BTC Sessions - Why Did The IMF Just BAN This Superpower From Bitcoin? (WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON?)

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Why did the IMF just ban a major superpower from adopting Bitcoin? This shocking move has global implications—and raises serious questions about what’s really going on behind the scenes.BOOK private one-on-one sessions with BITCOIN MENTOR! Learn self custody, hardware, multisig, lightning, privacy, running a node, and plenty more - all from a team of top notch educators that I've personally vetted.https://bitcoinmentor.io/—------------------------------FOLLOW Simply Bitcoin & BTC Sessions on other channels:Simply Bitcoin on Youtube: youtube.com/@simplybitcoinSimply Bitcoin on X: x.com/simplybitcointv Nico on X: x.com/bitvoltBTC Sessions on X: x.com/BTCsessions—------------------------------SHOW SPONSORS:BITCOIN WELL BUY BITCOINhttps://qrco.de/bfiDC6COINKITE/COLDCARD (5% discount):https://store.coinkite.com/promo/BTCSessions AQUA WALLEThttps://qrco.de/bfiD8gNUNCHUK HONEYBADGER INHERITANCEhttps://qrco.de/bfiDARHODLHODL NO KYC P2P EXCHANGEhttps://hodlhodl.com/join/BTCSESSIONDEBIFI LOANShttps://qrco.de/bfiDCpCRYPTOCLOAKShttps://qrco.de/bg5Dvo#btc #bitcoin #crypto

The worst of the worst are at it again, but this time the sovereign nations of the world are waking up and the IMF is panicking. Countries are beginning to push back against the financial leash that's held them for decades and the cracks in the system are starting to show. This week, a nation with over 250 million people once again tried to use some of its surplus energy to mine Bitcoin. And the IMF, they shut it down again. But here's the twist. We're no stranger to El Salvador, and we know that El Salvador has already called their bluff. They signed a massive IMF deal earlier this year, including provisions prohibiting them from accumulating Bitcoin. And they kept buying anyway.

Every single day, they're adding more to their national stack, refusing to bow to the pressure. So who is the new nation state hungry for hash power? And more importantly, will they obey or defy? Because if they choose Bitcoin, we're not just talking about mining here. We're talking about the beginning of the end of the influence of the IMF. Today we're going to be talking about the final hours of the fourth turning, the dissolution of our failing institutions and the bright orange future that lies ahead. Stick around, you are not going to want to miss a beat.

I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your weekly session. All right, let me bring in my co-host with the most, Mr. Nathan Fitzsimmons of the Bitcoin Mentor. How you doing, buddy? I'm doing pretty good, Ben. Man, long time, no, see, I haven't hung out with you since Monday. Too long, my friend, too long.

Did you happen to see that we had that disgustingly large bill pass today? I did. It was neither, it was big, but it was not beautiful. Absolutely not. And I also know some news coming out from the Southern District of New York Court, which it seems like it's always those fuckers when something goes wrong. Pardon my language there, but every single time. I mean, you know, Ben Loski really, really set the tone there when it comes to Bitcoin. And again, the Southern District there with more BS as it pertains to the Samurai case. They're dropping in crazy things here and there. But we'll get to that later in the episode. Yeah, let's chat about this nation state that has basically been said or been told by the IMF.

Yes, surplus energy for Bitcoin mining? Absolutely not. And of course, here we're talking about Pakistan. And so Pakistan, of course, they were at the Bitcoin conference earlier this year. And they had an announcement saying that they're going to do a Bitcoin strategic Bitcoin Reserve and that they wanted to mine Bitcoin as well. And they've put through multiple proposals to the IMF because, of course, they are beholden to them,

as many nations are by design. And the IMF has once again rejected Pakistan's proposal to mine Bitcoin with surplus energy. And let's take a look at the actual article here from CoinDisk. So interesting. Again, they rejected the proposal. The government had planned to allocate 2,000, megawatts from its 7,000 megawatt electricity surplus. So 7,000 megawatts surplus, meaning

it was just extra. They don't have a way to use it. So just a portion of that allocated to, it says crypto mining, but we know what's up. It's Bitcoin mining at a rate of 23 to 24 rupees, which is around 8 cents per kilowatt hour. Now, the funny thing here says, quote, the IMF questioned how the government would transition the subsidized electricity back to market rates and argued that similar concessions had failed to deliver results in the past. So, I mean, I have questions. I'm sure you have questions, but to me, it sounds a little bit like the IMF is trying to say here, guys, if you have a sale on something, how are you ever going to return to the regular price, which is a ridiculous statement? So, I mean, Nathan, how?

