BTC Sessions - They Finally Admitted It... ep373

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

The Wall Street Journal has withdrawn its claim on Bitcoin's link to terrorism, underscoring the importance of factual reporting. The NYAG's lawsuit against Gemini, DCG, and Genesis marks a significant moment for Bitcoin oversight. SEC's Gensler celebrates the Bitcoin whitepaper's anniversary, recognizing its enduring influence. Investors watch closely as a BlackRock Bitcoin ETF ticker appears on a Nasdaq site, suggesting new Bitcoin-linked financial products. In Argentina, Javier Milei's election could sway Bitcoin's trajectory, as he competes in a pivotal runoff. Join us for a deep dive into these events shaping Bitcoin's journey. 💪 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/ 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://a.co/d/1DkbfV2 Canadian customers: https://link.thecryptoboutique.ca/BTCSessionsSeedor 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 a Server Lite, One or Pro 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 buddy, Nico, here. It's going to be bringing us all the latest and greatest in the news. WS.J. Quietly admitting that there were a bunch of douchebags and just totally outright lied. We'll cover that in plenty more. I hope you're all having a good week.

It's been interesting. There's been lots of stuff going on. We're going to, we'll chat about it all. But 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. 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 that little like button just below the screen. Make sure you give that a little tap and show this around. if you enjoy watching the show every single week.

Subscribe if you haven't. What are you doing? Anyways, guys, I'm Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your Simply session. All right, before we bring in Nico, first of course, I'm pulling up the side chat there. So get those messages coming and we'll be taking a look at them all throughout the show. But let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is TimechainCallender.com.

We're sitting at $34,920. per coin, a single U.S. dollar will pick you up 2,864 sats in terms of fees. Ooh, looks like next, and we've got a new block coming in there too. Fees, next block, five sats per byte, anytime four sats per byte, anything below 1.82 sats per byte is currently being purged from the mempool. So keep that in mind. And in terms of Bitcoin that have been mined, 19.53 million of them, we just recently ticked over 93% of all bitcoin is 93.01% of all Bitcoin that will ever exist have been mined. Shout out to sponsors of the

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discounted by about 200 bucks and if you use my code btc sessions with a little plus sign at the end you'll get a further 18% off so check them out start nine dot com and uh with that enough my rambling let's get Nico in here and let's chat news let's see what's up but yo it's good to see you it's good to see you bro i'm being held hostage um just kidding i'm on the move but i brought i brought everything with me so you're globe trotting here the show doesn't stop look we we have you in the background you know it's nice little i love that show it's a great show it's one of my favorite oh man i got to give a shout out to Mike, a friend of mine in the chat. He's running a start 9.

He was sharing some pictures of his, his, and he did it self-sovereign too. He built it himself and put it on like a mini PC. I'm not sure exactly what he's running, but it looked awesome. So showed it to Mike running that start 9. Yeah, huge fan, huge fan of Start 9 myself. That's why I personally use big fan of Matt and everything they're doing over there. Yeah. They're sovereign computing, man.

It's the way to do it. Way the future. The way of the future. So what's been going on? What's happening this week? There's lots of stuff. Bro, I mean, what does it? Like, there's always, you know, I always get this fear because, like, simply is a news channel that, like, on Monday, I'm like, we're going to have nothing to talk about this week.

Nothing, nothing. And then the, I swear to God, the news cycle never lets you down. There's always something crazy around the corner. But just kind of like a series of events. I think this tweet like perfectly summarizes it for anyone who's been paying attention to Simply Sessions. Dude, the first time in Simply Sessions history, the previous episode, we spent the entire episode talking about essentially the sciop that was happening. But more news started to break out, which was not only the Wall Street Journal retract the article. But also, Elizabeth Warren not only doubled down, but she finally said the quiet part out loud, right?

And we've been speculating that that's what they've wanted to do for a while. We've, you know, we've, we've come up with these extravagant theories. We've tried to, like, push it together and, like, all that stuff. But we've never really had a full confirmation. You know, it's always been, like, us speculating, us, like, saying, like, look, guys, like, you can't. come to another conclusion but i don't know if it was a freudian slip i have no idea but one of the my favorite features of bitcoin that i think a lot of people are just not aware of is how bitcoin exposes incentives and i think for like finally she was pressed into a corner enough where she just she just

said it out loud exactly what she wants to do right so anyways uh let's go through the series of events first so this is elizabeth thorns stared up the hornet's night I don't want to beat a dead horse. We went over this. But here is the official retraction by the Wall Street Journal. And Nick Carter puts up a really good point. He says, when the one report which you cited exclusively and your letter to the White House issues a correction, I think you lose the right to say it's not about one report. And of course, that is a quote by Elizabeth Warren.

