The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - Kraken Gets a Fed License - What Does This Mean for Bitcoin? | CBP 255 Pt 1

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Canada processes MAID applications same-day. The median wait for surgery is 28.6 weeks. This isn't broken — this is the system working as designed.In this episode:⚡ CANADA & MAID — A disabled man is pursuing medically assisted death to avoid homelessness. Not terminal. Not mentally ill. Just afraid of being on the street. We break down the same-day MAID protocol, 76,475 deaths since 2016, and what it tells you about Canadian governance.🛢️ OIL SHOCK — The Strait of Hormuz closed for the first time in history. WTI hit $119 overnight. Iraq's southern oilfields lost 70% of production in a week. The G7 met and decided they "weren't ready yet" to act. What this means for Canada, the Bank of Canada's impossible position, and why stagflation is Bitcoin's best argument.🏦 KRAKEN JOINS THE FED — After 5.5 years, Kraken became the first crypto company in history to access Federal Reserve payment rails. Direct Fedwire settlement. No correspondent banks. Vancouver, meanwhile, killed its Bitcoin-friendly city motion because a 1953 provincial law says municipalities can only hold government bonds. One country is building the future of money. The other is watching.📉 MARA & CORE SCIENTIFIC — MARA Holdings quietly updated its 10-K to allow selling its entire 53,822 BTC treasury. Not just mined coins — the whole stack. Core Scientific sold 1,900 BTC, announced it's exiting Bitcoin mining entirely, and took a $1B loan from Morgan Stanley to pivot to AI.🍞 CANADA'S FOOD CRISIS — 60% of Canadians skipped meals or reduced portions in the past six months. Over half used credit cards or payday loans to buy groceries. This is not a developing nation. This is Canada in 2026.🌎 ALSO THIS WEEK — Paraguay mining Bitcoin with 30,000 confiscated ASICs powered by the Itaipu Dam. Bank of Canada runs Canada's first tokenized bond trial with RBC and TD. And what the $25M scholarship program for Indian students says about Canada-India relations.─────────────────────────🔔 Subscribe so you don't miss next week🐦 Follow us on X: @CanadianBTCPod📩 Newsletter: CanadianBitcoiners.com─────────────────────────#Bitcoin #Canada #MacroEconomics #BitcoinCanada #OilPrices #MAID #Inflation #CanadianBitcoiners #Kraken #BankOfCanada #FinancialFreedom #SoundMoney #CBP

Friends and enemies, welcome back to the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast this week. Well, I mean, there's a million things going on. What am I really going to say here? We got the Canadian same day made offering. So now you can get phone cases on Amazon or assistance suicide, same day. Delivery in both cases. Obviously, there's more going on overseas. Well, spike to 120 overnight and then now back down and red for the day in the 80s, I believe.

So we'll talk about that a little bit. And then, of course, Cracken, the first ever exchange to get a federal reserve master account. Who could have seen it coming? All that and more coming up this week on CBP. And so, you know, the government can say whatever they wanted, but this thing not competing. It's for black market only. It's for this for that. But they're really treating it like a threat.

And one of the things that can't be attacked is your self-custody Bitcoin. And one of the things that can be attacked is the ETF. Can't be exposed to that. That's my view. It's not a good idea. And by the way, that'll hit MSTR or two. It'll probably get other stuff as well. Friends and enemies.

Welcome back. Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. Friends and enemies, welcome to the CBP. Want to be better and form. Listen to Lennon Joe E. Spots is taking care off right off the top. Oh, Bitcoin and Easy DNS, the media is feeding the slop. Well, what do you have to say for yourself on this beautiful Monday night in Ontario?

Man, I can't believe how nice was today. I wore shorts this morning first thing and did some sprint training in the cemetery, not far from my house. And I got to tell you, it's just like the sun coming up there, get the vitamin D, get the sweat, get your heart rate up. It felt like summertime, man. It felt like summertime. Yeah, it was nice. I didn't get to notice until I got to the car in the afternoon.

I was like, holy shit, it's fucking warm. Yeah. So, but anyways, yeah, another day, another dollar. And, yeah, it's going to be good. One day, one day I'll get to be having fun in the sun. That's nothing. Lens most level-headed guy out there. Let's do some sponsors off the top here.

Easy DNS, the title sponsor, the flagship sponsor. Mark is your friendly neighborhood registrar. So if you want to do anything related to DNS, that's like hosting a website, porting a website, if you want to buy a domain, Mark's got your back there. Tons of options in terms of back-in. You can do stuff with WordPress and other. There's tons of sweet options in terms of like the apps available to you if you want to do something over on EasyDNS.

We use it for Canadian Bipotorner's.com that we are criminally undersharing. on that website. But on Access of Easyware, when I do another show, you can see exactly what you can grab there in terms of offering, you know, it's like audio back end, embedding video,

all that good stuff. Not the only thing going on over there, though. You can also do some virtual private server stuff, which I think we may end up talking more and more about as time goes on, unfortunately, for us. There's so many things going on in the privacy world here in the what apps are allowed world

So if you want to do Bitcoin nodes, Noster relays, any of that stuff, and maybe increase your, make yourself a little more decentralized. Mark is the guy for that. And then, of course, if you have like a newsletter or a business, you can pay a couple bucks for easy mail and domain share, make sure that your mailing list is safe, your product stuff is safe, your website is safe. And it's all basically white glove. Mark does a great job helping you through the process and making sure that you're happy

at all times. Plus takes Bitcoin, if you want to pay in Bitcoin. We love that. EasyDNS.com. The promo code is CBP Media. You get 50% off your first round of buys, which is sick. Not many places you can do that. Len, who's the other sponsor?

Cool Bitcoin. We have some good price action going on with Bitcoin, going up, going down, going sideways. You could buy, you could sell. You could look at the price if you want to just do nothing. But those people, why don't just jump on board, get some Bitcoin. And with bull Bitcoin, they don't hold on to your Bitcoin. In order to do the purchase, their non-custodial exchange, you've got to provide an address. This is what you want in exchange.

