BTC Sessions - US Gov VS Bitcoin Privacy - Could it Become Illegal? ep367

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

In this must-watch news roundup, we dive into the US government's controversial stance on Bitcoin privacy practices and explore whether they could become illegal. But it's not all doom and gloom! The new Speaker of the House is a Bitcoin enthusiast, shaping a potentially favorable landscape for BTC in politics. Meanwhile, Joe Rogan has finally acknowledged Bitcoin as the most likely to succeed in the digital money realm. We also unpack a new report by Fidelity that lays out a compelling investment case for Bitcoin. Plus, did you know that Mark Zuckerberg is a Bitcoiner? In a surprising turn, Apple has bent the knee to China's app store censorship demands. Tune in for these stories and more! 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

Yo, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to the show. Another Thursday, another episode of Simply Sessions. I've got my second tip, my better tip back on the show, fresh tipped from Pacific Bitcoin. And Nico is going to come in and fill us in on all the latest and greatest in Bitcoin. I got the tech updates for you coming down the pike here. Of course, this is live.

Anything can happen. Make sure to take a look at my good friend here, Bill. We'll do it live. We'll do it live. Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. The thing sucks. Of course, if you have not already,

smash that like button just below there. Do it now. It helps a ton. Please do. Subscribe. All that good stuff. and keep those comments coming in the chat. We'll be bringing it up on the live screen here.

Anyways, I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your simply session. All right, before we dive into the news, let's take a look at where we are in the market right now. This is timeschain calendar.com. We're sitting at $26,751.54 dollars per coin. A single US dollar will pick you up 3,738 sats. In terms of fees, next block, 22 sats per byte, anytime six sats,

and try not to be thrown off any transactions sub two sats per byte. They'll probably get purged from the mempool. In terms of Bitcoin mine, we're sitting at 19.51 a million. That is 92.91% of the total supply. Coming up on the halving pretty soon here in April, it's getting closer, 28,000 some odd blocks until they're having. So, yeah, keep an eye of. Shout out to sponsors of the show, hoddlehottle.com.

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Check them out today. Links are down below. Of course, Coin Kite. Once you stack some stats, you're going to want to secure them with some of the best hardware on the market. Coin Kite kills it. I love my cold card Mark 4. I've got all their other goodies, tap signers, sats cards, block clocks, open dimes, all of that. And, hey, have you reserved yours? The cold card, Q1? Very excited. Also, they got this curious little guy here, the stats link. I also reserved one of those. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure It's just like an offset conscious gold card. But really, I'm not sure, but I bought it anyways.

Fuck it. Fuck it. I'll let you know what it is when it gets here. Anyways, videos coming soon. Check out coincite.com. Use code BTC sessions for 5% off everything in the store. Backups, of course, are important. Once you get your hardware, you're going to want to back it up on solid steel. And one of the most robust and premium solid steel backups on the market is Cidor.

Really simple disc. encapsule enclosure. The starter set comes with everything you need, mallet, stamp your seed, all of it on the discs. And it comes with the enclosures. You can get multiple enclosures or order more discs if you need to switch out your seed. And the whole thing is beautifully designed.

I love it. I did a video on it. Check them out. Links are all down below depending on the cheapest shipping for you. And Nunchuk, of course, for your multi-sick needs. Check them out for their Honey Badger program. You can set it up on your mobile device, tap signers, cold cars.

it's any kind of hardware, your little hard desires. On top of that, once you're all set up with your multi-sig, it has built-in inheritance planning so that your stats get to your next of kin, if anything should happen to you. And of course, no K-Y-C. You don't have to sign up and use your personal information to have this set up and working for you. So check them out. I have a tutorial on them as well. And last shout out of the day, of course, Start 9, your sovereign computing solution.

These guys offer plug-in-play sovereign computing solutions. You can run your full Bitcoin stack, Bitcoin Core, Lightning, Manpula, space, join market. Also, your data, files, passwords, photos, nostriles, and clients, all that good stuff. They have from entry level all the way up to what is on my shelf right now, which is the Start9 server pure and absolute beast. So check them out, start nine.com. And with that, I'm going to stop my rambling here. And I'm going to bring in the co-host with the most, the tip to my tip. Dude, how you doing?

I mean, dude, we are so synchronized. I, you know, we were kind of losing synchronization for a little bit. And I made tutorials this morning. It felt really great. It felt really awesome. I couldn't agree more. I feel you in my brain now, now that it's fresh and it's, you know, Mrs. Sessions, Lisa, did us a huge solid by freshening up your tip.

And we have a third tip now, don't we? We do have a third tip. We, it's a fish, is it a movement? It's a movement now. I think it's happening. But hats off or tips off to Nathan Fast. And now, so what is it? So we had simply sessions, but now it's.