And she was asked on Monday night, hey, now that the report that you use, to send a letter to the White House, you know, is retracted. What do you have to say about that? She's like, it's not about one report. What other report then? And then the Bitcoin senator comes in hot, and she has her own form of Maddix. And I mean, look, like, I think this perfectly summarizes it, right? So crypto assets account for less than 1% of global illicit finance, right?

Less than 1%. But if you were to believe the letter that was sent to the White House, House, the proposal by the FinCEN, Elizabeth Warren's rhetoric, it's a lot higher than 1%. That's the, that's the picture she's trying to paint. But when you look at the reality, the fact is that the majority of global illicit finance is done through the traditional legacy financial system. Why aren't they focusing on that? I mean, I think it's obvious why they're not focusing on that because Bitcoin is the separation

of money and state. And that's what it's really about. think it has anything to do with money laundering. I don't think it has anything to do with terrorism. I don't think these people are really concerned about the facts. I think that they're more concerned about keeping their privilege of being able to create money for free that the rest of us have to work for. But anyways, the good news is she finally said the quiet part out loud. And to paraphrase Pierre Richard, he said, Elizabeth Warren spread disinformation to explode a crisis. It's backfiring and now undermines her misguided anti-Bitcoin agenda.

So all the bills that we're going to get into that she's proposed, the FinCEN regulation, all of that is now completely called into question about the sincerity of those rules. What are the actual motivations behind that type of regulation? Anyways, here's the clip of Elizabeth Warren finally saying the quiet part out loud. Last year, you wrote that, quote, in their attempt to avoid being traced, illegal actors have adopted ever more sophisticated cryptocurrency technologies, such as non-custodial wallets.

Bro, like, is that worthy of a repeat, Ben? Let's do it. Like, last year you wrote that, quote, in their attempt to avoid being traced, illegal actors have adopted ever more sophisticated cryptocurrency technologies, such as non-custodial wallets. Illegal actors are take, bro, I mean, isn't self-custody the default? I mean, I was going to say this off the top of the show, but Nico, you look quite sophisticated. and I think so

and also I think a lot of the people in the chat are equally sophisticated I'm I consider myself relatively sophisticated and and I think

it warrants sharing but be sophisticated in self custody I think I think we could all be sophisticated up your game come on guy

we just got to this bro if enough of us raise up our sophistication, we're going to win. Yeah. I mean, we're a sophisticated bunch. We're learning. No, I mean, but like, I can't believe, you know, because what she's saying, she's not stupid.

She's basically trying to commingle self-custody with crime, right? Like, that's what she's saying. And, like, you know, that's where we are in the movie. That's pretty crazy rhetoric. that's serious, right? Because you know where it's going to be like three or four years from now. You're a financial terrorist because you wrote down 12 to 24 words. Yeah.

You know, like, how insane is it the idea that if you don't give your money to us, for us to guard it, you must be a criminal. Yeah. Like that's what she's insinuating here. If you dare not give up full custody to the fruits of, your labor, then you must be a terrorist. 100%. And she's scared, right?

Like this is like when Christine Lagarde's video of the CBDC, you know, this Elizabeth Warren video, she's scared. This is the separation when he said, look, you hit the nail on the head. The fact that they can't easily confiscate wealth at the like snap of a finger terrifies them. The government isn't a monolith, but let's say people that are part of. certain governments. It terrifies them. Like Christine Lagarde uses the word.

She uses the word escape valve, right? They hate the escape valve. They can't put up with it. And then this calls into the question her bill, right? Which is the, it's a bipartisan bill. It's sponsored by Senator Marshall, Warren, Mansion, Lindsay Graham, and many others. And we've read you guys this bill before, but it's interesting because, here it is again address a major gap with respect to unhosted digital wallets, right?

Which will, which allow individuals to bypass AML and sanctions checks, right? So it's like, we can't allow you to take self-custody because, you know, terrorism, because of money laundering, because of, you know, all these reasons. But when you actually look at the data, it's very, very clear that the vast majority, of global illicit finance is using their very system in which those control features are in place. But why is that not talked about? Right. If all those things, like they always talk about this, AML, sanctions, blah, blah, blah. Look, despite all of that, despite all of those controls, people still prefer to use the legacy system and not Bitcoin. And that just tells me that it's

is not a sincere argument. This is really about just killing or maiming the competition that they now have and they can't just get rid of how they usually wouldn't. Yeah. Honestly, the term on hosted wallet, we need, I think we need, again, the term is so malicious in its very creation in that it it denotes that you're lacking something that is needed. And it normalizes the idea of deferring the responsibility of your money to others. And I think we need a term that is meant to equally target these assholes and what they're trying to do. And so I propose and like just off the top of my head, I think if you have Bitcoin that is not in your own custody, we should be referring to it as unsecured Bitcoin. Like it's not secure.

