking point come up. Obviously, Alex Gladstein was also on that show with Lord Fasitua, and he later went on to write all about this as well.

So, yeah, I love that this is actually through Bitcoin's base layer and then secondary layers of lightning, enabling people to send remins payments to anywhere in the world at next to nil when it comes to cost. And Jack Mallors with Strike is very much helping with this cause. And the people down at Bitcoin Beach in El Zonte in El Salvador, all of this is kind of coming together. And bringing that problem and now solution to life for a lot of people. Now, along with the good takes, of course, Elon Musk was there with some bad ones. Now, he did get some attention in the headlines for a general positive stance on things. So he did say a couple things that weren't known before.

One of them being that SpaceX actually holds Bitcoin. So we knew that Tesla did. We knew that Elon Musk personally did, but we did not know that SpaceX did. Well, it turns out they do. Now, what he did say is, and I'll read a little bit here from CoinDesk, Elon Musk's love hate affair with various cryptocurrency communities continues a pace as he shared more details about his and his company's holdings at the B-word, a conference held Wednesday. One of his privately held ventures aerospace company, SpaceX holds Bitcoin, must said.

SpaceX's Bitcoin holdings have not been previously disclosed. So I guess we'll find out in quarterly earnings and reportings, you know, in the next, at some point in the next quarter. the entrepreneur provocateur said he personally owns Bitcoin. He did reveal he held some Ethereum, not surprising, giving his a lack of understanding of Bitcoin, and of course, Dogecoin. So there's that.

And then beyond that, he also said that he's kind of walking back his take on the whole fossil fuels thing. He said, now what do I want to highlight here? He said, I want to do a little bit more due dillity. to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50% and that there is a trend towards increasing that number. If so, Tesla will resume accepting Bitcoin. So previously, he stopped accepting Bitcoin because he was worried about fossil fuel usage

in and around the mining industry. Now, I do want to touch on a bunch of this article here. So I'm going to read a little bit from CNBC. So Elon Musk said the company will, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will likely start accepting Bitcoin for vehicle purchases again. It looks like Bitcoin is shifting a lot more towards renewables and a bunch of heavy duty coal plants that were being used have been shut down, especially in China. Again, he goes on to the due diligence piece. In May, he said that they would suspend vehicle purchases using Bitcoin out of concern.

for the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining. Since then, Beijing cracked down, expelling the country's miners, who have since begun to Patriot elsewhere. New data from Cambridge University shows many miners are headed to the U.S., which is now the second biggest destination for the world's miners. Now, this is what is interesting here, is I don't think that he really understood, And this was another good take from Jack Dorsey.

I don't think he really understood the dynamic of where this energy was coming from, how it was being utilized. Because a lot of it in China was actually from hydroelectric. That was a big percentage of it there. Was there a little bit of coal involved? Yeah, absolutely. But I don't think that was most of it. And furthermore, when we're talking about Bitcoin utilizing fossil fuels, they're actually picking up wasted energy by and large when it comes to that. So you have, when you drill for oil,

there's waste gases. There's going to be natural gas. There's going to be methane gas. You can capture those and take them to market if it's feasible economically to do so. But if not, you have to either just burn it, which is known as flaring, or you have to capture it and vent it, or rather not capture it and just vent it right into the atmosphere, which is even worse. So Bitcoin miners can hone in on that waste energy and actually utilize it, which is way less bad for the environment than just burning or flaring it. And the way that Dorsey put it is that literally what we produce so much energy on this planet and a third of everything we produce is just wasted. And I think he coined it as literally just picking up the waste off the floor and utilizing that. It's just energy that's just being discarded.

And Bitcoin finds that energy because it's cheap or free in some instances and utilizes that to secure a global monetary network that can vastly improve the lives of billions of people. And is that not worth it? So I was glad to see pushback on that from Dorsey. Now, again, with the bad takes, Elon Musk, and I can't fully fault him for this because in part this is likely true, but he probably single-handedly up the number of people curious and actively attempting to run a node. He said, the reality is that the average person is not going to run a Bitcoin node. And kudos to Umbro for utilizing that tidbit, that little soundbite. And they said to all the average persons running a Bitcoin node, congratulations.

Feel free to post a pick of your node below. And they were kind enough to also include a link to my tutorial of how to do so. So very excited to see a newfound interest in nodes. If you are not running a node, feel free to join in and become an average person as well. I do have videos on how to do so, both from Umbrell and from my node. Both are great projects. Check them out. They're on my channel.