How are you taking this article here? No, that's absolutely correct. I mean, what other possible gains could they have from Bitcoin mining? And I guess they're learning from like the Walmart kind of perspective. It's like once you start a sale, man, there's no going back on that. You're stuck in that. You could possibly never recoup those funds. They'll just drive up and leave as soon as they're gone.

Yeah, it's just laughable the way that they've approached it. And again, the signal here is that a bunch of unelected bureaucrats are dictating what a sovereign nation can do. with its surplus energy. That's crazy. Like, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. That's insane. That's insane.

Like, oh, I've got some extra energy. Yeah, well, you're not allowed to use it to do that. Oh, no. And heaven forbid you put it on sale too, right? I've got all these 7,000 megawatts just sitting on hand. What should it do? Just burn it. Just throw it into the ground, give it away for free.

Don't you dare put it at a price where Bitcoin miners could set up and start stacking stats for you? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Now, the real question here is, are they going to listen? Because again, El Salvador has not been listening. So this is an article from back in May. And keep in mind that the deal, the IMF deal, was signed back in late February. And it contained provisions basically saying, like, no more stack in Bitcoin. And then months later, when they were still stacking Bitcoin, the quote here at International. Monetary Fund announced Tuesday that it will, quote, ensure that El Salvador does not increase its current Bitcoin holdings, reaffering restrictions tied to a $1.4 billion loan agreement. So they said, again, date here, May 28th, they will ensure that they will not keep stacking

sets. Again, May 28th. What's the date today, July 3rd? Well, this tweet was yesterday, and it would appear that they did not ensure shit because Salvador just added another full coin yesterday and every day before all the way dating back to May 28th. You know, they may have missed a day here and there, but then they double stack it. But you can see they're sitting at 6,226 Bitcoin with their public Bitcoin address. they're not stopping the stacking. So, you know, are they going to listen? This is the big question.

Do you think that they're going to bend the knee? And if so, if they don't bend the knee, if they decide to just go ahead and do whatever they want, referring to Pakistan, what does that do to the IMF? Man, I feel like the IMF is already on its way out. I had a wonderful conversation this week with Keith Dicker from the Looney Hour. And he even made the comment, like,

who can they bail out these days? Their power is dwindling, which is fantastic. You absolutely love to see it. But I mean, Buckelly's got to watch out here. The IMF very much could at any moment in time write them a strongly worded letter. They could. He could come after them in that sort of sense. And nobody wants that stress.

Nobody needs that kind of heartbreak on like, you know, Saturday afternoon. So it seems like what they can do is dwindling, their influence is doing which makes sense that the dollars essentially that they're using or losing purchasing power against Bitcoin and everything else in this world. They're not going to have that influence.

And I do want to point out, by the way, I do want to point out, because I know there's going to be some comments down below. I'm well aware that Augustine is not with the IMF, that he's part of the Bank of International Settlement. But in terms of like the visual for Fiat and evil, like you can't get past that one. He's too good to throw up there.

Yeah, I mean, he's clearly the visual representation of the final boss, like everything Fiat about him. 100%. And that for, I love the memes, that front button of his suit. And people are like the Fiat system. Being held together. from collapse. It's so good.

Now, you mentioned, like, you know, the jokingly, the IMF, they might write them a strongly worded letter and everything. Now, this is what we've seen so far. And I think part of the thing that's keeping Buckelly and other safe is that it's so public, the pushback, and that doing anything too tricky would be pretty overt. but let's not forget the lessons learned in this book here.

And if you haven't read it, you absolutely should. It's called Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. And he details basically what his job was, was going in to countries that had a lot of resources, but not a lot of infrastructure, offering massive loans that were just unpayable. And then as designed when those nations could not repay the debt, They basically said, hey, you know, that's fine.

We will restructure the deal. What we'll do is we'll take ownership of some of the resources. And then we'll give you another loan, but the loan must be used to build infrastructure to get those resources to market. Not for schools, not for health care or anything like that. It's just straight up allow us to extract all your resources. And the most insidious thing about this is, yes, economic ruin but when people would not take the loan uh quite often times they would be on the

receiving end of a bullet which is is scary and and this is what i've been worried about for el salvador um as they've stacked in the face of the i'mf i think again because it's so he's so blatantly public about it that might be a saving grace but what would make it even harder to execute something like this would be multiple nation states doing the same thing pushing back at the same time because then then all of a sudden if you get like four or five world leaders that are doing this and they all got picked off and and assassinated or something then of course of course it would be obvious at that point if it's just one though i still feel like there's plenty of opportunity for uh fuckery here which is worrying.