You hear so many stories. over the years of exchanges going tits up and they take the Bitcoin that is on there with them. Well, Bitcoin doesn't have that because like I said, in order to facilitate the buy, you've got to provide a Bitcoin address. So you have to take custody of your own Bitcoin. This is the proper way to do things. And when fees are going up, which they will one day, they're not today, though, is that you could start using something like lightning.

It's available. You could do your buys. You could do your sales. You can do limit orders. You can do all kinds of things over there. You could pay bills with your Bitcoin. Would you want to do that right now? Maybe.

I haven't yet, but in the future you never know, you want that optionality. I might be able to get that through that. Yeah. The fact that they offer it and other things you could do over there, you got to send some scratch to your friend. Well, you could have it done in such a way that you're sending Bitcoin to bowl Bitcoin and they will send Canadian dollars to your buddy, e-transfers. A lot of different options over there.

If you haven't yet open an account, what are you waiting for? Our link to open account is below. And if you do that, all your buys and sells forever. are going to be cheaper. So check it out, do it. They're the best. We love it. We love it. Housekeeping. We had Scott Horton last week. Great interview. He's in the middle of a move. So he was kind enough to give 35 minutes in a room that he was settling into, actually, at his new home, which was fantastic. We had a lot of stuff to talk about, obviously, with the stuff going on in Iran and overseas. You know, Len, he had a lot to say about

the influence that Netanyahu has on a war like this, the people, around Trump, Trump's ego, and then we talked about the spiritual cost of empire over in the United States. What is it really given them and what have they paid in terms of the soul of the Republic? It was really good. I enjoyed talking to him and we'll have him on again for sure. This Thursday, I'm going to talk to Francis. He's an introduction. We'll not stream that, but we'll put it up probably sometime next week once the Wonder Kid gets his hands on the video and does the hook and all that good stuff for us. So look for that. in the week or so to come.

So for the boost, it's becoming problematic for me to get them. So I'm going to try. Founding them off. Is it any good anymore? Can we talk briefly about this? Someone else told me today that they are moving away from Fountain on like a sort of personal level. And, you know, we've had some good interactions with Fountain, some bad ones.

And the boosts are now giving you a hard time. This is like the third week. second week it's problematic but it is what it is I mean I'm not going to steer away from Fountain because you know I that's my go-to

app when listening to the podcast I don't listen to many these days but if I do they're the ones I'm going to be listening to either way wartime 3-3-3 sats and it's a salute with a couple of beer mugs like that thanks bro MoBTC dick 500 sats

any opinions on what the futures hold now that Cracken has a Fed account. I guess we'll talk about that momentarily. It sounds to a pleb like myself, like a huge turn in institutional Bitcoin, but I don't know if how it's meaningful, long term. Stay tuned.

We'll talk about that. Yeah. Just a little bit. Yeah. Business cat, 1337 Sats. Joey and Len, when keeping it real goes right. I like that.

He opens rock paper Bitcoin. I shouldn't say every week, but some weeks. He's talking about their show the same way we do, like, you know, reviews, what we're going to talk about. I think they do it in post. And he calls himself Business Cat, your best friend on the internet. Good tagline. I like that.

Sometimes it's your very best friend. I think in the week it just passed. He said, your very best friend. And then pulled it back a little bit. Tempered the expectation. So, but all the same. I like that tagline. I thought Friends and enemies was good.

It's, you know, we've been doing it for five plus years. So I'm tempted to get away from it, but truly it is part of the brand. So maybe not. Dan, I missed this one. Dan 513s. Appreciate the sats, Dan. I love the Singapore dollar as well. We need to flee our nation before our house prices go higher than ever, but worthless.

Len, aka the legend, called it right. I don't know when it to sell, man. It's going to be it. I fear that I'm going to miss the boat. Isn't the answer that you have to be prepared to leave without? selling. I think that's where I am right now. You have to be prepared to leave without selling. But in a perfect world, you'd liquidate and somehow get added to that. Sure. Sure. And I'm just looking more of a perfect scenario. But last but not least, we have JR 2,000 sats.

And he says with the Scott Horton interview, fantastic guests, fantastic conversations. Appreciate it. One of the thing I want to know in the, oh, okay, I thought you were done there. Yeah, thanks, Jerry. I appreciate you, bro. One of the thing, A friend of the show and semi-regular co-host slash guest, Boomer, was on Rocky Ridge Radio, Business Cat's other podcast. And they talked about a bunch of stuff. I mean, if you like just hearing two guys chop it up, especially if you listen to this show, like that you're familiar with both those guys, it's pretty good.

I like it. The more I listen to the more I listen to non-Bitcoin macro podcasts and more like sort of parisocial relationship podcast, the more I enjoy them, I think. And it's even more fun when you know both guys. I like this what makes our show good, by the way, is that, you and I are friends in real life. So it's not just like, we're going to talk about macro this week. Macro, macro, macro.

We got to talk about Bitcoin and Rick coin. It's like, you know, it's just shit we would say over lunch, except we put a couple of mics and a few sponsors on it and turns the other little bit of a gig. Yeah. It's a lot of fun to do it and to discuss the shit that's going on in the world, but also what's going on in Bitcoin. Yeah. It's,

everything's got a Bitcoin lens now. Don't you feel like that? I mean, it's been like that a while. You could always kind of spin it. But in the early days of the show, we were doing a lot of red yarn on the idea board to connect to Bitcoin.

But now, you know, not much red yarn. People are talking about Bitcoin thinking about Bitcoin. It's a good time to be a Bitcoiner. Yeah. Well, to be honest, I almost view everything 100% towards with respect to Bitcoin lens. There's nothing I look at and say, only in the field world is like,

I want to get involved with this. It's like, well, I get involved. Why I get involved with this. Doesn't make sense. And we'll talk about a few of those stories today. Why it is makes sense just to lessen your exposure to Fiat world. And I say this as a hypocrite because I own a house. But you know what?

It's half mine. And the wife, she wants to continue living here. That's fine. Damn it at these women keeping us in our. You got to live somewhere. And I've said this many times with Bitcoin. You can't live in your Bitcoin, but you can always rent. There's always an opportunity to do something.