Yeah, I'd say overall, when looking at that particular talk, it was good in that Musk seems to, I mean, he's he's learning in public. In general, I don't think we should really give a shit what he thinks. I would be just as comfortable him not owning Bitcoin at all, but he does. So what are you going to do? A lot of his takes, and I saw somebody on Twitter say this, it feels like going back and looking at like the Bitcoin talk for him. from like 2014-2015 because he's still stuck on scaling on the base

layer and he doesn't understand the trade-offs in doing so and the precedent it sets if the base, if the foundation of the entire system is malleable and you can easily change consensus-breaking rules then what do you have?

You have no assurances whatsoever moving forward and a bunch of people suggested that he started reading this book and I can confirm it's awesome. I have a copy right here. I'm like halfway through it. The block size war.

And what this details is kind of the history of the whole scaling debate and how to handle scaling Bitcoin. Because back then, you know, back in 2015, 16, 17, there wasn't really Lightning Network, even, especially in 2014, 2013. People didn't really know that Lightning Network was. even going to be a possibility. So it was all in general kind of dependent on how do we scale on chain. So the tradeoffs weren't immediately evident. And it wasn't also immediately evident that there would be definitely a solution to that in secondary layers. But this details kind of all of the arguments that took place, all of the tradeoffs that were made on behalf of people that wanted

to just scale on chain and kind of the result of that. Now, I, watched this happen actively, but reading this book has kind of put things more in chronological order and inserted bits of information that I, that I kind of missed the first time around. So it's kind of like I get to re-experience it with greater context. And I've got a greater appreciation for what happened then. And to be honest, how close of a call it was. It could have gone a lot worse than it did. And I look back and think, wow. Like if I'm confident, if I was confident in Bitcoin then, what worries, you know, the worries that I have now are infinitesimal in comparison to what I should have had during that time. But I guess, you know, looking back, looking back in retrospect, it's always 2020 vision when you're looking at the past.

But hey, let's keep going here. I want to address some thoughts. So we're done with the B word portion of this show right now. I want to talk about EU policymakers proposing tighter regulation of crypto transfers. And so there was a lot of stuff that came out. And a lot of people were very worried that it seemed that the European Union was about to ban or outlaw self-custody. And the reason being, let's take a listen to this kind of cliff's note version, this from CoinDesk, EU policymakers have proposed tightening regulations on the transfer of crypto assets by requiring companies to collect details of senders and recipients.

So general KYC, AML, kind of sounds like. The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, made the proposal Tuesday to help crack down on the flow of illicit money. Such a law would extend to crypto and financial action and the Financial Action Task Force travel rule that already, applies to wire transfers. The aim of the legislation would be to, quote, ensure full traceability of crypto asset transfers and, quote, allow for prevention and detection of their possible use for money laundering and terrorism financing, the commission said. The travel rule requires service providers to exchange identifying information such as customers name, address, and account details. Now here's the point that everybody was looking at going, holy shit.

Extending these requirements to crypto transfers would prohibit the use of anonymous crypto wallets. And many people looked at that point and said, so it would prohibit the use of anonymous crypto wallets. That's all of them. When you create a new wallet by definition, it is anonymous because it did not exist before and it has no identity attached to it. That's the nature of how a Bitcoin wallet is created. It has no identity from inception. It only gets an identity later if you happen to link an address to an activity of yours.

So it's pseudonymous in nature, I suppose. but at the time of creation, all wallets are anonymous. So people were kind of freaking out over this, and this is, it's happening now. Here's the part. Then they fight you. Well, it looks like they just didn't know what the fuck they were saying, for lack of a better term. Okay, so let's read a little bit here. This was just today, yesterday.

In a series of shocking statements early yesterday, European Commission regulators declared that they were banning anonymous cryptocurrency wallets as part of a money laundering crackdown. This understandably sent crypto markets tumbling, so and so forth. The provisions were part of a package of four proposals intended to fight money laundering. In a tweet thread summarizing the proposed rules, Marriad McGuinness, the EU Commissioner of Four Financial Services, wrote that the measure will ban anonymous crypto wallets

and make sure crypto asset transfers are traceable. Also, again, like, just a side step here a little bit. This could only feasibly work when you're talking about exchanges. It could not work in terms, like you could not police this within the system itself, within Bitcoin itself. It doesn't work that way. It could not work that way. You could not bake that into the protocol and make people adopt it. But I digress.