It's simply fast sessions. We got to do a trio show at some point, once in a while with him. And then eventually there'll just be so many tips that it'll just be like, Cacophany. Who's the next target? Who's the next target? Who's going to be the fourth tip? I don't know.

It's got to be somebody that is obviously like quasi-public that like they can't run from it. They have to be in public with it where they're going to be seen. It can't be like, oh, I'm I'm upset conscious and nobody knows who I am, right? It's got to be vivid. I see Tatum in the chat. So. Tatum, Tatum, the hair dot. I'm coming to your house right now, right after this show.

Right now, Tatum. Yeah. It's happening. It's happening. Oh, wait, I think we got a volunteer. I guess I could do my beard tip. Okay. I'll take it.

I'll take it. It's soon, again, my op-sec is going to be so good pretty soon. I'll blend right in with the crowd. Nobody will know I'm even there. It's going to be incredible. Oh, man. Oh, man. But yeah, it's a movement.

I'm claiming, I'm claiming that I'm a co-founder, all right? because I'm I'm number two. Yeah. All right. I'm also in this movement. We can't, we can't ignore this comment. Tips are the new laser eyes.

Thanks, Dave. I appreciate that. That's a great comment. That deserves to be framed. I think so. Also, side note,

after we got the tips all died, we had tip, like wrapper tip come in and give her thumbs up in approval. Tip approved the tips. Yeah. It would not be official. if she didn't approve.

So it was very important that she was there and gave a thumbs up. Yeah, I'm glad. I need her on a pin so I can wear it. I guess we should probably talk about the news, given that's what this show is about. Yeah, maybe. Or we could just keep talking about tips. But yeah, lots of news, lots of news.

Lots of news that has happened. kind of setting the tone. We have the great Lynn Olden pointing something out. She said, oh, and give a little bit of context, by the way. So Kevin McCarthy, he was the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. He got ousted. It was the first time in American history. You know, Fiat is just throwing everything.

The collapse of Fiat is just throwing everything. Politics is a madhouse, whatever. And he got ousted. And the intern speaker, so the speaker that hasn't officially been elected, but he's a speaker until they kind of figure it out who the next speaker is going to be, is a gentleman called Patrick McKenry. Now, it's really interesting, as Lynn Alden pointed out, the acting speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has been hosting the Bitcoin white paper on his subdomain of the House website for almost three years now. The government is not a monolith, especially in a republic. It is a mess of many different interests. Imagine telling Satoshi in 2009 that in a little over a decade there would be leaders of the

US government hosting his white paper. Don't trust verify. Let's click on the link. And will you look at that? It is literally the Bitcoin white paper and you guys can't see it, but it is literally being hosted on a .gov website. Now in terms of the US presidential. line of succession, God forbid anything happened to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Speaker of the House is actually third in line for the U.S. presidency. And this dude is literally hosting the Bitcoin White Paper. There are some things that Coinbase does right, and they have like these politician profile. And they tell you whether the politicians are pro. Bitcoin and shitcoins or anti-Bitcoin and shitcoins, right? And this guy is extremely supportive. And the guy who actually has a chance at winning or becoming the next speaker, he is Tom Emmer.

And Tom Emmer has been extremely pro-Bitcoin. He's actually the gentleman that you and I, Ben, Saul, absolutely massacre Gary Gensler. when we watched that video of him just getting grilled in a congressional committee, that was Tom Emmer. And Tom Emmer has a, he has a pretty good shot at becoming the next speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. And we know how he feels about Bitcoin. We know how he feels about CBDCs. And if you kind of, if you see this on its own, you'd be like, okay, Nico, maybe this is an offshoot.

But you got to connect the dots between everything that's going on. So the current Speaker of the House, super pro Bitcoin, he's hosting the Bitcoin white paper on his website. But we also have a presidential candidate. We've talked about this, RFK Jr. He just dropped out from the Democratic Party. He's running as an independent to run for president. He spoke at the Bitcoin 2020-3 conference, says that if he got elected, he would protect the right to self-custody. and he would also protect the right for you to run your own node and all that.

So on the Democratic side, on the independent side. And also on the Republican side as well, you have Governor Ron DeSantis who actually passed a bill in Florida that would ban CBDCs. If he got elected, he promised to ban CBDCs and to be pro-B Bitcoin, right? So all of these things are kind of shifting. And if you look at it from the angle of the Overton window, which I think is really, really important to kind of think about it from this sense. But first we have to define what the Overton window is. The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at any given time. It is known as the window of discourse, right?

And here's a really good graphic for our audio listeners at the very top. It's unthinkable, radical, acceptable, sensible, sensitive. popular policy, right? Obviously we want to get here. And El Salvador, it's already policy in Argentina. It's basically already policy. They hate the central bank. Well, now, the current U.S. Speaker of the House,

the third most popular member of government, you can make the argument for that, is hosting the Bitcoin white paper. So where do you think, in terms of the Overton window, where is the political discourse? I am pretty confident to say that, that the idea of Bitcoin is no longer radical. I would basically say it's around acceptable and sensible, to be honest with you.

