BTC Sessions - Trump Aimed To Go After Bitcoin, Land Rover BTC Ad, Lightning VS Liquid EP072

Starting point is 00:00:13 Wasabi wallet and fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC sessions and this is your daily session. Before we dive in, I just want to give a shout out to sponsors of the show, leaden.io. I've been working with these guys for a while now. I think back March of last year, March or April of last year. So over a year now. And they offer a bunch of different things that you can utilize your So the first thing that I ever used them for was their Bitcoin-backed loans. I happened to be in a pinch. I needed some dollars.

Starting point is 00:01:00 And rather than sell my Bitcoin and incur a taxable event and potentially have to buy back higher, I was able to actually put my Bitcoin in a dedicated address that I could audit 24-7. Once it was in there, I got a loan to my bank account within 24 hours. And when I paid that back, I got back the exact same Bitcoin that I originally deposited. Now, they've got a couple other things. They've got their Bitcoin and USDCs saved. and USDC savings accounts where you can earn up to 7.5% interest. And they've got their B2X offering.

Starting point is 00:01:28 That's where you use the same loan mechanism to instantly buy more Bitcoin, effectively doubling your Bitcoin on the spot. So if you want to check out any of that, there's a link in these show notes down below. And if you use that link to get a loan, then they'll actually give you $50 worth of Bitcoin for free. And secondly, we've, of course, got coin cards.

Starting point is 00:01:48 Now, I've been using these guys all the way back six years, already. The first time I ever used these guys was back when I was trying to live on Bitcoin for the very first time, which back then was much more difficult than it is now. But these guys were a godsend. Mike is awesome. He's been running this and growing this company for six years now. And yeah, it's really easy. Just use your Bitcoin to buy gift cards. So if you're like me and you're trying to make that transition to relying less on banks and being more self-sovereign and trying to take advantage of Bitcoin and really, I guess, kind of walk the walk and talk. the talk, the talk. This could be an excellent option for you. They've got tons of different options, pretty much anything you could possibly want to buy in the form of a gift card. They accept Bitcoin on Mainnet and on Lightning as well. And hey, if you got some shit coins that you want to dump and pick up something of value with them, then you can also do that here too. So be sure to check them out. Again, as with Ledin, there is a link in the show notes down below if you want to check them out. And with that, let's dive into the news. So Trump,

Starting point is 00:02:52 back in 2018 apparently told the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to quote unquote go after Bitcoin. This is from the new book from Bolton, from John Bolton, which is apparently coming out soon on June 23rd, although the Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Bolton and has urged the court to stop release, claiming it contains classified information. So regardless, let's get to the meat of this thing, what he actually said. So apparently a part in the book, it says that in a terse exchange about imposing sanctions and tariffs on China, Trump reportedly told Mnuchin, don't be a trade negotiator, ordering him to instead go after Bitcoin in brackets for fraud. He said, if you don't want meat on trade, fine.

Starting point is 00:03:47 your economic team will execute whatever you want, minutiae retorted. So yeah, this is, again, an excerpt from the book, and it was obtained by the Washington Examiner. Now, at the time that this was apparently happening, it was in and around May of 2018, and that's when Bitcoin had rose, I mean, it had obviously dipped from all-time highs,

Starting point is 00:04:10 but at that point it had rose 33% against the dollar. And so it's kind of unclear, from the excerpt what led Trump to order Mnuchin to crack down on Bitcoin, whether they had been talking about it previously just before this happened or not. I guess we'll find out more with the release of the book. But yeah, I mean, Trump has already kind of let known his stance on Bitcoin previously. He tweeted out this tweet, when was this? This is, I think, at some point last year. But anyways, he said, I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity, both points of which are hilarious based on thin air, as if the U.S. dollar is based on anything other than hopes and dreams.