Let's keep going. If that sets your hair on fire, take a deep breath. I try not to use the F word, this being a family publication, but this one is the rare appropriate instance. The statement from McGuinness is straight up Fudd. Rather than ban on crypto wallace, the EU rules would impose tighter, but defensible, I don't know about that.

You're reaching their man. Rules on money service providers, such as exchanges or custody services. Either McGinnis and her communications team misspoke out of genuine ignorance when describing the new rules to the public, or they knowingly obfuscated as a way to misdirect public perception. As Tim Copeland at the block pointed out, the new rules would be very similar to the travel rule guidelines from the multinational financial action task force. The rules prohibit providing anonymous services such as custody or exchange accounts provided by a third party, not the provision of software for self-custody. In short, the ban would impact the equivalent of Swiss bank accounts, not the use of Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies as cash. So if you're willing and able to self-custody, which you should really be doing anyways, you can still hold and spend your. money anonymously unless you do commit a crime, then that anonymity probably won't last long,

meaning that somebody's going to use some sort of chain analytics on you. So again, this regulation seems to be focused at just the exchange level. And so that would mean if you're on an exchange that is in one country and you send money from that exchange to another country on another exchange, those two entities then have to communicate that information to each other of who you are and all of your information, which to me sounds like a big fucking mess because not only now is there one honeypot of user information and how much money is there. Now there's multiple honey pots depending on where your money goes. So the long and the short of it is get your shit off exchanges and self-custody.

but number two is the more exchanges you move money to and from, the more information is going to be just out there and the more of a target you're going to be. So if you're looking at all of this and you're saying, none of that just really sounds good to me at all. I really don't like that. Well, I made a nifty little thread on Twitter, and I'll just read a little bit of it to you.

You can find it later. There's a lot of information there, a lot of step-by-step tutorials. So I said, EU got you down. Afraid you might not be able to hold your own Bitcoin, tell them to go fuck themselves in a few easy steps. A quick thread complete with instructional videos. And those listening on the pod later, there's a gif of Keanu Reeves laughing and it says, kill yourself. So a few of the tips that I added in here.

First up, grab some peer-to-peer non-KYC Bitcoin via the BISC network, full tutorial included. Ensure your data isn't unnecessarily shared on a network level. by running your own node. One easy option is Umbrol, with a video included. Another great alternative is My Node with a video included. You can then link a variety of wallets to your node, for instance, Spector wallet or Sparrow wallet. As far as privacy goes, there are options with varying tradeoffs.

For large amounts, you can use Vassabi wallet coin join. Also a great way to manage hardware wallets and connect to your node. For mobile mixing on the go, you can use Samurai wallet and connect your node with both examples given above. You could always use some of those coin-join-utux to open lightning channels too. Thunder Hub is a great tool for this. Alternatively, you could explore the liquid network side chain and utilize Bloxroom Green, which has its own set of privacy, benefits, and tradeoffs.

Overall, there are many tools at your disposal to tell the EU to eat shit. In general, hold your own keys, always get your shit off exchanges, and start exploring the options above. So be sure to head over, hit up that thread. There's videos for literally every single thing that I just outlined there. And you can start kind of reclaiming self-sovereignty. And yeah, you can never get too much of that. Let's move on.

From CoinTelegraph, Rothschild Investment Corp has increased its Bitcoin exposure by 300% since April. again, I've got to outline here. Let's just let's look at that chart. Okay, let's look a year to date. Three months back, April. Okay. So in and around that time, in and around April, that was basically the peak. The peak came April 14th at around $64.5,000 per coin.

Over the course of the three months as Bitcoin has dropped basically fully in half currently where we are, this company, the Rothschild Investment Corp, has increased its Bitcoin exposure, 300%. So clearly, they're not playing a short-term game. They are continuing to gradually accumulate. I'm going to read a little bit here. Billion dollar investment firm, Rothschild Investment Corp, sorry, not tripled, but quadrupled its exposure to Bitcoin since April new record show.

In a filing with the SEC on Saturday, Rothschild confirmed it now owns 141,000 shares of gray scale Bitcoin trust. So they're in GBT, but they're accumulating those. And the reason they may be going through GBT is the premium, or rather the discount currently. So there are a limited number of shares of GBT, and they represent a certain amount of Bitcoin. So the share price, because there's a limited number of shares, can be at a premium or be more expensive than the underlying Bitcoin, or they can be at a discount, which they have been at a discount for quite some time. So if you're looking to get Bitcoin exposure and you're an investment firm, for instance, the Rothschild one, looking at a discounted Bitcoin on GBTC, something that you can actually buy and own as an institutional investor, could be very attractive. And I've seen GBT be as much as a 15% discount as of late.