This isn't just happening in the U.S. I know I talk a lot about the U.S., but we also have the conservative presidential or prime minister candidate in Canada, Pouvier, Paul I've ever, totally butchered his name. Sorry, guys, I'm not Canadian. I've butchered that pronunciation. he's super pro Bitcoin and he's super anti-CBDCs. So the point that I'm trying to make is that this is clearly, things are clearly shifting in one direction.

Bitcoin is becoming acceptable and political discourse. The idea of Bitcoin isn't radical. The idea of ending the central bank isn't radical. The idea of having a non-state currency is not radical anymore. And that is a massive deal. That is a big win for us Bitcoiners. And that is a huge defeat for governments. Because their main weapon is this idea that, hey, guys, without us, money can exist.

It seems like people are no longer buying into that bullshit. Yeah. I want to, the one thing I was going to say here, this Tyler Durden in the chat said Liz Warren is still a big hurdle. I would venture to say that stances like Elizabeth Warren and Brad Sherman and people that basically just want to outright ban Bitcoin, those views are becoming the radical views. It's on the fringe of being viewed as radical by your average person. They're looking at it going like, I mean, come on. Like, we didn't do this to the internet.

Like I think people are starting to piece together like, okay, you know, Bitcoin exists. And it's a thing. Even if they don't care about it or they don't use it, I think a lot of people aren't, aren't kosher. They're not viewing it as kosher to just outright ban it. So I feel like they're soon to be on the fringe and like the radical line of thinking when they say they want to get rid of it. As much as anybody saying that you should ban the internet would be viewed as a crackpot. 100% I think it's going to be politically unviable, you know, in a couple of years, this whole idea of, of, of, you know, Elizabeth Warren is running on an anti-Bitcoin stance. Like, in five years, like, she won't get elected into office, you know? That's something that she could do right now. But, you know, as, as, you know, the population ages and more of the, because we know how much, how much. You know, we know that the younger population holds a tremendous amount of their assets in Bitcoin.

Oh, Opti's ex-girlfriends in the chart. I'm going to ban Bitcoin. So, so yeah, man. So, yeah, Elizabeth Warren Dinosaur, the Bitcoin meteor is looking at it. And she's like, I'm going to make that meteor go away. Like, I don't know, man. Yeah. Not happening.

Not happening. I completely agree. All right. In other news. We got two videos back to back. Again, I'm going to talk about it. In terms of the Overton window, it is shifting ever so slowly, but it is shifting. We have the most popular broadcaster in the world, 11 million views and listens per episode.

We have the man, the myth, the legend, himself, Joe Rogan. And let's take a look at what he had to say about Bitcoin on one of the latest episodes of the Joe Rogan experience. I mean, the real fascinating crypto is Bitcoin. To me, I mean, that's the one that I think has the most likely possibility of becoming a universal viable currency. And it's, you know, it's limited in the amount that there can be. It's, you know, people mine it with their own computer. It's like that to me is very fascinating. And I love the fact that it's been implemented and that at least some, like I've had a,

Andreas Antonopoulos on the podcast and he's when he talks about it he's living it he's spending all of his money everything he has paid is in Bitcoin he pays his rent in Bitcoin everything he does is in Bitcoin I mean so I mean dude like yeah when are you going to bring BTZ sessions on the show mr. Joe Rogan I think we need like we need like a booth or a sailor or somebody somebody who can can slam out some talking points very succinctly in a short conversation. I like that. But I love what you're saying.

And this is a different Overton window that's shifting. Hey? It's the Overton window of Bitcoin versus crypto. And the people that are already in tune with the idea that Theat is bad, the overton window for a lot of notable individuals is now shifting to right over top of Bitcoin. instead of having all of these shit coins in their purview saying like, oh, they're all the same. That is definitely shifting as well. 100%.

100%. It's shifting ever so slowly. The Bitcoin ethos is slowly starting to penetrate into mainstream consciousness. You have Joe Rogan saying what Fidelity actually said, we're going to get to that in the minute. Basically, like, Bitcoin's not crypto. Like Bitcoin is special. Bitcoin is unique. Yeah, how long until he has someone like Sailor on the show.

It is quite perplexing. It's something that we've talked about on Simply Sessions before. Like, what is Joe Rogan waiting for? Those episodes that he did with Andreas Antonopoulos, those are from like 2016, 2017. They're very old, you know? I think it's time. I think it's time, to be honest. In other news, also pretty crazy.