But raising a family in a rental environment, it could be a little more of a challenge compared to owning your home. But it's all mad at perspective. Cracken, I'll talk about those goons. Sure. Let's do it. They're boldly going where no shit coin exchange has gone before. You're framing it the same way as a lot of people, eh?

With like you lead with shit coin exchange. Well, they not just sell Bitcoin, do it. They have hundreds of tokens. and stuff on there. So they're not totally pointing to, this is Bitcoin, this is the only thing we sell, the only thing we offer,

no. I get the product, what they're trying to do. They're trying to maximize revenue and trying to maximize profit. And by getting into shit coins, it gives an opportunity to do that. But fuck that.

That's like, you know, it's a dead end street, if you ask me. But I don't think that they're looking at these days and saying, fuck, we screwed up because they got the access

to the Federal Reserve Master account. The fact that they, got this, a skinny account is nonetheless. It's unheard of. For an exchange, one year term, though. Okay, so let me tell. The only thing, the only thing I'll note is that there's two crack in entities here, right?

You talk about the Wyoming? Yes. So the Wyoming one is the one that has the license, not the quote unquote exchange. But obviously some news coming out today about like, you know, what the exchange is going to be able to do in terms of 24-7 trading. Like, I think these stories are related, right? I'm pretty sure this is all. I'm amazed at that.

Yeah. Because by doing something like this, it's basically giving up a lot of power that the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ has. By letting somebody else tokenize an ETF or a stock and then using that and trading a 24-7, it's easier to keep things within, I'm not trying to justify what they're doing, but if you want to maintain certain level of control, you could do it as long as they're They control all the rules and all the games that they want to play in it. Once you have somebody else do it, I don't know. It's interesting to see what happens here.

I mean, tokenizing it. Now, before they were able to still get access to the master accounts. They were able to rent their way in or beg and borrow their way. And there were ways that they could do. But now, by having this, it allows their Wyoming affiliates to do what they have to do. and exchanging money have it without a middleman, right? And, you know, the Fed wire, like, nobody can fucking get access to this. How much you think you're going to need it is the question.

The fact that they've offered it, that's interesting. Because how much are they going to be able to transact? They're not going to be doing trillions of dollars, not even billions in this one year. But the fact that they got it, I'm wondering if Coinbase is looking and say, we fucked up. We should, instead of building out stuff like base and crap like that, These guys are doing something that's going to potentially positively impact their business and also get them in good standing with the banks, which are probably fucking pissed off that this is being allowed.

If they're going to be offering up the tokenized stocks and ETFs, the big banks and traditional broker's houses, like, how could they say this is good news? These guys are going to come in and piss on their lawn and run away. Yeah, I agree with you. Right. Like, natural tension is starting to take shape here in the financial, world, especially in the United States. Yeah, between stables and banks, now 24-7, tokenized. Yeah, it's, it's, uh...

They're playing the long game. And it seems like they're doing it. Who's playing the long game? Cracking is. Cracking, okay. Yeah, it seems like, well, to do this, they lobbied the right people. They whined and nine their right individuals. They presented the right PDFs and slideshows that, yeah, we've got to get access to this. And with, you know, with enough time and effort, they were able to get in. They cracked the system. They packed their way in. I think it's for them. For one year to... It's even easy. It's even easier than that, don't you think? You know, it's funny. Custodia, you know, custodia, right?

They were dealing with them previously. You say previously, do you know they both applied for this in the same month? Custodia was denied because their submission was reviewed earlier. And so the sort of political calendar was in a place where you just happened to have a Democrat in office at a time when choke point was going on, at a time when Silvergate was going on. And so it was easier to deny the bank that access on the basis of, well, this stuff is risky and we're going to shut it the fuck down. That turned out to be the wrong interpretation, excuse me, of the asset and of the asset class. You know, you have to include crypto in this, whether I like it or not. Like you mentioned, Cracken does operate in that realm.

The interesting thing, too, is that, as you mentioned, there's a one-year term and it's what's called like a skinny Fed account. So no access to overnight loans, no access to interest, no access to a bunch of money. of other stuff. Could you imagine they got access to that interest? Well, how long? I mean, at the end of one year, what are they going to do? Re-up? Are they going to extend?

What's the plan? And the other thing, too, is that how many other exchanges are going to apply for this exact same license? Coinbase is looking at the... They're all going to do it. They're all going to do it. Could you imagine they were able to get access to the central bank, the Federal Reserve's interest-bearing accounts?

And here's the question. Well, there's two things, right? The interest on reserves is one thing, but the access to the overnight window is another one. The overnight window is an interesting one that I think people are not talking about, okay? Not to clickbait, but just, I just want to just point out if they had some sort of defy token. And I'm not justifying this. I'm not trying to say this, but they could have done so and then offer up interest. And the interest, it is rock solid because it's not coming from some printed entity from some it's coming from the Fed.

Federal Reserve, which is still put into an entity. But at least it's something we could back by guns. More legitimate, for sure, for sure. Yeah. You know, what's interesting, though, then the overnight loan thing is really a, like, the reason you get that is for emergencies, right? And, you know, if you think about what are the requirements to need an overnight loan? Generally, it's because you need liquidity to prevent a broader shock to the system, right? Coinbase and Crackin and these guys, they don't meet that size requirement now. But could they meet it in three years?

Do they meet it at $500,000 Bitcoin? Do they meet it at, you know, a trillion dollars under management? What is the number where they meet that requirement? You remember that Silvergate was not that big a bank. Obviously, some other stuff going on in terms of pressures from the government there that caused Silvergate to go sideways. But the interesting thing is that if you look at assets under management, Coinbase and Cracken might wind up in that emergency lending window, not because the Federal Reserve

is suddenly progressive in their licensing, but rather because they have no choice. They have to protect those guys in the event of a liquidation problem or a liquidity problem, I should say. It all depends on the business model, to be perfectly honest, I can't wrap my head in entirety what they do is they do with so much bullshit that's Fiat and chiquinery that I don't really want to know what's going on.