That seems to be eking up because it's now sitting at about a 10% discount. So that would seem to suggest that people have been buying up that unlock of a lot of GPTC shares that we've seen over the past month. Those shares originally were locked up for six months upon initial purchase. And after that, they can be unlocked and sold onto the market. It seems that people are starting to snap those up, and we now know that Rothschild Investment Corp is one of them. They say a quiet but nonetheless substantial player among institutions, Rothschild Investment Corp has also invested in, unfortunately, the ETH equivalent, the Ethereum Trust. Its exposure to Bitcoin has increased considerably this year.

The filing shows in April its shares totaled only 38,346. Now, data implies that declining prices have not phased executives while Bitcoin has been maintaining a drawdown for three months after hitting all-time highs of 64-5 in mid-May. Actually, that was mid-April. We just looked at it. As gray scale CEO, Michael Sonnichin, I'm not sure how to say that, noted this week, institutional players are likely taking little notice of short-term price moves, instead concentrating on a much lower a time preference strategy when it comes to investing here. Investors in this asset class are really not focused on short-term movements in price.

He told CNBC, these are really investors looking at their allocations in the medium to long-term. And so any volatility or dampening of volatility is not something anyone is phased by. On Monday, Arc Invest purchased a reported 310,000 shares of GBT of its own, bringing its combined holdings to 8.81 million or 0.5% of its portfolio. At its peak, GBT represented 0.9% of the ARC portfolio in late March, but that has changed largely in part to them purchasing other assets as well. They haven't reduced their actual number of shares in GBT. Also, just a quick Cliffs note here, Fidelity did a study,

and it shows that Fidelity data says 7 and 10 institutional investors hope to gain crypto exposure in the near future of those interested in digital assets 90% see themselves investing in the asset class within the next five years. So it could be an interesting one this next half decade. All in all, again, I think that

we're going to see obviously continued volatility. We might get a little. bit of a boring summer, but I still think we're in for a crazy year. And a lot of people seem to have fallen off that track and think that, oh, the bull market's over and it's boring and it's not doing anything. We're going to see another bear market. I don't fucking think so. I think that we still see a crazy end of the year. I do think that we do see a bear market eventually, but I don't think we've gotten anywhere near the top. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. Do I think I'm wrong? I don't think so.

Let's move on here. Quick note here, Greenlight by Blockstream. Lightning made easy. So I'll read a little bit from the top here from their blog. Today we're excited to unveil Greenlight our latest Lightning Network service. The new service provides simple, secure access to the Lightning Network, allowing anyone to spin up their Lightning Node in the cloud while retaining complete control over their funds.

So this is effectively a service for people or entities that, or entities that aren't ready to make the leap of running and managing their own lightning node, managing channels, all that kind of stuff. And they want to still retain custody because, of course, you can do, you can do something where you just give up full custody and somebody basically maintains everything for you. This is kind of that in between, between like fully managing your own lightning node and channels versus full custody with somebody else where it's all totally managed.

This, you actually retain the keys and any movement that requires your approval and movement of funds will be greenlit by you through the paired application that will be here. So, I mean, this isn't for me because I like that control. I like to jump into my lightning node and tinker with everything.

But for some people, this may be either something that they want to go with and stick with or this may be an interim as they learn. And they do allow you to actually port out all of your lightning stuff to your own setup down the road if you choose to do so. So just a few things they highlight here. Security, it's non-custodial. The nodes run on their infrastructure.

Our operations team never has access to your funds since keys are managed on the user's device. Low cost, it's a low resource footprint and nodes run on demand, meaning means running a node using greenlight is very inexpensive compared to other providers. There is a single node per user and you can have multiple front ends. There's simple recovery. So if you lose your phone, you can recover using your seed phrase through their service. You can onboard and off board. Like I said, you can take all of your settings and export them to your own setup down the line.

Some of the stuff that will be covered here that they plan on implementing is just total channel and liquidity. management, so that will be not on the user to do. They'll have improved privacy. So they're looking at making it so that everything is kind of encrypted. So even though they're hosting the infrastructure, they can't actually see what payments are being made. And then again, access to control via security, having like tiered access to your nodes. So you could have somebody with certain permissions, but not able to do other things like close out channels. So you could always adjust that and tweak that.