You've not secured it yourself. It's unsecured. So it's like people hear that and they'll go, oh, that sounds bad. That's because it fucking is. It's not good to give up custody to somebody else. You don't have control of that. like uncontrolled or unsecured or whatever we decide. On something is what it needs to be referred to

when you don't have custody of your own shit. Exactly. No, 100%. We have to use their tactics of like attacking the language, essentially, like co-opting the language using terms like unhosted wallet. Elizabeth Warren right there. She's literally saying they're using sophisticated methods. of taking self-custody of their Bitcoin.

Like, it's so absurd, but I agree. Because this is, at the end of the day, it's information narrative trench warfare. That's really what it is all about. And it's really about, you know, capturing the hearts and minds of individuals and really getting them to understand, right? And I think what Elizabeth Warren is like hoping is that she's hoping that

this rhetoric or this, you know, this little clitorial, that she made and whatnot is going to fall on uninformed voters and uninformed viewers. Right? She's been like, yeah, oh my God, she's totally right. Listen, Elizabeth Warren is up for re-election next year. If you live in Massachusetts, this person doesn't want you to take self-custody of your Bitcoin. Maybe you should start asking questions. Anyways, this leads me to my final point on this, which is they will think twice about using legacy media to attack Bitcoin now. And the age of social media, the old tricks don't work anymore. So, you know, I think that this is just a testament of how empowered people are in the information age, right? We've seen the Christine the guard

get fact checked. We've seen Joe Biden get fact checked. We've seen politicians get, you know, like community noted, better said, right? You now have a voice. Now you could write in the comment section. You can make a video rebuking that. And they've never had that before in their entire existence. And I think that if it wasn't for social media, this sophisticated sciop attack by Elizabeth Warren and her media allies would have been successful. But because of social media, the Bitcoin immune system reacted so quickly and so viciously that it just jujitsued her move. and it just made her look like you were you misrepresented yourself and you lied um and you you haven't been sincere about this thing this entire time and then that could have led to her finally just

saying exactly what she wanted which is like look you just can't take self-custody that's that you know um so anyways it's uh it's and i i think you're right like social media has changed the landscape of how we get information and how easy or how difficult it is now to just have the like pull the wool over everybody's eyes because you control everything. And part of that is only because there's so many people on Twitter now and it has been kind of ripped from the control of the U.S. government in the past months. But that's not to say that it can't be co-opted again in the future. However, we're now witnessing a shift of social media again where we're seeing Noster, effectively, becoming an alternative social layer.

And it's so early, but at the same time, you can't go and control that narrative on that platform, right? You can make a lot of noise and you can try, but you cannot control it. And this is something that, you know, luckily right now, I love the community notes thing on here and everything, but it's not to say that that can't be co-opted down the line, right? When you're deferring to the people in charge, you're just one change of the old guard away from, you know, the same draconian rules that you had before. And so I think that, you know, if we lean hard into Nostr, if we can make it so that people realize that this is kind of how free speech was supposed to come about, that it'll be even harder to try and do what they currently do on the regular. 100%. And, you know, what you said about one changing of the guard, you know, they have Elon Musk in their cross. crosshairs right now. Like, you know, and again, like, we're relying on, you know,

must to stay moral and ethical and whatnot. But it just kind of reminds me of the Bitcoin ethos, right? It's like, don't put yourself in a position where you have to trust the third party, right? And I think platforms like Noster, you know, networks like Bitcoin really highlight that, right? Which is like, it doesn't matter who hates this thing. They can't stop you from using. it, right? And that's what makes it very powerful. So, like, even though Elon Musk has been pro freedom of, you know, speech in some senses, he's not perfect, far from it. But, you know, that's not to say that

look like he's had so many allies. I mean, so many enemy, he's made so many enemies because he's allowed this type of debate on Twitter where they used to control it. And I'm really glad that you brought this up, Ben, because I actually have a video of the now speaker describing essentially really how bad it is and how bad it was, better said. And like what I say is please put the political rhetoric aside because that's what politicians do is they always make it about right or left. But not only does he highlight how bad it was, but remember, this is the same government that wants you to trust them with the American version of a central bank digital currency. right? So if they can't even help themselves but to censor speech and information, what makes you

think that they're not going to weaponize the money? Right? If they, and specifically in a country like the U.S., where in the first amendment of the Constitution, speech is literally protected, government couldn't help themselves, but to censor it for political means. Anyways, let's check out the clip. What you've documented carefully in the Twitter files are a couple of key facts. You'll hear people hear a lot of things today, but this is what they need to know. The federal government, from Democrat members of Congress to intelligence agencies, including the FBI, used Twitter and other social media companies to censor Americans' speech. If the alarm bells are not going off, then you're not paying attention. Over the past three years, documents show they prove what you guys

have uncovered here is there's communication between Twitter and the FBI. It was constant. It was pervasive. Twitter was basically an FBI subsidiary before Elon Musk took it over. The Twitter files revealed that by 2020, Twitter was engaged in open information sharing with the intelligence community and now we know there were many intelligence agencies apparently involved in this. The FBI pressured Twitter to act on election related tweets leading up to the 2022 election. Of course, they did it in 2020 as well. And Twitter dutifully censored content as a result. Twitter executives restricted accounts.