But without that knowledge, it's hard for me to truly answer that question. But it gives them the ability to do it. to get access to the liquidity that's needed right away. But if they need it right away, is their business model solvent? Is it something that is sound? If they have to always go to the, right? Like, we talk about if banks need to do this. Like, we laugh at all the time, all the time at the fact that they have the fractional reserve

that doesn't even fucking exist anymore. Like, you put the money in, it's already gone. It's no longer yours. Like, does that say it's a good business model? Hell no. 20 banks in the States have failed since 2019. That's a low number. banks.

That's a very low number. I also don't know how they're describing failed. Like, you know, does that mean the door shut? I'd have to look at like assets under management bank to bank, but it's a difficult set of stats to pull. There's a website that's been, that's being maintained by, I don't know. The Federal Reserve maintains one. That's the one I'm talking about. Yeah.

Yeah. I can see the name, why it failed, when it happened. That's right. And yeah, we've gone through. The problem is that's not a legitimate. The problem is it's not a legitimate. Because the Silvergate rationale is liquidity, but really what happened there is there was pressure put on that bank almost overnight to change the way they accounted for T bills, I think, and the way they accounted for some other thing that was on their balance sheet. And it put too much pressure on them and they had to, they had to, you know, shudder.

But like that, like that's not a legit liquidity problem. That's been well documented. Like, you don't need to take my word for it. You can go read any number of different accounts of that instance and find that the best. way to look at that is with a skeptical view of the official explanation, like many things. Does it really matter? Well, it sort of matters because then you don't really know how many banks went quote-unquote bankrupt, like how many of them just got pressured or, you know, guy was in the Epstein

files or something. Like, who knows, right? If you go to the bank and you try to get your money out and- functionally for the savers, no, it doesn't matter. Yeah. And furthermore, for the taxpayers that bail out to $250,000 per account, I don't care why it fucking failed. I just care it failed. And it's a matter of time before they all

could fail at this particular rate because let's be honest, the banks, you just need a couple of big players that each of the big banks asking for their money and they're insolvent. Yeah, but you know, like that's never going to happen. What's actually going to happen is the currency. Never thing ever. Yeah, it's not going to happen. What's, well, it's

actually going to happen is the currency is going to fail. So the banks will always have your savings, but you know, they'll gate your withdrawals or they'll gate your, you know, the value accrued or the currency will no longer keep up with the rate of inflation or whatever. Like that's what I mean.

Definitions are so skewed now that when someone says the bank has failed, they only mean the doors closed. What they should mean is did they ever, you know, tell you your money wasn't available? Did they ever, you know, did the currency drop? Yeah, I mean, obviously not. Obviously not. Obviously not.

And that's not even a case to be the sky. That's what I mean. It's like, it's like a nightmare for people who are saving. And I think I made this this point on Bitcast, I think. But the thing is, like, the risk is all on you, the saver. All the other stuff that goes on behind the scenes, the overnight loans, the, the rehypification, the reserve ratio, which is zero, non-existent, by the way. It's all benefiting those guys, but you are taking all the risk, not them. The risk is all with you on your side of the counter. And on the other side of the counter, it's all just moving ones and zeros on Excel sheets

and hoping that, you know, they can, they can tell you to not take any money out because you, tweeted something mean or whatever. Like that's basically where we are now. So Bitcoin is is going to be fine. It's going to be more and more frequently used by dissidents. Not because we find dissidents need more ways to spend money, but because everyone will become a dissident in the eyes of the state at some point in the next decade. And you need that second money.

Is this a Bitcoin story or is this a shit coin slash fiat story? It's a Bitcoin story. You think so. Yeah. And for no other reason than because I think it was no BTC Dick who said in the boost, like what does this symbolize? I see all the time. You got to look at the signposts, man. You can't look at the lines on the highway. You can't look at the traffic. You got to look at the signs. Like, you're headed the right direction here in terms of legitimacy. And by the way,

this is one of the reasons that it's actually never been easier to buy Bitcoin from like a, you know, testicular fortitude standpoint at 50% off the highs. In 20, we talked about this. You know, when we, when we had that crash a few weeks ago or a month ago, whatever it was, You know, we both came on the show with Boomer, I think, and we talked about how, look, you know, we were buying Bitcoin in 2017 when it dropped from $20,000 to $3,000 because of Bitcoin cash. We bought it in 2020 during COVID when there was a pandemic. No one knew anything about. There was no regulatory clarity.

There was no institutionalization. There was no treasury assets. There was no too big to fail. And now it's all there. It's never been easier to buy low-priced Bitcoin than it is today. And this is yet another reason, I think. It's never too high for me to buy in my opinion. But, you know, that's just my...

Oh, you're right. You're not wrong about that. You should, I think you should, you know, it's AVB, man, always be buying. That's the, isn't that the, you know, that's the best way to accumulate, the best way to see growth. And as many people will tell you, if you miss the 10 best days in Bitcoin every year, you're down in terms of the quality of your investment. A lot, the same thing with, for sure. For sure. It's everywhere.

Traditional markets have this do. And so I would just tell people like, don't get cute. Just be buying, man. That's exactly, yeah. The position size is what you should be looking at, not the days you're not buying or when to sell. Like, you know, there's too many obvious reasons to keep buying. 100%.

But I'm skeptical this is a not a Bitcoin story. Oh, you tell me why it's not a Bitcoin story. Because I can't see any way that this is going to push the narrative of Bitcoin. Right away, we saw the news that they're going to tokenize stocks and ETFs and shit like that. I think that's the M.O. of the day they're going to try to maximize profits as much as possible, be it Bitcoin or not Bitcoin. It doesn't really matter. They'll just do whatever, whatever blockchain you need to do, whatever defy token they want

to push out, they'll do it because at the end of the day, they're trying to make as much money as possible for their, they're not publicly traded for their owners, I guess right now. It's going to be shareholders. They're going to go publicly traded. Once it gets publicly traded, that would be an interesting thing because now if they're going to also still have the Fed account, I don't know. Coinbase is just, they've got to be licking their chops and say, fuck, we're next. Yeah, for you guys are doing it.