Starting point is 00:05:10 and I mean they're printing trillions in the past few months here. So clearly that's not based on anything and easily debased. Furthermore, the US dollar is the most used asset to a purchase and obtain illegal and illicit goods and or services on the planet. So I mean, both claims. Kind of ridiculous. But regardless, it's in the book. And the best part is that Bitcoin doesn't care.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Honey Badger don't care and Bitcoin chugs along, you know, more than two years after that. No big deal. Let's move on. So major crypto debit card issuer has reportedly suddenly is missing $2.1 billion in cash. So to be clear, this is not specifically to any Bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related company, but rather the issuer of mastercards that can be used by crypto companies. in funding the card with crypto to then be used for, for, you know, retail purchases and online purchases. So I'll just read a little bit about this. So major fintech company Wirecard, which issues crypto.com's debit cards, has fallen into controversy as some of its employees appear to have defrauded the company. As reported by the Financial Times on June 18th, auditors from Big Four accounting company EY could not confirm the existence of 1.9 billion euros in cash, which is around $2.1 billion US dollars. According to the

Starting point is 00:06:46 statement from the company, a trustee of Wirecard's bank accounts attempted to deceive the auditor and falsely indicate the existence of the cash balance. The company's stock price plummeted by almost 50% on Thursday after the issue came to light. According to earlier reports by the Financial Times, Wirecard staff in Dubai and Dublin appear to have conspired and falsely inflated sales and profits for almost a decade. So wirecard issues cards for crypto.com. It also issues for wirex, 10x, and crypto pay. Now, yesterday I was talking about Bitsy launching its debit card. They are not using wirecard. They are being issued. Let me just check on the back of the I looked at it earlier, but they are issued by Centrip.

Starting point is 00:07:41 So, yeah, anyways, I've used YREX in the past, although back then they were, they had their cards issued, Visa cards issued by WaveCrest. And WaveCrest actually collapsed in January of 2018, and they were issuing pretty much all of the debit cards for any companies doing like that, including Bitwala, at which point all those companies were just kind of shit out of luck at that time and weren't able to do anything about it. Like they had to come back and find a new card issue and everything. So the hilarious thing about this is it's not the Bitcoin or cryptocurrency-related stuff that's failing.

Starting point is 00:08:21 It's the traditional system and the fraud within the traditional system that takes time to actually audit. That is the biggest problem here. So regardless, again, the Bitsy card that I just got the other day, not at all. affected by this because it's a failure of a totally different company. But yeah, it's very, very interesting to see how the easily auditable Bitcoin side of things holds up a little bit better in these instances, whereas the traditional stuff is a little bit harder to audit and is subject to these kinds of things. At least it's harder to catch them. Like they said a decade. They've been

Starting point is 00:09:04 going on with this fraud for over a decade, that's crazy. Like in the industry that we're in, where it comes to things like Bitcoin, it's not long before shit like that catches up to some of these companies. Yeah, they might be able to string it along for a little bit, but you can't just inflate money out of nothing and kind of stringing along for too long before it collapses in on itself. And there's this natural check of, you know, of a currency that can't be debased that forces anybody committing that kind of fraud out in the open relatively quickly. At least it's like you can't get away with decades of fraud with this kind of stuff, at least from what we've seen so far. So regardless, anyways, if you're utilizing any of those

Starting point is 00:09:55 cards, you may not notice anything right away. So they ejected the person or the people that were responsible for this, it seems. But because the company is going to have that sudden liquidity crunch, you may notice delays or some issues when trying to use the card, but it's unclear as of yet exactly what will come with this. The cards still do work from what I'm hearing, but who knows, that could change. Either way, like your Bitcoin and everything, if you're holding it yourself in a wallet that is connected to funding that card, the cryptocurrency, if it's personally held, shouldn't be an issue. It's more the funds that are already allocated to the card that could be an issue for a little bit. So we'll see. Moving on, Land Rover, odd little segue and link here,