They censored speech that conflicted with the less narrative. Twitter has used its internal tools to control and manipulate speech considered misinformation. And who was determining that? It was the government bureaucrats. Documents show that Twitter used visibility filtering to restrict certain accounts and post and removed people from the platform altogether. The Twitter files should be a matter.

a bipartisan concern for every member of Congress and every American citizen because it is a bedrock principle of our constitutional system that the government does not get to decide what speech is acceptable or true. On the First Amendment, Americans have a right to speak freely regardless of whether their speech upsets the preferred narrative. In fact, that's when it needs the most vigorous protection. Everybody on the left used to believe in that, or at least they... So again, I think the politicization, that's a very difficult word, but the right has had a history of censoring the left in the United States as well, right, during the McCarthy era in the 1950s.

So it's not about, you know, whether the left is in, you know, position of power and they censor the right or the right is a position of power and then they censor the left. It's about using a protocol in which, regardless of who's in power, they can't censor the other side.

And then that becomes a forcing function because if you can't censor the speech that you dislike, like that makes your ideas look bad, you have to now debate them on the free market of ideas, and that makes it a lot more difficult, right? So anyways, I'm really glad that you brought that up. And again, it's, yes, it's Elon Musk, thank God, right, for now. But what if he goes nuts in five years, right?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Anything could be. Or he decides to go with Dogecoin as the financial backing of X and decides any discussion around Bitcoin is no good. So, you know, like any variety of things can happen. Or, again, you start criticizing him for something else. And that speech gets, again, stomped on. It's, again, as soon as you rely on people at the top, you're just asking for trouble eventually.

100%. 100%. So this leads me to the breaking news. We didn't have a chance to cover this last week during Simply Sessions because we were covering the Elizabeth Warren news. The Argentina election results came in and it seems like Javier Malie, which is the Austrian economist, libertarian candidate, he did not win. Now, the good news is that he did not lose either. apparently it is going into a runoff later this year specifically in November so this month

but it really was kind of like a reality an awakening to me and I said this I said not going to lie, Malay not winning is extremely disappointing either some funny business or people chose to keep the party in power whose policies have led to more than 100% inflation either way we got a lot of work to do Bitcoiners. To be fair, the runoff between Masa and Melae is November 19th, but after tonight, forgive me if I'm skeptical. Now, put the funny business aside because I don't, there's no evidence of that.

The, this part blows my mind. People chose to keep the party in power whose policies have led to more than 100% inflation. And that to me tells me that there's a, cultural, like this is deeper than we have better monetary policy, we have better money, we have better economic issues. The fact is that there's so many people in Argentina that have lived in the fiat matrix for so long that even though the party in power whose decisions have led to this 100% inflation, they're so addicted to that free fiat money. that they're scared of voting that out, right? And I think this leads to a deeper question,

which is we have a lot of work to do as bit corners to change the culture to make it popular to take personal responsibility again. Because if we don't do that, people like Elizabeth Warren can get away with rhetoric like taking self-cust cities a danger, right? And these types of disappointments will continue to happen because this just tells me that people are just addicted to the money printer, bro. Like that that's what it is.

Like they the handouts. Like they're just like, yeah, give them to. It's like they don't realize it's coming out of their back pocket. They're just like, I'm getting it. It's awesome. It's amazing, you know? Yeah. And I mean, again, when a government has control of.

how its populace is educated. It's very easy to direct your constituents into a way of thinking where they believe that the state is necessary for the society to function. And it's necessary to be given things and for capital to be reallocated and that that somehow makes them better off. But in reality, were the state to step aside. in most instances, people working together as a community would, and let's be honest, just the human nature where, yes, if somebody does something and steals or, you know, harm somebody, then of course

there's going to be consequences. But if you get to a place where society can organize itself and people are free to build and, you know, transact and interact as they see fit, society will come up with solutions for all of these things. And people that work hard and people that can build will be able to create incredible products and services and meet the needs of people in the most efficient way possible. Because if they do not, then somebody else will come along and beat them to it. And so, like, I'm, I'm a firm believer that in, in an, in an environment where there's, of course,

rule of law, you can't go and steal people shit and you can't go and hurt people, but people are free to go and, and transact and, and, you know, create their own economy without any government intervention, that that is always the best path and the most efficient path in the past path to the most human flourishing. Yeah, 100%. A hundred percent. It's just, it was, I forget, it was like Daniel Prince that said it and he was just basically like advocating for, advocating against like what he used a very strong word, which is like indoctrinating, which is like what he would, It was like public schooling is essentially the equivalent of indoctrination. Yeah.