Shout out to Peter McCormack and what Bitcoin did. great podcast. Peter's a great dude. And take a look at this. Documenting Bitcoin got a clip of basically a former top Facebook exec, quote saying Mark Mark Zuckerberg is a Bitcoiner. Let's check it out. You can theorize a lot about the experience we've had, but having lived it has changed my worldview and my appreciation in such a way that now I have this unshakable conviction that, that Bitcoin is the only form of neutral internet money there will ever be. And it's one thing saying it because you have laser shooting from your eyes. It's another coming to that conclusion after having tried for the right reasons,

I believe for the right reasons, to build a technology that would scale to billions of people and that could provide a stable form of digital money that would travel on this new scalable payment system. And then you've come to the realization of actually private companies issuing a new unit of account of of anything that has that kind of distribution is problematic. You might not want to answer this, but is Zach a, is he a Bitcoin? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he appreciates Bitcoin. But yeah, I think, you know, there was, we had a lot of conversations about this.

Especially when I was struggling with seeing how we could decentralize this thing enough. We've had a lot of conversations and attention was between full decentralization and and the reality of scalability, usability issues, and then the volatility that we would have to put people through to enable them to use a product. So it was a... And then, you know, when you look at very good currencies, like the dollar, and some will argue it's not, etc.

But I think, you know, everyone in the world, I think, you know, we talked about your trip to Lebanon and other places where people, what they want is to hold dollars. And when you have a good currency like the dollar, the volatility or the lack of volatility required for you to create a digital asset that can master. is very, very, very small. So so much shit to unpack there, but he basically said that the CEO and founder of Facebook,

now called Meta, it is a bitcoiner. And before that, he talked about how he came to this conclusion. And the reason that he came to this conclusion is because Facebook meta launched their own type of cryptocurrency, called DM, before it was called Libra. And the problem is that it generated a tremendous amount of backlash from government regulators in the European Union, in the USA, and in other countries. And it was ultimately shut down in January 2022.

Now, why did he say that having this experience with Debra and DM and Libra made him realize the importance of something decentralized. If it's issued by a central authority, it will be either co-opted or shut down, right? PayPal tried to do the same thing back in the 90s, and it got shut down, right? So that's why I believe that Elon Musk, if he wants to do this whole X.com thing,

and I know he's, like, riding on high right now, and he's like on his horse, and he just thinks he's untouchable, if he really wants to roll out a payment platform, he has no choice but to use Bitcoin. If he doesn't use Bitcoin, it will inevitably get co-opted and it will get shut down. And that's why David Marcus said what he said. And that's why he said what he said about Mark Zuckerberg. Because Mark Zuckerberg realized, holy cow, unless we use something that is completely decentralized,

we can't do this. We can't launch this this payment platform and give give Give the world access to the global economy. We can't do that because if we go through governments If we go through regulation, they will shut it down. They don't want competition. They have a monopoly Right with Bitcoin. It's a forcing function because it forces it down their throats. They can't do anything about it Therefore, they're forced to compete with it, and we all know who's going to win that competition, which is why they hate it the way they do, right? So anyways, really interesting. It sounds like in order to, I mean, for people in those positions of power, you know, the ones that launch a shit coin to make fiat gains just get angry at the system in terms of like, oh, they're clamping down on everything.

and they almost had this knee-jork reaction of like, oh, it's going to happen to you two and you two. And Bitcoin's not exempt and everything because they're incentivized to think that way. But it sounds like when you try to altruistically launch a shit coin to give people greater functionality and cross-border whatever you're trying to do and it still gets stamped out, that's that instant realization of like, oh, wow, this is why this is why Bitcoin wasn't. important. Like I, I tried to do, and who knows, like, maybe there were ulterior motives with Zuckerberg and Marcus, but like from what he's saying there, he felt like they were trying to do something good and simply just wanted to offer the ability to not be, um, not be confined by a singular currency or government and transact globally very, very simply. And he quickly fucked around and found out

that yeah Uncle Sam European Union everybody they're not going to put up with that shit and if there's somebody to clamp down upon they will and they did and so he had like it seems like he may have been penetrated by the orange pill

exactly all roads lead to Bitcoin some people have to hit themselves you know metaphorically against the wall a little bit harder than others to kind of reach the conclusion that okay you know I no one could own this thing you know it's it's like you know you need a little bit of humility

to truly understand bitcoin because if you don't have that humility you know if you're this all powerful government or this billionaire you have this like I'm here I'm here I'm super smart I'm here to fix bitcoin I can make bitcoin better but history has shown Bitcoin's history has shown how much of a cluster fuck that has been for Roger Ver for Ghan you know for Gihon they've just absolutely they have significantly less bitcoin than they had before if they just would have stayed humble and stack sats you know so so yeah just very very interesting um i think this is just wins overall bitcoin can't stop winning um in other news this is pretty crazy uh this is some news that came out about you know when we were in cali but uh the u s government frames bitcoin privacy as criminal what are they talking about in another unfortunate turn of events for anyone hoping their right to privacy to be protected as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, or other applicable law and federal law, the U.S. government has argued that the disclosure of proprietary chain analysis