Starting point is 00:10:52 but anyways, Land Rover just dropped a new ad for a new vehicle that I don't even care what the vehicle is, but besides the fact, they just dropped a new ad. And what it is is it's the history of the vehicles that they put out alongside historical moments that happen to coincide with different times where they've been releasing vehicles. And so they go through this history of all of these major things. They start with the first heart transplant in 1967. They mentioned happenings of an Olympian Mark Spitz and his seven gold medals in 1972. They mentioned the launch of MTV in 1981 and the Berlin Walls Fall in 1989. And then getting into the 2000s, they highlight one of the main things as the Bitcoin network being created in the year 2009. So it's just kind of cool to see

Starting point is 00:11:48 within this historical context of all of these major things happening, they decided to pick out Bitcoin being launched in 2009. And the reason, I mean, obviously a lot of people watching this do see it as a huge historical moment, but it's not really viewed as a huge historical moment by a large swath of normies yet of regular people that aren't really interested in Bitcoin yet. But I think moving forward, you'll see more and more stuff like this beckoning back to the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 and its importance on the trajectory of a lot of global macro events. So yeah, cool to see. And again, I think we'll see more of this in the future. So I wanted to touch on this article that just dropped for the Bitsy Academy. We had Vlad Kosteia who write this for us.

Starting point is 00:12:42 Excellent article. It's talking about Lightning Network versus Liquid, which one is for you? And so the way that this article is kind of broken down, it's in different, not necessarily use cases, but categories and features. And so he goes through and says, okay, based on this particular feature, which one wins. And so the ones that he talks about, he talks about transaction limits and liquidity, talks about security, he talks about decentralization, privacy, speed, and transaction fees. Okay. And he goes through all of those. and talks about how each one is influenced by the protocol being used. And it's very, very, I think it's well split up,

Starting point is 00:13:28 and it's not super biased towards one of the other I found, but more just kind of outlines, you know, what is it for, and what are you trying to do? And in that context, how will it best serve you? So I do recommend you check this out. Now, as far as utilizing both of these, I played around with liquid and lightning, obviously. I think my favorite lightning wallet thus far has been Phoenix wallet.

Starting point is 00:13:52 Because of the ease of use, you don't really have to really set anything up. It automates a lot of stuff. Now, that does result in, yeah, you might be paying like 10 SATs or something for a transfer or whatever. But it also is just so seamless when you scan a regular Bitcoin QR code instead of a lightning invoice. It detects that and knows that you want to swap from lightning. to main chain Bitcoin and vice versa. It'll actually easily help you move money in and out of lightning relatively seamlessly. So I do recommend you check that one out.

Starting point is 00:14:28 And then for Liquid, obviously, given that it was created by Blockstream. The Blockstream Green Wallet allows you to utilize the Liquid Network. Now, I don't use Liquid as much. I think it's more of a tool for large traders and inter-exchange settlements, things like that. but it's still fun to play around with and they do have confidential transactions. Keep in mind it is a one-to-one peg with Bitcoin. So it's a separate token. It's a side chain of Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:14:56 So it's not, while there are definite security measures making sure that that one-to-one peg is maintained, just know that it's not specifically Bitcoin, I'll say. It is a one-to-one peg token on a side chain of Bitcoin. So keep that in mind, whereas Lightning is actually Bitcoin locked in a channel that is, I mean, you can audit both to prove that they're there, but just there are different tradeoffs. So keep that in mind. But if you're looking to play around, Blockstream Green and Phoenix Wallet, I would start there. Moving on, I really enjoyed this website that I came across, Bitcoin Q&A.com slash node compare. And what it has here is a bunch of different, uh,

Starting point is 00:15:44 plug-and-play knows that you can get or build yourself. And it gives all of the different features that could be included or are included and gives them yeses or knows and any of the cons and starting prices and all of that. So they talk about whether you build it yourself, what the hardware is that's supported, things like does it have lightning, ride the lightning, remote tour, coin join, BTZ pay server, block explorer, mempool viewer, Samurai's Dojo, any other unique features, the pros and the cons, what it's best at and the starting price.