So nonetheless, what I'll say is, if you haven't read that book, please, please check it out. It's awesome. You can get an audiobook as well. But the other one, more centered around the Bitcoin space, would be Alex Gladstein's hidden repression,

how the IMF and World Bank sell exploitation as development. And this has got to be in the upper echelons of books that I have yelled at because every page you just get so angry at how insidious these organizations are. So if you haven't read it, it's an easy read unless, you know, you have anger issues and then it's a very difficult one. But, I don't, Nathan, any other thoughts here around IMF, Pakistan, Vkeli, all this stuff?

Well, I hope that Pakistan does move forward in the face of the IMF, because I agree that once we, once additional nation states start standing up to them and kind of not taking their bullshit anymore, that they're going to have more power, especially if it's very publicly facing, and particularly regarding like the book. both books actually there. The idea is that we know their game, right? We know how they're doing this, and we've made it publicly. We've made it publicly available.

And that information ultimately ends up being the defense. Like at the end of the day, Bitcoin is just information. There's other fun information you can get with 3D printers. That's also very good for defense as well too. And in the same vein, knowing how they're going to do this, what they're going to do, exposing their tactics, sunlight is the best disinfectant. That's so we can take them down a peg or two and hopefully put a stop to it. Particularly, again, you have that public sentiment and pressure and awareness of what's going on.

Yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, we'll see how it plays out. I would have assumed, and everybody had thought back in 2021 when it was first announced that it was the first dominant of fall and we were going to see many more very quickly. And that just wasn't the case. But we had Samson Mal on the show before. And he was very much saying that as soon as that happened, the IMF was swooping in and just completely sabotaging a lot of the talks that he was. having with nation states and that others were having with nation states and really they they were able to effectively put the breaks on a lot of announcements that that would have and could have been made so either way uh we're going to jump here if you're enjoying the conversation make sure you do smash that like button and jump into the comments if you're watching this from uh somewhere other than youtube like Rumble because we love those guys. And please do, again, like the end sub and follow and all of that good stuff because nobody likes to be banned.

Nobody enjoys it. Last week was a sad show. This is about as far as we got into the show. And then we just got rug pulled. So we're back. Thank you all for the support for bringing us back. But again, please do support as much as again. On the other side of the jump, we're going to be chatting about the big, not-so-beaut-beaut-beaut-beaut-beaut-bueful

bill and many other things that seem to indicate that money printer go burr is as always an absolute given but it's about to accelerate like nobody's business so make sure you stick around we're going to say a quick shout out to our sponsors and we're going to give away some sats on the other side of the jump see you guys in a second bitcoin well is the best place to be buying and selling Bitcoin in Canada and the US. And now with Bitcoin Well Infinite, it's also the best place to be making large buys at their OTC desk of over $50,000. Their white glove service gives you fast transactions, no slippage, and the lowest fees. You can scan the QR code on the screen or simply head to Bitcoinwell.com slash BTC Sessions to sign up today. And you can share your own personalized referral link to

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and today we have 518 sats for whoever scans it first good luck to you all if you do snag them let us know in the chat we love to hear it uh but nonetheless we're going to go ahead and uh we're going to chat about this gentleman here first. So Bo Heinz, this is the executive director, this is a mouthful, the executive director of the president's council of advisors on digital assets of the White House. Man, I feel like they could have picked a better title there. I feel like I need one of those titles for the channel. The executive director of the sessions council of advisors on Bitcoin of the YouTube and Rumble channel. There we go. Perfect. I love it. I'll put it on my business card. I'll take up the whole thing. But I got it on bone and that's important.

Excellent. Excellent. So, bohines recently sat down for an interview and this clip here is him talking about some of the impacts of the industry and some of the recently passed legislation and how it will impact the size of the industry. So we're just going to listen to a quick clip here and then we'll chat a little bit. Take a listen. Put it on the president's desk to be signed. The capital injection that goes into digital assets, ecosystems, there's all of stables, is enormous. You know, I think that you're looking at probably an industry going to $15, $20 trillion, because what this does is it establishes really the foundation for all the exciting things that we've dreamed of. tokenized public securities, 24-7 markets, if you want to access U.S. capital markets,

you're going to have to use a dollar-back stable. And this is what positions the United States to be the global leader. And in reality, we should be pushing this change. We should be at the forefront of adoption of digital asset financial technology and really leading the charge globally in that. It'll protect the U.S. economy. It'll certainly create innovation here in the United States. And that's something we should all be excited about.