heuristics information in the case U.S. versus Sterling Gov would jeopardize numerous law enforcement investigations and impact the effectiveness of law enforcement tracking tools by enabling the development of, quote, criminal countermeasures to blockchain analysis. The oath each and every U.S. government employee pledges when first taking the office reads, I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic,

and that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion and that I will well and faithfully disenfranchise. discharge the duties of the office on which I'm about to enter, so help me God. Apparently, this oath is only applicable so long as it serves the U.S. government's agenda. While attempting to retain a protective order to seal the disclosure of chain analysis, heuristic information, the U.S. government has, in essence, argued that the right to privacy

does not exist when transacting on a blockchain. In the newly released court documents the U.S. government defined software developed to protect individual financial privacy and the blockchain, such as coin joins, as adversarial, contending that the disclosure of chain analysis training methods and techniques bears the reasonable expectation to enable, quote, circumvention of the law. This is completely against the Fourth Amendment, which says that the government is not allowed to do any unreasonable searches and seizures. This is not innocent until proven guilty. This is you are guilty. You are guilty. because you are seeking privacy,

which is absolutely crazy. This should not come as a prize to you for anyone who's tune in to Simple Sessions because we have read this passage from this book, The Sovereign Individual, millions of freaking times because it hit the nail on the head so many times, and I think it's completely applicable

to this latest news. It goes on to say, this is a book from the quote, The Sovereign Individual, it says, Lacking their accustomed scope to tax and inflate, governments even in traditionally civil countries will turn nasty. Businesses that offer services that facilitate the realization of autonomy by individuals

will be subject to infiltration, sabotage, and disruption. Arbitrary forfeiture of property already commonplace in the United States, where it occurs 5,000 times a week, will become even more pervasive. Governments will violate human rights, censor the free flow of information, sabotage useful technologies and worse. This is the separation of money in state after all, and the state sure is getting desperate. And I love that part in that article where it said that even though government employees, they swear an oath to the Constitution, really what they are actually loyal to is the government.

They're loyal to the money printer, right? They're loyal. That's where their loyalty lies. It doesn't lie to the Constitution. If it doesn't lie to the, if their loyalty doesn't lie to the constitution, that means that their loyalty does not lie to we the people, right? It lies to the administrative state.

Some people call it the deep state, right? So anyways, what's your take, Ben? So the wild thing to me about this one is they've effectively said, I mean, first of all, they're trying to put somebody in jail. and they're trying to use chain analysis as evidence that this individual has committed a crime. The defense has said, okay, show us how you came to your conclusion

with the metrics that you used on chain to determine that a crime was committed by this individual to which they've effectively gone, we can't share that information with you because if we do, then people will learn from that and then be able to subvert our systems. The thing about that is,

when they're saying that, they're effectively admitting that it's currently possible on-chain to do regular Bitcoin transactions that can take their assumptions about who has done what and who owns what coins. There are actions that you can take on-chain right now that actually make their assumptions incorrect in many cases. What they're saying is that, hey, if we show, how do we came to this conclusion, people will be able to structure transactions in a way that make our conclusions, you know, happenstance or not conclusive at best. But that means that you can

currently execute transactions that way, right? Because nothing is changing with the consensus rules of Bitcoin. You can already transact in a variety of different ways. So it is fully possible that the way that they've decided this individual, that they've pinned a crime on this individual, can be interpreted multiple ways because they're saying that if they show how they interpreted it, people can do transactions in a way that can be interpreted differently. And so is that not an admission in and of itself

that the software doesn't work? If they're saying that simply showing how they came to their conclusions means people will be able to go around their conclusions without any changes to Bitcoin. Yep. Exactly. We can't tell you why we're putting you in jail because if we do, other people will be able to avoid jail.

Like, trust us. It basically is what they're saying. That's literally what they're saying. It's like, you know, like don't trust. It's the exact opposite of don't trust verify. It's like, no, trust us. We have your best. It always goes back to the same attitude that governments have,

which is like, this is for your. your own benefit citizen. And then it's like, how so? Shut, shut up. It is. Trust me. And it's even worse because it's not like they're using these tools altruistically just to catch people that are committing crimes.

Chainalysis is a company that sells their services to the U.S. government and to other, to other companies saying, hey, we can decisively, you know, track people and, and make sure that we can catch people that are committing crimes and get a good picture of what's happening on the network. They're they're incentivized to say that their shit works and to not let people see how it works. And if it is broken, they're directly incentivized to hide that fact, which they seem to be doing.