And yeah. But I just think we have so much work to do. I think, you know, this, it caught me by surprise just based on the, you know, the results of the primary. But I think that, you know, we got to wake up and just realize, like, this is really about winning over the culture as well as, you know, it's not just about having sound money. that's great. But like unless like we all want to move to El Salvador, right? You know, we really have to convince other people that Bitcoin truly is the better way, that it's not left versus right, that it's just it's the party of orange versus the party of green, right?

And what side do you want to stand on, regardless of whether you call yourself a liberal, progressive, communist, socialist, fascist, bitcoiner, whatever, you know, all of that stuff like Bitcoin doesn't, care about ideologies. It doesn't. Bitcoin is for everyone, you know. Yeah. So anyways. Yeah. I do think that we get to the point first, probably, where we see Citadel-like states and communities where like-minded people get to get together and, you know, live in a way where, again, there's actual true free markets. And I think that people that move to this kind of Bitcoin standard and this Bitcoin ethos, and it's not even a, it's not even a, again, it's more of a libertarian ethos than anything.

But I think that you'll see now that there's a direct economic incentive that can't be co-opted by the state, you'll start to see those communities thrive. Yeah. And we're going to definitely need some really big walls and a lot of guns. Build that wall. Oh, man. Okay. All right.

So moving on to, we were talking about Elon before. And we were talking about how you'd essentially want to make Doge like the back end of, you know, of X.com, of Twitter. And, you know, it seems like a joke, but like I wouldn't put it past him. But it seems like he has, you know, he wants to make X.com a financial platform, which like the road to hell is paved in good intentions type of thing. Because it's like, yeah, it's so convenient. It's all in one app. But at the same time, it's like, like personally, and I know Ben, you've said some interesting things on Twitter. I don't know if I want my financial stuff.

tied to me saying Bitcoin or slavery. Like, oh, let's shut off his bank account. You can't have, you can't be saying that type of stuff, you know. So yeah, I just think this is a, this is bad. The headline is Elon Musk gives ex-employees one year to replace your bank. It says, goes on to say, quote, you won't need a bank account. It will blow, it would blow my mind if we didn't have that rolled out by the end of next year. And then it goes on to say, Elon Musk wants X, formerly known as Twitter, to be the center of your financial world, handling anything in your life that deals with money.

He expects those features to launch by the end of 2024. I just think that this is such a bad idea, especially with what we know governments want to do with CBDCs and the fact that this is a centralized entity. Look at what happened to Facebook's project, Libra and DM. It got shut down really, really, really quickly because governments found that threatening. Are you telling me they're not going to knock on that? They already hate the guy, right? Are you telling me they're not going to just shut that down real quick under the guys of stopping money laundering and such? You know what?

This might be his orange pill moment, hey? This might be the moment where he tries to do, he has, you know, assuming he has the best intentions. he might try and do this, and then he's going to realize what an absolute cluster fuck compliance is. And he'll realize, listen, this is why Bitcoin is necessary, you know, something that cannot be changed, that cannot be aware of the rules in which there's no one to point to, no CEO to call, no team of developers that you can have, roll something out and coerce people to use. this might be his moment. We'll see. Let's check up on it in late 2024 and see how he's doing. Yeah, 100%. All roads lead to Bitcoin. And it's like if he doesn't come to that conclusion, because, you know, every PayPal started with that intention. Facebook started with that intention. Obviously, the financial system isn't as efficient as it should be. How do we make it better?

but what ends up happening is the government regulators come on knocking the door and then they Frankenstein it, you know, because they want to control it. They want to control the flows of money, right? So anyways, I thought that was interesting. And then we got a couple minutes, Ben, so I might as well talk to you about this because you are, I would consider yourself a tech, a hardware expert. I don't know about you, bro, but I think this is a disaster. And for anyone who's listening, the article is,

Ledger now lets you pay $999 per month to ID your cold wallet seed and send it to trusted third parties. It goes on to say, today is the day I'm glad to announce that our secure wallet recovery solution Ledger Recovery, provided by CoinCover, is now available for Ledger NanoX users. The service, which notably failed to launch earlier this year due to community backlash will cost its users $999 per month after the first free month.

It goes on to say, when you subscribe to Ledger Recovery, a pre-Bit 39 version of your private seed, private key is encrypted, duplicated, and divided into three fragments with each fragment secured by a separate company, Coin Covert, Ledger, Escrow Tech. When you want to get access to your wallet, two of the three parties will send fragments back to your ledger to device, reassembling them to build your private key. Now, I was saying about the road to hell is paved in good intentions, but maybe I'm just simple-minded, but this sure sounds like paying $9.99 for a government backdoor into your wallet.