So I have thoughts, Nathan, but I want to hear your thoughts first. What's your takeaway from this clip here? Well, I think it's a little bit bearish. I think it's a little bit bearish. But it was interesting because I ran the numbers on it. I want to see exactly where that would put us. So even taking that $15 trillion market cap, current total market cap of Bitcoin plus all the other shit that's out there,

sitting at $3.39 trillion. And so that would be a $4.4.4.000 market cap for Bitcoin, putting us at $421,000 per Bitcoin. Soon we'll stop measuring in dollars. But in the meantime, that's not bad. A little bit under my... I guess it's right in line with Dr. Jeff Ross, but still under my projections.

Yeah, I mean, like a 3 or 4x is... you know, when he's talking about all these seismic shifts, you know, I think that's, I mean, I don't know what timeline he's referring to here, but in my opinion, still bearish. And why do I say that's bearish? Well, the big, beautiful bill just passed. And it is big. It is not beautiful. It's a bit of an atrocity when you really look at it. And again, Elon, this is kind of what caused the rift between Trump and Elon, was Elon was brought in to do the Department of Government Efficiency, cut costs like none other, and make everything reasonable again.

And then this bill was basically what he came out against and why he left the position. And reason being that, again, they're going to increase the debt ceiling. by a record $5 trillion. $5 trillion with a T. I mean, the signal here again is that there is no ceiling. There is no spoon. There is no ceiling. It's all, it's fake.

There's no, there's no reins to pull back on. You know, Lynn Alden is absolutely right. Nothing stops this train. And they can't stop spending. They can't help themselves. people are seeing the writing on the wall here. People are understanding it. And with this bill and this next clip that I'm going to show, it kind of goes to show how far this administration is willing to go to make that money printer go burr. And they're trying to do things to

offset it to extract wealth in other ways. But let's take a listen to this. this, this is Scott Bessent. And yet, he was asked if he could be the Fed chair and the Treasury Secretary at the same time. Let's see what he had to say about that, because that's wild. You know, your name gets floated out there. You have some odds on Polly Market of being the next Fed share. Can you be a Fed Chair and a Treasury Secretary at the same time? Well, I think it hasn't been done since 1930-something. And I'm very happy. happy in my job here. I think we have lots of good candidates for Fed chair. We will start working on that in the fall. We've been busy. The president's been doing peace deals, trade

deals, tax deals, and we are landing the plane on all of those. So we're going to have more bandwidth after Labor Day. That was not a no. I just want to point out on the double job. Very interesting. Thank you for the time today. Good to see you. Like absolute silence there at the end. There's nothing. Did not say a word. I mean, that's, that's, that's,

it's not a bad poker face, Scott. You did all right. Very, very telling. But I mean, that would give him, like absolute control, right? Like, they could do whatever the hell they wanted at that point. Well, do you think that the Fed might monetize and buy up the debt that's being issued by the treasury if it's one and the same person? Or do you think he'd play hardball with.

himself. That's a weird euphemism. Didn't mean that. Again, that is some of the most money printer go bore like bolthearted stuff I've ever heard. Like five trillion added to the debt ceiling and then you know, you've got somebody, you've got Bessent there saying not willing to even acknowledge the fact that, oh, yeah, there's, you know, are you going to take both jobs and just like silence? It's like that $5 trillion. Keep in mind, that's more than twice the market cap of Bitcoin. It's just what they raise the limit.

That's not the existing debt. That's just what they raise the limit. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Wild. Wild. Now, in terms of the big, beautiful bill, there are people that were hoping to see some Bitcoin stuff in there.

Sadly, no. No Bitcoin related to me. in the bill, here Neil Jacobs saying, I'll talk, nothing actually got done. Of course, Senator Loemis is pushing again to introduce yet another bill. She really doesn't want that capital gains on small expenditures, but she's definitely capitulated down. Now she's going for a piddly $300 exempt from capital gains. It's like, I mean, at this point, what are we even doing here? Like, 300 bucks.

Come on. I mean, you have to report if you're in the States, like your $600 Venmo transactions get reported to the IRS, which is beyond crazy, beyond crazy. But, yeah, I mean, it just seems like a whole lot of money printer go burr, not a ton on the Bitcoin front. than just kind of like we like Bitcoin buy our U.S. dollar shit coin. Yeah, exactly. Now, the other thing that I wanted to talk about in regards to, you know, what Bo Hines was talking about here, he said something in there that I thought was interesting.