We can't all behind, right? Listen, if you're watching on YouTube, make sure you like the video, okay? I'm trying to grow the YouTube side, so do that for me. Okay, next story, where are we going? Paraguay. Let's go South America. They want to get into Bitcoin mining,

and they want to scale up their operations in a very interesting way, and how is that confiscation of all things, right? And their state-owned power company, Andy or Ande? I don't know. Anyways, it might even be a, it might even be a acronym, right? I don't know. Yeah, but we still like, we say out acronyms too, right? They're never going to send us a T-shirt, I'll tell you that. You never going to.

We could ask. Do they even do? What do we do? What do we do? What do we do? What do we do? I did call them like I did. What's the worst that can happen?

I don't know. Call them on air. Who the fuck did I call in here? What was it? Yeah. No. Oh, no. Nakamoto. Nakamoto, yeah, yeah, that's right. They coin well, by the way, teetering on being called on the ear, too, according to Len.

Len, I'll ask some questions for them as well. I don't get anything answered. I mean, I'm kind of pissed off. But I ask questions in both official and unofficial channels, and they just fall on deaf ears. You know, like, I find that to be, I don't know. It is the way things are done. No comment. No comment. But Andy, anyways, these guys, they signed.

the Carney special that was an MOU to launch a new initiative over there and it is a state run mining operation and this is all through the confiscation of equipment as I said because the government is sitting on 30,000 pieces of equipment

A6 and they got this all through raids of illegal operations so people were setting up mining operations that were not properly vetted by the people in charge over there. Raids took place and over the last two years, now they have 30,000 ASICs that they're sitting on. So what's it do with all that

equipment? You just don't let it sit there collecting dust. They don't want to sell it. It looks like, no, they want to do something interesting. They want to energize it. And so starting off with a pilot project using 1,500 of these ASICs, and they're going to be powered by surplus electric energy that is going to be generated through a dam. And normally the electricity that is being generated from this dam is sold to Brazil for fucking pennies, far, far less than what they would get if they are going to use that to mine for Bitcoin. And Bitcoin mining, say what you want. We see a lot of people changing their minds and going to AI.

That's fine. But it's very lucrative when you generate your own power and the equipment is free, which in this case, it was. Two generations old, but still free. It doesn't matter. This is fucking free. And you're generating your own electricity. It's giddy up, right?

Let's do it. But now comes the problem that it has not. yet been discussed maybe not a problem but something that will need to be dealt with in up to distant future what to do with the bitcoin that they earn they're going to mine bitcoin they're going to collect bitcoin what did they do with it they keep it did they sell it they trade it for rapid bitcoin there's a lot of different options out there that they could do but at this time it's not known i'm assuming they're going to sell it it only makes perfect sense for them to do it is their balance sheet doesn't look all that healthy so if they could do whatever

they can to try to make the negative a little bit less painful for the people i think people we're going to be happy about that. But yeah, interesting. Paraguay, Bitcoin mining. Al-Landay is saying that they think the mining operation will net them both $250 million, $240 million U.S. in annual revenue. So the answer is, yeah, they're going to sell. I don't know at what price, but I would assume that's today's prices or somewhere between that, you know, $125, $126,000 high and today, whatever, it's at $66, $67. I don't know. That's what I would guess.

The interesting thing here is that, did you know that Hive is operating in Paraguay? They just bought BIF Farms facility for $56 million in January. And now they're going to be competing with the government over there who just stole a bunch of machines. Generational sell from BipFarms, maybe. We'll find out, I guess. But I, you know, I don't like governments interfering with things like this. And, you know, one thing we talk about a lot, then is how there's no economic calculation for governments. Are they going to consider the cost of power and the opportunity cost of taking that power from potentially other productive uses?

Not the Bitcoin mining is not productive, of course. But, I mean, they're obviously incentivized. Well, still, they're incentivized to not use that for something else. But it's not being used to anything. Well, not right now. But if someone somewhere down the line says, hey, I want to invest in. in Paraguay, are they going to give up their power and their mining income to support that? That's a good question.

The answer is probably no. The answer is probably no. It really depends. We don't know. But the beautiful thing that this provides is they could easily scale it up or down. Yeah. They're not forced to continually draw that same power to energize those machines. Yeah.

You could do whatever they want. This is a big benefit of mining. Yeah. Big benefit of money. Yeah. You could be very agile in terms of the energy usage. You can go 100% zero, whatever you want, anything in between. And because like I mentioned, like we talked about, this is confiscated equipment.

It's not like they have skin in the game that they got to get the ROI back on what they invested in this. Somebody else fucking bought this. The price was basically sending the police over to collect the fucking equipment. Right? And they're not paying that much to do that. So it's essentially free. Wow.

Whatever. They got one million Bitcoin left to mine. Good luck to them. if they want to mine all of it. Of course, Scientific won't be mining it. I can tell you that because they're selling off some Bitcoin. Some 1900 Bitcoin were sold up in January.

It looks like they're going to sell everything that they have. This was one of the largest Bitcoin, publicly traded Bitcoin miners out there, and they've pivoted to AI, and they went all in for that approach, and that's fine. And nothing new here, but we have some interesting news this past week.

Morgan Stanley, they liked the move to AI, so much that they are preparing to offer core scientific $500 million loan and that is for expansion of the AI data center. There's also the optionality to increase that loan to $1 billion. And I'm wondering how many Bitcoin miners out there

that are looking at this move and they're thinking about, and we should make this change to AI. And they look at Morgan Stanley offering up money and saying, you know what, this might be an opportunity for us. It's not just a stock price. Look at the stock price of course, since they made the move compared to Bitcoin miners.

It's significantly higher, right? So the market participants, they like what this is all about. They like this move. So if you're a Bitcoin miner and you're looking, okay, these guys switch to AI. The valuation of the company went up. Big boys like Morgan Stanley are willing to open up their purses to lend you money. Ah, you know, it's hard to say that they're going to stay doing this. Like I look at Marathon, right?

Like how long before they make this move? Slipstream? Like how much is that making them? Caspa's making them fuck all. Shareholders must be asking questions. When are they going to change their direction? Maybe soon. Yeah.