Now, not all of this is production ready, but it is coming down the line. And yeah, I mean, anything that gets more people utilizing lightning, fantastic. You know me, I like to get my hands dirty, but I also like using something like Moon, right, where it's just all automated for on the go. So, you know, I kind of use a mix of the both. Now, another funny thing that I saw here,

this is from Grubles, or not Groobles on Twitter. He does work at Blockstream as well. But he said, shitcoins are now copying Liquid Bitcoin's Federated model. That's how you know Bitcoin is the clear winner. And he shows a couple of headlines here. One is from Ripple.

And they said, Vision for Federated sidechains on the XRP ledger from David Schwartz, which is super hilarious because like the whole thing about Ripple was you could just do on-chain payments and how many transactions per second you could do. and now they're talking about, you know, doing side chains. And then this one really got me. Smart BCH Basic. Get this.

Bitcoin Cash, which prided itself at transactions per second on the base layer, wanting to do hard forks to make sure everything would be base layer. Anything second layer was garbage and wasn't real Bitcoin and so on and so forth. And they push back. They're literally the entire reason. for this fucking book I talked about the block size war and here we have what is Smart BCH

do you ask Smart BCH is a side chain for Bitcoin cash and has an aim to explore new areas and unlock novel possibilities A side chain is a blockchain designed for fast and inexpensive transactions a special relationship with the main chain because of a two-way peg

in this case between Bitcoin Cash and SmartBCH By developing optimized high throughput and hardware-friendly libraries compatible with the de facto standards of smart contracts, defy applications can easily be migrated into Bitcoin Cash's ecosystem and run fluently at low cost. Jesus Christ, guys. I mean, some of you might be like, what's the big deal? When you sat through the whole argument from 2014-15 through all of the, we want it all on chain, everything on chain and like total pushback between a layered scaling approach and then you see this

it's just it's mind boggling but hey best a lot to them uh now if you do want to play around with liquid network i do have a whole playlist of stuff that you can dig around with there are definite tradeoffs when it comes to a side chain of bitcoin this one again working on a federated model it's somewhere in between having full custody and leaving your money on an exchange. And what I mean by that is there's a one-to-one peg. There's a token issued that represents Bitcoin. So it's like a one-to-one peg, one liquid Bitcoin is one Bitcoin.

This peg is maintained by a federation of different members, which are geographically diverse companies and exchanges and stuff like that, where effectively the vast majority of them would have to, collude to break the peg just to screw you out of your Bitcoin. Now, for some, that tradeoff is not good enough and they won't want to use it. For some, they may use it in the interim for certain things like confidential transactions, which hides the amount and nobody can see how much you're sending or what asset you're using. Or maybe you want to have some sort of a token on liquid that represents, you know,

it could literally just be a voucher to purchase something online. You can do that kind of stuff on Liquid. And then still others might like the idea of being able to hold Bitcoin in a way that they can secure on a hardware wallet, because you can't do that with Lightning Network, because on-chain fees may go up over time. And maybe Liquid Network is kind of like a nice interim for them. So anyways, if you want to look and play around, then I've got a bunch of videos on it, but you can use the Blockstream Green Wallet to. to kind of dick around and see what it's like. Also, I just dropped a video on the foundation passport the other day. I had my little goodie bag.

Hold on. I've got my little goodie box here. I love this thing. I store all my fun stuff in it. But yeah, I did a video on the foundation passport the other day to, there it is, just like the video. There you go. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I like it.

It's an air-gapped hardware wallet. Super easy to use. I did a little tutorial of how to use it alongside Blue Wallet. Also, how to use it alongside a multi-sig setup with the Keystone and Blue Wallet all in like a multi-sig vault. So anyways, if you want to check that out, you can head over to the channel to see that. And I wanted to finish up with a little something here. This is from the New York Times. It's an opinion piece.