It's insane, man. Okay. I get that their initial thinking was... people are worried about backups and people are worried about how to secure their seed phrase and we think that we should be able to do this in a way that is very streamlined and easy to recover if something happens. But when you think about how, number one, how this works, it's like, oh, you got to prove who you are so that you can get access to the fragments. I mean, number one, how good is that process really? I guess we'll find out. Number two, the CEO of Ledger literally in an interview when asked if the government could

demand that they hand over the fragments. And he said, well, I mean, I suppose if the government came, then we'd have to comply. What? What? Like, what are you? Okay, then like that's, okay, I'm going to, uh, I'm going to spill the beans here. I've got a new service, actually.

You just send me your seed phrase, and it's only $4.99 a month. And I'll just keep that thing for myself. And it may or may not be more secure than ledger. I guess we don't know. I haven't open-sourced it, so you'll find out. Dude, I mean, like what you're saying is like, it's the same thing. It's the same thing.

You're trusting a third party who's beholden to the state, right? Because they're a company to not give over your money. Look, I bet you Elizabeth Warren is a huge fan of Ledger. I bet you maybe if you looked into her tax, whatever, she's an investor in Ledger. I'm totally making that up, but I would not be surprised if that was discovered. I've just been undercut in the chat. CJ said he did it for $3.99. My business model is ruined.

Guys, this is like if those that have seen something about Mary, this is like the six minute abs thing. Dude, it's, oh man. Okay. And then one more thing, okay,

which is ledger is closed source. So how are they able to do this? You don't know how they're able to do this, right? And if your wallet has that type of capability, right? what else is kind of built into that thing? You don't know. You're trusting.

I loved Ledger. Ledger was my first hardware wallet. But as soon as I heard, I think I hit you up. I'm like, yo, like, bro. Like, this is kind of sketchy, right? So, yeah, man. This is not good. I think we should toss out there that, okay,

if you're in the boat where you have a ledger and you're finding this concerning, and you're like, shit, what do I do? but you don't have money to go out and get new hardware. What I would say is if you're concerned about this, go take your ledger and use it with different software. You don't have to use ledger live to use your ledger. So download Sparrow wallet, Sparrowollet.com,

download Sparrow wallet, and then you just go file new wallet, and then you'll be able to import it and just plug in your ledger, and you can see your entire ledger account there in Sparrow wallet. be able to use it just as normal, but you're not relying on their software. And so then there's no like call home through the Sparrow wallet software, which is open source. And it also has a ton of other great tools that you can use with your ledger that you may not have even known your ledger was

capable of. So for the time being, if you don't want to be using Ledger Lab, go use Sparrow Wallup with your ledger and you'll be just fine. 100%. 100%. But yeah, I didn't want to spook anybody in case, anyone had using specific wallets at home. But yeah, man, this was a lot of fun. It's always a pleasure to come on Simply Sessions. And yeah, thanks, Ben. Dude, thank you for being here. Thanks for filling us all in.

I'll catch up with you, I guess, next week. Yeah, yeah. Next week, let's do it. All right, it's my favorite part. This was your Simply sessions. All right, later, man. See you later. Awesome. All right, everybody, thank you for being here. Now, don't tune out yet. We've got a few more things. I want to keep you updated on the latest and greatest in tech hardware updates, all that good stuff. Let me get my screen up here first. And by the way, I've got my fancy space heater on in the background. So it may boot on here in a second to warm up the room. So excuse the sound of freedom in the background. Oh, there goes.

You get to listen to that for a minute. Anyways, besides the point, this is Bitcoin Deb.org, or rather this is no BS Bitcoin, but they're talking about Bitcoin dev.org. And what is this? This is a website specifically for developers in and around Bitcoin and Lightning Resources. And it was put together by somebody that I think you guys should be aware of. He's an incredible dude. He was integral to my understanding of Bitcoin very, very early on. His name is Vortex.

And he ran a YouTube show back when I got started. And he was gracious enough to have me on very early when I knew far less about Bitcoin than I do now. And he's just an absolute asset. So if you want to check it out, if you're a developer, it is a very technical website. but it says you can find links to the latest, most popular libraries in your favorite programming languages and get started building Bitcoin into your own applications. So check it out. Bitcoindev.org.

Hats off to Vortex. What an absolute living legend. And he just joined Noster, by the way. So if you're on Noster, make sure you follow Vortex. He's incredible. I'm hoping that this is his way of saying, I'm back. I hope so. Vortex, if you see this, come on the show.

I'm way back then. Okay, mini-bits, version 0.1.3, beta, LN URL, pay, and withdraw zaps, onion mince, all this good stuff. So what is mini-bits is basically Chalmian e-cash on Lightning. I've done a video on E-Nuts was the other one that I covered that I did a tutorial on. Anyways, trade-offs, but excellent privacy with this stuff. So what's new, they have Lightning, Kassu, LNURL, and LNURLP, Deep Links. I don't know what LNURLP is, to be honest.