He said, if you want to access U.S. capital markets, you will have to use a U.S. backed stable coin. And to me, and for those that were around long enough, I need you to. Go back, go way back, and remember a time, a little time called 2017, in the midst of the ICO bubble. And what these entities would do is they'd have a coin that was effectively worthless that they could make as much of as they wanted to. And they would say that in order to use our platform or our features or whatever it is, you must use this token. to do it. Even though any other money would have worked just fine, they said, you have to use ours to do it, and that's why the token is necessary. And to me, this is just like a state

level echo of this. In order to access the capital markets of our country, you must use our shit token to do it. I mean, Nathan, would you echo that? I would completely echo that. And something else I picked up on there as well, if I'm not mistaken, he said access our markets 24-7. I think he was alluding to them being open constantly, which I can't wait for the day that like stocks are trading 24-7 because Wall Street is not used to this environment. They're used to a nice cushy job. They, you know, they make an obscene amount of money by being close to the money printer. And then they relax on the weekends and their villas and these things too.

They haven't been through the things that Bitcoin has been through. They will be losing their shit when it's just going up and down and left and right all weekend long. Every holiday never closed. You can't sleep. You're going to be stressed out. Maybe that will even push them into Bitcoin savings as well too. And I'll take, I want to take the devil's advocate position. I'm going to go against you.

That's right, Mr. Sessions. I'm going to go against you on that $300 limit for no-cap gains. For me, any amount, any amount is still a win. Give me that inch. We'll take the whole world. I'm not worried about that. We just have to get people to normalize it and start using it and see the benefits of it. For small retail sellers like online, particularly, it's better than Visa.

It's better than anything else. You don't have to use Stripe. So you could just start accepting Bitcoin, start demanding that, maybe give a benefit to your customers. Additionally, if we take the example of like, Maryland, marijuana legalization in the U.S. and Canada. It largely didn't come from like a groundswell or them realizing that, hey, maybe what someone puts in their own body is their own damn business. We shouldn't be arresting people from this.

It just became normalized. It became basically unenforceable. And eventually they just gave up on it. So you think at like 301 someone's going to report that? No. Then they're going to start to have this part of their every day. They're going to start to push the limits. And I think eventually that the no cap gains on Bitcoin just comes from like,

hell, we can't do anything about it. It's very difficult to trace. It's not worth it. We'll just bump up that limit over time. Yeah, that's fair. I think you may have sold me on that one. Side note, there's a great comment from somebody, Mix Picks, said that Scott Besson is going to need both jobs to keep up with inflation. That's great. That is awesome. Now, again, you know, there's a lot of people that are picking up on this and seeing the writing on the wall and realize, okay, there's printer about to go burr. And this includes. gold bucks. And so we have a public gold miner, I believe called Hammock or Hammock, or I'm not sure how to say it, limited. And they announced that they will buy Bitcoin for their treasury, much to the chagrin of

Peter Schiff, who says all the companies adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets are either Bitcoin treasury companies or crypto-related businesses. No non-crypto companies are adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets. This is concentrated crypto speculation, not broad-based adoption. It would see. some gold bugs would disagree. Now again, small company, but we saw a lot of it here in Calgary over the weekend. We'll get to that in a moment, but there's quite a large gold market cap. And if gold bugs are starting to see the writing on the wall, you know, there's $22.4 trillion that we are just akeen to take a bite out of.

And, you know, usually when a better technology comes along, it often eclipses the market cap of the legacy, the legacy option. So we're going to be chatting a little bit more about that on the other side, what we saw with some of the gold bugs here in Calgary over the weekend and the Bitcoin event. But there's also something that we discussed off the top of the show in regards to, in regards to samurai wallet. Of course, samurai wallet, the founders arrested last year. And the server is taken down, whirlpool taken down.

And it seems that the Southern District of New York has just thrown everything in the kitchen sink at it. And kind of come off as flailing a little bit, just trying to throw pepper in extra stuff here. Econo Alchemist gave a great breakdown of what they've just done. And so we're going to chat about that after the break. if you're enjoying the show. Please do smash that like button. Very important. Give this a share wherever you may be watching it.