It's a guest essay. But they're talking about, and this just kind of gets to the idea of this is why we Bitcoin yet again. It talks about how cash will soon be obsolete. Will America be ready? And it starts talking about the idea of central bank digital currencies and how they're starting to be discussed more. And some of the benefits that they give people access to the financial system,

so on and so forth. But right in the middle of it, right in your face. Take a listen to this dystopian nightmare. A central bank digital currency can also be a useful policy tool. Typically, if the Federal Reserve wants to stimulate consumption and investment, it can cut interest rates and make cheap credit available. But if the economy is cratering and the Fed has already cut the short-term interest rate, it controls to near zero its options are limited. If cash were replaced with a digital dollar, however,

the Fed could impose a negative interest rate by gradually shrinking the electronic balances in everyone's digital currency accounts, creating an incentive for consumers to spend and for companies to invest. In layman's terms, that would be like if you had a bank account with a thousand, dollars in it and every day a little bit of that money disappeared so you better fucking spend it now before we take it all.

That is what they're saying there. If you don't like that, this is why we Bitcoin because this is what's coming down the pipeline. And some people might look at this and say, that's crazy. That is not crazy. That is the direction we're going because they are running out of ammunition. rates are effectively at zero. They're already printing insane amounts of money. We've got UBI, the opposite of UBI, or I guess in concert with UBI.

You'll have diminishing balances and you'll just need you need to spend it quickly before they just whittle it away from you. Insanity. Some more insanity here. I'm actually going to play this clip. This is Biden. The question in what is? Is this like a town hall meeting or something? Yeah, presidential town hall.

The question was, what is your administration doing to ensure the poor and middle class are not hurt by higher prices? Now, hopefully, I think this audio should play. I'll look in the comments to see if it's not. But take a listen to his response here. Into the economy, couldn't that add to? No, look, there's a deal. Moody's today when I walked return, not some liberal thing, okay, said, if we pass it, the other two things I'm trying to get done,

we will, in fact, reduce inflation, reduce inflation, reduce inflation, because we're going to be providing good opportunities and jobs for people who, in fact, are going to be reinvesting that money back in all the things we're talking about, driving down prices, not raising prices. And so it is, I sincerely mean this.

Prices are up now, and they're up in, for example, You're in a position where you're trying to build a house. Try to find two by fours and lumber. Well, guess what? People stop working cutting lumber. They stopped doing it because the unemployment was so down. Now all of a sudden there's this need because people are coming back. And guess what?

Instead of paying 10 cents, you're paying 20. You understand what I'm saying? It relates to what, in fact, is now needed because we're growing. He literally just said, by pumping a ton of money, by creating a ton of money and pumping it into the economy, by spending a ton of money that it would decrease inflation. When's the last time you heard that there was so much demand for goods that prices went down? This is literally the exact opposite of how things work. if you take and create more money and you spend it into the economy, prices will rise.

All you've done by increasing the money and then spending it into the economy is you've given the government temporarily a higher percentage of all the money that exists and thus a higher purchasing power temporarily for the new money they created. they're able to get more out of the more out of people before that inflation fully kicks in. But once it sloshes around, shit goes up. Prices go up. That's how it works. Everything is more expensive now.

I don't know how this could be said with a straight face, but maybe it's just pure ignorance. Maybe it's actually what they think is going to happen. Like as if all of the prices going up over the past year and a half, two years, after printing trillions of dollars, like suddenly that's going to reverse by doing more of the same. Absolute insanity. Guys, this is why we Bitcoin.

And speaking of why we Bitcoin, why are we bullish is going to be awesome tomorrow. Very excited. I've got Eric Yakes, who is the author of the seventh property, an excellent book. If you haven't read it, go buy it now. It's awesome.

I just finished it last week. We've also got Dr. Jeff Ross. We've also got Camilla Compton, Campton over from Swan. And we've got Nico from Simply Bitcoin. All on tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern. Make sure you catch that one. It's going to be a banger.

And that's it, guys. Thank you so much for watching and or listening. If you're on the pod later, smash that like button. this a share, subscribe if you haven't already. If you want to help out the show in another way, you can hit up the sponsors I mentioned down below. That was Ledin, Bit Buy, Bit Refill, Keystone, and Bill Fottle, I've ever at Privacy Pros. And if you really liked what you saw, you can always hit me up with a Bitcoin tip over at my strike page. That is strike.com. Me slash BTC sessions.

When you hit up that link, you can type in any amount you like. You hit the tip button. You're greeted with a lightning invoice, or if you click to the right, a regular, Bitcoin address and you can shoot over anything you like there. If you need a strike demo, I did do a video on that too. All in all, it's a cool app. Anyways, guys, thank you again so much for watching. I hope you have a wonderful day, a wonderful evening, wherever you may be. And I will see you next time tomorrow for your daily session.