And so like all of the incentives are super fucked up right here. And all it's going to take is, is basically shining a light on it, saying, hey, your conclusions are not as conclusive as once thought and can be interpreted multiple ways, which if something is beyond a shadow of a doubt, then of course, then we deem the person guilty. But if there is doubt and there is doubt with on-chain analysis, you can't convict on that. Yeah, yeah. No, but I think you hit the nail on the head, Ben, it's really, all we have to do is continue shining light on this. That's all we have to do. And then everything else would take care of itself. But, but yeah, this is a, you know,

this is what it's about. I think these, these institutions, whether it's governments, you know, these, you know, whether it's these news corporations, the internet just completely, you know, short circuit. They don't know what to do. They've just been so used to. having this monopoly on money, this monopoly on information, that it's like all of a sudden, when they're on a level playing field with everyone else, when the government actually has to compete with money, when these legacy corporate media institutions have to compete with, with the internet, their knee-jerk reaction is like, no, I'm too good for that. Just ban everything. Like, bro, what's happening in Canada is insane, man.

Yeah, yeah. You can't visit Instagram. You can't visit certain news sites on Instagram now. Did I show you, like when I was down there, did I show you actual Instagram where it just says Canadian citizens can't view this? That's so crazy. No, I mean, I've seen the pictures, but I can't believe it. I can't believe in a country like Canada.

That would happen. Even while I was down there. Like, even though I was now in a different IP address and different locale, it was like, still no. Oh, we found out you're Canadian. No news for you. that's so crazy and then it's of course it's it's government approved news oh you can you can have that yeah it's so it it's like that's like north korea dude it's so crazy i could never have imagined

it's a little wild that's for damn sure yeah and everybody up here is just a sleep over it they're like huh can't see news anymore on social media yeah anyways you catch the game the other night yeah it's a literal meme i'm living the meme here Oh, man. Yeah. Oh, man. Well, we always have El Salvador, Ben. We always have El Salvador.

Yes. VTC Sessiones. Yeah. Simply Bitcoin. VTC Sessions, bro. All right. We got to do it. All right.

Okay. So other news, I think this is a really, really big news of today. Fidelity digital assets. This is Michael Saylor, by the way. It's a big deal that Michael Saylor says this because Michael Saylor is the figurehead of the strategy of using Bitcoin as an alternative to fiat currencies holding Bitcoin on a public company's balance sheet. And he has that experiment has worked and he's the figurehead of this movement. So when he tweets this report by Fidelity Digital Assets that explains why Bitcoin is a unique and superior form of money that investors should consider first

and separate from all other digital assets. It's a big freaking deal. And if you actually take a look at this report, and we'll talk about why it's so consequential who fidelity is in a second. It says Bitcoin first revisited, why investors need to consider Bitcoin separately from other digital assets. So that's not BTC sessions or simply Bitcoin saying that. That is fidelity.

Fidelity has $4.5 trillion assets under management. The company has been around since 1946 and it has a yearly revenue in 2001 reported of $24 billion. These guys do not fuck around. These guys are serious. These are the real deal. That's why Michael Saylor retweeted that. So when they write a report, Bitcoin not crypto,

though, it's a really, really big deal. Now, they were kind enough to write a short little summary, but you guys could check out the full report, check out Sailor's tweet, and I'll just read some of the highlights from the summary. It says, once investors have decided to invest in digital assets, the next question becomes which one? Of course, Bitcoin is the most recognized first ever digital asset,

but there are hundreds, even thousands of other digital assets in the ecosystem. One of the first concerns investors have regarding Bitcoin is, as the first digital asset, it may be vulnerable to innovative destruction from competitors, such as the story of MySpace and Facebook. Another common consideration surrounding Bitcoin is whether it offers the same potential reward or upside as some of the newer and smaller digital assets that have emerged. In this paper, we proposed one, Bitcoin is best understood as a monetary good and one of the primary investment thesis for Bitcoin is as the store of value asset in an increasingly digital world.

Number two, Bitcoin is fundamentally different from any other digital asset. No other digital asset is likely to improve upon Bitcoin as a monetary good because Bitcoin is the most relative to other digital assets, secure, decentralized, sound digital money, and any improvement will potentially face tradeoffs. This isn't Bitcoiners saying this. This is Fidelity saying this. That's a big effing deal. Number three, there is not necessarily mutual exclusivity between the success of the Bitcoin

network and all other digital asset networks. Rather, the rest of the digital asset ecosystem can fulfill different needs or solve other problems that Bitcoin simply does not. Number four, other non-Bitcoin projects should be evaluated from a different perspective than Bitcoin. Number five, Bitcoin should be considered an entry point for traditional allocators looking to gain exposure to digital asset. And number six, and I think this is the most telling, investors should hold two distinctively separate frameworks for considering investment in the digital asset ecosystem. The first framework examines the inclusion of Bitcoin as an emerging monetary good.