There's a legal responsibility these companies have, especially if they have the capability, the swap to a different use case for their hardware and their PPAs. Core says that pivoting to AI nets them somewhere between 3 and 25x more revenue per kilowatt hour than Bitcoin mining. That's an interesting analysis. That is a big, big. And if everything being equal, right, because there's a lot we just don't know.

But if everything being equal, why would any company out there saying that doesn't generate electricity, for instance, still want to do this? Yeah. Bitcoin mining. We talked to, listen, you can go back in our catalog. years at this point. And it started around the time I was doing research for Jeff Lucas, maybe a little before that,

where the question that I was asking was, if you want to be exposed to AI as a Bitcoin miner, because it makes more money, why would you ever stay in Bitcoin? What's the point? You need the asset to go up. Your shareholders are impatient. Your investors are impatient.

And you have responsibilities to maximize share value. You almost, once you get, go, once you dip a toe into AI, you're out. You're out. And the more that we look at Bitcoin mining share prices, you know, the more that it seems the market has realized this, too. The sort of Apple of our eye, Iron, if you're like a, you know, Bitcoin mining shareholder, buyer, enthusiasts, whatever, iron really is the golden goose in that whole industry. And they're obviously doing HPC now too. It's just hard to justify looking at that share price compared to the

the hoddle miners, the maxi miners. It's hard to justify buying into this other stuff. And I don't know what the plan is for industrial mining going forward because the one thing that AI is, you know, you may disagree with the thesis, you may disagree with AGI, you may think all these guys are like, you know, a little bit off their rockers, the Altmans, the Amadais, the whoever else. in the AI space. But the one thing you can't argue with is that AI right now is the arms race. And governments want this thing to not only work, but flourish and crush the opposition.

So what are they going to do? They're going to make anything related to AI as friendly as possible. They're going to subsidize power around those plants to keep people happy and make sure there's no protests or disagreements with local communities where these things are planted. And I just don't see this stopping anytime soon. Can Bitcoin say the same thing? No. And invidia is a huge holding in stuff like American pensions and Canadian pensions. You need that company to be successful. The Meg 7s now are all agreeing to contracts with not only AI companies, but also hardware manufacturers, whether it's Intel, Nvidia, you name it.

This stuff is a security issue now. And I don't necessarily just mean a military security issue, but rather a societal cohesion security issue. You need those pensions to stay afloat. You need those entitlements to stay afloat. And how do you do that? You've got to keep those stock prices high. And I think you're going to see more and more of this because it is the rational thing to do if you're a minor.

Now, I'll ask you, how many more industrial miners have to go to AI before you start worrying about hash rate? I don't have any problems with that because the fact is there's going to be some privately held Bitcoin miners that just because they just don't want to switch, they'll just continually mine Bitcoin rather than switch to AI. I think that is, I could not discreet that more. Well, I'm looking at Bob Burnett, for instance. I'm using that as the example. So you'll have some of those. And then I'm not sure how easy it is to set up AI in the wilderness where you have stranded energy far away from. But from what I gather, setting up one of those portable AI systems, data centers, they are available.

I just haven't really looked too much into that. I know that the ones for the Bitcoin do exist. Steve Barber, for instance, sells those. So, you know, that's one thing. Also, as you get less people mining for Bitcoin, the rewards for mining Bitcoin go up. And so the desire to mine Bitcoin also goes up with that. So it's something that just, it works on its own.

It's a wonderful system. Yeah, I don't think it's a closed loop like you're describing. I think the rewards go up and more people want to mine. But I think the price is attached to security now more than it's ever been. And the reason I ask about the HPC affecting hash rate is because now you're going to see security getting pinched from both sides. On one side, you have the increase in power in these chips in terms of the likelihood that they could destroy the Bitcoin security or do like a 51% attack. That's one problem. And then on the other side, you have the number of miners that are leaving for HPC growing by the day.

You mentioned Burnett. It's not that I don't like Bob Burnett, but I think if there's, The argument for continued growth and hash rate relies on people acting irrationally because they like Bitcoin. We're fucked. And we got to start thinking about it. It is true. No one acts rationally forever because it doesn't make sense. And you have a self-survival instinct and all these things.

And you can't do it. And even if he is a guy who acts irrationally and goes down with the ship, so to speak, he needs everyone else or a bunch of other people do the same thing. Like, it doesn't make sense. And it's never happened. Joey, do you mine at a loss? no you don't so the buying you the equipment that right now are you oh i mean so i mean maybe a minor loss you're acting irrationally so people do this because they love the thing yeah but you have no i have no other choice i can't pivot my s 19 to

a i don't have shareholders i don't have any of these things if i had a lot of hardware easy you could easy pivot you can unplug and sell you choose not to you continue to mine it a loss that's number one number two is if you look at the amount of hashes out there joey it's an extraordinarily high number, a 51% attack, a sustained 51% attack that is going to be able to double spend over many, many blocks to make sure that no other minor out there that is a good actor, mines a block. That is very, very challenging to do because that amount of energy and equipment plugged in for a long time, it just doesn't work. And what do you achieve in the end? It's especially, eventually have a good miner build a block and it's undue,

everything that is done by that 51% attack. Yeah, I don't know. I think there's a lot of pressure coming. With that being said, somebody would look at it and say, why would anybody want it to do any sort of attack against it? Just because the amount of effort and amount of money you have to put into this and achieve fucking nothing in the end, they would rather build a rocket to go to Mars than do something like this. You don't think even if a good miner built a good block after five double spend blocks that the price would be irreparably damaged? Of course it would. It would fix itself.

The price, the price. Not everyone is lent. The price would be irreparably damaged if that happened. It would fix itself over a long enough period of time. It may take a year or two. That's what I'm trying to get at is what you're doing. You're just damaging it for a temporary period of time. Eventually, it will get back to where it should be because people look at the ads and say,

look, we've had issues in the past. We've had the inflation bug, for instance. There's issues. It gets fixed. move on, right? We have spam. We have garbage that's being put on there. We live with it. This is the way it is. We try to address it as best

we can. If the price this shit in, if you're going to use it to fucking put dickpicks on there, you pay for it. It sucks for people that run a node, but you know what, that's the way the system is built up. And if that's the case, if you want to try running a

mining farm, a massive mining farm in order to fucking do a sustained 51% attack against Bitcoin, I encourage you to do it. In the end, you're going to bankrupt yourself. What do you achieve? You're bankrupt and Bitcoin still runs.