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Okay, so this is a conalchemist. He's breaking down the update with this samurai case here. So let's just do a little peruse through. He said on June 24th, and again, this was like a week and a bit back, but worth outlining. and also we need to take a look at the updates and how you can still use World Pool. SDNY, so Southern District of New York, filed a superseding indictment against Samurai Wallet. Basically, they updated the allegations against the developers. As if the original indictment wasn't crazy enough, the SDNY is completely drunk with power now.

Here's the biggest differences. I saw. First, the allegations timeframe has been extended a couple months. So they added a couple months onto the end of the time period where they're, alleging that crimes happened, implication is that SDNY found something they want to use as evidence that occurred in the couple months leading up to the arrest. Second, the original indictment stated Samurai laundered over $100 million of crime proceeds. The number is now $250 million.

Putting one and two together would seem to imply that shoddy chain analysis evidence points to an additional $150 million in crime proceeds magically appearing in the two months leading to the arrest, or maybe their definition of crime proceeds changed to expand that amount. Or who knows? In any case, to my knowledge, none of these multimillionaire criminals have been charged despite the evidence and tracing of their proceeds through Whirlpool. Only the developers who built a neutral service and who have no control over the end user's actions have been arrested.

Moving on, the language used to describe the background on Samurai wallet change significantly. The new indictment states explicitly that Samurai transferred funds on half of the public, which is absurd departure from the reality of non-custodial wallets. Additionally, paragraphs have been added in the background section, putting heavy emphasis on the absence of KYC measures in Samurai wallet. Oddly, this isn't a legal requirement of any non-custodial wallet yet. Beware wallet devs, the trajectory couldn't be more clear. Why were the percentages removed from the new version of the Whirlpool?

fee table. The allegation is that $2 billion passed through Whirlpool and Rikishay and that Samurai collected $4.5 million in fees for those services. But $4.5 million is 5% of only $90 million, not $2 billion. So again, New York doing some fun math there. In a stunning, this is the best one, in my opinion, because it's so sarcastic. In a stunning cryptographic breakthrough, the SDNY has uncovered a whirlpool coordinator that magically generates new addresses on behalf of end users. I'll read the actual bit from the indictment. Samurai's coordinator server automatically generated the new addresses that were used as inputs and outputs throughout the process on behalf of users, although the private keys for these cryptocurrency addresses

were stored in each user's individual cell phone and not shared with Samurai's employees. Below is a graphical... Anyways, that's not possible, so that's fun. Moving on, several social media forum and private messages have been added to the new indictment, highlighting things like cartoon graphics that Samurai didn't control and very vague language like dirty BTC. None of these amount to court of the counts as charged. Things get weirder.

They've thrown allegations of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute controlled substances. So a drug dealer used Whirlpool and now the devs are drug dealers. They removed allegations of violating 1960 B1B, but they left B1C, which is regarded. highly regarded because it means that the devs are not charged with failing to get a money transmitted license, but still operated an unlicensed MSB to transfer funds on behalf of the public. So Samurai wallet used non-custodial wallet software to transfer criminal funds on behalf of the public with an unlicensed MSB that didn't need a license. Got it. Clear as mud. So anyways, this is a mess, man. What do you think of this?

To me, it screams of desperation. Like ultimately, software being speech, you know, code being speech, has been codified long before this. And I don't think they have a legal leg to stand on. I think there was some perhaps incendiary kind of comments prior. And I think they're trying to make an example of samurai, but I don't think they have the grounds. And so in an attempt to find something, my guess is increasing that amount and opening up

the window is they're probably trying to push for a guilty plea that they're trying to get them, uh, that there's freak them out to put so much pressure on them. they just settle for something as they're starting to have their case kind of fall up from under them, particularly with the Trump administration outright saying that like we're not interested in going after crypto anymore. We're going a different direction with this. This isn't a priority for us. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I'm again, these guys don't deserve this, obviously. I think people need to continue making a stink about this. And I hope that they continue to push back. I understand that obviously they've got to be under a ton of pressure.

And, you know, if something attractive comes up, you know, I would be hard pressed to, you know, I've got a family and stuff at home. I would be hard pressed to not take some sort of a deal. But like, you know, in the examples of being bullied by the state, it takes the people that actually stand up to make any changes. When you bend the knee, the status quo continues, which is just a lot. unfortunate. Now, what's not unfortunate is that the tools that these guys built, they live on. They live on because somebody forked the project. And I've covered Ashi-Garu wallet and how to

build your own Dojo node and link it. But that didn't have Whirlpool, which was the actual coin join protocol that allowed you to break the links between you and your Bitcoin. Well, That also has now been forked and built in to Ashigaru with Ashigaro Whirlpool and Terminal Version 1. This was released a couple weeks back. I'm now looking into it, starting to play, and pretty promising. Pretty awesome to see. Now, it's important to note, of course, there are fees involved. And so, you know, you're going to have to, I will cover those as I do the tutorial.