Starting point is 00:16:19 And so it's a very nice little rundown here. When I'm looking at it, maybe I'm a little bit biased, but man, my node just literally has everything and that's what I love to use. Nottal looks pretty rad as well. I haven't played with one of those. Raspi Blitz, they've got Ronin Dojo in there. They've got the various types of mine node that you can use

Starting point is 00:16:46 and a couple different types of Noddle as well. Either way, very useful sites. So kudos here. Moving on, I wanted to touch on this because I just, I find it so funny. So somebody tried to scam me earlier today. I mean, it was very evident. It was a scam from the get-go. But I just wanted to read through some of these messages.

Starting point is 00:17:08 And this links back to last year I scammed a scammer. Oh, we'll get into that and say. Anyways, so somebody messaged me on Facebook Messenger pretending to be Chris DeRose, who is another like Bitcoiner cryptocurrency related podcaster that's been around for quite some time. And I've met Chris once in 2018, I want to say. Yeah, 2018, I believe in the fall. I was down at a conference there. And so I got to meet up with him, chat with him for a little bit. Really nice guy. I enjoy. I had some really good conversations with him. But besides the fact, anyways, this guy's posing as Christopher Rose. And I'll just go and look at some of the conversations. So we get chatting and right away, I was like, I'm pretty sure this isn't him, obviously. But yeah, we get to just some small talk and I was probing. I was like, hey, when was the last time I saw you?

Starting point is 00:18:12 I can't remember. And I mean, it's obvious he should know that we met once. He's like, yeah, it's been forever, man. I can't recall when we last saw. That's funny because we've only seen each other once ever. So anyways, I know where Chris, like in general, I know what state he lives in. I also know he for sure doesn't have children. And yeah, anyways, besides the fact, I was like, hey, man, how is your move to Kentucky?

Starting point is 00:18:42 He all settled in and then, of course, yeah, it's all good over here. How's the family doing? And then I asked him about his kids resuming school in the fall. And he's like, yeah, absolutely. And so at that point, obviously, total scammer. So then we start chatting. And it wasn't long before the scam came out. And he said, I went into Bitcoin mining with a mining corp.

Starting point is 00:19:09 And it's been amazing. I've made a lot, even for my own startup. And so I start getting, like, not excited, but pretending to be excited. Yeah, and I was like, wow, that's incredible. I've heard it's mega profitable right now. Was thinking of dabbling myself. Yes, it is, man. It's really great.

Starting point is 00:19:32 My mining platform is even more amazing. You can get 2.9% to 3.5% daily interest on your investment. That's 87% monthly. And then I started inserting like techno babble bullshit that to any person that's actually into Bitcoin and like knew anything would be like, that doesn't make sense. So I was like, sounds like they pay out after every coin base cycle. They must be running those new S-9s. Damn. So we keep going.

Starting point is 00:20:04 He didn't call me out on my bullshit there. So clearly he didn't know what he was talking about. I was like, so if you reinvest, it goes into more nodes and compounds your hash rate, that would be amazing. I honestly don't know why more people aren't doing it that way. So again, totally doesn't call me out on like my nonsensical babble. And we just kind of keep going back and forth. And I was getting excited because I was like, I might be able to, for a second time, scam a scammer. And so I started to ask about like how I get involved.

Starting point is 00:20:39 and is it open to everybody? Maybe we could keep it hush, hush, and he's getting me to invest. And I'm trying to like wow him and get the dollar signs flashing in his eyes. So I'm like, how about, what about 10 coins? I just got 10 Bitcoin from a side deal. I think it might be good to cycle them through this,

Starting point is 00:20:57 but I know these things have low limits. Is 10 Bitcoin too much? I could always go lower. He's like, it's not too much, man. The higher your investment, the higher your daily interest is, man. let me get you the investment plans so you can see anyways we keep kind of going on he gives me some like ridiculous he's like oh if you if you put in 40 bitcoin you can get uh you can get 4% a day anyways so uh i'm i'm trying to like spark his interest and i got deep into the conversation

Starting point is 00:21:33 and at one point i i was trying to figure out how could i scam him and then like donated to charity again like last time. And I got further into this conversation with him. And I tried to say that I was trying to like dodge taxes through my company. And so I needed a good paper trail. And I needed some sort of a deposit to my company account to come through first from him so that I had the necessary paper trail to justify the outflows of 10 Bitcoin, which again makes no sense whatsoever.