What's the fucking point? We'll see. I hope you're right. But I think like many things... That's the case. Yeah. And it gets harder every day as more and more powers needed. And you have to then...

There's not many fucking Bitfarms out that are selling other equipment to hive. There's so much equipment that, right? Like, no, man. We'll see. We're going to see. We're going to see. It's all. Fed strike. Let's talk about new product was released by them. The Bitcoin backed line of credit.

Love it. And it's not the same as the Bitcoin backed loans that they offered and they announced last year, I believe it was. This, the Bitcoin backed line of credit, 13% APR. No credit check required for this. They say that collateral is held securely, securely, securely, no re-hypification of this. We've been through this fucking song and dance before with them. I don't fucking believe them one fucking bit. And I say like, you know, every time I see this is like, I want to see that GTA meme where it, oh, shit, here we go again.

That's exactly what I fucking think about this thing. The max loan to value is 50%. So you may ask, how the fuck does this differ? Is Bitcoin backed line of credit differ from the Bitcoin backed loans? essentially you're putting up Bitcoin for both of them and you're getting some sort of fiat loan same shit not quite the Bitcoin backed line of credit is like a bucket you could draw upon right it's think of like your home equity line of credit you could don't have to do it but you could do it anytime you want it's like any other line of credit you're accustomed to there's no

fixed date of repayment for the line of credit with the Bitcoin backed loans there is you have 12 months to pay that back. The APR is slightly better with the Bitcoin backed loans versus the line of credit. And this is supposed to be the line of credit

for people that want to have flexibility. Give users a lot of flexibility with getting some extra scratch. And I look at this. It's good to have options, right? I like having options. I like having people. Do the ability,

whatever you want. there is a potential use of Bitcoin as a medium exchange. I look at what the Czech Republic is doing, right? Because this seems like more of a band-aid until the Czech Republic-style system comes out, where I believe it's $4,300 is going to be tax-free, as long as you hold your Bitcoin for three years. That's what I want to see. That's the stuff.

So something like this is kind of a band-aid until that comes out. I understand this probably would work well for people that are living on a Bitcoin standard or have a lot of Bitcoin. I get it. But I don't know. For the majority of people, I think that there's better options out there. If you need money, you're probably going to be to need a little bit of money. I would suggest sell blood, sell whatever.

Do something else. Don't expose your Bitcoin because Bitcoin price could go up and it could go down. And it goes down and you have to fucking deal with that. The LTV of 50%. It's got to be dealt with. I don't know. Interesting. I wouldn't use it.

I think this is going to wind up being a product that a lot of people love. You mentioned there that it's not being re-hypothecated. I think that's, like, I think it's obviously not being re-hypothecated because they're not paying a premium to you, like Lennon does, for example. What they're doing is collecting interest on a loan. So when, like, that's the, that's the way that the income stream for strike will work in this situation. To your point, though, the volatility of the price really will get people in trouble. Like, you just never know what's going to happen in terms of a giant price move, a liquidation, cascade. The worst part land is that these things seem to always happen on like Saturday nights

and Sunday nights. So you're at the mercy, you know, potentially of a geopolitical event or a global event that you're not paying that much attention to. You may not even be home when it happens. What is the, you know, the leniency level that strike is willing to exercise with you as someone who's got a Bitcoin-backed loan? These are difficult questions to answer without trying it. In Canada, we don't have to worry about this because it's not available to us. Like everything else stuck in the dark up here. But I think it's going to wind up being something people take advantage of. I don't know what the likelihood is of de minimis tax exemptions really taking shape on

Bitcoin. It seems less and less likely by the day. And also, let's face it, you know, if I want to spend Bitcoin, the likelihood that I'm going to spend Bitcoin for coffee is very low. But for like a home improvement, maybe. for a car, maybe. And if you don't want to spend that larger amount of Bitcoin, this is a pretty good option, right?

9.5 APR is pretty good. That's lower than you get on, I think, a line of credit. I don't know what the credit is. It's higher than that. It's 13% APR. The 9.5 comes from the other product they're offering to Bitcoin loans. Right. Bitcoin line of credit is 13%.

Now, that could change depending. Obviously, this is very, it's a floating rate. But it's, see, if you need. the money, like I said, there's other things you could do. I would even suggest look into fucking borrowing traditionally than exposing your Bitcoin. Another thing by exposing your Bitcoin to this type of system, it's more K-Y-C for what you own. Do you really want to do with this? Of course. Yeah. I don't think so. I mean, but then, you look, that's my opinion. You all could do what the fuck you guys want to do. I know what I'm going to do with mine.

It's not going to be exposed to this kind of stuff. But like I said before, like the other reason is because a lot of people like if I think when people younger than me, they may not have traditional assets and so you can't really use the traditional Fiat loan system because you just don't have the collateral. So this is at least a chance to use some of the stuff that you view as valuable as collateral as opposed to. Yeah. I see where you're coming from in terms like not having, but I would suggest. It's risky. It's still risky. I'm not going to suggest I will say that some people and this is not something I recommend people doing

but some people may even decide to sell their Bitcoin converted to Fiat and use that to buy whatever they want to buy either home improvement of car or whatever and don't even fucking report that. I don't suggest doing that. You always got to pay your taxes, ladies and gentlemen. I was scurting the system. It's the wrong thing to do.

But people have done it in the past and from what I gather I don't think they got their wrist slapped yet. Yeah. Mayor Ken Sim, you talk to this. Friend of the show. Yeah, good dude. Vancouver mayor, right? He wanted to make Vancouver more of a Bitcoin friendly city.