But again, it's just really, really cool to see that these tools cannot be censored. It's, again, it reminds me of bit, you know, like bit torrent and all of that. You know, they slap down one website and another one pops up. The Pirate Bay has been around for how long, how many iterations of that. So, you know, they're not going anywhere. I mean, you must be happy to see this, Nathan. Oh, I'm ecstatic to see. The more privacy tools we have out and available, the better.

And again, going back to even the earlier conversation about the IMF and how the information ultimately is the thing that takes it down. It's the same thing here, right? Information wants to be free. It wants to be out there. It doesn't matter like if the state is even going to go after the samurai devs. It was open source. It was available to fork off beforehand. So good white hat actors out there are going to get it.

They're going to run with it because people hunger for this sort of thing and they hunger for their freedom. You're not going to stop us, particularly if what you're trying to prevent is just information. Yeah, 100%. 100%. Now, again, to segue a little bit. to keep in the vein of people exercising their individual sovereignty. We saw a little bit of that here in Calgary over the weekend because we had the sat market, which was awesome.

This one was the biggest one yet. A ton of awesome. Local and national and international Bitcoiners made their way to Calgary and celebrated with us and spent sats with us and got all kinds of things. We had, you know, butchers and, you know, beef and eggs and chicken and some of the best jerky money can buy. And there were tradesmen there. There were artists there. There were people with apparel. There's dentists.

There's, you know, my personal trainer was kicking around. There's a ton of awesome, awesome stuff. And I don't know. I'm pretty bullish on it. How did you enjoy your time at the sat market? Oh, I absolutely loved it. We also had banks there with Bow Valley Credit Union. We had hotels there with the Kenrick.

Love those guys. Love Jeff. It was a fantastic, definitely the best and biggest one yet. The mood was electric. People were very, very excited to participate to meet other people. And I got to say, guys, like this kind of thing comes up all the time. We can all do a little bit more. We can all learn something new.

So we're very fortunate that Ben started this off here, got the sat market going. But if you don't have one in your area, start one. Maybe go to a local meetup. You could send a nice message in support of the samurai devs, right? You can learn a new skill. There's always something in Bitcoin you can be doing to contribute. and to help and to help build us out. Yeah, yeah, 100%.

And we tried something new at the sat market this time. We started onboarding some people to Vexel, which looks pretty cool. Again, just reading from the website here, it's a mobile app giving users a simple, accessible and safe way to trade Bitcoin as it was intended, peer-to-peer, and without K-Y-C. But that kind of understates what you can do in the app because what we're looking to do and what's built in is you can designate, I have cash, I want Bitcoin, or I have Bitcoin, I want cash, but you can also say, I have Bitcoin, I want to buy a product, or I have a product, I want to receive Bitcoin. And so we're onboarding the local merchants

so that we can easily connect with and find each other on a local level. And then it's based on kind of your circle of trust. So when you connect with somebody, you also get their direct connections added in to your kind of listings on your main screen. So I, I'm, you know, we're experimenting. We're going to see how it goes and how we can add people. But, yeah, I'm hopeful. I think it'll be a pretty good experiment here. And, yeah, we'll see how it goes.

But this wasn't the only thing that we saw over the weekend, too. We obviously had a ton of awesome people in here for the Bitcoin Rodeo. I was pretty stoked to see a bunch of them. A couple also that stand out in regards to the previous topic, the gold bugs. again, Bow Valley Credit Union, Brett Olin, big gold bug, and he's kind of recognizing and being a part of a lot of these Bitcoin events locally here. And, you know, he sees the writing on the wall. He knows what's up with monetary policy. He's a gold bug, but now he's a Bitcoiner. And also we had Stephen from, he's the owner of Sun City, Silver and Gold Exchange. Dude is awesome. Such a character. Really like that guy. And he was at the sat market as well.