And the second considers the addition of other digital assets that exhibit venture, capital like properties, right? That is extremely telling this last line, right? It's basically saying it's a very, very nice and sophisticated way of saying pump and dump. But yeah, man, this is a, this is a big deal, dude. This is a really, really big deal that, you know, a company's largest fidelity is releasing reports like this. I think it's safe to say, Ben, that the institutions are here. it's undeniable at this point. And calling back to the earlier mentions that we were talking about with Rogan and with David Marcus, that Overton window of Bitcoin, not crypto, has, you know, very decisively

shifted with things like this. There's people in all walks of life that come to Bitcoin. And, you know, a lot of them start with crypto and then settle on Bitcoin. And we're seeing that on a scale with very visible people. people and companies and institutions that we have not seen previously. And it's exciting to see because we get to watch everybody's learning trajectory in real time. And we all, you know, we all did it. We all did it.

And so like I, you know, sometimes I feel a little bit bad when somebody has to publicly go through their learning curve because, you know, Bitcoiners can be an abrasive bunch as we try to educate. But, you know, people are getting it. and people are getting to a place where they're going, oh, wow, this is completely different than everything else. And again, I'll go back to the quote that I've heard and said many times. Fiat is the elites can print money. Crypto is everyone can print money.

Bitcoin is no one can print money. Wow. Beautifully said, a hundred, you dude, you hit the nail on the head, right? It's Bitcoin levels the Bitcoin levels the playing field. It makes people like Sailor like equal to the Pleb. No one has the ability to create money for free that someone else has to work for. Anyways, guys, this was absolutely awesome. Ben, thanks for having me like always.

I will see you next week. Guys, this was your Simply sessions. That's my favorite part of the show. Later, man. Thanks a bunch. Yeah, take care. Thanks, Ben. All right, everybody.

A few more things before we wrap up. I've got to throw your tech updates so you know what's going on. And again, thanks to Nico for bringing us the best in the news. Go subscribe to Simply Bitcoin if you haven't already. What are you doing? What are you doing? Okay, I got to, we got to get this tweet in, even though it's not a tech update. We got it, we got to, Paul Krugman is out there being busy and ensuring that his Nobel Prize is nothing more than a fancy.

paperweight because holy shit this tweet he tweets out the war on inflation is over we won at very little cost and he shows a chart of inflation and in the chart it says that it excludes food energy shelter and used cars so i mean if you don't need to eat travel or live indoors then you must be absolutely elated that we have won against inflation at very little cost congratulations paul Tweet of the day, dumbest fucking thing I've seen in a week. Good for you. Anyways, let's get into the tech updates. Okay.

Code card, Mark 4, version 5.2.0. Seed Vault. What the hell is Seed Vault? Seed Vault, this is actually pretty super interesting. Seed Vault enables storage of multiple secrets into the cold cards encrypted settings for easy recall and later use. They are encrypted with a key based on your seed, but not themselves stored in the secure elements. Enable this functionality through the following menus, and it says it here on the screen, but it says it is not enabled by default, and it is a feature best suited to experimenters and advanced users with complex key management needs.

This might apply actually to some people that are using Byzantine. I'd have to look into it a little bit more, but very interesting. There will be a video coming, but let's touch on what it is. again. Once enabled, you can easily recall the stored seeds using a new main menu item, which is called Seed Vault, which appears when enabled. The fingerprint and origin of each key is shown there and activating takes only a single click. You can also edit the name for each key. So basically what it's saying is you have your main key, your main seed phrase on the secure element. you then use the information on the secure element to basically create and derive new seeds that are

used, decrypted with some of the stuff that is on the secure element. Those keys can then be labeled and accessed with single clicks once you've logged in to your cold card. So you can basically jump on, it sounds like, and say, okay, go to seed. vault and I'm going to go to C Vault number one and that will be for a specific use and you'll be able to call up that information and utilize it for whatever. So if you've got perhaps your uncle jimming for family members or maybe you're like an advisor and you have like a multi-sig service and you're a single keyholder for different people, you can say client number one, there's their

seed that is part of a multi-sig but it's all done from a master cold card. So yeah, pretty awesome. I'm kind of interested to play with it. You can also use it for things like dice rolls and CEDXOR and TAPSiner recoveries and duress wallets and BIPP 85, all kinds of different things. I'm going to have to dive into this because I'm trying to understand and practice how this is going to work and like the practicality differences between those other, you know, features that I just mentioned. It seems like it just kind of streamlines everything that you could do before.