And it looks like that dream may have died this week. Yeah. Because it looks like, well, that dream is gone, but, you know, if you're local indigenous over there, lots of dreams have been made this past few weeks. land is being well, I don't want to go there but it's interesting times over in BC the city has their hands tied

from what I got their city of Vancouver as they cannot hold Bitcoin as a municipal reserve asset. They just do not have the capacity as per the municipal finance authority act. They are governed by this. BC is the one that is

that they're you know the people that they have to deal with. that's you know it is what it is we could kick scream do whatever we want it's just this is the law over there it does allow this act does allow them to buy fucking bonds and gics the stuff that doesn't even keep up with actual inflation they could buy as pretty active bitcoin that's too speculative right it because it's not backed by any government not just bitcoin you can't they can't buy gold they can't buy silver right these are the things they can't buy Anyways, they can't even buy ETFs, Bitcoin ETFs.

So they're stuck. That is it. So the dream is dead and it's not due to any of the people out there like Mayor Ken Sim. He's just dealing with laws. That's fine. These laws have to change if they want to do this.

Ken Sim is too smart to be a politician. You know, having spoken to him obviously on the show and a little bit before and after, he's too smart to waste his time and as the kids would say, his motion in the mayor's office was criticized for putting a gym in the mayor's office for everyone to use. You know, has the vision to think about Bitcoin as a treasury asset. He's not suggesting they liquidate the Treasury and buy Bitcoin. He's just saying that it be a good idea to have some Bitcoin in there.

You know, the bill was or the suggestion was titled like become a Bitcoin friendly city. And even collect Bitcoin through collection of taxes. Yeah. Yeah. Easy stuff. Easy stuff. And just, you know, you're constantly held back by people who just have no vision. Bureaucrats in general are sort of talentless parasites in a lot of the time.

And when you talk about municipal politics, oftentimes these people are failed federal politicians, failed provincial politicians, failed business people, failed, you name it. and this is where they come to retire. It's like cattle grazing for publicly known failures. And you see that in a lot of big cities. Hamilton's like that, Toronto's like that. These people have no business chops or visionary chops. Sims is a different guy, obviously. You know, it was an entrepreneur and understands, I think,

this sort of digital revolution that we are living through. By the way, he's not the only one, you know, listening to guys like Evan Solomon talking about you know, art. Yeah,

the art dealer. Technology is moving. We have a choice between moving at the pace of technology and moving at the pace of trust when it comes to legislation and we're going to move

to pace of trust. Like that's fucking retarded. You can't, you can't think this way in the year of 2026. You are constantly playing catch up and again, like don't make me tap the sign,

sovereign individual. You know, that you knew this was going to happen if you read that book. You knew it. These guys have no interest in becoming better regulators, more progressive, more thinking writers of laws and rules and regulations in these things. The only interest they have is in preserving what ill-gotten power they've managed to accrue through brainwashing some portion of the 50 IQ electorate in any major city to get enough votes. Well, keep in mind, I mean, not keep in mind, you're just hitting the nail in the head.

There are really just two levels of government in Canada, the provincial and the federal. If you look at everything that when they founded the Federation. Yeah, it's downstream. Yeah, it's all the fine. You have this for the federal government deals with. That is dealt with the province. So the province then, as you said, it's downstream. They created a new layer.

But it really is just a fictional layer that is created by the province. And so everything that is that you see there, it's all just because of the provincial legislators. They're the ones that are defining what the cities can do. Sometimes they give a little more leeway like in Toronto. They have the Toronto Act where they could actually raise taxes and shit like that. But for a lot of municipalities, like in Ontario, for instance, they don't have that ability because Ontario is the one that's going to have to levy everything. So here, if you're pissed off at this, really the people that you have to deal with are BC MPPs.

Talk to them. have them change the laws and go from there. But until that's done, it's never going to change. The thing is that at some point, at some point, there will come a time when some thresholds passed and it no longer makes sense. I'm going to talk about this with Francis on Thursday, too. Spoiler alert. It just no longer makes sense to adhere to the rules of the state above you.

Like enough people want to do something differently. And so what the province wants doesn't matter. The province wants to do something differently. Enough people want it. It makes sense. And so what the federal government wants doesn't matter anymore. And there's a number of relationships that are like this in Canada. Vancouver may or may not be one.

I don't know what the desire for a Bitcoin city was over there. It seems to be not as great as we had hoped. But for a lot of people, this is going to start to become obvious. even if they can't articulate it. It's happening everywhere at every level. It's happening in schools. It's happening in, you know, sporting clubs. It's happening all over the place.

And the idea that productive people will continue to just allow themselves to be governed by fools, I think, is misplaced and becoming more misplaced. And becoming more misplaced thanks to stuff like Bitcoin that just says, well, I'm not going to put up with this anymore. I'm agile. I can either leave or affect change, but you're going to be governing nobody at some point. And, you know, there's only so many bananas to go around in a banana republic. Once you run out of those, you know, you're just passing laws for yourself at that point. There's no one of, of any worth. There's still a lot of people willing to come here because life is better in Canada.

Yeah, but it's only better because of the people who are here now. And once those people leave, like, this is the fact of the matter, right? So that's what I mean. It will take a generation or two to really feel the impact of that. It will be a slow degration of everything. You'll see society continually devolve around you, but it will take decades, I think, before you hit rock bottom.

So it's still, you'll find people wanting to come here because life is better here than it is and a lot of other places out there. And I totally understand why people want to come here. But be agile, man. We have the ability to move around, go somewhere. And don't be stuck wherever you,

if you all go somewhere, don't be stuck there. you know, because things could change wherever you are and your opinion on shit could change. I'll be honest. Like, the things that were important to me 10, 15 years ago, they're not important to me now. And the things that are going to be important to be 10, 15 years from now, they're not really important to me right now. I don't think.

I'm always evolving, I think. That's the way I am. Anyways, I think that's it for the Bitcoin. Like, we've done enough for the Bitcoin side of things. 55 minutes in. We got tons of talk about plus a very interesting Hamilton versus Brampton. man segment okay let's uh let's uh let's kind of go over to the other side if you're on audio come back tomorrow for the back after you're on video stay with us uh make sure you like the video

all that good stuff and we'll see you in a second and don't be a cuck you watch you there