And of course, we also, and I'm wondering if I'm completely missing him, he's not on the main page here. But Nicholas from Silver Gold Bowl, they are one of the biggest facilities for storing and securing precious metals in the northern hemisphere, I think, or at least in North America, one of the largest facilities. I actually visited them, funny enough, during a Bitcoin event. I got to hold this piece of gold here. It was, if I'm not mistaken, that that's in my hand is $1.7 million. Oh, my God. That's a lot of stats. I wouldn't have minded if my hand was a little lighter and I was just holding a cold card with, you know,

would that be 17 Bitcoin or something on it? But nonetheless, really, really cool. Great guys, too. And they get Bitcoin. Their understanding, which is so bullish, so incredibly bullish. And the last bullish bit that I'll mention here, and maybe Nathan, you want to chat a bit about this. But our weekend in Banff where we did the Bitcoin Survival Workshop. So, I mean, what was your experience up in Banff with all these based newcomer Bitcoiners?

Oh, my God. It was absolutely incredible. The thing that really struck me is we packed a lot. So Sessions was doing a massive, massive workshop. We packed about seven hours of material with really the key focus being working with people as well as privacy tools, all that kind of advanced stuff that we want people to start to learn about. And particularly in Canada, is getting more and more kind of necessary. But what astounded me is not only with these amazing guys,

incredibly successful entrepreneurs and businessmen in their own right as well too. But we had one moment at the time. We had a big hike in the morning, everyone went for breakfast, and then we were able to get started. we were a little behind. And so we were going to go and take a break. And I knew we'd already done like two and a half hours. I feel like these guys are drinking from a fire hose in terms of Bitcoin content.

And we asked the group, it's like, oh, guys, we had a break scheduled. Do you want to stop? Take an hour. Get some food. How do you want to proceed? And unanimously, the answer was no. We don't want to stop. Coming up on that three hour mark, which is a long time to sit and be working on an intense workshop.

They did not want to pivot. They didn't want to stop. It said, okay, quick, 15, get a coffee, come back, and we'll just keep going. And everyone was just basically like on edge, taking in everything they can. We're unbelievably excited to be learning these tools. We focused a lot on again like multi-sig and layer twos. And we did a big deep dive into wasabi wallet as well. And they could not have been more thrilled.

And from learning more about their backstory, knowing that these kind of people are coming into Bitcoin, not only doing self-custody, but having concerns about privacy in the future. It was phenomenal and unbelievably exciting. Yeah, yeah. I'll echo that. Man, we covered a lot.

But I said to the class afterwards, I was like, this was the most I've ever taught to a group of people in a single day. The amount of material that we went through was wild. But again, they were eating it up and they were doing a great job with it. And we sent them home with a solid foundation and then resources to continue to level up their skills. And so that's just, you know, seeing curious people that aren't just here to talk about how bullish Bitcoin is and, oh, number go up and everything, but actually taking action. And that's, that's the important thing for people to do. And so, again, if you're watching this show, if you're tuning in, you know, because of the main stories and all that, that's fantastic. It's super fun to talk about.

But if you do not take action, then you're missing out. You're not getting the sovereignty that Bitcoin affords you. So again, I would encourage you to, one, check out the QR code here. That will lead you right to a learn page where it has basically laid out some skills. If you can get through that page, you're going to be better off than most Bitcoiners on the planet. You're going to be leveled up beyond most Bitcoiners in terms of skills. So go check that out. Highly encourage it.

And if you're looking there and you're like, this is a little above my pay grade. I need somebody to hold my hand. then of course, you should reach out to myself and Nathan at Bitcoin Mentor. And we've got an incredible team of educators. I mean, Nathan, you've been working with them for a year and a half now. I mean, the team's amazing, aren't they? They're absolutely incredible. They're not only just so successful in their own skills in their own right,

but they are unbelievably advanced in their Bitcoin knowledge and understanding. They have been able to help a ton of people, knowing with their setup, their nodes at home mining, but even in some of those tricky, like, okay, we got to troubleshoot and figure out what happened here. they're the best. They have the absolute best. I'm so privileged to be working with these guys. Yeah. Yeah. So can't say enough good things about the whole mentor team. But whatever your path, whether you use in the free content on the website and the learn page and all the tutorials, or whether you need one-on-one help with Bitcoin mentor, just level up, get your skill set one step at a time and just become a better and better bitconer because you will thank yourself

when all of a sudden your Bitcoin is worth 10 times what it is now and you know it's secure. So nonetheless, Nathan said, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks everybody in the chat that's been watching live, wherever you are. Make sure you give this video a like if you've enjoyed it. And of course, subscribe if you haven't already. And yeah, we'll see you guys around next time. So keep stacking stats, but also, as we always say, keep stacking skills. I'm Ben.

This was Nathan. And this was your weekly session. See you guys next time.