Allows paying to static QR codes, links, and lightning addresses, including NostraZaps, allows withdrawing into the wallet from services supporting LNURL withdraw. There's a universal APK, so that means you can install it without needing an app store. And another new use case is you can run your own Mint

without the need to have a public IP address on and domain. You can expose it via Tor service that the wallet can connect to without additional networking setup. So anyways, I'm probably gonna do a video on many bits soon, but if you haven't checked it out, check out E-Nuts. That's the most recent Chalmy and eCash thing. And C.J. in the chat, let me know that P, is pay, of course.

Moving on, StartOS. They are now under the MIT license. That means fully open source. They did have a non-commercial license before, which, to be honest, I don't really, in around that stuff, I don't, I know some people are very much purists.

For me, I don't particularly care around the commercial stuff. It's, can anybody audit the code, make sure it's doing what it says is doing? I think that's very important to me. But number two, being able to fork it and use it as you see fit if you want, I think that's also very important. The commercial stuff doesn't matter as much to me,

but those that are absolute curious, this is a very big deal to a lot of people. So basically, StartOS by Start 9 has recently been switched to the MIT license, allowing its users to complete freedom to tinker with the product. That's what Bitcoin was published at. And in our opinion is the only true free license. That's from Matt Hill from Start 9. StartOS no longer belongs to Start 9 as a company.

We are its stewards. We are its engineering team. We're going to pour our lifeblood into it. But from a proprietary stance, we have the same rights as everybody else in the world. You added. So, I mean, yeah, of all reasons to support the Start 9 team, I mean, they're, again, they're pouring their heart and soul into it. They've obviously they've built plug and play devices. You don't have to use those.

you can build it yourself and just use the software entirely for free, or you can fork it and you can sell a product using it, which, wow. But beyond that, if you do want to support them, then buying a product from them, you get like the absolute best and most responsive support 24-7 in the game. They're awesome. They're so responsive whenever anybody has an issue with their start device. So, yeah, anyways. They're awesome. And I agree. Think Orange in the chat says Matt Hill is a legend.

Fully agreed. Fully agreed. Anyways, let's move on here. Leanna, this is something I just kind of learned about recently. It was on no BS Bitcoin as well, but I figured I just pull up the website. So this is a simple Bitcoin wallet leveraging on-chain time locks for safety and recovery. So basically my understanding of this is you can, give your assets to people, uh, loved ones,

whatever, like next of kin, um, but you can do it in a way where you don't even need a third party. And the way it works is that you have, uh, a key that can effectively only be utilized to unlock the coins at a certain point in the future.

Um, and so you can give that key to family members and then it just auto unlocks at a certain point. And you can also change all, all the different. ways that you can do this. It works with multi-sig, but basically it's utilizing time locks in order to use it in an inheritance planning way. Or just to kind of like hedge yourself against, oh, what if I lose my key? Well, don't worry. There's another key that won't work now,

but at some point in the future, whatever you set the time lock to, it will become available. So you haven't lost those Bitcoin forever, but just temporarily until the new key comes into effect. So, interesting. I'll probably play around with it and learn about a little bit. Maybe do a video. Moving on, Wicked. I love this guy. What a legend. I'm super happy that we have more people making video tutorials out there. But anyways, he dropped a new tutorial. He demonstrates how to check, delete, and recover a Bitcoin seed phrase on a cold card signing device and also how to recover the seed phrase on a passport and on a jade. And finally, how to recover the seed phrase and sweep all the funds using Blue Wallet.

So be sure to check that out and follow them at W-U-U-S-W-S-W-S-W-S-B-S-W-Discore Bitcoin. Stans for W-E-D-S-MAR Bitcoin. Anyways, check it out. He's also on YouTube. Give him a follow over there. Doing really good work. Also, Nico from Consensus Network at Omni-F-I-N-N-N on Twitter. He said, what am I working on?

I'm glad you ask. The first Bitcoin fiction anthology should be ready by Christmas. It's been a long time since I was so excited about a project and it's called 21 futures. It looks awesome. Yeah, I'm super excited about this. Again, like a fiction anthology, Bitcoin fiction is something I've been really, really waiting for. I think there could be some really cool futuristic tales to tell of how different Bitcoiners

envision the future playing out on a Bitcoin standard. So yeah, I will be watching this closely and I can't wait to see some of this stuff drop. And again, like the AI generated art that's playing here. Yeah, super stoked about this. Hey, question for you guys. What are your most used Bitcoin apps currently? I was curious about this. I put this up on Twitter. I had a lot of cool responses. of Bitcoin apps that I'm using a lot right now. Phoenix, Nunchuk. I've got the progressive web app for my Start 9. Timechain calendar.com as a progressive web app.