Starting point is 00:22:08 but I was trying and it was working it was going well but then he was trying to get around like not actually sending the 50 bucks and then I think he started getting suspicious and anyways long and the short of it I tried to decoy him with like another fictitious another fictitious investment from adam back and block stream and tried to make it seem like I was potentially going to put my money there in the end he ended up bailing he deleted the rest of the conversation so I couldn't even screenshot how far we got into it before that happened. Unfortunately, that's just those are the breaks. So I was sad about that.

Starting point is 00:22:48 Anyways, so I was playing around with this because a lot of scammers, they'll utilize different social engineering tactics to try and get you to do something you wouldn't normally do. And so what I wanted to play around with was some of these same tactics that I've been reading about that people all. often do. And so there's a few books that I read on this that I've found very interesting. And you can get these an audiobook, but worth taking a look at just so that you're cognizant of if somebody ever tries to scam you. So one is influence the psychology of persuasion. That was a really good

Starting point is 00:23:25 one. Um, the like switch. This one, this one I really liked. It's an ex-fbi agent. And it talks about what he's done in the past to influence people to get people to like him and in turn do what he wants. And then social engineering, the art of human hacking. This one is pretty in depth and it talks of a lot of different case studies about how companies will hire people to come and try to social engineer themselves into a position where they can extract information. Excellent book as well.

Starting point is 00:23:56 I'd say the last two, the likes which and this social engineering art of human hacking are both excellent. Yeah, if that's what you're into, go check it out because you can never be too careful. and if you know the mindset of a scammer, then you're more likely to pick it out when you see those tactics thrown at you. And again, this is all a throwback to something that happened last summer in August.

Starting point is 00:24:21 And I got a message on Instagram from somebody trying to scam me more or less. And so I started like talking with them and pretending that I was like a wealthy businessman that had more money than cents that had just gotten Bitcoin. I ended up turning it around on them and scamming them and they sent me 50 bucks,

Starting point is 00:24:41 which I then donated to Bitcoin Venezuela. I just thought it was funny and then I put it in a blog post and it blew up and within a few days I was literally like international news. I remember like my friends one morning being like, are you, Ben, are you serious? It was like the front page news of the CBC and it had like Donald Trump,

Starting point is 00:25:02 whatever he had done that day. And then literally the next story was like, my dumb face and my show. And yeah, anyways, I thought it was super hilarious. So if you want to read through that old thread, all included in the links down below, it's a good laugh. I think you'll find it funny.

Starting point is 00:25:19 Anyways, guys, I am going to wrap up there. Thank you so much for watching and or listening. If you want to help out this show, of course, you can always hit like, subscribe, and share here on YouTube. You can check out my other platforms that I'm on. Facebook, D-Ly, Twitter, I stream live. I'm on Twitch. I'm also audio only on the podcast for Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all that. Just search me up. You'll find me. If you want to help with the show

Starting point is 00:25:47 another way, you can hit up the sponsors down below that was leaden and coin cards, links in the show notes. Or if you don't already have your Bitcoin on a hardware wallet, please do that, obviously, because if you leave it on an internet-connected device like just your phone or computer without additional protection. You can get hacked. You can get your shit stolen. Don't be that victim. Start future proofing now. One of the devices that you could use is the ledger, the ledger nanoX or the ledger nanos. I have both. I also use other hardware wallets. So even if you're not into the ledger, just get yourself protected. But if you like the ledger and you want to pick one up and want to help the show, there's a link in the show on us down below. And finally, if you really like what you saw,

Starting point is 00:26:31 you can always drop me a lightning network tip at my tippin.me page that is tippin.combe slash at BTC sessions. And with that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful evening, a wonderful rest of the day, wherever you are, and I'll see you next time for your daily session.

BTC Sessions - Trump Aimed To Go After Bitcoin, Land Rover BTC Ad, Lightning VS Liquid EP072

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