But that's super awesome. Anyways, kudos. I will be touching on that soon and another tutorial to do. Speaking of more tutorials to do, Trezer announced a new hardware wallet. It is the Safe 3 signing device. And so what's different with this versus the old model of Treasor? Well, one of the interesting things about it is that they've incorporated a secure element. And this is something that Trezor used to get a lot of shit for because their hardware didn't have a secure

element in it, unlike things like ledger and cold card and, you know, passport and a lot of other options that do house a secure element, which actually keeps your keys safe from somebody physically attacking the device. They famously said that you didn't necessarily need to have a secure element on your device and then said that they were going to roll their own secure elements and do their own encryption and all that. We haven't heard much about that. And now it seems that they've gone with a third-party vendor for their secure element. So that's interesting. Again, I think they're catching some shit for this for like kind of backtracking and waffling on what they previously said. But I also do want to recognize that like, I mean, okay, if this is more secure,

then I mean, I can't shit on them too much. Yes, you know, maybe maybe they're previous statements they now recognize us as mistakes and they prefer going with the secure element instead, which means perhaps they've grown in terms of how they interpret things. Now, the other thing that they said about this new device is that they have a Bitcoin-only native version that they're shipping. But curiously, they said that they are only shipping 2013 units. It says available for now of the Bitcoin-only edition. Anyways, I've ordered the Bitcoin-only edition because I do want to do a review and video on it

and kind of cover what they've got in front of us here. So hopefully it's a pleasant experience and hopefully it's good. But yeah, we'll see. I'll let you know and I'll drop a video once it arrives. Okay, moving on, Blockstrom Greenlight is now open for business. Greenlight is their scalable, non-custodial Lightning as a Service or LAAAS solution that offloads the complexities of operating a lightning node to, Blockstream experts while keeping keys in the user's control for greater security.

So basically, this is a plug-in-play open standard that any developer can utilize in mobile lightning apps. So you may see a lot of different lightning apps start to utilize this backend and be able to provide fully non-custodial lightning experiences that are automated in the background is simple to use. I think this is great. And I think that we're going to start seeing these standards kind of proliferate so that people can self-custy lightning without having to make compromises. And I think it's fucking awesome.

So again, kudos blockstream on that one. BitVM, compute anything on Bitcoin. Now, this one's a little bit technical. I'm not going to go too deep into it. But basically, rather than executing computations of Bitcoin, they are merely verified similarly to optimistic roll-ups. This basically means you can compute anything and use Bitcoin to verify it. So the computation, like all kinds of smart contracts, crazy crap that you maybe want to do, you can do that external to Bitcoin and then use with very little data fingerprint data on Bitcoin to verify that the computation you've done is valid.

So very interesting. We'll see how it develops early days. I don't want to speculate too much, but hey, we shall see. Hoster, decentralized web hosting solution on Noster. Basically, it's the ability to, it's an open protocol that enables global decentralized censorship-resistant social media. It provides free anti-censorship and fault-tolerant web hosting using relays that can be set up by anyone. So think decentralized websites that nobody can fuck with. That's pretty cool.

And in that same vein, we have Hoster. We now also have Shopster, which is a Decentralize, which is a Decentralized. decentralized classified marketplace that uses lightning and cashew and it does it over Nostr as well. So you can buy and sell items on a marketplace that cannot be shut down and is truly decentralized. Super awesome to see these developments popping up on Noster. And of course, Bitcoiners rallying around them. A couple last things here. I just dropped a tutorial, I suppose a tutorial on time chain calendar.

I always use it off the top of my live shows. but there's so much more than the data that I cover on the top of the show. So please check it out. TCS made an incredible tool here, and it's well worth you diving in and truly appreciating everything that's at your fingertips in a single screen. So go check out that tutorial if you get a chance this week. And finally, why are we bullish tomorrow? We've got Julian Figuera, who is also known as kinetic finance.

We've got Aladdin from BTC trading cards. and we've got Zach Gwignard. I hope I didn't scrub up his last name. Anyways, awesome, guys. They're going to be on the show tomorrow at 6 p.m. Eastern time. Make sure you do not miss it. And then finally, before I wrap up here, I just want to say a quick shout out to everybody at Pacific

that I just got to see down in L.A. There's a picture of myself, Nico, and Nathan, with the tip seal of approval. Again, lots of awesome stuff that happened down there. We did a beach workout one morning as well. And it was just a good and fun time. all around. If I saw you down there, it was great to come across so many awesome Bitcoiners at a single event. And I had a lot of fun. So thank you all. And with that, I'm going to wrap it up.

Thank you guys so much for watching. As always, please do smash that like button down below. Very, very important. That always helps a ton. If you want to help the show in another way, you can always hit up the previously mentioned sponsors in these show notes or you can head over to my website, BTCSessions.ca, and that's where you can book one-on-one sessions for me if you need any hand-holding and help on your Bitcoin journey. With that, I am out. Have yourselves a wonderful day or evening. I'll see you guys next time for your daily session.