Coin Miles for earning stats back when I'm spending fiat for what little fiat I do. Green wallet, because they have now the integrated lightning on chain and liquid and hardware. Zeus, with its new rollout of the native lightning node. on the phone as well as integration with any lightning nodes you may be running. Mutiny, which I'll talk about that in a second. Of course, my, this is not start nine in the bottom. That's my actual S-9 minor, which is sitting behind me, heating my office. It's quite toasty in here right now.

So, yeah, I'm curious, what are yours? Let me know. And you can even just take a little screenshot of it and tweet at me or hit me on Noster, preferably. would be awesome. Let me know what you're using. And if there's something that I should be checking out that I don't know about. If you want to help out a fellow content creator, go and check out Geyser Fund for Kinetic Peru. So K-I-N-E-T-I-C-P-E-R-U. This is Kinetic Finance or Julian. He is doing a something called Bitcoin's Peru's Bitcoin Revolution, a kinetic finance documentary, a film exploring how Bitcoin is igniting a revolution in Peru, transforming isolated and independent indigenous communities

to architects of their own destiny. He goes through kind of his recent trip to Peru with running with Bitcoin, and he breaks down his goal. He wants to go back and do some filming and everything and put together all of the stuff that he's been doing. And he does just incredible, incredible work. I've already seen a bunch of people that have been donating, including Rick from Crypto Cloaks, just dropped 1.4 milsats and BTC pins, 1.4 milsats as well.

And Rick literally just threw in an extra couple thousand sats so that he could be ahead of BTC pins in the leading board, which is awesome. But yeah, go and contribute because dude is doing. doing amazing work. If you haven't seen his prior work, it's it's amazing, but be sure to give him a follow at least, kinetic finance, YouTube, Twitter, Noster, all of that. And speaking of Rick from Cloaks, shout out to Cloaks. They have been shipping S-9 space heaters like madmen. He ordered a ton of them and they're flying off the shelves. He's been pump in my tutorial on the build and everything, and they've been flying off the shelves.

So if you're in the market for an S-9 space heater, so you can get some non-KYC sets, while you heat your home, if you're going to be running a space heater anyways, that's a good way to do it. So check them out. Also, how was everybody's Halloween? I'll show you what I wore. So here's my inspiration. This is Zoolander. and and I he's if you've seen Zoolander you know what's up but anyways I put him in a Bitcoin mine

and so I did the I did the same so I was a really really ridiculously good looking Bitcoin miner so so that was me what did you go what did you go as was it Bitcoin related speaking of Mutiny Wallet earlier I did a tutorial on Mutiny Wallet this week pretty badass I've got to say. So again, automated channels, lightning service provider in the back end, fully self-custody. It has integration with Noster. So you can integrate all your Noster contacts and you can use Noster Wallet Connect. So it auto zaps from your Noster wallet without having to navigate out of your mobile app.

And you don't even need the app store to get it because it is a progressive web app. So you go to the website, you go to the top of your browser, hit install, and it'll show up as an app. and then it gets rid of that browser thing. And you back it up with a regular seed phrase. And recovery is just seed phrase entry if you need to use it. So yeah, pretty badass. Check it out. It's really cool.

I enjoy it. And there seems to be a lot coming from them in the future. So I'm sure it's not the last time. We'll be covering it as a video. And then finally, tomorrow, why are we bullish? Stoked for this one. This one should be a good one. We've got Wicked.

He's coming to the show. Everybody that I was talking about pretty much is on the show tomorrow. Wicked. is coming on. We also got Rustin from Simply Bitcoin. He's been killing it. Best podcast voice in the game. And then of course we've got Rick from Cloaks. He's coming to join the gang. And we're going to have a good old time on a Friday night. Maybe come join us. Have a beverage. Partake. Should be a good time. So don't miss it tomorrow. 6 p.m. Eastern time. That's Friday. And that's it, everybody. This was a good one. Thanks for being here. Of course. I hope you enjoy

enjoyed it. Please do like, subscribe, share all of those things super important. They really do have the show. That little like button is just down below. Make sure you tap it. Make sure you share it and make sure you subscribe if you're not already so you don't miss a thing. You can also hit up the previously mentioned sponsors. Hoddle, Hodel, Coin Kite, Cedor, Nunchuk, and Start 9. And finally, by the way, those are all in the show notes as well. And finally, there's a QR code on the screen right now, and that QR code will lead you to my website where you can book one-on-ones with me. So if you need a little bit of extra handholding, you're setting up new hardware, you're dealing with multi-sig, privacy, nodes, whatever it may be. You can scan that.

You can go, you can book me for a private one-on-one session if you need it. And if you're listening to this on the pod afterwards, it's just btcsessions.ca for the exact same thing. Anyways, guys, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. and I will be seeing you guys next time for your daily session.